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The Colorless | So whisper monochrome, it’s like a prayer
you couldn’t bear to raise lest God insist
on stripping even more, your breath laid bare
without the heart or muscle to resist
the days still destined: manic moments pass,
a zoetrope of chemicals that burn
your neurons into ash and bones to glass,
a fate from which no spirit could return —
if spirit still you have. It dies away,
even a perfect light will atrophy
where darkness doubles down, the dimming day
will crack at last — and even Heaven flees,
the color bleeding out — and eyes go blind;
you stumble for a miracle to find. | https://medium.com/sonnetry/the-colorless-71cb18147d68 | ['Zach J. Payne'] | 2020-09-11 23:02:19.712000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Sonnet', 'Life', 'Wellness', 'Self'] |
Mantenimiento de WordPress en piloto automático | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/blogging-y-blogs/mantenimiento-de-wordpress-en-piloto-autom%C3%A1tico-c9df27c77c64 | ['Antonio Cambronero'] | 2019-11-22 21:22:46.586000+00:00 | ['WordPress', 'Marketing', 'Blogging', 'Bloguiland', 'Wpo'] |
When You Stop Expecting Others to be Perfect It Could Work Wonders | When You Stop Expecting Others to be Perfect It Could Work Wonders
How giving the benefit of the doubt can help you have better relationships and achieve inner peace, according to science.
Photo by Fernando Brasil on Unsplash
Perfectionism is a double-edged sword. On one hand, striving to be perfect can help you become the best version of yourself. On the other, it can lead to some dysfunctional behavior that might be quite toxic:
You might end up attaching your sense of self-worth to how much you’ve accomplished.
If a project fails, you might start thinking, “I’m a failure”, instead of “This project failed.”
You might get so obsessed with accomplishing the perfect outcome, that you start procrastinating and might never even start.
Your need to be perfect might give you undue stress.
Your quest to be perfect in everything you do might lead to more harm than good. But have you ever considered how expecting other people in your life to be perfect can work out?
Most of the complaints we make daily revolve around unmet expectations: “Raj was supposed to call me but backed out at the last instant. I’m so disappointed in him.” “Shaina and I had plans for dinner but she canceled and I had to spend the night alone. I’ll never ask her for anything again.”
If these sound familiar, hold on for a moment and ask yourself: are you holding others to super high expectations? Sure, you aren’t perfect and you know it and have embraced your flaws. But are you judging your loved ones too harshly?
“We judge others according to our image of perfection as well, and naturally they fall short of our expectations.”
— Don Miguel Ruiz
This article shows how most of us tend to have unrealistic expectations from other people and how this quest for seeking perfection in others can harm our mental peace. You’ll also find some science-backed ways you can adopt to let go of the need for everyone else to be perfect for you to be happy. By the end of this article, you’ll be more open-minded towards being forgiving, relaxed, and at peace with yourself. | https://medium.com/mind-cafe/when-you-stop-expecting-others-to-be-perfect-it-could-work-wonders-d429836b9ecc | ['Anangsha Alammyan'] | 2020-12-24 13:06:28.857000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Ideas', 'Happiness', 'Relationships'] |
How Smartphones Change Our Relationships | Humans are social animals. We seek companionship and acceptance. The relationships we build are critical to our individual happiness and well-being. On the hierarchy of needs, Maslow puts “love and belonging” third, superseded only by basic physiological survival and general safety.
The way we fulfill this need is by sharing events, thoughts, feelings and ideas with one another. By opening ourselves up to others, we build the trust and common ground required for deep, reciprocal relationships.
This process of relationship building has played out since at least the dawn of recorded history, but technology is starting to shift this fundamental human activity.
I recently finished reading Enchanted Objects by David Rose, of the MIT Media Lab. The book was eye opening on many levels, but I was particularly struck by his points on a concept known as the “filter bubble”.
The filter bubble is the individual conscious space we each occupy. It is created by our unique perception of our surroundings. We all have a bubble. It comes part and parcel with life as a conscious being. Our bubble is shaped, over time, by the aggregate of our interactions with all the things around us.
While our personal bubble is unique, it also shares elements with the bubbles of other people in our lives. These common elements are the result of shared experiences. When we share an interaction with another person our filter bubbles overlap. These overlaps form the basis of our relationships.
Think of these overlaps as Venn diagrams. They are only partial and are never a complete mirror.
Take, for example, two friends together at a concert. They both have a similar physical experience. They hear the same music, experience the same basic smells, sights, sounds, atmosphere, and weather. They share the same jokes and discussions and overhear some of the same conversations. This is the overlap. The shared portion of the Venn diagram. But, each person also has their own inner monologue. Their own reactions to the physical experience. You’ve no doubt experienced the flood of memories and emotions that can come from hearing a piece of music or smelling a familiar smell. This inner experience is where the Venn diagram diverges.
Our circle on the Venn diagram represents our full experience of life, both shared and internal. But the overlaps are where we stitch ourselves together. This is where connection, community, family, friendship and love happen.
The deeper our relationship with someone the more we work to expand the overlapping segments of our filter bubbles. We talk about our feelings in the moment and tell stories about the memories an experience dredges up. We divulge more of our inner monologue.
This sharing strengthens our relationships, but it takes work. It requires presence and it often requires shared catalysts (i.e. the concert mentioned above).
This is where technology is changing things.
Smartphones are a persistent, personal window into a world outside of your current experience. The people you are with have no insight into what you are reading, watching or hearing. And even more, to interact with a smartphone requires attentive processing, which means your brain must be almost fully engaged. Mentally, the phone pulls you completely out of your current environment.
As such, the interactions that occur through your smartphone fall squarely on the divergent side of the Venn diagram. They are not shared, they are part of your inner experience.
The more time spent staring into your phone the less present you are in the moment, and the more the foundation of a shared experience shrinks. This means the divergent sides of the Venn diagram grow at the expense of the overlap. Even your inner monologue completely changes. You are no longer reacting to shared stimuli, you are reacting to something happening miles away in cyberspace that only you can see.
Take, once again, our two friends at the concert. If one is now spending time checking their phone, they are effectively eliminating the shared catalyst. They miss jokes and discussions. They don’t see events as they occur. Depending on the depth of interaction with the phone, they may even become oblivious to the music. From a sensory standpoint, they become functionally blind to their surroundings.
With every passing moment the two sides of the Venn diagram drift further and further apart. This disconnection chips away at the core of the shared experience. With less commonality in the physical experience, the work of sharing the inner experience becomes extremely challenging. It is difficult for the person on their phone to relay their feelings and thoughts because their friend is not privy to the other side of the interaction. Likewise, the friend engaged with the concert is unable share their thoughts and feelings because the other has missed the relevant pieces.
The smartphone dismantles all of the relationship building opportunities of the shared experience. Effectively, the two friends are alone together at a concert.
And the impact runs even deeper than that.
Almost all interactions on a smartphone are asynchronous. Take texting for example. You send a message out into cyberspace and wait for a response. In the time between sending the message and receiving a response there is no feedback. You are completely blind to the reaction of the message recipient. This of course differs from a face-to-face conversation, where, even if the verbal response is delayed, you still receive real-time feedback in the form of facial expressions and body language.
These non-verbal cues are part of the filter bubble overlap. They are physical insights into a person’s inner monologue. They improve your understanding of the person and help guide the conversation. Texting, social media and many other digital communication tools are devoid of this nuance. You’re left to interpret all of those cues from whatever digital response you receive. And the longer a response is delayed the more you start to infer things with no real context to support them.
Say a friend takes longer than normal to respond to a text message. Your mind attempts to fill in the gaps left by the lack of non-verbal cues and physical context. Maybe they are mad. Maybe your message offended them in some way. Maybe their phone is dead. Or maybe they are locked in a life or death struggle with a Grizzly bear. Unfortunately, in the asynchronous world of smartphone interactions there are a million reasons a response might be delayed, but you have no way of accurately reading the situation.
These asynchronous interactions create a weak filter bubble overlap. There is no shared physical context, as you are both in different locations, and all you are able to know about the inner context is what the other person chooses to divulge in their response.
Back to our concert goers, the net of all of this is that the person checking their phone at the concert is left with nothing but a set of weak connections. Their interactions through the phone are weak by nature, and in pursuing those, they have lost their opportunity for a strong connection with their friend who is physically with them at the show.
They have missed their chance to forge a deep connection with another person through shared experience. Which is the critical piece to addressing our need for love and belonging.
The more technology captures our attention, the more our shared experiences with others become weak and superficial. The Venn diagrams of our relationships overlap less and less. This change in our interactions is touching every aspect of our life. A recent study even found that 20% of young adults report using their smartphones during sex. That this is coinciding with a rise in loneliness, especially in young people, cannot be coincidental.
As screens become more and more personalized this filter bubble issue is only going to increase. Smartphones are just a middle step in personalizing our screen-based experiences. The next wave of screen technology, including personal heads-up displays like Google Glass and augmented reality, will eventually allow us to experience the entire world in a completely personal way of our own choosing. The possibilities are endless but they are also ripe with risk. How far could our filter bubbles diverge when every detail of our experience is personalized?
This is not to say that these technological advances are inherently bad. But it is to us to acknowledge that these issues exist and do the work to address them.
As designers, how might we change our design approaches in order to drive stronger human-to-human connections? How can we better leverage technology to enhancing shared experience and physical context instead of diminishing it?
We talk about human-centered design and/or user-centered design, but are these ideas too individualized? Do they miss the larger design context? What would it mean to start thinking about humanity-centered design or community-centered design instead? | https://hairyelefante.medium.com/how-smartphones-change-our-relationships-2acedaa0b1d1 | ['Jesse Weaver'] | 2018-08-06 21:24:06.963000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'Technology', 'Tech'] |
Q&A with Emily Ryan, Director of Product at Harvard Business Review | Q&A with Emily Ryan, Director of Product at Harvard Business Review
This week, The Idea caught up with Emily to learn about her role, why HBR is experiencing the best subscription numbers it has ever seen, and how the publisher plans to build niche audiences. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.
Tell me about your role at Harvard Business Review.
I am the director of product. I manage three product managers and one scrum master. We’re responsible for feature enhancements, maintenance, bug fixes, changes to the website, and off-platform products as well. We oversee products including our iOS and Android apps, a partnership with a company called News Over Audio to create audio versions of our article, and a significant number of newsletters.
How has HBR’s product teams evolved over the years?
We used to work in Kanban, which is a method of working that focuses on having a set number of “work in progress” items and “on deck” items. We realized, however, that this wasn’t working for us. We were working in a very waterfall way and had no idea when work would be done or when we could get help with design, analytics, or testing.
So, we transitioned to working in co-located, cross-functional scrum teams. Each one of my product managers is on a team with a scrum master, three to four developers, and a designer. We found that these small teams are much better at solving problems and coming up with solutions together.
We also have more insight into when things will be done through the structure that scrum provides us.
When reorganizing the structure of our product teams, we also made sure to align the teams around certain aspects of our business.
One of the teams, “The Core Team,” is focused on site architecture and maintenance. They are mostly innovating along architectural and structural lines. For instance, they recently built HBR’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The other two teams are aligned along our business goals: encouraging people to consume our content, and eventually getting them to purchase our content. We built the “Consume” and “Buy” Teams to support these goals individually. The Consume team works closely with editorial stakeholders and goals, while The Buy team focuses on revenue opportunities with subscription marketing, e-commerce, and advertising.
This arrangement has been great because it allows product managers to 1) become in-depth subject matter experts in certain areas of the business and 2) narrow down the scope of the stakeholders that they’re working with. This set-up also allows our product teams to more easily prioritize editorial and business goals as they are not competing with each other.
HBR launched its good-better-best pricing model a year ago. Can you tell me about how this product was built?
Last January, we launched our first three-tier subscription product. Before that we only offered one subscription that included all access to the site, the print magazine, and access to our app. When we launched the three-tier subscription product, we introduced a digital-only subscription that was unlimited access to the site and the apps, a digital plus print subscription, and a premium subscription, which included some additional benefits like free eBooks every quarter, case studies and events. That project was enormous and required collaboration amongst all three teams.
The Consume team focused on editorial innovations that would strengthen the subscription offer, such as editor curated reading lists and case study bundles.
The Buy team focused on the mechanics of the conversion page, supporting account management, and all of the underlying structures that help us identify subscribers and manage paywalls. We used what is called “Scrum of Scrums” to ensure that all three product teams were aware of what the others were doing.
We also worked closely with our UX team. They took charge when it came to thinking about the paywall language: the call to action needed to differ based on what type of subscriber you were, anonymous, or registered.
The running joke for awhile was this one scene from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” where one of the characters is trying to figure out a mailroom conspiracy theory. The character has a bunch of papers up on the wall connected by strings and it was a mess. It kind of felt like that. We spent a really long time with the UX team parsing out all of the potential scenarios and pain points that users might encounter when coming across a paywall.
How has Covid-19 impacted HBR?
Recently, we’ve been publishing a lot of content on working from home, supporting employees, and answering all kinds of nebulous questions that come with the unprecedented situation we are in. Our editorial team has always focused on creating content that’s helpful and relevant to our audience. Now more than ever, I think they’re doing an amazing job of it. And, even though the content is free, it communicates to potential subscribers the value of our brand.
While we decided as a company that all of that coronavirus-related content should be free and in front of the wall, we are a business and, just like any other business, are really concerned about what this means for us and our ability to make money.
So, we also made the decision to reduce our wall. Previously, non-registered users could access three free articles and registered users could access six articles. When they ran out of articles, the user would be asked to subscribe. When we made our coronavirus coverage free, we reduced the wall from three to two articles for non-registered users and from six to four articles for registered users.
This combination of publishing relevant and timely content along with reducing the wall has led to the best subscription numbers we’ve ever seen.
We’ve also seen an unprecedented number of site visits: In March, we had 17.9 million unique visits, an all time high, bolstered by one of our coronavirus-related articles titled “The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief.”
This story actually came about when our editors were on a Slack call and asking each other how they’re doing. One person responded that this moment felt like grief and this inspired one of the editors to do some research and bring that piece together alongside grief expert David Kessler.
Was HBR considering to reduce its meter limit prior to the pandemic?
The reduction of the wall was always something that was out there. I think we weren’t ready to pull the lever to do it until we realized that this was a good opportunity for us and that we had to be a bit proactive and defensive in this moment.
What’s an interesting project that you’re currently working on?
We’ve been thinking a lot more about how to a lot build rabid, excited audiences around certain topics or issues. One project I’m working on now is thinking about how HBR can create memberships for different segments of our audience, specifically young professionals.
These are people who might be a little bit younger than who we would consider our typical audience. We currently have a student subscription, but we want to identify a voice, style and platforms that would be best suited for an audience of young professionals.
We have been able to successfully build some niche cohorts of audiences before. The example we keep going back to is our Women at Work podcast which started as an experiment and went really well. We were able to quickly build an engaged and excited audience. And, we ended up following up the success of the podcast with a focused newsletter and events.
What is the most interesting thing that you’ve seen from a media outlet other than your own?
With the young professionals project, I’ve been looking a lot at verticals like The Cut, The Lily, The Skimm, Smarter Living from The New York Times, among many others. I think the common thread between all these sub-brands is that they’re really daring to go deep in a certain area and they’ve given themselves space to create a new voice that caters to a specific audience. These verticals have such a distinct style and they’re unapologetic about it.
I’m also really interested in user generated content and how we might make more of that. The Wall Street Journal is revamping its newsletters and encouraging people to contribute more. And, now, with Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, the line between content consumer and content creator is so thin.
Rapid Fire
What is your first read in the morning?
Definitely my email, then usually The Boston Globe online.
What are you currently reading?
I’m part of a monthly book club and last month’s book was The Holdout by Graham Moore — I highly recommend it, especially for crime heads like me!
What job would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role?
I started out as an editor and would probably be doing that if I didn’t get into product management. | https://medium.com/the-idea/q-a-with-emily-ryan-director-of-product-at-harvard-business-review-79259693b02 | ['Tesnim Zekeria'] | 2020-04-28 19:57:52.132000+00:00 | ['Subscriber Spotlight', 'Journalism', 'Media', 'Product', 'Harvard Business Review'] |
Design Interview Questions & Prep | Over the past month, I have interviewed with about 30 companies for UI, UX, Product, Interaction Designer roles. So, that’s a lot of different questions based on the company and the person who was interviewing me.
50 Questions
I know that’s a lot of questions but I was asked at least 5–8 of these questions in each round. It was a mix of personal, design, business and behavioral questions.
All of these questions might not apply to you based on what role you’re applying for. Although, it definitely helps to be prepared for most of these questions.
Tell me about yourself. What do you know about our company and this role? What do you do in your current job? What does your current company do? How did you become a Designer? Why do you want to change your job? How did you find this role? Why do you want to join our company? How many people are in your team? Who do you report to? Tell me about a project you’re proud of. Where do you get design inspirations from? Do you follow any designers? How do you keep yourself updated with the latest design trends? Which company do you think does the best branding? How do you define UX design? What’s your favorite product or app and why? Which product’s design do you dislike and how would you change it? What design tools do you use? What design tools are you proficient in? Do you use whiteboard? Can you code? Have you faced any problems while working with developers? How do you solve it? What do you do when project managers or clients don’t like your design? Was there a scenario where you planned something for a client but something completely unexpected happened? How did you overcome it? How do you convey your ideas to project managers or other designers? Do you use any task management software? How do you hand over your designs to the developers? Do you like working with other designers? Do you have experience leading a team or conducting presentations? How do you handle critique on your designs? Do you like flat design? If so, why? Have you designed primarily with iOS or Material design guidelines? How do you decide what visualizations to use for a particular data? What design tools do you use for data visualizations? Find 10 flaws with this illustration (interviewer shows you a design). What do you do when you come up with a design but it doesn’t align with the research? Have you done usability testing? What do you think about collaborative work? Do you have experience with people working remote? Talk me through your design process. When do you know a design is complete? How do you stay organized or keep up with deadlines? Do you follow Agile scrum or Waterfall methodology? Do you design in Mac or Windows? What do you look for in an ideal boss? What do you do outside of work? Where do you see yourself in 5 years? How much compensation are you expecting? Do you have any questions?
Preparing for answers
I haven’t discussed the answers for these questions because they are based on many factors,
Your experience Your profile Company’s profile Posted job’s requirements Interviewer
So, before every interview, I would prepare with all of these,
When you’re asked a question, take a deep breath — think and recollect because you would have faced that situation in your life. It is not necessary to give an answer as soon as the question is asked. You’re not a robot! Get thorough with your resume and projects. It is very important to know what you have done in the past and what your expertise is in. More than often, you will be asked if you know anything about their company. And, you will definitely get bonus points for researching about the company — shows that you’re really interested in them. It is good to read up on the job requirements and responsibilities, so that you can align your answers based on what they are seeking. Go on LinkedIn and check who the interviewer is, to see if you have anything in common with him/her or to get an idea of their profile. This helps to know what type of questions you might expect.
What I do before an Interview
Of course, prepare for the interview. I read a lot about the company, role, myself, design articles., etc. I talk to myself or someone about what I would say when a certain question is asked. Practice practice practice! I always have some pointers written down, so I can quickly browse during the interview. Staying calm is the key to nailing any interview! So I do something that calms me down — like meditating. I go to a quiet room, so there is no disturbances during the interview. I have a glass of water next to me because sometimes I get parched while talking a lot during the interview. I have my laptop in front of me with the job posting open or to search something quickly or to even have my portfolio handy. I have my iPad to take down notes. I usually go to the restroom before so I don’t have to excuse myself during the interview. Pretty important! Just 5 mins before the interview, I try to listen to a song or watch a video that I like. This usually loosens me up.
What I felt worked during the interview | https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/design-interview-questions-prep-d2e286a45e1d | ['Pavithra Aravindan'] | 2017-12-12 01:20:59.244000+00:00 | ['UI', 'Design', 'Interview', 'Tech', 'UX'] |
How to create a searchable log with Gatsby | Taking notes is key to remembering most things in our lives. How many times have you worked on a project, then three months later needed to get back in the code, and it took you hours to come back up to speed? If you had taken a few minutes to jot down some documentation, you could have cut to the chase.
Personally, I keep my notes all over the place — in notebooks, mostly, but also right here on this blog. Many times when I finish a large, difficult feature, I like to blog key elements of it so I can come back later and figure out how I did what I did. Plus, it might help someone else along the way. However, there are tons of things I learn every day that just slip away. I keep learning and re-learning them and that’s inefficient.
I recently wanted a way to quickly jot down things I learn throughout the day, or lessons I want to keep in mind. But that’s not enough — I also need to be able to search these logs so I can find exactly what I’m looking for right away. That’s exactly what I’m going to show you how to build today. This project, front-to-back, took me maybe an hour and a half.
Gatsby
This project is built using Gatsby, the wildly popular front-end framework for creating static websites. I’m going to skip all the sales pitch stuff and just jump into the code, but if you want to back up a step, I wrote a long blog post about why I love Gatsby so much. In short: it’s awesome if you know React, and probably worth learning anyway if you need a static site.
Step 1: Create a new Gatsby site using the beautiful “Julia” template
Assuming you’ve got the Gatsby CLI working, run this to pull the pared-down but beautifully laid-out Julia template:
gatsby new <site-name> https://github.com/niklasmtj/gatsby-starter-julia
Pop open the gatsby-config.js and swap out your details for “Julia Doe” under siteMeta . You’re halfway there.
Step 2: Add logging
Now we want to add some functionality to the site. In the content directory, add a markdown file or twenty. Nest them however you like. You’ll follow this format:
---
title: "Whatever title you want"
date: "2019-05-010"
draft: false
path: "/logs/some-slug-for-the-file"
tags: testing, documentation
---
# Monday, May 6, 2019
* Added documentation ....
Note that path needs to be unique for each file. I named mine by date (with each week getting one file) but obviously you can do anything you like.
Step 2A: follow the Gatsby documentation for creating pages from Markdown
I could reiterate, but the Gatsby documentation itself is incredibly straightforward and easy to follow. You’ll install the required plugins, configure them in gatsby-config.js , create a template for how your posts should look, and set up gatsby-node.js to build pages from your markdown files.
To steal a tip from somewhere else on the internet: if you head to a localhost page you know doesn’t take you anywhere (I prefer localhost:8000/garbage ), you can see all the available links for your page. It’s a quick way to check Gatsby has created all your markdown pages appropriately.
Keep it clean
I learned working on this project that you can assign multiple folders to get scanned by Gatsby’s file system plugin:
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`,
options: {
name: `images`,
path: `${__dirname}/src/images`,
},
},
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`,
options: {
name: `markdown-pages`,
path: `${__dirname}/src/content`,
},
},
So no problem if you are already using gatsby-source-filesystem to read, for instance, your image files. I also tested nesting, and Gatsby will grab anything in your content folder recursively — so you can go ahead and organize any way you like.
Good times! If you took that diversion to the Gatsby docs, you should now have a fully-functioning log system.
Step 3: Add search
Now the fun part. We’ll add the ability to search our logs using the Gatsby lunr elastic search plugin.
Configure
First, yarn add @gatsby-contrib/gatsby-plugin-elasticlunr-search , then we’ll add to gatsby-config.js :
{
resolve: `@gatsby-contrib/gatsby-plugin-elasticlunr-search`,
options: {
// Fields to index
fields: [`title`, `tags`, `html`],
resolvers: {
MarkdownRemark: {
title: node => node.frontmatter.title,
tags: node => node.frontmatter.tags,
path: node => node.frontmatter.path,
html: node => node.internal.content,
},
},
},
},
Note that I’ve added a field not included on the lunr docs: html . We’ll need this for full text search of the logs, rather than just searching by tags.
Add a search bar
Obviously yours can go anywhere. I put mine right on the index under my name.
The search bar component:
import React from "react"
import { graphql, StaticQuery } from "gatsby"
import Search from "./search"
export default () => {
return (
<StaticQuery
query={graphql`
query SearchIndexQuery {
siteSearchIndex {
index
}
}
`}
render={data => (
<Search searchIndex={data.siteSearchIndex.index}/>
)}
/>
)
}
Nothing much going on here — we’re just grabbing the search index from the elastic search data.
The search component, essentially copied directly from the lunr docs:
import React, { Component } from "react"
import { Index } from "elasticlunr"
import { Link } from "gatsby"
import styled from "@emotion/styled" export default class Search extends Component {
state = {
query: ``,
results: []
}
render() {
return (
<div>
<input type="text" value={this.state.query} onChange={this.search} />
<ul>
{this.state.results.map(page => (
<li key={page.id}>
<Link to={"/" + page.path}>{page.title}</Link>
{': ' + page.tags}
</li>
))}
</ul>
</div>
)
}
getOrCreateIndex = () => {
return this.index
? this.index
: // Create an elastic lunr index and hydrate with graphql query results
Index.load(this.props.searchIndex)
}
search = evt => {
const query = evt.target.value
this.index = this.getOrCreateIndex()
this.setState({
query,
// Query the index with search string to get an [] of IDs
results: this.index
.search(query, { expand: true })
// Map over each ID and return the full document
.map(({ ref }) => {
return this.index.documentStore.getDoc(ref)
}),
})
}
}
You build a search index, fetch results based on a partial string, hydrate those results based on what the index returns, then map over them to display.
And that is seriously it. Your markdown pages will be built when Gatsby build runs and your search will index the first time you try to search.
Step 4: Add security
I’m not putting any state secrets or env variables in these logs, but I would rather not have a potential employer stumble upon them, mostly because I want to be free to talk about my struggles or be very clear about what I don’t know. If I have to censor myself, it will affect the quality of my logs.
At the same time, I can’t be bothered with a login or anything too fancy. So I opted for the silliest, loosest, easiest security I could come up with: a basic localStorage token. If you have it, you see the logs, and if not, too bad. Here’s how that works.
In landing-bio.js and anywhere else I want to protect:
const isBrowser = () => typeof window !== "undefined"
const isAuthenticated = isBrowser() && window.localStorage.getItem('authenticated'); [...] {isAuthenticated ? <SearchBar /> : <div>You aren't Amber, so you don't get to read her logs.</div>}
I would never use this for actually-sensitive information, but it’s great for a tiny bit of peace of mind that my coworkers won’t be sneaking around my personal logs.
Note that the browser check (first line) is needed for this to pass tests on Netlify — it works fine without it otherwise.
Bonus: Deploy with Netlify
I talked about how much I love Netlify on my previous Gatsby blog post, and I still love them. It’s so dang easy to get your stuff right online.
All you’ll do is head over to Netlify, authorize them to access the Github where your logs are stored, and they will monitor Github and make new releases for you whenever you push to master. They will also create deploy previews when you make PRs! It’s really wonderful and I super-recommend them.
If you are going to create logs in markdown, I highly recommend a deploy system as easy as this one, and I don’t know of another that is as seamless. | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-to-create-a-searchable-log-with-gatsby-d624bf3a05af | ['Amber Wilkie'] | 2019-05-16 17:23:45.594000+00:00 | ['React', 'Gatsbyjs', 'Tutorial', 'Web Development', 'Tech'] |
How Does It Feel When You Don’t Speak Up Against Racism? | How Does It Feel When You Don’t Speak Up Against Racism?
Speaking up against racism takes courage and sometimes as a black person, one doesn't. One just swallows the humiliation and hurt of racism to not cause a stir.
Photo by Wayne Lee-Sing on Unsplash
After close to 50 years on earth, you would think that I, a black woman, would be used to racism by now. It happens so frequently, I must have grown accustomed to it by now you must think. But the fact is, no, I am not.
One can never get used to the hurt and pain of racism. In fact, one almost never knows when racism will strike, and sometimes I must admit it takes me, by total surprise.
And that’s the really hard part about it — it’s emotionally jarring because you could be having a totally happy day, and boom, racism hits and brings you down. And I find that the older I get, the more mentally difficult it gets to come out of an incident of racism unscathed. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/how-does-it-feel-when-you-dont-speak-up-against-racism-4558730dd846 | ['Rebecca Stevens A.'] | 2020-12-12 12:37:43.465000+00:00 | ['BlackLivesMatter', 'Racism', 'Interracial Relationships', 'Mental Health', 'Equality'] |
7 quick Figma tips | Originally published at marcandrew.me
In this article I’ve compiled a handful of quick, and easy tips to help speed up your design workflow when working in Figma.
Most of these tips are perfect for when you’re working with design systems or large design files, but they’re also equally suited to just general day, to day usage when working inside of Figma.
Some you may use already, but hopefully you may find the odd undiscovered gem in here too.
Let’s dive on in… | https://uxdesign.cc/7-quick-figma-tips-113849e21d63 | ['Marc Andrew'] | 2020-12-14 11:03:34.520000+00:00 | ['UI', 'Figma', 'Design', 'Web Development', 'Prototyping'] |
Words of Poetry | Words of Poetry
Poetry
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
The sun rises,
as the moon sleeps
and stars hide behind an unassuming sky,
while a poet paints vigilant clouds paused
with strident syllables,
hoping for words to fall upon
deafened ears and opened hearts. | https://medium.com/scribe/words-of-poetry-cdbafc8e30b | ['Connie Song'] | 2020-12-26 23:14:43.609000+00:00 | ['Readers', 'Writing', 'Poet', 'Poetry', 'Scribe'] |
State Department Records Show Senate Republicans Knew About Russian Disinformation & Failed to Tell the Public — Again | Peer-Reviewed Politics
State Department Records Show Senate Republicans Knew About Russian Disinformation & Failed to Tell the Public — Again
US intelligence analysts picked up chatter last month that emails like those revealed yesterday by the NYPost would be leaked in October, having been stolen by the same GRU unit that hacked the DNC. One worry was Russia would mix in forgeries.
Foreign Influence and the Trump Administration | Karl Evers-Hillstrom on 5 Jun 2019
The Hunter Biden investigation that spent taxpayer dollars investigating known Russian disinformation, found nothing illegal and no new information on Hunter Biden. The timeline on it should also raise some flags. For a more full report on what about this investigation should raise red flags, you can read the follow-up and consider the pattern of behavior described below.
What they did find is more shocking in the context of yesterday’s New York Post, given the federal government knew about it.
The GOP Senate investigation gave the Russian disinformation on Hunter Biden credibility, or as Mitt Romney says it was a “political exercise.” Using the state against political opponents is the hallmark of Russian and Chinese regimes. That this furthering of disinformation and withholding of the truth is neither the first instance nor the only type of use of the federal government against an opponent should worry anyone who values democracy.
US intelligence analysts picked up chatter last month that emails like those revealed yesterday by the NYPost would be leaked in October, having been stolen by the same GRU unit that hacked the DNC. One worry was Russia would mix in forgeries.
Despite this, Americans were not warned just as they were not warned when we received reports early in the year that Russia would further the idea that Vice President Joseph Biden’s stutter was evidence of degenerative illness. For further information on that, see DHS Withheld Intelligence on Russian Disinformation. How it Happened is the real story. | https://e-rosalie.medium.com/state-dept-records-show-senate-gop-knew-of-disinformation-failed-to-warn-public-7a017f91dcc9 | ['E. Rosalie'] | 2020-10-15 16:45:34.128000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Election 2020', 'Politics', 'Govenrment', 'Psychology'] |
Extreme Learning Machines | Extreme Learning Machines I
Part I: Introduction: Why do we need ELM?
Around 2005, A novel machine learning approach was introduced by Guang-Bin Huang and a team of researchers at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
This new proposed learning algorithm tends to reach the smallest training error, obtain the smallest norm of weights and the best generalization performance, and runs extremely fast, in order to differentiate it from the other popular SLFN learning algorithms, it is called the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM).
This method mainly addresses the issue of far slower training time of neural networks than required, the main reasons for which is that all the parameters of the networks are tuned iteratively by using such learning algorithms. These slow-gradient based learning algorithms are extensively used to train neural networks.
Important features of ELM Source
Before going into how ELM works and how is it so good, let’s see how gradient-based neural networks based off.
Demonstration of Gradient-based Neural networks
Below are the steps followed in a single-layered feedforward neural network in brief:
Step 1: Evaluate Wx + B
Step 2: Apply activation function g(Wx + B) and Compute output
Step 3: Calculate Loss
Step 4: Compute gradients (using delta rule)
Step 5: Repeat
This method of propagating forward and back involves a hefty number of calculations Also if the input size is large or if there are more layers/nodes, the training takes up a significant amount of time.
fig.1. 3-layered Neural Network
In the above example, we can see for a 4 node input we require W1 (20 parameters), W2 (53 parameters), and W3 (21 parameters), i.e. 94 parameters in total. And the parameters increase rapidly with the increasing input nodes.
Let’s take a real-life example of image classification of numbers with MNIST Dataset:
MNIST Example
This has a 28x28 input size i.e. 784 input nodes. For its architecture, let’s consider two layers with 128 nodes and 64 nodes, which are then classified into 10 classes. Then parameters will be:
First Layer (784, 128) = 100352 parameters
Second Layer (128, 64) = 8192 parameters
Output Layer (64, 10) = 640 parameters
This will give us a total of 109184 parameters. And the repeated adjustment of weights by backpropagation increases the training time by a lot.
And this just for a 28x28 image, consider training it for bigger input size with 10000’s of features. The training time just gets out of hand.
Conclusion:
In almost all practical learning algorithms of feedforward neural networks, the conventional backpropagation method requires all these weights to be adjusted at every back-prop step.
For most of the time, gradient-descent based strategies have been employed in varied learning algorithms of feedforward neural networks. However, it’s clear that gradient descent-based learning strategies square measure usually terribly slow because of improper learning steps or could simply converge to local minimums. And many iterative learning steps are needed by such learning algorithms so as to get higher learning performance.
This makes the training far slower than required, which has been a major bottleneck for various applications. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/extreme-learning-machines-82095ee198ce | ['Prasad Kumkar'] | 2020-08-06 04:40:49.911000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Research', 'Computer Science'] |
Hadoop Performance Evaluation by Benchmarking and Stress Testing with TeraSort and TestDFSIO | Evaluation
In this article, we will analyse different stats such as running time, performance, I/O rate, the throughput by running TestDFSIO and TeraSort Benchmark on Hadoop clusters.
The experimental cluster I used consists of 6 nodes. One of them is designed to serve as a master node and the other 5 nodes are designed to be slave nodes or core nodes. The master node manages the cluster and typically runs master components of distributed applications. Core nodes run the Data Node daemon to coordinate data storage as part of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). I used AWS EMR to create the cluster. The hardware information of each node is as follows:
8 vCore
15 GiB memory
80 SSD GB storage
These configurations are of m3.xlarge instance type.
I ssh-ed into the master node to run the following benchmarks from the command line interface.
TestDFSIO
TestDFSIO benchmark is a read and write test for HDFS. It is helpful for tasks such as stress testing HDFS, to discover performance bottlenecks in your network, to shake out the hardware, OS and Hadoop setup of your cluster machines (particularly the NameNode and the DataNodes) and to give you a first impression of how fast your cluster is in terms of I/O.
TestDFSIO is designed in such a way that it will use 1 map task per file, i.e. it is a 1:1 mapping from files to map tasks. Splits are defined so that each map gets only one filename, which it creates ( -write ) or reads ( -read ).
The command to run a test :
hadoop jar hadoop-*test*.jar TestDFSIO -write|-read -nrFiles <no. of output files> -fileSize <size of one file>
TeraSort
TeraSort Benchmark is used to test both, MapReduce and HDFS by sorting some amount of data as quickly as possible in order to measure the capabilities of distributing and mapreducing files in cluster. This benchmark consists of 3 components:
TeraGen - generates random data
generates random data TeraSort - does the sorting using MapReduce
does the sorting using MapReduce TeraValidate - used to validate the output
TeraGen
To generate random data, the following command is used.
hadoop jar $HADOOP_HOME/hadoop-*examples*.jar teragen <number of 100-byte rows> <input dir>
Suppose you want to generate data of 10 GB, then the number of 100-byte rows will be 10⁷.
Explaination : 10 GB =10⁷ * 100 bytes = 10⁹ bytes
TeraSort
To sort the generated data, the following command is used.
hadoop jar $HADOOP_HOME/hadoop-*examples*.jar terasort <input dir> <output dir>
TeraValidate
To ensure the data was sorted correctly, the following command is used.
hadoop jar $HADOOP_HOME/hadoop-*examples*.jar teravalidate <output dir> <terasort-validate dir>
Challenges faced while running the benchmark
Since the instances I used were of m3.xlarge type, the memory and storage were limited. As a result, few challenges were faced while benchmarking.
After running each benchmark test, HDFS should be cleaned so that the next benchmark can be run without any storage issue.
No two benchmark tests should be run simultaneously so as to avoid memory issues.
Results
TestDFSIO
I ran a TestDFSIO read-write test for assessing Hadoop performance of the experimental cluster I created. This test was run on 5 files each of size 10 GB, 20 GB, 30 GB, 40 GB and 50 GB.
Following are the different stats extracted from the TestDFSIO benchmark.
Runtime
Runtime (TestDFSIO)
In the above figure, you can see that read operation is a bit faster than write operation. This is because disks such as HDD or SSD work like that only.
Throughput
Throughput (TestDFSIO)
In hadoop, the task is divided among different blocks, the processing is done parallel and independent to each other. So because of parallel processing, HDFS has good throughput.
I/O rate
I/O rate (TestDFSIO)
I/O rate is the speed with which the data transfer takes place between the hard disk drive and RAM.
TeraSort
I ran a TeraSort test for assessing Hadoop performance of the experimental cluster I created. This test was run on 5 files each of size 10 GB, 20 GB, 30 GB, 40 GB and 50 GB. First I used TeraGen to generate data to be sorted, then used TeraSort to sort the data and finally used TeraValidate to validate the sorted results.
Following are the different stats extracted from the TeraSort benchmark.
Runtime
Runtime (TeraSort)
Performance
Performance (TeraSort)
There are several interesting details which can be quantified from the above stats:
A larger amount of data to be sorted implies increasing the runtime, as could be expected a priori.
For intermediate size of data like 30 GB and 40 GB, cluster of 1 master and 5 slaves is ideal.
For large size of data, there is less gain with cluster of 1 master and 5 slaves. | https://medium.com/ymedialabs-innovation/hadoop-performance-evaluation-by-benchmarking-and-stress-testing-with-terasort-and-testdfsio-444b22c77db2 | ['Rahul Nayak'] | 2018-09-05 12:13:38.669000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Hadoop', 'Mapreduce', 'Terasort', 'Backend'] |
How to Measure Execution Time in Python | Python Interface
Import
Add the following import declaration at the top of your Python file:
import timeit
timeit
We are going to replicate the same code snippet that we tested earlier using the timeit function. It accepts the following input parameters:
stmt — String containing the code snippets for your test case.
— String containing the code snippets for your test case. setup — Initial code that will be executed once.
— Initial code that will be executed once. timer — The timer instance. It is defaulted to time.perf_counter() , which returns a float.
— The timer instance. It is defaulted to , which returns a float. number — Number of executions to be carried out. The default value is 1,000,000.
— Number of executions to be carried out. The default value is 1,000,000. globals — Specifies a namespace in which to execute the code.
Most of the time, you will use just the stmt , setup , and number parameters. Append the following code in the Python file:
result = timeit.timeit("'-'.join([str(i) for i in range(100)])", number=20000)
Then, print out the result:
print(result)
You should see the following result when you run it. The time might differ based on the specifications of your machine:
0.4323697
repeat
Should there arise a need to repeat the same test multiple times, you can use the repeat function. It accepts the same parameters as timeit with an additional repeat parameter. The default value is five:
result = timeit.repeat("'-'.join([str(i) for i in range(100)])", number=20000) print(result)
You should see a list of floats with different decimals placed on your console when you run the Python file.
Function
If you are testing codes that are enclosed in a function, you can wrap the function in a multi-block string and pass it as an stmt input parameter. However, a better solution is to import it as a setup parameter. Let’s define the same code snippet inside a function:
def test():
return '-'.join([str(i) for i in range(100)])
The next step is to import it from the main definition:
if __name__ == '__main__':
result = timeit.timeit("test()", setup="from __main__ import test", number=20000) print(result)
You should get more or less the same execution time when you run it. One big issue with this solution is that you will have a hard time writing the import statement if multiple functions exist.
Globals
Another option is to set the globals namespace, which will cause the code to be executed within your current global namespace. This solution is a lot more convenient and does not affect any of your underlying code: | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-measure-execution-time-in-python-21004748535e | ['Ng Wai Foong'] | 2020-05-06 14:19:02.480000+00:00 | ['Python3', 'Programming', 'Python', 'DevOps', 'Data Science'] |
Shrink the Node_Modules Folder Size in Yarn(1.*) Project by Deduplicating Dependencies | We can reduce our node modules size by these actions:
find and remove all unused dependencies with depcheck.
deduplicate all the duplicated dependencies with yarn-deduplicate.
Step 1 — remove unused dependencies
first, we will install this tool:
npx depcheck
and then we will run it with this command(for advanced uses you can look on the docs):
depcheck
it will give you a list of all Unused dependencies, Unused Devdependencies, and Missing dependencies — for example:
Unused dependencies
* @aws-amplify/auth
* @fullcalendar/core
Unused devDependencies
* @babel/core
* @babel/plugin-transform-typescript
Missing dependencies
* serverless: ./serverless.yml
now you can remove those dependencies (only) with yarn remove (its a bad idea to remove it by simply delete the files or changing the package.json or yarn.lock manually — for a lot of reasons…):
yarn remove @aws-amplify/auth @fullcalendar/core @babel/core @babel/plugin-transform-typescript
and then run
yarn install
again, to update your node modules library.
in the docs there is this quote:
Depcheck just walks through all files and tries to find the dependencies according to some predefined rules. However, the predefined rules may not be enough or may even be wrong. There may be some cases in which a dependency is being used but is reported as unused, or dependency is not used but is reported as missing. These are false alert situations.
so — it’s possible to get a false alert and remove dependent that is in use — so its recommended to remove the unused dependencies one by one and make sure that your app is working properly after removing this dependency.
Step 2- deduplicate all the duplicated dependencies
*** This part is relevant only if you use Yarn v1. Yarn v2 supports package deduplication natively and you don’t need to use this tool at all ***
the second step is to clean up yarn.lock by removing duplicates.
A duplicate package is when two dependencies are resolved to a different version, even when a single version matches the range specified in the dependencies.
if you “host” other npm packages that use different versions of heavy dependencies(material-ui, babel, jest, etc…) you can easily go to crazy node_modules folder size — that will affect developing, build and deploys times and performance.
you can check how much duplications you have with by running this command:
npm ls — parseable | xargs -L1 sh -c ‘basename $1’ dummy | sort | uniq -c | grep -v “^ *1 “ | sort -rn
to get the names of duplications with the numbers:
or by run:
yarn-deduplicate — list
and get the names and the versions:
you can also see the size of your node_modules and understand which packages make the noide_modules very big with this:
cd node_modules
du -h -d 2 | sort -h
you will get a list of all libraries and their size:
and it can help you to focus on the specific packages that you should focus on.
Why to use it(yarn say that they do it automatically but they don’t 😞)
Yarn documentation seems to suggest this package shouldn’t be necessary.
For example, in https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/dedupe/, it says
The dedupe command isn’t necessary. yarn install will already dedupe.
This is, however, not exactly true. There are cases where yarn will not deduplicate existing packages. For example, this scenario:
Install libA. It depends on libB ^1.1.0. At this point, the latest version of libB is 1.1.2, so it gets installed as a transitive dependency in your repo
After a few days, install libC. It also depends on libB ^1.1.0. But this time, the latest libB version is 1.1.3.
In the above scenario, you’ll end up with [email protected] and [email protected] in your repo.
How to use:
in your root project folder run:
yarn add yarn-deduplicate -D; # local. this is best practice!
yarn yarn-deduplicate -s fewer yarn.lock;
yarn install # Don’t forget this step.
To understand better what the deduplication do,
I recommend to ensure your yarn.lock and package.json are committed, run the tool, examining the diff, and commit the changes!
you should see something like this in your yarn.lock:
as we can see in this example, yarn-dedupe changes change the yarn.lock and now these “@babel/helpers@⁷.7.4” will use version 7.10.4, and in the next time that we will yarn install
the @babel/helpers@⁷.7.4 will remove from our node_modules tree.
here is an example of a node_modules tree of an npm package of other teams that we host in our main app before and after deduplication:
and this is only a little part of the diff — so you can understand how it can shrink the size of the main node_modules.
there are a lot of options, strategies, and more details to learn in this tool — highly recommended to read the docs and this great article.
if your yarn.lock is very big and it’s possible deduplicate every package separately, you should do it with this command:
yarn yarn-deduplicate — packages <package1> <package2> <packageN>
it is possible that things can stop workes after this tool (you actually change dependencies of your dependencies) in some cases you would delete your node_modules library and install it again with:
rm -rf node_modules/ yarn install
anyway — don’t forget to yarn install after dedupe and make sure to test your app after using this tool and make sure everything will work as expected. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-shrink-the-size-of-node-modules-in-yarn-1-version-based-project-b47662e04ec2 | ['Erez Lieberman'] | 2020-10-12 08:46:01.253000+00:00 | ['React', 'Node Modules', 'Yarn'] |
MARKET Protocol — Explain it like I’m Five | Bitcoin is often referred as “digital gold”. Gold, like silver and any other precious metals or agricultural goods, is a commodity. Commodities along with currencies, stocks, bonds, and real estate are types of primary financial instruments. To increase the flexibility and efficiency of the trading markets, finance professionals have developed secondary financial instruments called ‘derivatives’, with forwards, futures, options, and swaps being the most commonly traded. Derivatives have two main components, the base currency and the underlying asset. Users make or lose the base currency as the underlying asset moves. For example, the Crude Oil Futures at the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) trade in dollars (base currency) and derive their value from a price of crude oil per barrel (underlying asset).
In the cryptocurrency world, traders have only been able to exchange their digital assets from A to B in one-time or spot transactions for example, like Bitcoin to Ethereum. Blockchain technology is in the maturing process. Its participants should soon have better hedging and price discovery tools at disposal including derivatives. And since many future MARKET Protocol participants may never have been exposed to derivatives, the following example is provided to illustrate how one type of derivative, a futures contract, functions in the real world. Also given is an analogous use case in cryptocurrencies implemented using MARKET contracts to demonstrate their utility for risk management purposes.
Imagine you were a wheat producer and your biggest potential buyer is a flour mill. It would be essential for both parties to find ways to secure future positive cash flow in order to effectively plan and maintain their businesses. If you knew that you could sell a bushel of wheat for $4.5 in the future while current production costs were $3.5 per bushel, you might want to lock in a price of $4.5. If you did not, you risk a price decrease due to unpredictable factors from now until harvest (e.g. oversupply or other adverse market or weather conditions).
The mill holds the same risk but in the other direction, since the price in a few months might go up to $7 when it needs to re-supply. Therefore, it might be beneficial for both parties to enter into a contract that guarantees the delivery of wheat at a specified date and price in the future — in this case $4.5 per bushel. The type of contract just described (future delivery of an asset at a fixed price) is called a futures contract and it is a basic type of derivative. It’s called a derivative because it derives its value from something else — in this case the price of a bushel of wheat.
MARKET protocol contracts are also derivatives because they derive their value from something else, an underlying asset which can be on-chain (cryptocurrencies and tokens) or off-chain (stocks, bonds, indexes).
Translated into the world of cryptocurrencies, one could think of an Ether miner as a farmer and traders/investors/speculators as a mill. Similarly to agriculture production, there are several factors that need to be considered when assessing the profitability of mining a coin, e.g. the cost of electricity, the mining difficulty and the cost of hardware. Since MARKET protocol contracts can be customized by the creator, all of these risks could theoretically be hedged by creating the appropriate contract and finding a counterparty to take the other side of the trade. Therefore, if miners believe they can mine Ether profitably over some length of time in the future at a minimum guaranteed price, they may want to enter into a contract now to eliminate the risk of a future price decline in Ether.
Also, many cryptocurrency traders and miners might want to use their cryptocurrency to gain exposure to traditional market assets or cross chain currency pairs not currently available for trading on regular exchanges. For example, use your Ether to get exposure to Tesla stock. You would never have to sell Ether and open a brokerage account. It would be an excellent way to enable crypto/traditional assets relationships.
How about the ability to hold SALT lending token and partially get exposed to a possible Litecoin price surge without having to buy it (and without having to sell your SALT!)? As a novel price discovery tool for these types of relationships, MARKET contracts could help decrease the volatility of and make utility token valuations become more stable.
So we’ve just learned how MARKET protocol contracts share some similar properties to futures contracts. Yet there are some key differences and advantages to MARKET contracts over traditional futures. These include the ability to collateralize contracts using any ERC20 base token as well as the elimination of third party risk by implementing collateralization via smart contracts. Look forward to these being discussed in more depth in the future. To learn more, visit marketprotocol.io, read our whitepaper, and join the ongoing discussion on Telegram. | https://medium.com/market-protocol/market-protocol-explain-it-like-im-five-673312673b6e | ['Lazar Jovanovic'] | 2018-05-18 20:18:18.208000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Startup', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Why You Should Spend Less Time Looking in the Mirror | For the past few months, I’ve tried everything to get rid of an unusual red rash that has placed its self on the top of my lip. Numerous visits to the doctor and several prescribed creams later, the rash is still there and I’m still annoyed. The latest hypothesis from my doctor is that it might be ‘Perioral Dermatitis’, so I’m slathering some antibiotic cream on it every day in the hope that I’m not amongst the unlucky few for whom this skin condition “may become chronic”.
If my rash does become a long-term issue, I’m going to have to learn to cope a lot better with the frustration I feel every morning when I look at myself in my bathroom mirror. The red, angry bumps jump out at me and give me the impression that it’s the only thing that people will see when they look at me. Once I’ve fixated on this unsightly rash for a few minutes, I begin to notice all the other flaws on my face — the dark bags that hang under my eyes, the brown stains on my teeth, and the oily pimples hiding in the creases of my nose. Needless to say, looking in the mirror hasn’t been an enjoyable process for me these past few months.
The thing is, despite what my mirror’s lead me to believe, numerous friends have told me that my rash is barely noticeable — they hadn’t even been aware of its presence until I drew their attention to it. Maybe they’re just being nice, but I’ve known my friends for too long for them to feel worried about offending my sensibilities. I’m inclined to think that my friends are right and that my mirror’s been misleading me — it hasn’t been giving me an accurate picture of the true me.
What a mirror can’t capture
My mum was diagnosed with a chronic eye-condition several years ago, a side-effect of which is that one her eyes droop shut slightly more than the other (it’s called ‘amblyopia’ apparently). My mum has mentioned this unfortunate consequence of her condition on numerous occasions, but I’d never noticed it, until the other day when we were both stood in front of the mirror by our front-door getting ready to leave the house and I looked at my mum, in the mirror, and there it was — one eye was shut slightly more than the other.
I’d never noticed my mum’s eye issue when I was looking at her face-to-face because my mum is more than just her eyes, or her face, or even her whole physical body. When I look at my mum, there are so many different factors that contribute to my perception of her — the mood she is in, the energy she is giving off, all my memories of her, what she says, maybe what she smells like — none of which I can see when I look at her reflection in a mirror.
When we look into a mirror, the reflection staring back at us is actually an incredibly simplistic and reductive portrayal of who we are. I know that the mirror by my front door can’t show me the kindness, love, and compassion that I see in my mum every day when I look at her, all I see in the mirror is her physicality and that’s not even half of the story.
Even on a physical level, it has been shown that a mirror doesn’t always provide us with an accurate depiction of that which is in front of it — the size, color, and proportions of what a mirror shows us can all be affected by the lighting that surrounds the mirror, our proximity to the mirror, and the size of the mirror itself. Given this evident inaccuracy, we shouldn’t feel the need to attach too much importance to what it shows us, for better or for worse. For all I know, my bathroom mirror could be making my irritating rash look a lot more unpleasant than it actually is — I like that thought, so I’ll stick with it. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/why-you-should-spend-less-time-looking-in-the-mirror-356253fb17ed | ['Antony Pinol'] | 2020-07-30 12:14:28.415000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Self', 'Mirror', 'Self Help'] |
The Great Emoji Movie Challenge | The Great Emoji Movie Challenge
What else are you gonna do during your weeks (months) of COVID-19 social distancing?
With all this self-imposed social distancing (which is important and necessary) we have to keep ourselves amused somehow. My colleague passed over an emoji game which has been spreading in the UK, which I loved so much that I then decided to make my own!
One of the great things about playing (and making) this kind of emoji game is that it helps you think about visual language and how we communicate with signs. Sure, it’s fun, but it also helps you think about how you map information to representation and symbolism — which is something we do all the time in dataviz.
Below you’ll find 50 film titles as created by emoji. Some of these are deep cuts so it’s game on! I’ve added answers at the bottom of the post if you just gotta know.
Guess the film titles: | https://medium.com/nightingale/the-great-emoji-movie-challenge-63162bda9014 | ['Jason Forrest'] | 2020-04-01 23:59:39.782000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Games', 'Emoji', 'Puzzle', 'Design'] |
7 Truly Bizarre Books that Changed My Life | #1: American Psycho- Bret Easton Ellis
American Psycho is a first-person account of Patrick Bateman, an investment banker/ serial killer. Apparently, it is so disturbing that Australia refuses to sell it to minors. The plot alternates between Bateman obsessing over designer clothing brands and violently murdering his coworkers.
How it Changed My Life: I loved reading when I was a kid, but like many tweens, I grew out of the habit in middle school. Teachers try (and usually fail) to rope teens into reading, because there is a huge disconnect between what teens are interested in and what teachers think they are interested in. When I was a teen, I. LOVED. SHOCK VALUE. My desire to read shocking things led me to this book, and I had to persevere through the lengthy descriptions of silk skinny ties to get to the heart racing scenes. American Psycho taught me the value of patience. And patience is the trait I needed to start reading again.
Strangest Passage: “I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal’s handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No… one… would… care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”
Life Lesson: Developing new habits takes patience. (Always return video tapes on time.) | https://medium.com/illumination/7-truly-bizarre-books-that-changed-my-life-4df25f752de3 | ['Valerie King'] | 2020-12-01 04:42:49.242000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Reading', 'Book Recommendations', 'Books'] |
4 Easy Ways to Destroy Trust | If time is our greatest commodity, trust is our most valuable currency. Time is something we cannot afford to waste, but trust is something we cannot afford to squander. When we have destroyed trust at work, the destruction may not stop there.
If our boss cannot trust us in the workplace, we have left them with limited options. They may end up micromanaging your performance because you have taken away their belief in your ability to handle your job. They may end up leaning in to develop you because they believe you have the capacity, but maybe they have overextended trust before it was merited. They may have to replace you if the damage has been to vital and the organization cannot survive the road to repair.
As a fellow leader, there is only so much they can do. The company has to continue, the organization has to move on.
That begs the question, what are things we do that destroy trust?
What if we are caught in habits that are slowly eroding the very thing we need to do our jobs well? There are some behaviors or tendencies that are obvious. When it comes to destroying trust, they’re the wrecking balls.
Other issues are more subtle in their work, like water beneath the surface. It slowly erodes where no one can see but can lead to incredible damage when a sinkhole opens up. The damage may feel instantaneous, but the destructive work was slow.
Either way, trust is destroyed. So what are things we find ourselves doing that destroy the trust we have at work?
Gossip
What is gossip? I’m partial to the definition by Rick Warren. “When people are talking about someone or something, and no one there is part of the problem or solution.”
If we find ourselves in a conversation about someone, and no one in the conversation is involved, no one is a part of why that situation is going wrong, and no one in the conversation is part of fixing that situation, it’s probably gossip.
Our staff walked through this book on gossip, and I like their definition, as well. “Bearing bad news behind someone’s back out of a bad heart.” For Matt Mitchell, gossip must contain these three elements:
Bad news. Sharing information about someone’s newborn child wouldn’t qualify, because in most situations that comes as good news. Just because it’s not bad news doesn’t mean it should be shared, but for Mitchell, it wouldn’t qualify as gossip. Behind their back. Just like Rick Warren’s definition, for something to qualify as gossip, the people involved are not present. If you find yourself in a group text, email chain, or hallway conversation about someone or a relationship and no one is part of that conversation, it has a good chance of being gossip. Bad heart. Intentions matter…but are hard to evaluate. Are you sharing that story because you and the person you’re texting are genuinely wanting to help? Or are you sharing it because, deep down, it feeds your power or makes you feel more in control?
Gossip will destroy the trust you have spent years building. The old, stereotypical illustration of gossip rings true. Go take a bag of feathers and throw them off a skyscraper. Go to the bottom, walk outside, and put them all in the bag. That’s the reality of gossip. Once something has been spoken, it is nearly impossible to undo.
Think about it this way. You know the people in your office that are constantly filling you in on the latest stories…how likely are you to go to them when you need help? If you’re not likely to rely on them, what makes you think anyone else in the organization will, either?
Shading the Truth
This is similar to being a suck-up. Shading the truth means being “technically honest” but deceptive. It can come in two forms.
Positively shading the truth means giving a report to your boss that makes things seem a little better than they may be. An example from my context in student ministry would be going to my boss and saying, “We had 750 people at our retreat, it was a huge win.” The reality? Yes, we had 750 people, but that included staff, chaperones, kitchen staff, and on and on. If I know my boss is asking for how many students we had this year, 750 people is accurate, but still not a complete truth.
Negatively shading the truth is similar. You give an accurate response, but make it sound a little worse than it was. Maybe your team is processing an event you don’t want to host again, and you frame the conversation to be a little less favorable.
Negatively shading the truth can also come in the form of false humility. If you are trying to play the “Little Ol’ Me” card, your boss will eventually see this. Framing yourself as the victim, or less deserving, or more of a problem in a situation when you are not is a sure way to break trust.
Why does shading the truth break trust? For the same reason, gossip breaks trust. When people at your work cannot depend on your feedback or comments for unbiased, fair statements, there is no reason for trust.
You will build for yourself a reputation of being “mostly true,” but mostly true isn’t true.
Blaming
This should come as no surprise…blaming failures will always break trust. It doesn’t matter if you blame other people, if you blame circumstances beyond your control if you blame another department, or anything else. If you don’t take ownership of your own mistakes, you will never build the trust necessary to move on.
Why? Failure isn’t final. In almost every situation, failure is part of the journey, not the end of the journey. The problem with blaming is that you are refusing to take responsibility. When you don’t take responsibility, other people are at fault. When others are at fault, there’s no reason for reflection. When there’s no reason for reflection, there’s no opportunity for growth. When there’s no opportunity for growth, there’s no way to increase your leadership capacity.
The leaders that lead well have also failed, and failed well. The path to true, sustainable success isn’t built upon people and things you’ve thrown under the bus. It’s built upon the hard situations that have made you who you are.
When your default posture is to blame others in failure, you create a win/lose situation for your boss. If he or she gives you more responsibility, either that will go well (win) or things won’t go well and others are blamed (fail).
When your default posture is to accept responsibility (even if it’s not yours to own), you have created a win/win situation. As you get more responsibility, things may go well (win), or if things don’t go well, your boss knows it can be a growth experience when you shoulder the failure and keep moving forward (win).
For more reading on this idea, and to explore the concept of “extreme ownership,” I’d recommend this book by Jocko Willink.
Surprises
I don’t even like surprise parties. That’s personal, though, not necessarily something that will destroy trust.
If you want to make sure you don’t break trust, don’t let there be any surprises. Do you think a client is going to call and be furious about something that happened? Give their rep a heads up. Did something go wrong with a purchase order that you think will work itself out? Don’t let your boss be surprised, give them a heads up.
I have a handful of goals as a leader, and one of them is, “Never let my boss be surprised.” I may send more emails or give more heads up than my boss may like, but I have learned that’s the lesser of two evils.
In my role, I interview adult volunteers to work with teenagers and mentor them. Because of the sensitivity of putting adults in places of trust and power with minors, we have a lot of policies and procedures, as well as an extensive onboarding process to ensure the safety of our students.
As a part of that onboarding, we have leader coaching. When I am coaching a new leader, I ask the same of them: “Please don’t let me get surprised.” Here’s the general overview of my script when I unpack this with them.
If there’s something that happens in your small group time that you think may frustrate a parent, or if there’s a conversation that comes up that covers sensitive material, at least send me a text message.
If someone asks a question about sex and a parent calls me, that phone call can go one of two ways.
If you’ve texted me ahead of time and said, “Ross asked ________, so just as a heads up, we talked about this,” then that conversation with the frustrated parent is pretty easy. “Yes, thanks for calling. Here’s what happened.”
If you haven’t given me a heads up, and a parent calls asking why you were telling them about sex, I have to say, “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. Let me find out about that.”
Parents will respond to two very different ways to those situations. Please help me be in your corner by making sure I’m not surprised by anything.
I would say the same should be true in a working environment. Make sure that your boss is never surprised by something about which you have prior knowledge. It’s a lot easier to be in your corner and knows you’re reliable when you are constantly keeping your boss in the loop (and in turn, making him or her look better). | https://medium.com/the-leadership-journal/destroy-trust-at-work-1926ce1d8406 | ['Austin Walker'] | 2019-12-26 15:44:49.096000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Management', 'Leadership', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity'] |
Angular, Quarkus, Keycloak, Security | Angular, Quarkus, Keycloak, Security
Small guide of combining the two most used frameworks on the web in a secure manner.
Intro
This will be a small guide on how to tie and use together all the mentioned technologies in one nice end to end web project.
First of all, Angular is now a mature framework that makes use of typescript to develop modern and advanced UI applications. It’s taken care by Google and in the latest releases it came with lots of performance improvements.
Angular doesn’t necessarily require as much learning as other front-end technologies and it distinguish itself from React or Vue by being a framework not a library the can be easily plugged and unplugged.
This sometimes means that you have to write boilerplate code configuration to perform certain tasks and the framework will do it for you. Anyhow, you may use any front-end technology, the concept will still be valid just that there will be more code for you to write I assume.
The concept
The concept is based on the Oauth2 specifications, as well as UMA specifications. While you may go and read them for your own sake they are properly implemented within Keycloak by specialists.
Keycloak is also Opensource, mature, with a clear release cycle, broad documentation and highly used and appreciated by other people and corporations. What it’s important to take from here is that while it can be misused, chances of doing so are fairly low.
Security Concept
1. Angular — Keycloak Integration
If it were for someone to look into everything that Keycloak is capable of, I’d highly recommend their server administration documentation: https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_admin/#overview.
From there, we’ll make use of the concept of SSO, SSO protocols, as well as Managing Clients, Roles and User Session Management sections.
Secondly, Keycloack comes with a great deal of adapters to support integration with most of the languages & frameworks available on the web. These are small libraries that are very closed to your project implementation.
In the end, depending on the technology and the type of client you are implementing (or resource server configuration) — from oauth2 specs — different oauth2 flows are supported.
For example, when you think about JavaScript clients there are 2 OAuth2 flows supported. However, we’ll see that there is a third option: hybrid. It’s important to keep in mind that the hybrid mode combines best best from the two: refresh token, access token available right away. You may read more about it here.
keycloak-angular
Keycloak angular is a library that makes the integration much easier. It has everything a user might expect from it:
Interceptor to attach the security token on each request. Guard to protect your paths based on roles or any other logic you may find suitable. A service that gives developers access to a security context KeycloakService . An init method were developers may configure certain behavior on application startup.
Installation
npm install keycloak-angular keycloak-js
Configuration
If you are looking to login users before using you applications you shall create a factory method and attached it to your APP_INITIALIZER providers.
Angular Module Configuration
Now every time a user will load the application, it will be first redirect to Keycloak for login and only after that he’ll be able to access the application.
Note that if this is not the behavior you may look for, you can anytime use the keycloakService.login method.
Quarkus Resource Server
The project can be found here. It mostly follows the guide publish by Quarkus about centralized authorization with the central point being the application.properties where the security configuration are put in place.
It’s important to set your correct auth-server-url following the pattern /auth/${realm_name}/${client} as well as the client-id and client-secret.
Consider storing your secret in a environment variable rather then having it hard-coded like me.
Quarkus-Keycloak configuration
Demo
To start up the projects you’ll need docker , docker-compose , npm , angular-cli and java installed.
First we must start keycloak. For this navigate within the keycloak-client and run a docker-compose up -d Secondly, you may want to import the same configuration as I have from https://gitlab.com/blogging4t/keycloak-client/-/blob/develop/realm-export.json . To do this, in Keycloak, navigate to the Import button. Within the keycloak-client run npm install; npm start ; This will start the angular project for you. The quarkus project can be taken from here. To run it, simply execute from the command line mvn clean compile quarkus:dev Navigate to http://localhost:4200. In there the following should be displayed:
Angular app screen
By Clicking show message, depending on what role you have, the application will say either hello admin, or, hello user.
While playing around you might take interest in watching the network tab and checking all the calls that are being done for you to obtain an access_token as well as the fact that all the requests sent contain an Authorization header.
To experiment more, try playing with these if and see what happens if the user is normal and tries to access the admin endpoint:
Last Security Consideration
Use an SSL connection when connecting from a confidential resource server and make sure your certificate is validated. For you angular-client (public client) disable Direct Access Grant from the keycloak adminstration console Make sure to always use encrypted traffic between your services The entire infrastructure is based on signing the JWT’s. From my end this not the best security model and a incremental security pattern should be implemented. For example, the private key may be exposed by one of the organization employees through social engineering. One way to achieve a better security is based on reference tokens where an intermediate service will replace an Opaque token with the access token before accessing the resource server. This entitles that the outside users should be only have access to the opaque tokens. Nevertheless, the community seems to be aware of it and there is a request for this kind of functionality: https://issues.redhat.com/browse/KEYCLOAK-8278.
Best of luck building and securing your APIs! | https://medium.com/swlh/angular-quarkus-keycloak-security-ac95d4547d1 | ['Catalin Patrut'] | 2020-12-08 15:54:56.261000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Quarkus', 'Angular', 'Security', 'Keycloak'] |
Do You Lose Days to Anxiety? | How much do you struggle with anxiety? How often do you battle to stay sane in a world that steals the life from you? Do you ever lose days fighting to get your mind back from the brink?
Those of us who deal with anxiety know how hard it is to do “normal” things when we are suffering. Getting out of bed, showering, remembering to eat, trying to work — what do you manage to get done and what do you give up?
We know the sinking feeling when the anxiety visits us. First, it’s a nagging feeling that won’t go away. Soon it sweeps away everything else until we struggle to survive.
How are we supposed to live a normal life?
The past few days
I went to bed the other night feeling only the normal amount of anxiety I usually experience. I didn’t know anything was wrong. The only thing that marked this night was the panic attack my wife Flora suffered before she went to bed.
Between the two of us, panic attacks happen almost every day. We’ve learned to deal with them by using deep breathing and a lot of support from each other.
That night my sleep was more than troubled. I tossed and turned, fighting against invisible enemies and night terrors. I was up and down all night, trying to clear the demons from my head by pacing back and forth in the dark.
I woke to a feeling of panic and pulled the blanket tighter around my head. Soon Flora was yelling at me to get out of bed, and I pushed back against the anxiety holding me in place. There was a terrible amount of dread building in my chest, but I pushed it down inside so I could start my day.
I did a few of the things that I needed to get done, but I wasn’t able to write. The voices were screaming in my head, and I couldn’t concentrate no matter what I tried.
Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash
I was irritable and couldn’t talk to anyone without getting angry and yelling. After seeing the hurt in my daughter’s eyes after I yelled at her for daring to tell me she was hungry, I gave up trying. I spent the afternoon and evening curled fetal in my bed, trying to push away the noise in my mind.
That night and the following day weren’t much better.
I drank a few beers before bed last night. Not the best coping mechanism, but it’s was all I had. I slept sound, and while I woke to anxiety, I didn’t have the panic and terror that marked the previous days.
I realized when I sat at my desk to write today that I’d lost almost two days. Two more days of my life are gone. I’ll never get that time back and it bothers me.
How do you feel?
Do you see a little of your own battle in what happened to me? Are you struggling with sleep and moving through your days like a zombie?
Many of us tire of trying to rely on medications to help with our symptoms. I did that for years and became an addict because I gave up fighting and relied 100% on the pills as a cure.
Pills aren’t the only answer. Neither is drinking. None of us can live our lives in an irritable fog, lashing out at everyone who dares come near to us.
So what do we do?
The only way to rid ourselves of anxiety and panic is to figure out what caused it in the first place. In my case, I’ve been pushing too hard. I put myself in the middle of situations that caused me stress. I am highly sensitive, and I tend to absorb the feelings of the people around me.
I’ve allowed myself to be in situations I had no part of because I wanted to help. I wanted to stand up for the little guy and make a difference. But all I did was push myself down a rabbit hole that took me two days to get out of.
As much as we want to help, we have to think of our own situation first. Our minds get manipulated into a position where we are no longer practicing self-care. We forget to do the things that helped us in the first place. We forget our issues.
I hate to say it because I am the kind of person who likes to help others, but you have to be selfish. You have to concentrate on the things that help you get to a better place.
For me, it’s writing and taking care of my family. I forget them sometimes and sit staring into my phone, trying to solve others’ problems. I forget about my own goals, and I can’t do that.
Look where it got me.
Be selfish sometimes. Practice self-care. Try to help others but don’t lose yourself in the process.
Remember what’s important and do what makes you happy and fulfilled. | https://jasonjamesweiland.medium.com/do-you-lose-days-to-anxiety-1cefc914190f | ['Jason Weiland'] | 2019-04-03 01:03:54.156000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Anxiety', 'Recovery', 'Life Lessons', 'Mental Illness'] |
Introducing the “Careers in AI” Video Series for Middle School Students | By Carolyn “CC” Song, High School Senior and Personal Robots Intern
A sample of the AI professionals that we interviewed for this series. Credit: Daniella DiPaola
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Whether the last time you thought about this question was a few days ago or a few decades ago, your answer has the power to potentially set you on a course for life.
For kids nowadays, future opportunities in the tech world are more abundant than ever. More specifically, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing at an incredibly rapid rate and the careers that correspond to it are multiplying as well. That’s why I believe it is essential to introduce kids to these jobs as early as possible, because awareness around these opportunities is the first step to closing wage gaps and inequalities across race and gender lines that are prevalent in tech-related fields. Through my time as an intern in the Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab, I have learned so much about AI and how it might apply to my own career. I wanted to create an opportunity for other students to learn about it as well. That’s why I created a YouTube video series to highlight a diverse group of professionals in AI.
Before I continue, let me first introduce myself! Hi, my name is CC and I’m a high school senior who interned with the MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots group (PRG) this summer. Being 17 doesn’t usually have many advantages when it comes to conducting research or creating curriculum, but for this project, it was actually my secret advantage to be closer in age to the middle school students we are teaching. Having gone through that part of life just a few years ago, I have a strong sense of what will attract middle schoolers’ interests and get our point across. Combined with my unique experience working in the Personal Robots group, I can combine my life experience with my personal interest in how AI actually applies in the “real world.”
I’ve noticed that prior to entering college and the workforce, many of my peers assume that AI is only explored in tech jobs where strong math and CS skills are required. Younger students may not even know that accessible AI jobs exist, since they assume AI is so advanced and futuristic that only the most experienced handful of scientists can access it.
As a result of these misconceptions, I have seen many of my peers question their dreams of following a career in AI. Sometimes it’s a great opportunity to realize that they’re even more passionate about another field, but oftentimes it comes from lack of confidence, support, representation, and education from the adults around them. I hope that this series of videos will show kids that there is someone like them who is already succeeding in their career, whether that is a woman in STEM, an underrepresented minority, or simply someone who has found a unique way to combine AI with art, law, design, or more.
There were a number of principles I wanted to follow when creating this video series. Accessibility was really important to me, especially now that the pandemic has moved a lot of learning online. Creating a YouTube video series makes this information readily available to both students and teachers, and is a simple and meaningful way for kids to begin to explore these ideas. When it came to the content of these videos, my goal was to share honest, unfiltered perspectives directly from real people who use AI in their careers. I also wanted to make sure that these videos disproved the stereotype that an AI career only refers to someone who writes code all day. To do that, I interviewed people who work with AI in vastly different fields, from social media, to art, to space technology, and more. Likewise, I sought to include speakers who represented racial, gender, and geographical diversity. My hope is that any young student can see themselves represented on screen in multiple ways so that they never abandon hopes of pursuing an AI-related job simply because they don’t think they fit the conventional image of an AI professional.
An amazing part of doing this project is that, through my quest to educate younger students, I ended up learning so much about AI careers myself. I learned that being curious about different career paths was helpful in narrowing down what I was interested in. I’m still applying to college where I’ll have four more years to figure it out, but the knowledge I gained this summer has been an incredible inspiration and first step.
First of all, I was introduced to fields that I had never even heard of before, one of them through Alexandra Klotz, a Product Design Lead at a self-driving car startup. Prior to meeting her, I had never really thought about designers outside the context of fashion and visual arts, so her job and connection to AI through self-driving cars was very unique.
I also learned a lot about the interdisciplinary power of AI, and how it can really be intertwined with almost any other subject if you are passionate enough about bringing the two together. Some examples from the people I interviewed include Dr. Danielle Wood, whose work combines social justice, environmental protection, and AI-related space technology. Dr. Kate Darling researches the intersection of law and AI, and Dr. Claudio Pinhanez combined his passion for soccer and the FIFA World Cup with AI. As someone who hopes to pursue Mechanical Engineering in the future but has always been interested in too many subjects at the same time, I found that talking to these incredibly talented scientists who have forged their own interdisciplinary paths gave me hope that I will be able to do something similar in the future.
We hear about successful careers all the time, but we rarely see all the early phases that inspired and led up to them. Yet, these are the parts of life that many of us middle and high schoolers can actually relate to, such as having an obsession with science fiction books or playing video games, which multiple of the interviewees shared with me. Simply being able to talk to so many women in STEM and women of color in STEM was inspiring. There were also many specific projects that left me totally awestruck, such as Aman Dalmia’s project to create a program capable of weighing and measuring babies in rural Indian communities without touching them. Plus, the talented members of the Personal Robots group, who have welcomed me with kindness into their community for the past two summers, represent a diversity of skills, genders, races, and ethnicities. Their mentorship has had a huge influence on me, and I will always be grateful for this incredible opportunity Dr. Breazeal afforded me, which has reshaped how I think about the future of technology and the role I hope to play in it. In the future, PRG will continue to expand the series, engaging in co-design with teachers and students across the country to cover more topics that will appeal to and inspire them.
Finally, let’s talk about how to use these videos and their guiding questions, and how you can introduce them to your students. Each video asks a big question such as “What is AI?” and “What is your advice for younger students that are interested in learning about AI?” followed by answers from our interviewees. Our hope is that by showing different perspectives back to back, students will have many perspectives that they could potentially resonate with.
Here are some ideas for how you can use these videos as an educator or otherwise:
Watch as a class and then discuss together
Watch as a class and have students dive further into one particular career path
Use as supplemental homework that you ask the students to reflect on/write about, or discuss in class the next day
Watch with your own friends or family and discuss
I’m excited to introduce the first two videos in this series: “How does AI relate to your job?” and “What is AI?” Below you can find links to both videos and some guiding questions to begin having a conversation.
Video 1: “What is AI?”
Questions for students:
Before watching this video, had you ever heard of AI before? What did you know about it if so?
Regardless of whether or not you already knew about it, what do you think AI is now?
Where have you seen examples of AI before in your own life?
Do any of the careers presented sound like something you might want to try in the future?
Video 2: “How is AI used in your job?”
Questions for students:
Did you think AI could interact with so many different jobs? Which one surprised you the most?
Do you think that AI could be part of any job in the world?
What job interested you the most? Why?
Acknowledgements
A special thank you to Ishita Bhimavarapu for editing the video series. Thank you to Personal Robots group members Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, Safinah Ali, and Nisha Devasia for all of your help during this project, and group member Daniella DiPaola for always being my strongest supporter and advocate as my mentor. Finally, thank you to the incredible people whom I interviewed for this project:
Alexandra Klotz, Product Design Lead at Optimus Ride
Aman Dalma, Research Fellow at Wadhwani AI
Dr. Chad Jenkins, Robotics Researcher and Professor at UMichigan
Dr. Christina Gardner-McCune, CS and AI Education Researcher and Professor at UFlorida
Dr. Claudio Pinhanez, Head of Conversational AI at IBM Research Brazil
Dr. Danielle Wood, Head of Space Enabled group at MIT Media Lab
Elmarie Sánchez-Gonzáles, Annotation Analyst at large tech company
Göksu Uğur, Gameplay Programmer at Sony
Dr. Haiping Zhao, Senior Architect at ByteDance (TikTok)
Dr. Kate Darling, Research Specialist at MIT Media Lab
Dr. Pedrito Maynard-Zhang, Senior Engineer at Amazon
Dr. Siggi Örn, AI Software Engineer at Google
Dr. Taniya Mishra, Director of AI Research at Affectiva
Dr. Troy Lau, Leader of Machine Intelligence Group at Draper Labs | https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/introducing-the-careers-in-ai-video-series-for-middle-school-students-91949fa0f8f | ['Mit Media Lab'] | 2020-11-09 15:45:03.298000+00:00 | ['STEM', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Career Advice', 'Education'] |
Thank You | She was the mirror I never knew I needed,
The reflection of a stranger standing there in need,
A sign made of cardboard in her cold, brittle hands,
Saying, “Please, Anything Will Help”.
People walk by, drive by, pass by without a glance at the woman on the corner.
No one sees her, looks at her, cares to take the time.
They ignore her silent pleas,
They cant see what I see.
I see heaven’s gift, a woman whole
Pleading to respect her soul
Needing help, “Hello!” will do
A simple gift of kindness due
And so I offer up a word
A simple act of courage
My hand, a gift of trust
To smile is a must
She stands there chilled to the bone
And obviously quite alone
But when she saw me smile
Her face lit up with hope
I hand her my hand with a bill inside
She takes it with grace and a smile on her face
And two words quietly slip from her lips,
“Thank you.” | https://medium.com/scribe/thank-you-8e2d23d3cdd3 | ['Sarah E Sturgis'] | 2020-12-25 18:37:21.386000+00:00 | ['Kindness', 'Writing', 'Thank You', 'Homelessness', 'Poetry'] |
Atlas Protocol Joins IAB Tech Lab Blockchain Working Group | Summary: Atlas Protocol (ATP) is a blockchain application layer protocol of interactive advertising & marketing. It officially announced to join the IAB Technology Lab and its Blockchain Working Group to promote the development of blockchain advertising technology standards.
Atlas Protocol (ATP) officially announced to join the Interactive Advertising Bureau Technology Lab (IAB Tech Lab) and its Blockchain Working Group. It will work with Google, Amazon and others on blockchain interactive advertising technology standards.
Atlas team, the world’s leading provider of blockchain advertising technology services, has successfully developed Atlas Interactive Ads platform. With the intention to build a new blockchain interactive advertising marketing infrastructure, this innovative product enables users to get token incentives by participating in on-chain interactive advertising，and generates targetable user profiles from on-chain data.
Joining the IAB Blockchain Working Group will promote further development of Atlas Protocol’s technology in order to meet global technical standards. The membership of Atlas Protocol in the Blockchain Working Group will give it the chance to share native industry-based solutions to others in the advertising field.
This will give companies the ability to use Atlas Interactive Ads products when the advertising industry makes technological changes and pivots towards blockchain.
The IAB Tech Lab brings together innovators from a variety of different countries. All emphasize business ecology and endeavor to promote safe and secure development in the world of advertising.
The IAB Tech Lab Blockchain Working Group is dedicated to investigating how blockchain can be utilized to address challenges in the digital advertising space. It also works to develop standards and best practices for the deployment of blockchain technology.
Atlas aims to promote the development of blockchain interactive advertising technology standards through collaboration with the IAB Blockchain Working Group. This will allow for more structured and semi-structured data to be recorded on-chain, fostering more data sharing and collaboration within the blockchain advertising field.
Atlas continues to discover and explore more data values to provide advertisers with more competitive value-added advertising services, and to further develop common blockchain advertising data standards.
The implementation of blockchain interactive advertising technology standards will help advertisers provide more comprehensive solutions to achieve global business growth.
…
Learn more about Atlas Protocol：
Official website：atlasp.io
Medium：medium.com/atlaspio
Github：github.com/AtlasProtocol
Twitter：@atlaspio
Telegram：t.me/atlaspio | https://medium.com/atlaspio/atlas-protocol-joins-iab-tech-lab-blockchain-working-group-8ed72dec753c | ['Atlas Protocol'] | 2018-11-22 08:37:15.186000+00:00 | ['Advertising', 'Marketing', 'Iab', 'Atlasprotocol', 'Blockchian'] |
The Human Toll of the 2019 Media Apocalypse | Driving westward through Pennsylvania on a stretch of land dotted by trees, hills, and rest stops along Interstate 80, you’ll eventually hit the Ohio border. The first major metropolis you’ll come across is Youngstown, the state’s ninth-largest city. This year, The Vindicator, Youngstown’s only daily newspaper, celebrated its 150th anniversary. It would also be the newspaper’s last.
On June 28, 2019, employees were told to meet in the conference room at 4 p.m. “We all know what a Friday afternoon meeting means at a daily newspaper,” Vindicator reporter Jessica Hardin told me. Some people thought the paper was being sold to GateHouse Media, and its employee roster would be cut in half. But in a meeting with Vindicator owner Mark Brown, they learned the paper had sought a buyer but couldn’t find one. On August 31, The Vindicator would shut down operations, laying off 144 employees and 250 newspaper carriers.
After graduating from Youngstown State University in 2017, Samantha Phillips was hired by The Vindicator to cover three small communities outside of Youngstown. During her two years at the paper, she covered everything from crime and local government to breaking news and education. However, even before the closure, Phillips had been contemplating changing careers. Journalism “didn’t seem viable long-term because of the low pay and job insecurity,” she told me, adding that a few weeks before the closure she had driven six hours to Washington, D.C., to interview for a communications position with a trade association. The two months between the closure announcement and the Vindy’s actual shutdown felt like “a long funeral.” Media outlets from around the country visited to eulogize the 150-year-old paper, and employees received a nearly endless supply of food from local businesses and Vindy alumni. Phillips got the job in D.C, and after watching the final press run with her co-workers in August, she packed up and left her whole life in Ohio behind. “I had been considering leaving journalism for some time, but being laid off cemented that decision for me,” she said.
Having a number to point to at the end of the year can still feel meaningless — the tale of 2019 is that nobody was spared.
While working on this story, I received literally hundreds of messages from people who wanted to speak to me about their experiences getting laid off in 2019, from outlets big and small. In April 2019, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its coverage of the shooting deaths of 11 people and the wounding of seven others at the Tree of Life synagogue the year before. But as Post-Gazette reporter and editor Rich Lord pointed out recently on Twitter, many of the editors who led coverage of shooting had since left the paper — many through buyouts, another way media companies have whittled down the size of their staff. David Shribman, the paper’s former editor in chief, is now teaching at McGill University in Montreal; Web Editor Jim Iovino is now teaching at West Virginia University. Politics Editor Donna Eyring and Features Editor Virginia Linn have also left. And City Editor Lillian Thomas is now at the Houston Chronicle.
One of the immediate problems I ran into reporting this story was reporters’ apprehension in speaking on the record. Many laid-off reporters and editors I spoke to were nervous about violating the nondisclosure agreements their former employers made them sign as a condition to receive severance pay after they were laid off or bought out. I found this to be especially true with those laid off by newspapers owned by Gannett and GateHouse.
In many cases, the reporters and editors who spoke to me said they tried to apply for other media jobs after getting laid off. Jessica Hardin was able to stay in Youngstown after the Vindicator staff got the news about the layoffs, Mandy Jenkins, who had just been named director of the Compass Experiment — the McClatchy/Google project to put digital news startups in underserved news areas — reached out to Hardin. Jenkins had chosen Youngstown as the project’s first site and hired Hardin as one of the site’s two reporters. The four other positions on the local team were filled by former Vindicator employees. “I only spent a long weekend being unemployed,” Hardin said. “And honestly, most folks I worked with landed on their feet.”
Others, like Lynne Sherwin, who worked at the Akron Beacon Journal for 24 years before being laid off earlier this year, took jobs at trade publications. “The Cleveland area has a ton of B2B publications, where a lot of ex-journos tend to land, and I’m now managing editor of Plastics Machinery Magazine,” she told me. “It’s a big change from features coverage, but editing is editing.”
But often, employees laid off from media companies switch career paths entirely. Some, like Chris Kocher, who worked for Gannett Central New York for 22 years, find themselves in professions with transferrable skills — like working in communications. Kocher was part of Gannett’s January layoffs “I was determined not to move for another media job, under the theory that it too could be eliminated at any time,” he said. He ended up in the communications and marketing department at Binghamton University, a job he says he was “lucky to get,” with a short commute and state benefits.
Still, other reporters and editors consider jobs even further away from media and their skill sets. Elizabeth King, a freelance writer who wrote for Brit + Co. until its layoffs this spring, hasn’t been able to land a job in media since being laid off. “I’ve had a couple of interviews with nonprofits that haven’t lead anywhere,” she told me. “I’m considering moving back to my home state and getting a job on a factory floor where a couple of my siblings work. I signed up with a temp agency a few months ago that has gotten me one day of work where I literally counted crackers for a snack company.”
Brendan Skwire, who wrote for Raw Story until he was laid off earlier this year, applied to some media jobs, but one outlet that wanted to hire him would have required him to move across the country, and other offers he received were too low to be livable. He didn’t want to go into marketing or nonprofits, so he chose a different path entirely. “I’ve been a musician my entire life, and a friend here in Nashville asked if I had experience with audio-visuals. When I said yes, he gave me the number for the company he works for. I was hired that day without so much as an interview, he said. “I took any role that was available, until I realized carpentry was my strongest skill. I asked to be promoted and was bumped up accordingly. Next week I’m applying to the union, where my starting wage will again bump up quite a bit.” | https://gen.medium.com/the-human-toll-of-the-2019-media-apocalypse-4347ef4dd708 | ['Maya Kosoff'] | 2019-12-19 22:50:06.591000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Media', 'Jobs', 'Culture', 'Gen Longreads'] |
Simplify Code Review Process with Auto Mention Code Review Systems | As Tokopedia grows fast from time to time, so does the number of sub-teams and modules in our android team codebase. Each sub-team usually owns a number of modules, depending on the size of each sub-team. We use CODEOWNERS file system from GitHub to make sure that every code changes to a specific module should be reviewed by at least one of the members of the sub-team that owns that module.
Actually this system is great for securing the codebase from breaking changes. The only problem is: when we create a pull request (PR) with huge changes in a lot of modules and want to request for code reviews.
The Problem
What we usually do when we want to request for code reviews on our PR is by checking out who’s sub-teams are the codeowners by looking at the top right corner of the GitHub PR page.
Then we find out the list of persons that belong to each sub-team. For example, we want to know who are the members of android-minionkevin-dev, then we go to the sub-team page.
After we got the member list, we slack DM them one-by-one so if one team member is unavailable for reviewing (taking leave, in a meeting, etc), the other member can do the code review. After the review process finished and approval given, everything is done. Really? No no no.. not that easy fellas!
Remember that is just one approval from one CODEOWNERS sub-team. You have to repeat the whole process all over again for all sub-teams that own the modules changed in the PR. If you make changes to substantial things like the library that are used in many modules, you usually need to get approval from 10 or more sub-teams.
Frustrating? Yes. But those are just from the PR creator side. From the reviewer side, there is also one freaking thing: you should find out yourself which files are yours from the list of hundreds of file changes on the PR.
This cumbersome and frustrating process is there from times to times, until I have an “Eureka!” moment and figure out a solution to end this pain across all android teams.
The Solutions
I actually thought to myself: If there exists a system to notify all members of each CODEOWNERS sub-team that need to review a PR, along with lists of file changes that are mapped for each sub-team, it could solve all the problems, both for the PR creator and reviewers.
So I started with utilizing Slack, as our main communication and notification tools across the entire company. First, I create slack user group for each CODEOWNERS sub-team, so that we can just mention the user group to notify all of the sub-team members, instead of slacking them one-by-one.
Here is one example of slack user group, that you can just use @android-core-dev to get attention from all the core team members, instead of mentioning them one-by-one (look, I’m there btw 😂)
After that, I create a slack channel #android-auto-mention-code-review where all code review related matters will be inside here.
As you may notice from the above picture, yes, I automate the process of mentioning each CODEOWNERS user group that needs to review a PR via this little cute yellow Android Bot. What you have to do to trigger this bot is just comment /check review on your PR, and just watch him working hard to get approval from all CODEOWNERS needed.
This little bot also list all file changes needed to be reviewed by specific user group in a thread reply to the mentioning slack message, so the team members can directly look at the file list via Threads menu in the upper left corner of the Slack Apps, without going back and forth to the code review channel
Here is the example preview of that automatic thread reply
From there, all core team can know that from all 26 file changes in PR #14123, ten of them are belong to core team and need to be reviewed by them. Also, if there is any change requested by core team, the PR creator can just reply to this thread again to notify core team again that the change request has been addressed.
Although this invention and approach are hard to think until I figure it out, the tech ingredients that I used to create this magic is pretty simple and not a matter of rocket science. Basically, all we needed are just these components:
The way to detect /check review comment on a PR The way to programmatically obtain changed files list of a specific PR The way to programmatically obtain CODEOWNERS file content The way to programmatically mapped changed files list to each CODEOWNERS sub-team The way to programmatically post something to slack channel
Let’s break them out one by one!
So, to detect /check review comments on a PR, we simply use webhook system that is provided by GitHub. With this system, your company server machine can get notified when any GitHub event happened on your company repository, including new comments on PR. This notification includes what is called webhook payload, which consists of the event details. So what I do is getting the commented PR number along with comment body, check if comment body equals /check review, and then trigger auto mention code review Jenkins job, with commented PR number as parameter. Here are the docs of GitHub webhooks if you want to explore more.
After Jenkins job triggered, the first thing that the job do is to obtain changed files list in the commented PR. Fortunately, GitHub also provides this functionality through their API. Just pass the PR number and you are good to go. Don’t worry about :owner and :repo params, cause there are the same as in your ordinary GitHub repo url (github.com/:owner/:repo). Just hardcode them to keep it simple!
Then we need the content of the CODEOWNERS file. Again, we can use this API from GitHub to obtain it. Don’t forget to add this field in your request header
‘Accept’: ‘application/vnd.github.v3.raw’
or else you will only get encrypted content that is meaningless 😂
Now we have all the ingredients needed: The changed files list and the CODEOWNERS content. It’s time to cook them together so that we get delicious food: Separated changed files list for each CODEOWNERS sub-team. It seems complicated at first, but if you do further analysis, nothing to be scared of by exerting brute force iteration with n² complexity.
Imagine you have a very huge codebase in your company with 100,000 files inside a single repository, and you also have 1,000 lines in CODEOWNERS file. In worst case scenario — when you create a PR that changed every single file in the repo (100,000 changed files) — you will iterate 100,000,000 times to compare each changed filename to each line of CODEOWNERS. That is below 10 seconds for most of the computer nowadays with an average filename string length of 50. Very acceptable!
Lastly, we need to serve that delicious food to the customer. I use this pretty simple API from Slack to post full custom messages into #android-auto-mention-code-review slack channel, including user group mentions, PR links, and list of file changes in a reply thread. Please read my previous post to get more detail into how I did this step-by-step.
Conclusion
After this auto mention code review system is implemented, the code review process is much simpler and not as frustrating as earlier. Developers are happier, work-life balance can be attained, as they have more time to spend with their families instead of struggling with the stressful code review process. Henry Pri once again saves so many lifetimes of android developers at Tokopedia.
Want to be a hero too? Just use this invention, and treat me a cup of coffee if you get a noble prize from your company. Just kidding ;) | https://medium.com/tokopedia-engineering/simplify-code-review-process-with-auto-mention-code-review-systems-ca2264de16a9 | ['Henry Priyono'] | 2020-09-08 09:39:41.821000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Software Engineering', 'Engineering Productivity', 'Tokopedia'] |
Trauma of Mystical Experience | Trauma of Mystical Experience
An Exploration of the Phenomenological Similarities Between Trauma and Mystical Experience
Written by Mackenzie Amara for the MIND Blog.
“Cosmic love is absolutely ruthless and highly indifferent. It teaches its lessons whether you like them or not.” ~ John C. Lilly
Perhaps at first blush, there appears to be nothing phenomenologically similar about traumatic and mystical experiences. The former tend to range in scale from deeply upsetting to catastrophic, catalyze recurring suffering, and debilitate the experiencer for a lengthy amount of time. The latter are often assumed to be sunshine and rainbows, waves of bliss rippling out from a unified epicenter of which the experiencer also happens to be a part.
While I do not discount the truth of those experiences, or the reality that for many, trauma and mystical experience are two distinct threads and never the twain shall meet, this essay is a brief exploration of the opposite assertion: namely, that trauma and mystical experience are phenomenologically similar, if not identical. I do not mean to assert that all trauma is mystical, nor that a mystical experience is always traumatic; nor am I aiming to express the importance of a mystical experience in treating trauma (although there is mounting evidence supporting that claim). I only hope to explore how, when we poke around in what exactly constitutes a mystical moment of awakening, the living experience of it might be about as far from sunshine and rainbows as we can get; the living experience of it itself might be traumatic.
What Constitutes a Traumatic Experience
To begin with, let’s look at what constitutes a traumatic experience. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 (DSM-5), a traumatic event involves “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” to either oneself or a loved one and is necessarily followed by a host of symptoms which span behavioral, psychological, emotional, and social functioning. We could say that trauma is anything that renders the experiencer temporarily powerless in the face of a real or perceived threat. The aftermath of a traumatic experience are symptoms that we have come to associate with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Acute Stress Disorder (ASD). These responses can be explored physiologically, socially, psychologically, and theologically or spiritually.
To understand trauma responses at the level of physiology, let us turn to the research of renowned traumatologist Peter Levine, PhD, founder of the innovative trauma treatment modality Somatic ExperiencingTM. According to Levine, “traumatic experiences are largely the result of primitive responses,” meaning that the symptoms experienced by people in the wake of a trauma exist as a result of the body’s natural, evolutionarily purposeful physiological reactions. In response to something overwhelming a body will fight, flee, or freeze. Essentially, when any animal, human or otherwise, encounters an overwhelming threat, it instinctively engages one of these responses as a protective mechanism to avoid death. When the body under attack is not able to experience the natural instinctive response through to its completion, the impact of the encounter can get stuck. In Levine’s words, “trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time.”
The notion of “fight, flight, or freeze” to which I referred above could be familiar to some readers. These are the primitive responses of which Levine speaks. A fourth response — “fawn” — has also recently been noticed and is now being explored by traumatologists. To fight is to gear up to, and perhaps successfully administer a counter-attack in the face of threat. To flee is to run away from an attack, to freeze is to be stunned into temporary paralysis (as a deer in the headlights), and to fawn is to comply with the attacker in an unconscious vie for sympathy or safe passage (e.g. Stockholm Syndrome). In the wild, when an animal body is overtaken by one of these responses, the animal will naturally discharge the enormous energetic impact of the response once the threat has passed. They do this by shaking or trembling, sounding, or otherwise “off-loading” some of their physical energy. This discharge, according to Levine’s research, integrates the trauma and alleviates any chance of developing negative symptoms. As humans, however, we have been conditioned for dissociation — that is, disconnection from our physiological response — by a culture of hyper-rationality. This means that the overwhelming energy of impact can get caught in the traumatized individual’s body, like an impacted spring unable to release and uncoil. According to this theory, it is the stuck, unintegrated energy which results in many of the symptoms seen in a post-traumatic response.
Beyond the physiological response, trauma affects us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. According to Donald Winnicott, a pioneer in the field of child psychology, trauma robs the experiencer of their subjective omnipotence, that is their perceived power and autonomy, which renders them temporarily unable to engage with the world around them. This can feel like extreme identity disillusion, wherein one’s perceived dominance in one’s own life is called into question Without a subjective “me,” one lacks the required equipment to engage with the world outside of “me.” This leads to what Heinz Kohut has dubbed “disintegration anxiety,” or, in the words of Jungian analyst Dr. Donald Kalsched, “an unnamable dread associated with the threatened disillusion of a coherent self.” This lack of a coherent self results in a diminished capacity to make symbolic meaning of one’s life’s events, as the meaningfulness of external events results from these events’ relationship to one’s inner world and vice versa. A trauma can temporarily suspend one’s ability to connect to inner experience, or to build a bridge from inner to outer, thus eradicating the potential for sense-making, insight, compassion, and even transcendence. In this way, trauma has far-reaching psychological consequences.
To summarize, trauma is anything — real or perceived — that brings us face-to-face with our vulnerability, with death. The fallout from said experience is often an untenable dissociation from oneself, feelings of having lost one’s identity, being inexplicably, inconveniently, and often violently overcome by reactionary impulses, a deep loss of one’s ability to make meaning, frequent run-ins with chaos, and painful somatic symptoms seemingly without cause.
What constitutes a mystical experience?
As a result of the current psychedelic renaissance, we have gained new epistemologies, ontologies, and phenomenologies for understanding and studying mystical experiences. And it could not be happening at a more opportune time, for in this hypermodern world which normalizes disconnection from self, other, and nature, we are collectively wearing the malaise of spiritual bankruptcy and lack of meaning none too well. However, despite the utility of psychedelics in providing a window into mystical experiences, much of what we know about these states come from the fields of theology, anthropology, and psychology, far predating this psychedelic renaissance.
A mystical experience is considered one of a few non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC; also referred to by some as altered states of consciousness, or ASCs, particularly when the consciousness shift occurs as a result of ingesting a substance), the others of which are flow states, meditative or contemplative states, and psychedelic states (hence the renewed interest in them as a result of the psychedelic renaissance). NOSCs are brought about by what religious scholar Mircea Eliade refers to as “sacred technologies,” that is, the trance-inducing techniques used by shamanic cultures worldwide to engage with the spiritual dimension of existence: ecstatic states, communion with the transpersonal realms, and underworld journeying. These technologies include dancing, drumming, chanting, fasting, ritual, and ingesting plant medicines, among others.
While one of the hallmarks of mystical experiences is their ineffability (making discourse rather convoluted at times), for the purpose of this essay, I am going to join the likes of Henri Bergson, Aldous Huxley, William James, Jeffrey Kripal, Carl Jung, Houston Smith, and many others, in touting the “reducing valve” theory: that is, the idea that the dominant function of the brain is to delimit access to an expanded consciousness. According to these theorists, the sacred technologies outlined by Eliade can effectively diminish this control valve in the brain, exposing an a priori reality behind or underneath said valve. This means that a NOSC does not cause a mystical state, any more than a radio channel causes the frequency it picks up. In other words, a mystical experience comes about as a function of the removal of something, not the addition of another. This “thing” which is susceptible to unsuspected removal could be referred to as the “ego,” although I believe that is a bit too rationalistic and reductionist to be the full story.
According to this theory, an a priori “immediate luminosity,” “Mind-at-Large,” or “cosmic order” undergirds normal waking consciousness from which we are regularly barred by the brain’s standard or “default” resting state. During a mystical encounter, one can catch a glimpse of this more vast reality, which very well may challenge all of our previously held rational beliefs about what is real and what is not.
Bergson theorizes that the function of this “reducing valve” is to restrict conscious access to the interconnected web of reality at any given moment, lest we be overwhelmed by the ever-present flood of potentially meaningful connectivity spiraling, weaving, dancing, and dodging all around us. Neuroscientists who study the effect of psychedelics on the brain theorize that a network of brain regions, dubbed the Default Mode Network (DMN), might correlate to Bergson’s very-same reducing valve, in that these neurons appear to be active and engaged in the sharing of information while the brain is disengaged from anything else. The DMN is a collection of functionally connected regions of the brain which are involved in processing self-referential information and are thought to collectively operate as a kind of underlying identity generator. This brain network also seems to be active when the mind wanders, as evidenced by brain scans that show people in meditative (non-mind-wandering) states having less activity in the DMN.
It might be that this default functioning keeps one’s consciousness engaged in the assertion of a “me,” which is necessarily limited, far smaller than the underlying reality. During a mystical experience, whether psychedelically-occasioned or otherwise, it appears that one of the major neurological changes which occur is that the action of the DMN is temporarily suppressed. This produces a state of “transient hypofrontality,” wherein it may feel as if the mind is no longer blinded by personal identity and the “doors of perception” are open.
A mystical experience, no matter which transformational technology is employed to engender said experience, has certain universal qualities, as outlined by Walter Stace. They include things like ineffability and paradoxicality, an abiding sense of unity, and a vital gnosis or noetic quality, which seems to imbue the experiencer with a sense of a deeper truth.
The current research suggests that a psychedelic-occasioned mystical encounter can result in lasting positive changes in the lives of individuals suffering from substance abuse, end of life anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. These changes can include greater levels of openness and mental wellbeing, as well as decreased reliance on drugs, alcohol, or other compulsive negative coping patterns.
When the Mystical becomes Terrible; or, the Mysterium Tremendum
While the description of mystical experiences and the subsequent positive changes sound highly desirable, I want to explore the open secret of mysticism; namely, that often the first stop in transit to such mystical revelations might end up being terror, dread, fear, panic, and disillusionment. Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, after sitting through thousands of LSD psychotherapy sessions with hundreds of individuals, outlined the nature of these particular flavors of horror in what he refers to as “perinatal experiences,” a framework he created by interpreting the work of renowned psychologist, Otto Rank’s classic, The Trauma of Birth. According to Grof, perinatal experiences “focus on problems relating to fetal existence, biological birth, physical pain, disease, aging, dying, and death.” Grof theorizes that when undergoing an LSD psychotherapy session, the individual can be confronted with the visceral, psychological memory of their own becoming — that is, the trauma of birth. According to Grof, this confrontation can result in very real, emotional, psychological, and spiritual pain.
Grof outlines the precise stages of this experience in four distinct matrices, called the Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM). Speaking broadly, the general rationale behind Grof’s theory for why these perinatal experiences can feel so profoundly life-threatening is because they mirror the experience of the neonate during the birthing process; namely, they mirror the incredible shock experienced by the infant of being encased in a fecund, dark, (ideally) nourishing womb and rather suddenly, and without much choice in the matter, being forced out of said womb in a series of painful, pressurized, chemically foreign throes. Both mother and infant experience childbirth as agonizing. However, the mother is armed with foresight. The infant has no prescience of what’s happening to her, and so, for her, being born is akin to dying. Grof noted that for the individual experiencing a perinatal matrix during a psychedelic experience, this birth process is often recapitulated in a seeming death-rebirth experience much like the one they went through during their actual birth. Experiences of the BPMs range from overwhelming feelings of entrapment or suffocation; horrendous visions of hell realms and nightmare scenery; the unshakeable insistence of the void which incessantly begs questions of life’s meaning; and a seemingly infinite experience of “this will never end.” Grof also notes that, for most people, deliverance from these shockingly dark experiences is often experienced as radiance, transcendence, or a brilliant, indescribable blissfulness. In other words, your classic, desirable mystical experience.
The darkness, degradation, and deep fear Grof witnessed during his thousands of psychedelic psychotherapy sessions is not new. Mystics from numerous traditions write about the pain of surrender, the terror of encountering the numinous, or the phenomenal shattering which must occur to purge the mind of illusion. Perhaps the most famous account of this experience comes from the Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross, who details with painstaking clarity his own identity loss/divinity discovery in his book “The Dark Night of the Soul.” Indeed, that phrase is now used quite commonly to refer to the necessary darkening which occurs along many individual spiritual journeys.
Prof. Christopher Bache, religious studies professor at Youngstown State University and author of “LSD and the Mind of the Universe”, wrote a paper comparing Grof’s BPM to this “Dark Night of the Soul”. This paper details the purgative aspect of both John’s account of the via negativa (that is the negative way, or the way of divestment, of ridding oneself of everything standing between self and god, of purging falsehood) and Grof’s description of the confrontation with hell-realms experienced by hundreds of patients. Line for line, whether Grof’s account of the perinatal experience or John’s painful testimony about his years spent in a Dark Night, it seems that these experiences share a core phenomenological identity. Prof. Bache asserts that it is perhaps precisely the purging of all falseness (that is, belief in the separate self, the illusion) — something discussed by both Stanislav Grof and John of the Cross — which leads to the mystical encounter, writing that “this radical purging is necessary because if one is to be God, everything in oneself that is unlike God must be removed.” Recalling the aforementioned theory of a “reducing valve” mechanism within the brain, we can begin to theorize about what might be happening during a mystical experience. Could it be that through some kind of purging of a constructed self, through divesting oneself of the delimiting reducing valve of the mind during a perinatal experience, one is ultimately shown something more vast which exists a priori behind the veil of identity?
A Mystical Experience Might be Traumatic
I assert that this process of purging, whether in an LSD psychotherapy context à la Grof, walking the via negativa à la John of the Cross, or endeavoring to engage in any other number of practices which might cause someone to question their rational beliefs of separation or their engrained notions of identity, is subjectively and objectively traumatic, à la Levine. To explore this statement, let’s examine how mystical experiences could be seen as traumatic.
To begin with, let me introduce a concept from famed German philosopher and theologian, Rudolph Otto. According to Otto, an encounter with the numinosum, that is, the self-evident ineffable essence of which the aforementioned speak (e.g. James’ “immediate luminosity,” etc.) always contains something of the mysterium tremendum, or the tremendous, awe-and-terror- inspiring mystery. According to Otto, this sort of encounter feels life-threatening from the perspective of identity or ego, a point he explores through the de facto existence of earth- shattering fear when one finds oneself in the presence of the numinous. This threat to life is akin to the threat to life felt during a traumatic experience. Mystical experience can also be life-altering, as some of the previously mentioned research clearly shows. A mystical encounter with the numinous, which contains no small amount of dread according to Otto, can have the effect of catalyzing lifestyle changes, inspiring one to participate more fully in co-creating their life, and revolutionizing a sense of meaningfulness in one’s psyche. This kind of alteration to life is akin to the alteration experienced after a traumatic experience, only this sort of shift is subjectively far better.
Furthermore, mystical experiences, as well as trauma, call into question the notion of volition, as when the subjective omnipotence Winnicott speaks of has been violated and one’s ability to act autonomously is disrupted or when, as John of the Cross writes about, one’s willful actions seem to be thwarted by something which is experienced as divine intervention. Both could have the effect of alienating oneself from previous hobbies, social circles, and behavior patterns. Both pose an enormous challenge to previously held worldviews, cultural norms, and one’s sense of self. And finally, both carry a somatic load, whether from the frozen energy of previous impacts or the off-loading of previous impacts through release. In this way, much like John of the Cross’s Dark Night is phenomenologically akin to Grof’s outline of the perinatal experiences one might undergo during an LSD-psychotherapy session, I propose that a personal encounter with the numinous is akin to trauma.
This, of course, does not mean that one should not emphatically welcome the numinous if it comes knocking. Having the reducing valve of the mind itself reduced enough to allow the “immediate luminosity” of a direct experience to permeate one’s consciousness has the potential to be an inordinate blessing, even when the aftermath feels chaotic and hard to integrate. It is only to say that when one does come to discover the Mind-at-Large, one should not expect only rainbows and unicorns, for the body will perceive any threat of death as a trauma and will undoubtedly respond accordingly. Bear in mind, though, should you be delivered into the Dark Night, in the words of Peter Levine, while “trauma is hell on earth, trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.”
The MIND Foundation for Psychedelic Research aims to create a healthier, more connected world through research and education. Learn more or become part of our mission.
References appear in the original article. | https://mind-foundation.medium.com/trauma-of-mystical-experience-65353dd0585 | ['The Mind Foundation'] | 2020-12-26 17:03:10.361000+00:00 | ['Psychedelics', 'Mental Health', 'Trauma', 'Mysticism', 'Psychedelic Therapy'] |
Lifestyles of the Fake and Lonely | This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.
Connor is 27, with green eyes and a dorky grin. His favorite emoji is the shaka (🤙), which he uses to express a casual DTF energy. He’s tan and toned, athletic yet approachable, and his profile photos resemble ads for a millennial lifestyle brand. There goes Connor, throwing up a peace sign on Runyon Canyon. Surfing as the sun sets over Manhattan Beach. A mirror selfie, an action shot, an abdominal V.
Connor is your average thirst trap next door. Also, I created him in the palm of my hand.
The photos are a friend’s. Sorry. Not a friend’s. A friend of a former roommate of a distant acquaintance’s, the hottest friend of a former roommate of a distance acquaintance I know. I found them on Instagram, screenshotted a select few, and cropped out the identifying details with no one’s permission but my own. It felt harmless, or fun, or necessary, somehow, in the way chronic loneliness can make you believe many unnecessary things are necessary.
I know. I’m sorry.
I tapped my way through a popular gay dating app’s sign-up flow, uploaded the photos, and invented a person. Connor is a software engineer, though if you ask him what kind he’ll have to home-button his way out of the conversation. He grew up in L.A. but just moved to “Willyburg.” He says “haha,” not “LOL,” which takes some getting used to. He almost never exceeds one line of text. He is calm, cool, and Objectively Hot.
“I’m so glad we matched!”
“Hiii!”
“👋😊😅”
Shaka.
And this isn’t Grindr, either, but a newer, more ostensibly ethical and supportive queer app. A safe space, until I came along.
I match with everyone. For three hours, I mainline approval like the approval-hungry human I am. It feels like I’ve unlocked another dimension. I don’t have to tread the waters of small talk or drop gratuitous exclamation points to telegraph how happy I am to be here — my matches do that. When I’ve played this game as myself, a 32-year-old gay man who is not a model, it’s slower. Harder. Connor is my cheat code.
“You seem really genuine,” a man named Brandon messages me at midnight.
What I’m doing is wrong, I know that. I chat with 20 smitten or merely very horny gay men, deceiving them with every message. In queer communities, like the one I’m in, catfishing is everything we’re afraid of: We fear that people will prey on our sexuality, take advantage of our vulnerability, pretend to be someone they’re not when we’ve overcome so many hurdles to become who we are. | https://humanparts.medium.com/lifestyles-of-the-fake-and-lonely-f22ac231af46 | ['Harris Sockel'] | 2019-12-21 03:54:40.473000+00:00 | ['Nonfiction', 'Love And Sex', 'Dating', 'Internet Time Machine', 'Social Media'] |
Top Python Libraries Every Developer Should Learn | Image Source: Canva
When talking about Python’s popularity in both the programming and Data Science community, the first thing that arrives in mind is its integrity. One of the best specialties of Python is its inherent integrity and readability that makes it a beginner-friendly language.
As every language has its own libraries and to be a good developer, it is not essential to learn all the libraries. Therefore, there are some libraries that every developer should learn and know well.
This blog is aimed at newbie developers who want to learn the Python programming language. It is not a complete reference work on Python libraries, but rather, highlights the several libraries that are available and briefly covers their purposes.
Top 7 Python Libraries that Every Developer Should Learn
TensorFlow
TensorFlow is one of the most prominent libraries for Python applications launched by Google in 2020. It is a free, open-source python machine learning library that allows developers to work with numerical computation. It is very easy to learn and has a handful collection of helpful tools.
It is based upon data flow graphs that are used in GPUs and CPUs with a single API. However, it is not restricted to machine learning only; you can also utilize it for dataflow and programs that are differentiable.
TensorFlow is available for Python and C APIs and also for C++, Java, JavaScript, Go, Swift, etc. Also, Third-party packages are also available for MATLAB, C#, Julia, Scala, R, Rust, etc.
Features of TensorFlow
TensorFlow uses automatic high-performance APIs such as — Keras.
It offers an immediate iteration of machine learning models.
This library features eager execution, which allows you to create, manipulate machine learning models , and make the debugging way easier.
, and make the debugging way easier. With TensorFlow, we can easily imagine each and every part of the graph.
With TensorFlow, you can easily move your ML models in clouds, on any device and on-premises in any browser.
TensorFlow comes with an easy to learn architecture. You can easily develop your concept into code and make your publications even easier.
It has a solution to all of your common machine learning issues. You can easily implement it and go for giving your best.
2. NumPy
NumPy is known as one of the most popular machine learning library in Python. NumPy is generally used for scientific computation. TensorFlow and other libraries use NumPy within for performing multiple operations on Tensors. Array interface is the best and the most prominent feature of NumPy.
It enables us to operate multidimensional arrays. Arrays implementation is not there in Python so mainly the developers use NumPy in their machine learning projects. It’s easy to learn and is an open-source library that provides advanced math functionalities and a fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.
Almost every machine learning technician or data scientist applies this module for complex mathematical computations. While NumPy is a helpful Python package for a sort of general-purpose programming tasks, it’s especially great if you want to do machine learning since it provides part of the foundation for libraries like TensorFlow.
Features of NumPy
Makes complex mathematical implementations very simple.
Makes coding real simple and understanding the concepts is easy.
This python package provides useful tools for integration. You can easily integrate NumPy with programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran code.
Broadly used, therefore a lot of open source contributions.
NumPy provides such functionalities that are comparable to MATLAB. They both allow users to get faster with operations.
3. SciPy
SciPy is a machine learning library that is used for both application developers and engineers. SciPy is one of the core packages that offer up the SciPy stack. It provides many user-friendly and effective numerical methods such as methods for numerical integration and optimization.
However, computation is not the only job that makes SciPy special. It is also very famous for image manipulation, as well.
SciPy supplies for various scientific computing tasks that manage data optimization, data integration, and data modification. Just like NumPy, the multidimensional models are the main purposes in SciPy, which are given by the NumPy module itself.
SciPy is a useful tool for a wide sort of scientific, mathematical, and engineering tasks that lack some manipulation of numbers.
Features of SciPy
SciPy fulfills all the efficient numerical routines like optimization, numerical integration.
All the functions in all submodules of SciPy are well documented.
It makes the best use of NumPy arrays for general data structures. In fact, NumPy is an integrated part of Scipy.
Scipy can handle 1-d polynomials in two ways. Whether you can use poly1d class from NumPy or you can use co-efficient arrays to do the job.
4. Keras
Keras is recognized as one of the coolest machine learning libraries in Python. People who want to learn deep neural networks, Keras can be a really good option for them.
Developers who work with Keras are fascinated with its user-friendly and modular structure. It provides an easier mechanism to signify neural networks. Keras also provides some of the best services for compiling models, processing data-sets, visualization of graphs, and much more.
Keras has the ability and resources to run on top of popular deep learning libraries like TensorFlow, Theano, or CNTK. It also presents a comparably simple API that manages to also offers a lot of flexibility. This makes Keras easy to learn and simple to use.
This user-friendly, extensible tool allows easier development of deep learning models. It is a great, effective tool for beginners, too, and can run seamlessly on CPUs and GPUs.
Features of Keras
Keras, being modular in nature is amazingly expressive, flexible, and well-suited for innovative research.
It doesn’t only support neural networks only but also provides a fully supportive environment for convolutional and recurrent neural networks.
It runs smoothly on both CPU and GPU.
This python library features a variety of implementations from neural networks forming blocks — functions, layers, optimizers, objectives, and others.
Keras also features many useful tools that allow you to work with different images and texts easily.
Using Keras, you can build deep models for smartphones — both Android and iOS or for Java Virtual Machine also.
5. Pandas
Pandas is a machine learning library in Python that gives data structures of high-level and a broad variety of tools for analysis. One of the great features of this library is the capability to translate complex operations with data using one or two commands.
It is a must to learn for data-science and dedicatedly formulated for Python language. It is a fast, definite, and flexible platform that allows intuitive data-structures.
As Pandas is a data analysis module, we can refine the data most efficiently using the pandas’ library. It allows different kinds of data structures that are able to work.
Features of Pandas
Pandas make sure that the entire process of manipulating data will be easier.
will be easier. Smart alignment and indexing featured in Pandas offer you a perfect organization and data labeling.
Pandas have some special features that allow you to handle missing data or value with a proper measure.
This package offers you such a clean code that even people with no or basic knowledge of programming can easily work with it.
It provides a collection of built-in tools that allows you to both read and write data in different web services, data-structure, and databases as well.
Pandas can support JSON, Excel, CSV, HDF5, and many other formats. In fact, you can merge different databases at a time with Pandas.
6. Theano
Theano is a computational framework machine learning library in Python and it is a popular choice for performing neural network models. Theano works similarly to TensorFlow, but it is not as effective as TensorFlow.
It can analyze, define, optimize, and modify different mathematical information at the same time. As Theano gets the best use of multi-dimensional arrays, you hardly have to worry about the completion of your projects.
Moreover, Theano can also be applied in distributed or parallel environments just similar to TensorFlow.
Features of Theano
Ability to use NumPy arrays effectively in Theano-compiled functions.
Perform data-intensive computations much quicker than on a CPU.
Theano performs your derivatives for functions with one or many inputs.
Evaluate expressions faster than ever before, thereby, increasing efficiency by a lot.
Detect and diagnose multiple types of errors and ambiguities in the model.
Theano allows you to avoid dirty bugs while working with expressions. You can work seamlessly on expressions without wasting any time.
This library makes computation 140x faster. Computation of data-intensive applications is easier with Theano.
7. PyTorch
PyTorch is the biggest machine learning library and a popular open-source framework for machine learning and deep learning. This machine learning library is based on Torch, which is an open-source machine library performed in C with a wrapper in Lua.
It’s a useful tool for developing and training neural networks. It optimizes tensors for deep learning using CPUs and GPUs, and it also accelerates the way from research to prototyping to production deployment.
Other than this, PyTorch offers rich APIs for resolving application issues related to neural networks. This is the most used machine learning library, assisting planners to perform tensor computations with the acceleration of a GPU.
Features of PyTorch –
PyTorch can be used with other popular libraries, as well. You can easily integrate it with libraries/packages like Cython and Numba.
PyTorch uses TorchScript, which offers a flexible and simple eager mode. You can evaluate different functions and operations instantly.
While in the graph mode, PyTorch provides absolute transitioning, fast optimizations, and offers a C++ run-time environment.
PyTorch has good support for async. Execution for cumulative operations. This way, you can boost up your project performance.
This library also allows P2P (Peer to Peer) communication, which can be gained by both Python and C++.
Conclusion
Python Packages and Libraries play an important role in a developer’s profession. Whether it is for data science or machine learning or any other viewpoints of the programming world, these libraries are all here to meet you up.
We hope this blog encouraged you to kick start your learning on the libraries available in Python. We guess you got to know about different modules, libraries, and frameworks for Python. | https://medium.com/swlh/top-python-libraries-every-developer-should-learn-b25fd803b703 | ['Asha Goyal'] | 2020-11-28 19:03:20.494000+00:00 | ['Python Programming', 'Python Libraries', 'Python Pandas', 'Python'] |
Coffee Chat Series #1: Getting Ahead as an Early-Career Designer | Are you an Early-Career Designer?
You think of yourself as “new to designing professionally.” Maybe you’re still in school, with an internship or two under your belt. Or, perhaps you graduated in the last 1–2 years and are in the midst of your first or second design job. Or, maybe you’ve decided recently to switch careers.
You don’t yet consider yourself an expert in any aspect of design, whether it’s interfaces or graphics, user experiences or design processes. You may feel you’ve got solid fundamentals and a decent understanding of what good design is, but you can’t yet produce consistently excellent solutions at the level you aspire to, and you believe you are still a good ways off. You look around and can easily enumerate many types of design problems that you haven’t experienced before and would love to cut your teeth on.
You play a support role in bigger product initiatives. In larger teams, you might be paired with a senior or lead designer who is acting as a mentor or creative director. In smaller teams, you may be getting detailed briefs and specific direction or feedback from a CEO or product leader. You don’t typically feel comfortable pushing back on the problem you’re asked to solve or the feedback you receive because you’re mostly in observing and absorbing mode.
You’ve a long and adventurous career ahead. You’re just getting started, and you’re going to leave footprints.
Your superpowers
A lot of early-career designers I know don’t assume that they have any superpowers. They figure they’ve got a lot to learn, and not a lot they can contribute. This couldn’t be further from the truth! Pretty much everyone I know raves about working with these people. Why?
Flexibility. As an early-career designer, you come in with practically no bad habits or preconceived notions. You’re not weighed down by the past, so you adapt easily to new tools and processes. Non-existent are the grumblings of, “Well, in my day, we did X or Y and it was so much better…” Within a few years, I’ve seen many people go from n00b to expert designing on some new platform, technology, or cultural trend. And given the rate at which this industry changes — a lot — this kind of flexibility is a huge advantage. When paradigms shift — whether from analog to digital, or web to mobile— you’ll notice that a new generation of pioneers are at the forefront, rather than the established big names from the past. The only way forward is through change, and early career designers are some of the best at adapting.
Curiosity. If you’re new to the field, you’re brimming with a thousand questions. Everything is interesting and novel. You look at problems with a clean slate, which sparks new thoughts and ideas. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve shown a design proposal and gotten earnest questions from early-career designers like “What problem are you trying to solve?” or “Why does this need four steps?” that made me recheck my assumptions and realize a better solution. Asking for the sake of understanding is powerful; it reminds everyone else to not get lost in the shortcuts that inevitably build up over the course of a long career; it invites us to go back to first principles and reclaim that beginner’s mindset.
Enthusiasm. Just a few weeks ago I chatted with a designer who had taken on mentoring an intern during the summer. I asked her how the experience was. “Simply amazing!” she gushed. “The team loved our intern. Everyone felt so much more energetic with him around!” I hear variants of this story over and over again. As an early-career designer, your genuine and bright-eyed excitement stirs even the most cynical of souls. Problems that more experienced designers have solved half a dozen times already are made to feel fresh again, boosting everyone’s mood. Don’t underestimate how much of a gift this is. Enthusiasm fosters enthusiasm.
Ability to try new things and take risks. At this stage, this much is true: you have far more to gain than to lose. You don’t have a reputation to protect. You haven’t specialized in a particular area of expertise. You don’t have a deep history that people can draw assumptions from. This is the time to take risks! This is the time to raise your hand on the tasks that nobody else wants to do; to join the companies or teams that feel like underdogs; to volunteer for the projects that seem impossible or at the very least, incredibly complicated. This is the time to make like Shakira from Zootopia and “Try Everything.” The worst that can happen is that you get deeper insights into what you don’t like — a valuable learning! The best is that you discover you’re capable of far more than you realized.
Habits for Success
What are the daily practices that have outsized returns for early-career designers? After hundreds of conversations and observations of their career trajectories, this is my short list:
Focus on quantity of work produced. There is a famous study where an instructor for a photojournalism class divided his students into two groups. The first was told that they would be judged solely on quantity — ie, 100 photos submitted gets you an A, 80 gets you a B, etc. The second group was told they only had to produce one photo at the end of the course, and they would be judged solely on how good that one photo was. Guess what? When all was said and done, it turns out that the quantity group did better on both quantity AND quality. In doing the work of producing dozens of photos, they experienced firsthand what made for better composition, lighting, focal length, etc. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around for hours theorizing about what the “perfect” photo was, and then produced one mediocre piece. When designing to solve a problem, try as many different solutions as you can, then scrutinize the pros and cons of each. Trying to “save time” doing something that’s “good enough” isn’t the goal — instead, shore up your fundamentals through a constant stream of high output.
Show your work as often as you can, to as many people as you can for feedback. When I was getting started, I didn’t do this much, and it’s one of my biggest regrets. My excuse was always: “Oh, we already have a weekly team critique — I’ll just show my stuff then.” The truth was, I was embarrassed to ask for feedback, especially on early work that I knew wasn’t totally there. I worried other designers would think less of me if they saw my in-progress work. So I’d sit in my corner and try to perfect my designs before anyone saw them. Unfortunately, by doing this, I missed out on learning faster — I got critique feedback late, I passed up opportunities to get one-on-one advice and coaching, and nobody thought I was particularly proactive. Later on, as a manager, the designers who impressed me the most were those who didn’t let their egos get in the way of their growth, the ones who readily said, Can you take a look at my latest work? I’m struggling with the layout or I’m not sure how to approach this problem and I’d love to talk it through with you first. Ask for honest feedback and listen to it seriously. Iterate based on that feedback. Approach multiple designers you admire for their take on your work. Don’t be discouraged if some days, your work doesn’t meet your (or someone else’s) bar, or you don’t think you’re getting better fast enough. The only way forward is through the work, and through getting more and more perspectives that help you improve.
Work on your growth areas. The conventional wisdom for career growth is to Focus on your strengths. This is good advice in general, but I caution you to not take it seriously at the early career stage. Why? Because right now, investing in your fundamentals — especially shoring up your weaknesses — doesn’t cost you much and will benefit you every day for the rest of your career. If you aren’t strong at visuals, now is not the time to say, “Ah well, I’ll never be a great visual designer anyway, so why bother?” Be wary especially in situations (as in larger companies) where roles tend toward specialization, because you might be tempted to hand off visual work to an expert instead of trying to improve yourself. Even if you have zero aspirations to be an icon expert or a visual systems designer down the road, the more you improve those skills now, the more valuable you will be in every design job down the road. Same goes for other design hard skills — interaction design, motion, product thinking, etc — or soft skills like communication, persuasion, organization, proactivity, or leadership.
Ask questions all the time. As Euripedes said, “Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.” Asking questions is the fastest way to learn. Don’t know what an acronym stands for? Ask. Don’t see why your colleague used blue instead of purple on this button? Ask. Can’t really follow the logic behind why your team’s top priority is X instead of Y? Ask. You don’t have to agree with every answer, but you’ll gain a whole lot of context and perspective.
Raise your hand and try everything. Set a goal to try 3 things you haven’t done before every month. They could be new projects, new initiatives, or new practices. If an opportunity comes along and you’re not sure if you’re going to like it or be successful at it, raise your hand. You’ll be better off for the experience, no matter how it goes.
Read books about human culture and psychology. An underrated aspect of becoming a top designer is accumulating a better understanding of human motivation and behavior. Why do people do what they do? How do they process information? When do they behave rationally and irrationally? When does a behavior become habitual, and why? Some books in this category that I’ve found useful: Thinking Fast and Slow; The Design of Everyday Things; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results; Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas and Others Die; Predictably Irrational; The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion; How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Misconceptions and Obstacles to overcome
In my coffee chats with designers, we’ll often talk about what we wish we knew when we first got started. A few traps stand out again and again as misconceptions that hinder success:
Learning is more important than “proving yourself.” Remember: you have much to gain and very little to lose at this stage. Ask any money manager what the most powerful concept is to build wealth and you’ll hear the same answer over and over again: compound interest. Learning is the compound interest for your career, and the sooner you get started, the richer the rewards will be at the end of five, ten, or twenty years. Resist the temptation to “prove yourself” at the beginning. If you have the choice between banking a surefire success by playing it safe or taking a risk to learn something new, default to the latter. Unlike roles, titles, or rewards, which are fleeting, knowledge and experience gained is permanent. Nobody can ever take that away from you.
Your career is your responsibility, not anyone else’s. If you’re lucky, you will have many folks in your life who will support, encourage and help you in your journey— managers, peer colleagues, mentors, family and friends. But even if you don’t, remember this: your career should matter more to you than to anyone else. So look first to yourself to get where you want to go. You are not entitled to the generosity of others, nor can you control what they choose to do (though I’m always inspired by the warmth and helpfulness of the design community at large). It doesn’t do you any good to blame your environment or your manager if you’re not happy with your progress. You are the captain of the ship of your career, so ask yourself what you need to change.
Designing well is about solving problems for your intended audience, not about coming up with things you personally like. As an early-career designer, I took huge pride in my personal taste. I felt that I had an elevated understanding of aesthetics, of simplicity, and of the journey towards the ideal. But through the course of learning to design for millions, then billions, of people, time and time again I was humbled by the waves of reality. The designs I personally loved best didn’t always have the biggest impact. In fact, often they crashed and burned. I loved minimalism — the more spacious and elegant the interface, the better— but many people out there, especially those newer to the web, appreciate clear, wordy labels over stark icons. Creating excellent work isn’t about me and what I thought was lovely; it’s about meeting our users where they were and empathizing with their needs so we can solve their problems. Resist relying too much on your own assumptions and desires, and seek the truth of what really matters to your audience.
Mentorship starts with asking good questions, not asking for a mentor. It’s natural for early career designers to be excited about getting mentored by folks they look up to. But here’s the thing: 9 times out of 10, getting “mentorship” isn’t like gaining admittance into some sort of program (unless it happens to be structured that way— this is the 1 in 10 case). There’s typically no application process. It’s not a binary thing, like you’re either X’s mentee or you aren’t. In fact, trying to formalize it by asking Can you be my mentor? is awkward, because mentorship should be like any normal relationship — two people who like and enjoy each other’s company want to spend more time together. Refrain from immediately asking someone to spend regular time with you. If they don’t know you well, why would they say yes? Instead, start with genuine questions and low-commitment asks. I’m a huge fan of how you do X — can you share with me some advice for how I can also improve at X? or Can I invite you for a coffee to discuss X? If that goes well, then you can make another ask or request to make it a more regular occurrence.
Reflection Questions to Ask Yourself
The best thing you can do for your career is not to listen to what someone else has to say (this article included), but to get in the habit of regularly asking yourself deep questions. You’re the only one who knows your true heart and where you want your career to go, so keep these questions in mind:
Which qualities of people around me do I admire, and how can I learn from them? Seeing is believing. If a colleague does something that leaves you thinking, Damn, I wish I could do that— maybe its the simplicity and elegance of their design work; maybe its their attention to detail; maybe its the compelling way they make arguments— count your lucky stars that you get to see them work that magic and that you have the opportunity to learn from them. Admiration doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can appreciate a particular skill or trait without admiring everything about a person. Make a list of those qualities, and then ask yourself how you might get better at them. Can you ask that person to give you feedback? Can you request that they deconstruct their process? Can you make notes of their specific tips and tricks?
How can I find out more about my likes and dislikes? It’s perfectly natural to respond to a question like “What am I meant to do with my life?” with I have no f-ing clue right now. You can’t rush discovering the answer; it’ll emerge in its own time, through first-hand experience with the kind of work that gives you the greatest satisfaction. But what you can do is put yourself in situations where you’re constantly testing new scenarios and learning about yourself in the process. These experiments might not all be successful, but think of Thomas Edison, who said, “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.” You may try things and learn that you despise certain tasks but love others — this is what self-discovery looks like. if you don’t get out of your comfort zone, it will take you much, much longer to find your true calling.
What things gives me energy, and what sucks away my energy? This is is a simple reflection question to contemplate at the end of a month, quarter or year that is a baby step towards answering the much bigger existential question of “What am I meant to do with my life?” Simply observe which activities give you energy and feel rewarding, versus what make you feel heavy and discouraged. Don’t react or change your actions based on a particular month or quarter’s answer; narrowing your area of opportunity too quickly is limiting. Instead, note them and jot them down. What’s valuable is understanding the larger trends or patterns over the years — I am energized by people who take their responsibilities seriously and share my optimism in the future — not specific examples like I don’t enjoy working with Taylor.
What are my unique strengths and growth areas? Like the question above, this is an important reflection question to understand yourself better. Make note of your strengths, but don’t ignore your weaknesses — instead, focus on improving them to establish a better foundation for the future. Continue to broaden your field of experiences, but periodically take stock of what things come naturally to you, and what you struggle more with. | https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/coffee-chat-series-1-getting-ahead-as-an-early-career-designer-12d0c0aaec67 | ['Julie Zhuo'] | 2019-09-11 15:31:02.161000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Learning', 'Career Advice', 'Product Management', 'Designer'] |
Data Science — A quick overview. The big data ETL process is the key to… | The big data ETL process is the key to engineering any data pipeline. In general, an end to end big data pipelining consists of four main blocks:
Data preparation and collection Data cleaning, transformation, and loading (ETL) Data analytics (statistics or data mining) Predictive analytics (Machine learning / Artificial Intelligence)
Over the last decade, there has been a massive growth in both data generated and data retained. These data are retained by companies and organization to drive their business, we call this “Big Data”.
Nowadays, the term “Data Science” is gaining a wide recognition. But what does a data scientist do? Data scientists are the people who make sense out of all the big data and determine what can be done with it in order to increase the productivity of a business.
Let’s understand with an example:
Consider, you are eating candy, generally, a person takes those candies that he likes, in contrast, data scientists are the people who will get all the flavors of the candies and analyze them because they really need to know what each one tastes like. In short, the title “Data Scientist” encompasses different flavors of the work. According to me, that is the major difference between a “Data Scientist”, “Statistician”, “Analyst” or an “Engineer”. A data scientist is one who does little of those tasks done by a statistician, analyst, and engineer.
To be more specific, a data scientist is the one who does the following primary tasks:
Data Analysis (Statistics) Predictive analytics (Machine Learning) Visualization
Let’s have a look at each of the tasks in brief:
Data Analysis (Statistics):
In this task, lots of plots of data are made in order to understand the pattern of the data. Through this process, some theories regarding data behavior are crafted in a way that will be easy to communicate and easy to act on. A data scientist develops different models by understanding the data patterns through data analysis and develops some strategies based on understood or developed statistics. But the most challenging aspect of this task is that the models or statistics cannot act as a permanent solution to the defined problem. Therefore, a lot of time is dedicated to this task in which a data scientist may need to evaluate and make some changes in the existing models, as well as going back to the data and bring out new features to help make better models.
Predictive Analytics (Machine Learning)
Another important task of a data scientist can be developing predictive models for forecasting possible outcomes or patterns in the data. Such predictive analytics can help businesses take valuable business decisions. An important challenge for building a predictive model is the reliability of the model. A data scientist must make sure that the model passes several validation tests before it is ready for making business decisions. Some interesting use cases of predictive analytics can be weather forecasting, stock predictions, recommender systems based on buyer purchase patterns, etc.
Visualization:
The above-discussed tasks can just be defined or act as a tip of the iceberg. This is because even if we have state of the art data models for different applications, it doesn’t do anyone much good if the insights are not given to the customers or users and do it consistently. This means building a sort of a data product that can be used by the people who are not data scientists. This can be implemented in many forms like chart visualizations, metrics on a dashboard, or an application. The best examples of such applications are Tableau, Alteryx, etc. which are the market leaders in data dashboarding.
Understanding all the above tasks of a data scientist, in brief, it can also be understood that a long-term life cycle of a data science project may involve going back and re-analyzing the data models if there is always a new source of data coming in and there is a need to incorporate them.
Analyzing such traits and tasks of a data scientist it can be concluded beyond doubt that how great importance the data science and data scientist may have in the growth of any organization in the era of highest competition and the need of constant improvements in the services of the organizations. | https://medium.com/rock-your-data/data-science-a-quick-overview-b34e9772287a | ['Karan Tongay'] | 2019-06-10 05:01:29.159000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Big Data', 'Data Analytics'] |
The Lucrative Underground World Of SMMA | A License To Print Money
One of the members in my SMMA group makes well over $80,000 a month. That’s not a typo. He makes more in three months than most doctors make all year. He took a one-month course and then money started rolling in. Doctors dedicate half their lives to school and training to earn their salary. On the financial front, it doesn’t seem fair but it’s the truth.
We all know that the internet hosts a sea of get-rich-quick schemes. It’s no different with people posing as SMMA owners and gurus. But currently with an SMMA, it’s still possible to make this kind of money creating and managing Facebook Ads (which I’ll explain how later). In fact, several people I’ve met in these groups are making more money with their SMMA than their regular jobs. I’ve seen some Facebook groups that won’t even let you in unless you’re making at least six figures a year with your SMMA.
These success stories are incredibly inspiring, especially to people still in high school. The more teens learn about the SMMA world, the more they are intrigued. Social media makes complete sense to them. Their generation grew up with it, and manipulating these platforms is second nature to them. To make money with it seems like a dream.
Trade Secrets In Facebook Groups
Teens will tell you that Facebook is dead and they use Instagram or Snapchat instead. That’s true for most of them. But the entrepreneurial type are coming back to Facebook because it’s a popular site for businesses and special interest groups.
Facebook is a vital platform for teens creating SMMAs today. They’ll often post up their recent wins and losses. They can also learn about industry updates and techniques to try out. From what I’ve experienced, it’s mostly a place to get the kind of support people need to succeed. And lately, there are plenty of SMMA groups to choose from.
It seems like a new group pops up every day. It has definitely started to creep out of its underground status. I joined a group six months ago when I decided to focus on Facebook ads for my pre-existing marketing company. It was a challenge for me to fit in at first. It’s definitely a “bro culture.” That comes with the average age of members. Even the girls refer to other girls as bro! With some posts, I felt like I was reading the script from the set of the next American Pie movie.
In my SMMA group, I was the oldest of about 300 members. I’m so old, they called me “uncle” but it was endearing. Even though I had the most digital marketing experience, my Facebook Ads chops needed fine-tuning. And despite my experience, it just couldn’t compete with the group creator, Iman Gadzhi. He regularly made over $40,000 a month with his SMMA services alone.
Minors Allowed
Like many, I came across one of Gadzhi’s SMMA videos on YouTube. There are lots of really great SMMA videos created by other people. However, Gadhzi seemed to have a great understanding of the digital marketing landscape and where it was going. Back then, he had just turned 17 and dropped out of high school. That sounds bad until you learn that he was making an incredible amount of money online, and he found a way to sustain it month after month.
Here was this young man who became financially independent before he could even vote. The fact that he dropped out of school seems more like a business decision than a scholastic aptitude issue. Gadzhi took it upon himself to know more about how to run an online business than most adults.
At seventeen, the average kid is doing odd jobs for money and relying on their parents. It’s no wonder why people turned to him. And Gadzhi’s life story is part of his sales hook. It has been an essential piece in his personal branding that has helped him amass thousands of followers online. The more I learned about him, the more I felt like I should have been doing more when I was a teenager. He’s a huge over-achiever compared to most of the teens I’ve known.
Though I was very skeptical, I bought Gadzhi’s course to learn what he was doing. At first, I thought it was a crazy idea. It was the first time in my life where my mentor was practically a kid! Though I questioned some of the curriculum, after a few videos I was learning the finer details of social media that I have been missing all these years.
A New Kind Of Schooling
When you listen to Gadzhi, you keep forgetting that he’s a teenager. He’s unusually charismatic and well-spoken. Before every training video, he throws his hands out like a magician welcoming you into the act. He smiles a lot and always keeps things positive. There is no doubt that he is a likable character.
The online courses Gadzhi creates are a different kind of schooling. You’re encouraged to listen to his videos on 2X speed just to get through them all. For each lesson, he wants you to learn just enough and then take action. Gadzhi is a firm believer that direct experience is the best form of education. That could be a little scary for a teen and even a full-grown adult. Though many of us aspire to do great things, sometimes pulling the trigger is paralyzing.
The good news is that in this group, you never have to do anything alone. You’ll always find someone in the same boat to collaborate with. For example, one of the tasks is to find a partner and role-play sales calls — a daunting task for anyone. This is real-life immersion education. I began to think to myself, if more public schools taught in this way, we’d be much better off. Here, it’s all about viable skills not theory.
Some tasks are easy. Other tasks require you to really think about what you’re doing. For example, his first task for new members is to head to the Facebook group and write a quick hello. Following this, they must then state their financial goal for the year. One member wrote:
“Hey everyone! Anyone from Germany too?
My bold twelve-month goal is to drop out of high school ASAP, visit 7 countries, take care of my mum, and make $100,000. 🙏🏽”
Within minutes, several other members had replied to this post giving the newbie encouragement and support. (Half the comments were followed by “bro” of course.) For the most part, most of these goal statements sound alike. After seeing a few of these, I began to worry. Is Gadzhi a bad influence on teenagers? Not everyone can drop out and make money like he did.
But then again, seeing how interested these young members were about business and the actions they took made me feel differently. Looking at the state of our millennial graduates and the 1.4 trillion-dollar college debt crisis in the USA, maybe more teenagers should consider starting an SMMA or something similar in addition to finishing school.
We send kids to schools and colleges to become theoretical and knowledge generalists. However, the real world privileges in-demand specialists with commercially viable skills. We have it all backwards and many of the SMMA teachers know this.
The truth is, Gadzhi is not an outlier. Lots of other teenagers and twenty-somethings are making millions doing this today. I saw an SMMA course by Billy Willson that has the subtitle: The Replacement For College. He is a peer of Gadzhi (and a college drop-out), that is consistently making over $20,000 a month himself. And business is booming. Willson is on track for a breakout month that will net him over $50,000.
On a different SMMA Youtube channel, I learned about a sixteen-year-old from Florida named James Brinker who is making over five figures a month. Brinker goes well beyond SMMA. His team offers a full suite of professional digital services that rival many well-known marketing agencies. These services attract clients worldwide.
In India, I heard about a girl who set up a call center to serve American businesses. Her SMMA agency employs five people and a dozen more sub-contractors. This young lady, who is actually a very private person online, is only nineteen years old!
It’s obvious why so many teens want to own an SMMA when countless ordinary teenagers are becoming successful at it. With such a big upside, many teens don’t hesitate about the initial startup costs.
The Cost Of Admission
The majority of SMMA courses and exclusive Facebook groups are not free. Courses cost around $500 to $2000. Many courses have well over ten hours of video instruction. They cover everything from finding clients to mastering the ever-changing Facebook Ad features. Agency owners usually rush through the courses, but the Facebook group is something they really savor. Most say it’s the best part of the course package.
Unfortunately, I’m starting to see lots of courses and groups pop up from inexperienced SMMA founders. Because the reach of online courses, sometimes there is more money in teaching SMMA principles than actually running a real agency.
Like all online business offerings, it’s hard to know what you’re getting into. Every course’s long sales page looks the same. They pack in sales copy, videos, course outlines, and numerous testimonials. “Buy Now” buttons are liberally peppered in between sections. Worse yet, you won’t see very many reviews about these courses or none at all, and that makes sense. They’re created by people in an underground movement started roughly two years ago.
The Origin Of The SMMA Industry
Early in the SMMA movement, people like Tai Lopez were posting their ads on every social media platform — especially YouTube. One video ad with over sixty-nine million views to date is called “Here in my garage.” It’s where Lopez talks about his book collection, which happens to share the same space as his stable of exotic cars. His story has all the hallmarks of a successful online advertisement. Before he made it big, he was dirt poor. He was once confused, but his clarity and focus made him millions. Then he throws in the unscientific anecdotal argument: If he can do it, so can you! Needless to say, his marketing worked.
Lopez is one of a few first-wave SMMA experts. He wasn’t an early innovator in this space, but he was one of the first who really made it accessible to the masses. Through his numerous how-to videos, flashy images, and celebrity interviews from his Hollywood mansion, he attracted millions of followers worldwide. Lopez seemed to have the dream lifestyle that being a digital entrepreneur brought. And because the barrier to entry was low, countless young people all over the world followed him. One of them was Gadzhi.
Back then, the best SMMA course to get was Lopez’s. In his group, people were talking about their recent wins within days of receiving the course. Students who weren’t even finished with the course were already getting clients and posting up images of the checks they received from local businesses as proof. It was unreal. I can only imagine what the fast-moving Facebook discussion board was like then.
Pretty soon, those teens were posing in front of luxury cars they rented for the day or outright bought. Others started posting Instagram pictures from exotic locations. The Internet was seeing mini Tai Lopez’s all over the world. And because they wanted to be online famous like him, they did something key. They documented their journey on social media. In our age of digital influencers and online millionaires, there is nothing more click-baity than showing off things that people can’t have (at least today). These teens knew that. Within months, their lives changed because they learned how to create Facebook Ads for local business clients.
The Importance Of SMMA Services
This business opportunity naturally evolved from the increasing need for local digital marketing, and the application of Facebook ads in general. Getting online traffic is the real challenge. What small businesses have realized is that the golden days of SEO are gone. Ranking on the first page of Google or making bids for their ads to show up is really expensive now. Where search engine marketing campaigns used to cost under a hundred bucks a month, now it costs them thousands.
Local businesses have also seen a sharp rise in social media effectiveness. Before it looked like a big waste of time. With all this tweeting, poking, liking, vlogging, and hash-tagging it’s hard to believe those simple fleeting actions could be valuable to a business.
But thanks to people like Gary Vaynerchuk, social media has proven to be a viable platform for local and global brands to bring in new customers. And with today’s tools, analytics, and storytelling tactics, smaller companies can compete with much bigger ones using Facebook Ads.
This is all great news, but the whole process to do this is time-consuming for business owners. Hiring a typical brick-and-mortar marketing agency is an option, but with them you’re paying for the huge overhead. A qualified virtual SMMA seems to be the perfect solution.
Facebook As The Gatekeeper
A t over 2.2 billion active users, businesses are realizing that all their ideal clients are on Facebook. So why not advertise there? Sure, it’s a different environment. Unlike Google search, people are not on Facebook to do research or to shop. They are there to socialize and share pictures. Facebook is trying to change that by putting up local classified ads. Maybe in the future, people will see Facebook as a place to socialize and shop too. But for now, most people dismiss ads on the website.
There is one exception.
If you put out a compelling or irresistible ad — I’m talking Groupon style here — it’s just human nature that people are going to click on your ads.
This is the tradecraft of SMMAs.
They know how to interrupt people socializing and how to market on Facebook. This includes image selection, video editing, copywriting, audience targeting, and sales funnel mapping. With a few tests and tweaks, SMMAs make data-driven changes to allow Facebook’s algorithm to send their clients massive traffic.
How effective are these ads? With one of Gadzhi’s clients, his team spent £3,700 in ad spend to reap over £110,000 in sales. After fees, the client made around £96,000 in 30 days. It’s hard to beat that kind of return on ad spend.
On the surface the concepts of Facebook Ads are easy to understand. However, there are a lot of ways to screw up a Facebook campaign. Many businesses try out a few ads and end up wasting thousands of dollars. They get lots of clicks or views, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into sales. After the basics of creating Facebook ads, the learning curve is steep because the sheer amount of options and strategies.
However, businesses do see the tremendous value of Facebook. It’s a platform they have been dreaming of: Reams of data on their ideal client and direct access to them. Facebook knows how much money people make, where they work, and what they like to do. They know what they click on, when they view it, how much they view it, and if they shared or liked it. If they click off of Facebook, they can still be tracked because of a little device called a pixel.
As we all know, nothing is sacred online. From Google and Amazon listening in on your conversations to tracking random pages you visit, everyone is collecting data and creating consumer profiles to sell you more stuff.
It all feels a bit evil.
If it weren’t so common in marketing, people would probably hesitate to create their own SMMA. However, we’ve all given up our privacy by agreeing to the terms and conditions on the websites we visit. And if you work with a company that truly ads value to the world, using Facebook ads to extend their reach is mutually beneficial. There are worse things to use it for like rigging elections or harboring hate speech. So in the grand scheme of things, most SMMAs don’t get too deep with their online ethics and just focus on the prize.
And the sell is easy.
Compared to traditional media or SEO, generating leads on Facebook is clearly the way to go. You can reach more targeted people for a fraction of the price of other methods. This is something all these entrepreneurial teens seem to know, but older local business owners are just getting around to learning. The SMMAs that are successful at letting local businesses realize the opportunity here are making lots of money doing it.
What It Takes For Teens To Make It As An SMMA Owner
The odd thing about SMMAs is that you need very little to succeed. You don’t need a fancy website (the highest paid member does not have one and his clients are international brands). You don’t need to master Facebook Ads. In the beginning, you’re encouraged to outsource that expertise while you learn to do it. You don’t even need big testimonies. Local business don’t care about praise from faceless corporations.
What teens need the most are intangible things: drive, sales skills, and administration skills. No one can give you drive, of course, but it’s essential. The people that do well with their SMMA simply don’t stop until they are successful. They know the road is long and bumpy, but they persist. There is a lot of excuse-making with SMMA owners, but people with drive shrug all of that off to get results.
Sales is the one skill set that is often lacking with these teens. Where do they learn it? What’s the ethical way to apply it? These are a couple questions everyone has to ask because schools refuse to even talk about sales, conscious capitalism, or value creation. Ironically, those are exactly the lessons they need. Even universities do a poor job of talking about these topics, and not knowing this keeps them in the poorhouse.
The idea is simple: no sales, no business. To stay in business and make a profit, you literally have to make a bunch of sales. Deep down, everyone knows this but they would rather do dozens of other things except for this one task.
I see this as the biggest hurdle.
Teens don’t want to hop on the phone or shoot out an email to book appointments. The ones that do well understand there is never any selling on the phone. It’s just about convincing a business owner to have a sit-down and talk about their business. All the selling and consulting happens face-to-face. Even that part mortifies some people. It’s safe too say, if you can’t sell (or at least learn to sell better) than an SMMA is not for you.
Mostly this business is about sales. You can always hire a contractor with a decade of Facebook ad experience to run your clients’ ads. However, your job is to qualify leads, call them, and get the sale. It’s one of the simplest things, and yet untrained people find it incredibly frustrating. The Facebook discussion board is full of stories about how someone fouled up a sales presentation and left empty-handed.
This is a let-down for many would-be SMMA owners. The temporary sales and rejection keeps them from making more money than their parents ever dreamed of. However, mastering these skills would set them up for life.
We’ll always be selling something, whether it be products, an idea, or yourself in an important interview. This is reality education. And handling failure is essential too. Schools are simply not interested in teaching this important lesson.
Where The SMMA Industry Is Going
A s I write this, the third wave of young SMMA owners are making their mark. They are the students of teachers like Iman Gadzhi. Many are starting to launch their own SMMA groups — or leaving the industry entirely because they couldn’t make it work. It’s a shame because of the innovation this industry is developing.
As it becomes mainstream, creating Facebook ads and running an SMMA is becoming a science. There are plenty of supplementary tools, tests, and techniques that can predict an ad campaign’s success. And while many local businesses are already using Facebook and Instagram ads, it’s clear that countless businesses aren’t. In fact, many companies making well over $5,000,000 a year have yet to even touch Facebook Ads. These are easy marks for teens with a successful SMMA.
At last count, there are over 20 different SMMA online courses being offered. These teachers often have $100,000+ course launches and they re-launch their programs a couple times a year. That’s a lot of students. With millions to be made and droves of teens signing up, isn’t it saturated by now?
To make matters worse, cynics believe that the SMMA equivalent of LegalZoom or Canva is just around the corner. This would make creating Facebook Ads incredibly easy and inexpensive for business owners. I’m even starting to see local businesses trying to learn these ads themselves, thus removing the SMMA middleman.
However, the SMMA industry has a lot of room to grow. Business owners who are trying their hand at Facebook ads are struggling to keep ahead of the constant Facebook Ad changes and competitive marketing tactics SMMAs know. And every day I read how someone in my group closed yet another big client.
It’s likely that in the next four years, the industry will be saturated and some brilliant SaaS product will shut down most of the mediocre agencies. But that’s plenty of time for teens to make good money and provide real value in the marketplace. I’m excited for them and digital entrepreneurs of any age that are learning about SMMAs. In this economy, creating an SMMA is another lucrative option to explore so get on it, bro!
Arlie Peyton is a coach for personal brands and online businesses. He has served as Oregon’s state representative for vocational education and strongly believes that everyone creates their own brand of intrinsic and commercial value. Peyton is based in Portland, Oregon — a magical and mysterious city enveloped by a Douglas Fir rainforest. Learn more at arliepeyton.com.
Read Next
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +367,349 people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-lucrative-underground-world-of-smma-6ff105cfd8ad | ['Arlie'] | 2020-03-30 22:26:03.988000+00:00 | ['Smma', 'Small Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Social Media', 'Digital Marketing'] |
How We Built Penbook | Slaven Radic is User Camp’s co-founder and lead developer.
I’ve been fascinated with pen computing for 20 years. I wrestled my Apple Newton MessagePad in college, convinced that paper’s days were over. But it was my love for paper that convinced me that technology will eventually free paper of its physical constraints and transform it into an even better tool. I just never thought I’d be in a position to not only use those apps, but create one myself.
Here at User Camp, we’ve been working on UWP-exclusive apps for the past three years. We love the tech stack, and also Microsoft’s refreshing approach to app store merchandising. (Only an ex-Apple developer truly appreciates what the Microsoft Store has to offer.)
When the Surface Pro 4 launched, I switched to it as my main development environment. Using my Surface Pen every day tickled something in me. It’s hard not to feel a bit inspired with Ink Workspace always there for you. Microsoft has put so much work (and marketing) into a smooth inking experience that it makes anyone feel creative.
I eventually gave into my Ink-development FOMO with our app Spirality, an app that was less a business decision and more of a flight of fancy. The fact that it still earns us money years later with its soft-sell IAP model tells you something about its users.
Eventually, we decided to take this niche seriously. Even though the Microsoft Store already had good (and great) inking apps, many were not targeting the latest Windows SDK, or were using outdated frameworks. This meant the inking experience wasn’t as good as the hardware allowed. We also had a vision for a lightweight inking app that would sit somewhere between Ink Workspace and OneNote — an app that provided a familiar UI, but improved upon physical paper in many small ways.
So we buckled down and made Penbook. Now, our little FOMO-induced app is up for a Windows Developer Award at Build 2018. Here are some lessons from our development process.
Lesson 1: The Windows Ink API is amazing
It took a few years for Microsoft to settle the inking API to where it is today. If you have older inking code, you may be frustrated to find it no longer works on later versions of Windows SDK. I feel your pain.
But with the benefit of hindsight, I’m grateful the API had evolved the way it has. It is now (fairly) self-consistent and enables much with little code. I still have some pet peeves and niggles that I’ve already communicated to the @WindowsInk team, but for 95% of all use cases it does its job well.
We also decided to stick to Microsoft’s UI and affordances as often as possible. It means that Penbook will get free new functionality when the Ink API moves forward. But more importantly, it relies on familiar interface patterns that users don’t have to re-learn.
Lesson 2: SVG is awesome
Maybe half of what makes Penbook fun is the included stationery. We designed 60+ stationery templates for people to use for their notes. We really wanted our stationery to be in a vector format, so it could look good at any level of magnification — but we didn’t want to deal with the overhead of a PDF engine living under the InkCanvas. Since Windows 10 recently added native SVG support to XAML, we decided to rely on it completely. This made the whole design process a lot easier, having Adobe XD and Illustrator export the stationery creative and UWP render it.
Lesson 3: Moving fast and not breaking things
Most of our older apps still target version 10240, the original Windows 10 release. This was out of habit — we didn’t want to cut off even a tiny subset of users who could be our potential customers.
There is definitely a place for being prudent when deciding what version of the Windows SDK you want to support. But Windows 10 is moving and improving at a fast clip. Sticking with older versions can lead to a subpar product, or an expanded development schedule, neither of which we could afford.
So we decided to target Fall Creators Update, the latest Windows 10 version that was then available, and Penbook has done well with it. Besides the fact that we were “only” giving up about 20% of the Windows 10 install base, our niche’s users were more likely to update to the latest and greatest Windows so that they could take advantage of the new pen-centric Windows features. And in the end, over 100,000 users have installed Penbook. Our next app will be targeting Fall Creators Update again.
See you at Build
Again, big thanks to the folks at @WindowsInk — I can’t wait to see where this API goes next. And if you have a moment to spare, you can even vote for us as the Application Creator of the Year for this year’s Windows Developer Awards. I’ll be at the awards ceremony on Sunday, so if you see me come say hi and I’ll get you a beer (provided they have an open bar). | https://medium.com/user-camp/how-we-built-penbook-3c543e6d87a | ['Slaven Radic'] | 2019-08-02 19:32:42.584000+00:00 | ['Microsoft', 'Apps', 'App Development', 'Windows 10', 'Development'] |
How Did He Possibly Get So Many Votes? | How Did He Possibly Get So Many Votes?
Because we have a lot of trauma. And a lot of healing to do.
If you just can’t get your head around it — look at this way: this election gave us a picture of how much unresolved trauma exists in our country. And let’s not be confused. This is not about politics. This is about trauma (cultural, intergenerational, and personal).
In his podcast Making Sense, Sam Harris recently shared his view on The Key to Trump’s Appeal. He makes a case that Trump’s wild and unapologetic flaws make his base feel better (versus the Democrats pushing us to reckon with harsh realities like racism, science and math). Harris describes Trump as a ‘Punch you in the face, Grab you in the Pussy, Eat as many cheeseburgers as I want’ — Jesus. As if he is a savior absolving you of your sins by being so ridiculously terrible.
The thing is, we only need an absurd villain and his cheeseburgers to make us feel better about our own flaws when we are terrified to look at them ourselves.
I come from a culture laden with alcohol addiction. In a rare moment of clarity, a member of my family once said “I don’t like it when anyone else stops drinking, because then I feel like I have a problem.”
That person also happened to vote for Trump.
Many people survived harrowing cultural and individual trauma to become Americans. And tragically, the Trump campaign took advantage of that. Maybe you escaped the cultural revolution in China and you are terrified of information control by the media, and you feel safer with a radical leader who will stand up against that. Maybe you escaped an oppressive socialist regime in Cuba, and you think requiring the right to health care for every citizen is dangerous. These beliefs are only logical when we see them through the lens of trauma.
Even if you had the world’s most healthy family, our dominant cultures of white supremacy and Patriarchy are traumatic for everyone. And when we’re ready to reckon with the depths of our racial trauma and the emergency of our climate crisis we no longer need to protect ourselves from it — we can face it head on, and it becomes workable.
Thomas Hubl defines trauma as anything that was so overwhelming to our nervous system that we couldn’t integrate it, so we hardened off around it. This is a protective and intelligent response. The challenge is getting that hardened off part back — retraining it to feel safe enough to be present with reality. Trauma is like a time warp. It is frozen and stuck in the overwhelming event or series of events in the past— which leaves us unable to take in what is actually happening now.
To quote Brene Brown, “When we deny our history and pain, our history and pain own us. When we have the courage to own our stories of pain, fear, and oppression, we can write a new story.”
Until we do that work, we can actually believe the lie that most slave owners were loving and kind and treated their slaves like family. Because that lie is the only way you can sleep at night and still believe you are good Christian. Maybe you were physically abused by your parents, and constantly working your ass off to be a good dad who does not repeat that abuse with your own kids. Maybe that takes every ounce of energy you have.
That lie might help you cope, but it also walling you off from reality. And leads you to vote for Trump, who is clearly a racist (and a narcissist).
And if you allow yourself to see how Trump is a racist, then you might be too. And if the demonstrators are right, and we live in a country with systemic racism that needs to be adressed — then this whole sense of who you are is threatened. And you just can’t go there. You really can’t. That is not a conscious choice. That is an existential threat that would require you to deal with the painful emotions you have spent your life protecting yourself from.
If you are still reading this, I’m guessing you already know how hard and painful it is to turn towards our trauma. Whether that’s from your childhood of being raised in an abusive home, or from our cultural trauma of being raised in a racist society, or the millions of other possible harms— that move requires deep commitment and intrinsic motivation. And it’s the opposite of one and done — it’s a life long journey. And not everyone is ready to choose that path (yet). Trauma needs safety, care, empathy, love and a lot of space to heal and integrate. Given the right conditions this healing will happen naturally and slowly over time.
So let us never give up on anyone. Let’s believe in everyone and set a seat at the table for anyone who is ready. And let’s not be confused about what’s happening in this election. This is not about politics, this is about trauma — and there is absolutely no use trying to push someone who isn’t ready. And it isn’t kind. If they aren’t ready, they aren’t ready and not only will it not work — pushing can cause harm.
And it’s okay to take some space from our loved ones that aren’t ready. We can love them from a distance for a little while, while we move forward with what needs to be done.
We desperately need truth and reparations (and controls on social media). We need to make amends that are long overdue. And we need to prevent the next Trump from actually turning us into The Handmaid’s Tale.
Ta-Nehisi Coates offers Germany as a road map. For me the first crucial takeaway is knowing that we don’t need to wait until we all agree it’s a good idea. He cites the following statistics from the start of the reparations process:
We have to choose sanity and stop trying to convince anyone that isn’t ready. I’ll say it again: this is not about politics. This is about trauma.
And we can not wait for them. We just have to do the right thing, and let them catch up. That will take a long time for some, and for others that might be never — and in the meantime, we will create a generation who knows better.
I worked in Afghanistan for a long time. It took me many years to realize that the only thing we were fighting for was creating stable enough conditions for a new generation to be educated. And that is exactly what we need. More than 70 million voters, and the majority of our political leadership in the House and Senate has demonstrated that they are too bound up in Misogyny, Racism and White Supremacy to help us heal.
Our only reasonable goal is to shift our cultural consciousness over time.
Every German kid in every school is explicitly taught to reckon with the holocaust: We did this. It was enormously fucked up and we need to be extremely careful to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Can you even imagine what would be possible if at a minimum — we just stopped lying? If reckoning with the truth of racism and white supremacy and our climate crisis was basic education?
As Otto Scharmer said, in his recent piece The Darkest Hour is Just Before the Dawn, “this is the time to launch bold initiatives.”
And for kids, it’s easy. We can just tell them the truth. They will get it.
And there are enough of us — and we are ready. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/seriously-how-did-he-get-so-many-votes-d5ab7f6be36c | ['Meghann Mcniff'] | 2020-12-21 23:06:40.649000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'White Supremacy', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Racism', 'Mental Health'] |
Exciting Features of iPhone New Trackpad -Here’s How It Actually Works | This Content Originally published at CodixLab.
On March 18, Apple officially declared iPhone new trackpad for iPad.These modifications in apple’s official trackpad are considerable developments in the technology era. It concluded the half-baked choices in Phone’s function Accessibility that we main saw on the iPad display screen.
iPhone new trackpad maintenance is the most significant entity that takes place on the iPad in an extended period. Superficially, iPadOS cares several third-party trackpads. This is how-to exactly we get the support on the apple’s official trackpad.
How to pair Apple’s official trackpad — Quick Tour
Here’s the full explanation of how to fix it up on your iPad.As soon as Apple’s official trackpad is unpaired, turn it off down, and after that, turns it back on.
Start your iPad and click the Settings app. Keep it to ensure that Bluetooth is switched on (green). Just before the end of the menu, you have to see your trackpad programmed under Other Devices. Click on your device’s name and pair it. To unpair, Apple’s official trackpad, just go to Settings > Bluetooth and, after that, touch the blue “i” in a blue circle to the right of the device’s name.
Your iPhone new trackpad must now work. To unpair the apple’s official trackpad, just go to Settings > Bluetooth, and after that, touch the blue “i” in a blue circle to the right of the device’s name in the Bluetooth list.
Related: How to Reset Apple Watch in 3 Steps? [Smart Solutions]
How to customize Apple’s official trackpad on your iPad
Apple now gives iPhone new trackpad support in the General section of the Settings app. which is a significant improvement. Here’s how to do it.
Press the settings app. Click on the general setting. Press iPhone newTrackpad& Mouse.
At here, you may adjust the setting to sort the pointer move fast or more slowly.
How to use Apple’s official trackpad; multi-touch gestures with iPad
iPhone’s new trackpad maintains the iPad more than just a mouse. Further down, you’ll see the gestures we know about this moment.
Get access to the Home screen. Without clicking on your apple’s official trackpad, press your iPhone new trackpad with three fingertips and put-down in one dragging motion. You’ll instantly be directed back to the iPad’s Home screen.
Using the App Switcher to check all Open Apps at once
This is actually like the previous gesture, but with an indirect twist. Without clicking down on apple’s official trackpad, touch trackpad with your three fingertips and swipe upward, but gentle down before you touch the top of this iPhone new trackpad.
As a substitute for the Home Screen, you’ll see App Switcher with your all open apps. You can swipe-up the complete list by clicking the iPad trackpad with two fingertips and swiping through left or right.
Swipe up without using the App Switcher
Just the once an app is exposed in full-screen style, you can simply swipe up all other open apps that are running in the background by moving the Apple’s official trackpad with your three fingertips and swipe through left or right.
Open-up the control panel
Click down the iPhone new trackpad and swipe through the upper right direction. The Control panel will appear.
Quick action; list of options
Usually, in iPadOS, you must grip up an app’s sign for about a second beforehand you see a pop-up of Quick Action Menu.
By the iPhone new trackpad, we can change the pointer over an image, touch the trackpad with two fingertips, and we’ll quickly see the desired Quick Action Menu list. This works as a “right-click” choice with most apps.
Deprived of click down on the iPhone new trackpad, touch out to zoom on a photo or webpage. Pinch inside to zoom off. This is a similar motion you would usually use on an iPad screen, but it’s trickier on the trackpad because it’s easy to press down it.
However, there are numerous worthy explanations to hook up Apple’s official trackpad. For example, you don’t need to continuously lift your finger to poke the display while you’re busy with your iPad in the “laptop” approach on a place of work.
For an additional, Apple allows organizing the trackpad and mouse to assist you in everyday activities similar to right-clicking.
Conclusion
This Apple’s new trackpad is similar to a significant development over a mouse as it lets you practice gestures that only normal iPad functions like multitasking and Apple enhanced the involvement over what we said in the old iPad promote by assembling the pointer reflects more “Mac-like” in how it relates with contacts and text.
You may like: Amazing Handmade iPhone Accessories that Give Sexy Look to your iPhone[2020] | https://medium.com/codixlab/exciting-features-of-iphone-new-trackpad-heres-how-it-actually-works-2020-c5bb16d3b234 | ['Mustufa Ansari'] | 2020-03-23 08:11:31.979000+00:00 | ['iPhone', 'Features', 'Tech', 'Technology', 'Apple'] |
“Concept designs” in a lean environment | Lean product environment
At Docplanner we work in a lean product environment. This environment lets us test our ideas and deliver user and business value very fast. Read more about how we test these business questions.
By adopting the mindset of our users (their needs, business goals and technology limitations), we constantly improve our product.
A long time to deliver the best product. Vs short time to deliver MLP.
The Creativity trap
The thing with working in a lean environment is that you can easily fall into what I used to call a ‘creativity trap’. I bet that most designers have been there once or twice.
Very specific tasks can limit you to the simplest solution without having in mind the bigger picture of the user journey. You can see only one piece of a much bigger picture. | https://medium.com/docplanner-tech/concept-designs-in-a-lean-environment-b12ee893199e | ['Dawid Liberadzki'] | 2020-03-19 08:51:39.055000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'Lean Startup', 'UX'] |
Story | How Climax is connected to other Story Elements
When you are writing a story, climax is the key element you are looking for. When you know the climax — you have a… | https://medium.com/fictionhub/story-6274eb8ec538 | ['Ray Alez'] | 2016-10-03 09:19:57.618000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Fantasy', 'Writing', 'Science Fiction'] |
5 ways Deep Learning is changing our day-to-day life | About: Data-Driven Science (DDS) provides training for people building a career in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Follow us on Twitter.
Deep learning is a subset of Machine Learning in Artificial Intelligence (AI). When an AI imitates the human brain for processing data, creating patterns, and making decisions, it is Deep Learning. It uses multiple layers to progressively extract higher-level features from the raw input. The word ‘deep’ in ‘deep learning’ refers to the number of layers through which the data is transformed. Through this, it is possible to learn patterns from unstructured and unlabelled data. The deep learning algorithm performs a task repeatedly, each time improving its outcome, similar to how we learn from experience.
The vast amount of data being created every second on search engines, social media, e-commerce platforms has made deep learning of great potential. In addition to that, the strong computing power available today has made a huge impact on the algorithms used in deep learning. Moreover, breakthroughs in AI such as self-driving cars, AlphaGo, voice assistants are all possible because of deep learning.
Here are 5 applications of Deep Learning in our day-to-day lives:
Speech Recognition in Virtual Assistants
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
All major virtual assistants (e.g. Siri, Alexa, Cortana) are based on deep learning. These enable software agents to perform tasks or services for an individual based on verbal commands by interpreting human speech. The more a person interacts with such devices, the more training data it receives, it has a better scope to improve accuracy. This data can then be utilized to determine user behavior and preferences, thereby making human-device interaction smooth.
2. Facial recognition
In deep learning, Facial Recognition (FR) is basically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or video. FR works by comparing selected facial features from a given image with faces within a database. An application of FR is the anti-spoofing of face images. Detection of spoofing from facial recognition is used in applications where people are verified by showing their face in front of a camera. Another application of facial recognition is tagging people on Facebook photos, and recommendations of who might be present in the photo.
3. Personalized Recommendations
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
Netflix suggestions on what you should watch next are nothing but deep-learning algorithms at work. There are two types of recommender systems-
(I) Collaborative Filtering- This type of filter is based on users’ ratings, and it will recommend movies that we haven’t watched yet, but users similar to us have watched and liked. The algorithm predicts a rating for a movie from a user’s past behavior as well.
(II) Content Based Filtering- This type of filter uses a series of discrete characteristics of a movie in order to recommend additional movies with similar features.
4. Health Care
Photo by Online Marketing on Unsplash
Deep learning is being widely used in pharmaceutical and medical companies for applications ranging from diagnosis to image segmentation. It is helping doctors diagnose patients more accurately, make predictions about patients’ future health, and recommend better treatments. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in deep learning are well-suited to analyzing images, such as MRI results or X-rays.
5. News Aggregation
Photo by Matthew Guay on Unsplash
Efforts to customize news as per readers are strengthened by the use of deep learning. Newer levels of sophistication to define reader personas are being met to filter out news as per geographical, social, economical parameters along with the individual preferences of a reader. An example of this is Google News which uses real-time AI/ML to organize the news.
Another application is fake news detection. Fake news is misinformation or manipulated news that is spread across social media with an intention to damage a person, agency, and organization. Deep Learning classifiers help detect fake or biased news and remove it from the news feed, and also giving a possible warning of privacy breaches. | https://medium.com/swlh/5-ways-deep-learning-is-changing-our-day-to-day-life-7c17875b720c | ['Data-Driven Science'] | 2020-05-16 04:57:28.682000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Automation', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Submit Stories to Financial Strategy | Money.
For many it’s a taboo subject, not to be brought up in polite company.
Here at Financial Strategy we have a completely different point of view. We strongly believe there’s nothing wrong with money, or with talking about it, as long as it’s in the context of achieving goals that are important to you.
If they also have a positive impact on society, even better.
It could be buying a home. Starting a business. Paying off high-interest debt. Helping your kids get an education without taking on excessive student debt. Becoming financially independent.
It’s your journey, so only you can decide what’s important to you. We just want to help make that journey less stressful and more successful, through entertaining and informative stories.
If you have a money story you’d like to share with Financial Strategy’s readers, we’d like to see it!
There’s nothing wrong with money, or with talking about it, as long as it’s in the context of achieving goals that are important to you. If they also have a positive impact on society, even better.
Stories We’re Looking For
We’re always happy to publish (well-written) stories around money, finances, saving, investing, entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles, money-making or money-saving hacks, etc.
We especially like ones where you hook the reader with a personal story, entertaining while helping them learn from your experiences. It could be:
Financial struggles you dealt with in the past, and how you worked through them;
Current financial struggles, and how you’re dealing with them;
Your personal financial goals, how you chose them, and how you plan to achieve them;
How you’re making money, and more importantly, how you make sure to keep more of that money to reach your goals; and/or
How you started a business, how you run it, and how your personal financial goals inform the way you run it.
Stories We’re Not Interested In
If the story is clearly written to serve your needs rather that help our readers, we’ll pass. Some examples include:
Overly promotional articles, especially ones with links to join your email list and/or with affiliate links;
Articles that promote risky financial schemes or ones that require advanced knowledge and experience beyond what most people have. These could include becoming a day-trader; trading foreign currencies, commodities, or options; and/or
Articles promoting specific stocks or other investments, since you have no way of knowing whether a specific investment fits any particular reader, let alone all our readers.
How to Become a Writer for Financial Strategy
If you’d like to join Financial Strategy as a writer, it’s as simple as can be.
Leave a comment below saying you’d like to submit stories here, preferably with a bit about yourself and why you write about money, and we’ll add you as a “Writer” Once you’re a Writer, edit the Medium story or draft you want to submit, click on the three dots, click “Add to publication,” select Financial Strategy, hit “Submit”
We’re happy to accept stories you’ve published elsewhere first and import into Medium, as long as they’re your stories and comply with Medium’s Terms and Conditions.
We will review your submission and do one of three things.
Accept it as-is;
Edit lightly to improve the likelihood of curation; or
Let you know if it doesn’t fit this publication.
If we don’t accept your submission, please don’t take it personally. Review the above explanation as to what we’re looking for and what we’re not interested in, and you’ll most likely see why we made the decision we did. Then, please submit a different story that better aligns with our values, and that compares favorably with the quality of other stories on Financial Strategy.
We look forward to reading what you want to share with us and our readers! | https://medium.com/financial-strategy/submit-stories-to-financial-strategy-55198a6f9e7e | ['Opher Ganel'] | 2020-06-12 16:39:26.224000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Financial Strategy', 'Writing', 'Money', 'Finance'] |
The Burden of COVID-19 | In this work we will look at how COVID-19 deaths compare with the expected number of deaths in a country, based on historical mortality data. We define the COVID-19 burden to be the number of COVID-19 deaths as a fraction of the expected number of deaths in a country over the same period of time; that is from the time of the first reported COVID-19 death.
Now, you might ask why we need yet another metric? What does this metric tell us that others, such as the more usual total number of fatalities per capita, do not? Just as the number of fatalities per capita is a better metric than a simple count of fatalities — because it normalises for population, making it easier to compare countries of different sizes — the COVID-19 burden goes one step further, because it also normalises for a country’s natural mortality rate. And by doing so, it combines a whole host of additional mortality factors, from population demographics, healthcare conditions, living standards, food and water security, conflict etc.
Thus, we present the COVID-19 burden as providing a more comprehensive account of a country’s experience under the current COVID-19 regime. Using datasets from OWID we will attempt to shed light on the following questions:
Are countries with higher mortality rates more or less likely to be associated with high numbers of COVID-19 fatalities per capita? Is it fair to compare official COVID-19 deaths between countries, given differences in reporting policies? How does the COVID-19 burden vary by country and continent? How does COVID-19 rank against other common causes of death in countries around the world?
A Major Caveat
Before going any further it is worth confronting a key caveat associated with this work, namely inconsistencies in official COVID-19 fatality statistics. It is not that reported numbers are inaccurate per se, rather they mean different things because they arise from many different reporting policies. Some countries only include deaths that arise from a confirmed COVID test, others have limited their focus to hospital settings, while yet others have been far more inclusive, counting suspected and confirmed deaths across all settings. These differences were especially common during the early stages of the pandemic, and while many countries have at least addressed some of the obvious shortcomings in their early counting (e.g. counting hospital deaths only) inconsistencies do remain.
This is problematic given the central aim of this work, because the COVID-19 burden is, after all, a relative fatility estimate that is based on these inconsistent fatality numbers. However, we can at least shed some light on the the scale of this problem, by comparing official COVID-19 fatality statistics to so-called excess deaths. Excess deaths provide an estimate of the additional deaths this year so far, regardless of cause, by comparing total numbers of deaths in 2020 to historical averages. The problem is that these data are difficult to come by and are only readily available for a small subset of the countries in our dataset. However, enough data is available to at least gain some useful insight into the degree of inconsistency that likely exists.
Ideally, we should expect to find a strong correlation between excess deaths and officially reported COVID-19 deaths. This graph shows this relationship using an OWID dataset of 27 countries with known excess death estimates. It does indicate a reasonably strong relationship with a so-called r-squared value of 0.8, which means that 80% of the variation in the official COVID deaths can be explained by the excess death estimates. Note that excess deaths is measured by OWID as a sum of the daily percentage differences, relative to historical norms. For example, Belgium has a total excess of 380% based on an average daily excess of 2.5% during the duration of its outbreak. This does not mean that there have been nearly 4x as many extra deaths in Belgium, rather it means that there have been approximately 2.5% extra deaths so far during the COVID period.
Most countries fall close to the linear regression line used to estimate the relationship between these two fatality parameters, but Belgium is the obvious outlier. It’s official fatalities (>80 per 100k) are very high in comparison to other countries with similar excess deaths. Given that Belgium is the outlier, this suggests that its official fatality estimate is too high and needs to be reduced (by almost 40%) to bring it into line with the reporting standards of others, and such an adjustment will have a corresponding effect on Belgium’s COVID-19 burden. In a similar way, the official fatality estimate from the UK may be too low and it should be increased by approximately 12%.
In summary, some variation remains in the way that official COVID-19 fatalities are recorded, and although the degree of this variation between countries is likely to be <20%, this nonetheless highlights the need for caution when comparing countries to one another. This is especially true when official fatality statistics differ by <20%, because such differences may be an artefact of reporting rather than a sign of genuine difference in the number of COVID-19 related deaths.
Defining the COVID-19 Burden
Given this caveat we can now consider the relationship between official COVID-19 fatalities and historical mortality rates for a dataset of 173 countries. Not surprisingly, there is only a very weak association between COVID-19 deaths per capita and the corresponding expected deaths over the same period —the r-squared value between these two variables is just 0.02— because the former depends on the number of COVID-19 infections in a country, which is not strongly correlated with historical mortality rates. In other words, countries with a higher historical mortality rate are not associated with a higher COVID-19 infection or fatality rate, and vice versa.
We define the COVID-19 burden to be the total number of official COVID-19 deaths divided by the historical number of (all-cause) deaths that would be expected to occur over the same period; for convenience, we will typically express the the COVID burden as a percentage rather than a fraction. For example, at the time of writing it has been 180 days since Ireland’s first reported COVID-19 fatality, and there has been 1,778 COVID deaths reported so far. Ireland’s historical number of annual deaths is just under 30,000 per year. So during the outbreak approximately 14,500 deaths might have been expected; this assumes a uniform distribution of deaths throughout the year, which is certainly not accurate, but likely good enough for our purposes. This means that Ireland’s current COVID-19 burden is just over 12% (or strictly speaking 0.12) of expected deaths over the same period.
The “Tadpole” Plot
Below, is a plot of COVID-19 deaths versus the expected (historical) deaths over the same period of time. Each country is represented by a single marker (the head) with a tail, just like a tadpole. The size of the head is proportional to the number of confirmed cases per capita, and it is coloured according to its COVID-19 burden, as per the scale shown.
The highlighted countries are also annotated with their current COVID-19 burden, as a percentage. An arrow shows whether this is increasing, stable, or falling (compared to 30 days ago) and, in brackets, a separate burden estimate calculated using the total expected number of deaths in a year, instead of the expected deaths so far during the COVID period. For example, Ireland has a current COVID-19 burden of 12%, which is falling, and its COVID deaths so far account for 5% of Ireland’s historical annual total.
The tails indicate the trajectories of COVID-19 deaths over the previous 30 days. They show whether deaths have been increasing (tails with an upward trajectory) or absent (horizontal tails). For example, upward-facing tails of countries such as Peru, the US, and Israel indicate increasing deaths — the steeper the angle the greater the rate of increase — whereas Ireland, France, and Germany, have horizontal tails, indicating no material increase in COVID deaths over the past 30 days. | https://medium.com/data-in-the-time-of-corona/the-burden-of-covid-19-64cdcd7a9c3f | [] | 2020-09-18 08:51:27.011000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Data Science', 'Dataviz'] |
Python ASCII Art Generator. | Learn how to generate ASCII art from the image using Python.
Generated in Python
Steps to convert image to ASCII character
Load an image
Resize Image
Convert image to GreyScale
Convert GreyScale data of each pixel into respective ASCII character
Loading an Image using PIL image Library
To load the image we will be using PIL library.
import PIL.Image
def main():
path = input("Enter the path to the image fiel :
")
try:
image = PIL.Image.open(path)
except:
print(path, "Unable to find image ");
The above code read the image from the path given by the user. If the image doesn’t exist on the given path then, we will show an error message.
Define ASCII list
Let’s create a list of ASCII characters,
ASCII_CHARS = ["@", "#", "$", "%", "?", "*", "+", ";", ":", ",", "."]
The ASCII characters are arranged from the darkest to the lightest. This means the darkest pixel will be replaced with @ and lightest with .
Resize Image
We need to convert the image to some small width and height so that it doesn’t result in large size text. To find the new_height , multiply new_width with old_height then divide by old_width .
def resize(image, new_width = 100):
width, height = image.size
new_height = new_width * height / width
return image.resize((new_width, new_height))
Convert Image to GreyScale
We can use convert method on image with L option to get GreyScale image
def to_greyscale(image):
return image.convert("L")
Convert GreyScale Image to ASCII character
To convert the image to ASCII character first, get each pixel value (0-255) . Get the corresponding ASCII character and join them as a string
def pixel_to_ascii(image):
pixels = image.getdata()
ascii_str = "";
for pixel in pixels:
ascii_str += ASCII_CHARS[pixel//25];
return ascii_str
Now we have a to_greyscale method to convert image to GreyScale image, pixel_to_ascii method to convert GreyScale image to ASCII string, once we get the ASCII string of the image we need to split the string based on the width of the image and save it in a file
import PIL.Image def main():
path = input("Enter the path to the image fiel :
")
try:
image = PIL.Image.open(path)
except:
print(path, "Unable to find image ") #resize image
image = resize(image); #convert image to greyscale image
greyscale_image = to_greyscale(image) # convert greyscale image to ascii characters
ascii_str = pixel_to_ascii(greyscale_image)
img_width = greyscale_image.width
ascii_str_len = len(ascii_str)
ascii_img="" #Split the string based on width of the image
for i in range(0, ascii_str_len, img_width):
ascii_img += ascii_str[i:i+img_width] + "
" #save the string to a file
with open("ascii_image.txt", "w") as f:
f.write(ascii_img);
main()
Thanks for reading. Follow Javascript Jeep🚙💨. For more Tutorials | https://medium.com/javascript-dots/python-ascii-art-generator-60ba9eb559d7 | ['Javascript Jeep'] | 2020-06-07 04:57:26.030000+00:00 | ['Python Programming', 'Programming', 'Python', 'Javascript Jeep', 'Ascii Art'] |
Jews, Women, or Both? | The Hebrew Bible & Rabbinic Tradition
To properly grasp the historical nature of the Jewish people, it is necessary to explore the ancient structures through which Judaism operated for thousands of years. The Hebrew Bible, also known as the Tanakh, is the collection of scrolls considered canon amongst the Jewish religious tradition. The Tanakh is an acronym for the three sections of the larger text: the Torah (teaching), the Nevi’im (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings). This collection is roughly 1400 years old (Bronner 20).
It is within the Torah, the holiest part of the Hebrew Bible, that ancient narratives and the bulk of Jewish legal writings can be found. These still guide the life of Jews in a modern context. In the Nevi’im, stories of military conquest, political order, and prophecy can be found. In the final installment, the Ketuvim (writings) mostly contain poetry and wisdom writing and include the two sole scrolls named after women: Ruth and Esther.
The Tanakh has always been important to the Jewish people, but before the destruction of their primary holy site, the Temple of Solomon, Jewish life looked very different. Jerusalem was the center of Jewish life, where the priests lived and performed sacrifices. After the final destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD, a seismic shift occurred in which Judaism became a religion in diaspora, using its sacred texts as the primary axis of religiosity.
This period, known as the early Rabbinic period, canonized the Hebrew Bible and began the codification of other important religious documents. In this new era of Judaism, priests no longer served as the religious order since there was no longer a temple to preside over. Instead, the role of rabbi (teacher) was engineered to lead groups of Jews as they spread to the ends of the earth.
The early rabbis believed that all Jews, throughout the entire Jewish history, were present at Mount Sinai when Moses received the Torah, a notion that the feminist theologian Judith Plaskow equips in her famous book, Standing Again at Sinai (1994). This Torah supposedly came in two forms: the written Torah, which is divinely documented in the Tanakh, and the Oral Torah, which further clarifies the written Torah.
This oral tradition had been passed down verbatim throughout all of Jewish history, from Moses up to the rabbis themselves. When this tradition was finally documented, it became known as the Mishnah. The Mishnah set a precedent for the most extensive Jewish text of the Rabbinic period known as the Talmud, which contains the written accounts of commentaries on the Mishnah. According to Bronner, this literature has existed canonically for about 700 years (2).
As it relates to women, the Talmud expands upon the narratives contained in the Torah familiar to all Jews, providing further legal clarifications of the proper actions of women (these codified legal discussions are known as halakhah), and folkloristic narrative which expands on the given texts, known as aggadah (Bronner xvi).
Midrash, which provides exegesis on the Torah, is heavily aggadic, meaning it is primarily built on folklore rather than merely legal precedent. Throughout this paper, examples of midrash will be provided to display the texture brought to Biblical women in the Rabbinic period, both in a positive light and negative one.
The Gender Economy of Jewish Religious Life
The Hebrew Bible indisputably depicts men’s lives and their activities more than their female counterparts (Bronner 1). The 613 mitzvot (laws) contained in the Torah are built on a gender economy. They were designed, mostly for men. This means that men were (and are) required to perform all mitzvot, but women were (and are) excused from many. For example, women are excluded from participating in time-oriented mitzvot such as communal prayer and are not considered part of the minyan (Bronner 4). They were also not allowed to engage with the Torah, which restricted them from theological knowledge and religious dialogue (Rabbi Elierzer went so far as to suggest that the Torah “be burnt rather than given to a woman”) (Bronner 5).
Like nearly all ancient civilizations, women existed in a profoundly patriarchal system, tasked with keeping with the home and rearing children. Their participation in traditional religious life was reasonably limited, though expressed differently depending on the period.
Bronner distinguishes, “In the Rabbinic world.. [women] were enablers, family-oriented and away from the centers of power and communal leadership. This is in contrast to the Bible where despite their being ineffective in the legal realm, more women display active leadership in the narrative sources” (2). In the Tanakh, at least, there exists a tradition of women who rose to consequential public roles: Deborah becomes a Judge of Israel, Esther saves her people from genocide, and Serah bat Asher stands in solidarity with other powerful “Exodus Women”.
In the rabbinic period, this gendered approach of Jewish legalism gained more definition (Kashani-Sabet & Wenger 115). The Rabbis sorted laws into four categories: laws that applied to men, laws that applied to women, laws that applied to men and women, and laws that applied to neither men or women (Kashani-Sabet & Wenger 106).
Moving from law to a more general social context, women were seen within four main archetypes: daughters, wives, mothers, or sisters (Bronner 2). They existed primarily in their relationships with men. This rigid system further ingrained the importance of gender in Jewish society, making any gender deviance fairly difficult. This gendered way of approaching Jewish life, and therefore religious life, produced ideal archetypes of men and women.
There exists a surprising number of courageous Jewish women in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic tradition, too many to include in a snapshot of exceptional women in ancient and contemporary examples. Though the following section will primarily fixate on the characters of Eve, Serah bat Asher, Deborah, and Esther, honorable mentions include the Woman of Song of Songs and Joseph’s femininity.
Feminine Archetypes in Jewish Religious Texts
Eve as the Female Prototype
There are few Biblical characters as controversial as Eve. In the Torah, Eve was the first woman created by God, created alongside Adam, the first man. She was tasked with providing companionship and facilitating the multiplication of the human race (Genesis 1:28). While she acts as an archetype for women in general, her story has often been used as a framework for dos and don’ts for women (Bronner 22). She possessed a dangerous, creative energy that, to many, is interpreted as spelling out the destruction of humanity altogether.
In the written Torah, two creation stories are given for Eve. In the first, she is created alongside Adam at the same time.
“So God created Mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Genesis 1:27, Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation
In the second, she is pulled from Adam’s side when he is in a deep sleep.
“So the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon the man; and, while he slept, He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh in that spot. And the Lord God fashioned the rib that He had taken from the man into a woman; and He brought her to the man.” Genesis 2:21–22, Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation
The difference is significant. If one is to believe that Eve was created alongside Adam, as in the first creation myth, then it would be reasonable to assume them to be equal. But if one is to believe that she was taken from his rib, then a particular flavor of subservience is salient, as is ascertained later in the creation narrative (Genesis 3:16).
This seeming contradiction between the accounts gave rabbis much to consider, which resulted in several creative theological solutions. In one Rabbinic explanation, the Hebrew word ‘rib’ is instead translated as ‘side’ (Bronner 28). In this version, Adam was not created as a male but a hermaphrodite containing male and female qualities (Bronner 27).
Since the Hebrew word ‘adam’ translates to ‘human’ in English, many theologians have gravitated to this version of the narrative, including modern feminists. From the androgynous Adam came two ‘sides’, which became man and woman. To suggest that God made man and woman at the same time, as in the first version of creation, would also suggest that the male sex was created at the point of separation, not as a precursor.
Given the problem of Eve’s existence being a sexual one in nature, many of the rabbinic narratives surrounding the fall of man are sexual. To paraphrase the text: Adam and Eve are instructed to eat from any tree in the Garden of Eden aside from one, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A serpent deceives Eve, convincing her to eat from the forbidden fruit and then handing it to Adam, who eats as well. At this moment, they realize they are naked and try to hide from God, who is stomping through the Garden looking for them. He eventually finds them and expels them from the Garden after providing ‘punishments’ to both Adam and Eve:
“And to the woman He said, “I will make most severe your pangs in childbearing; In pain shall you bear children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” To Adam he said, “Because you did as your wife said and ate of the tree which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed be the ground because of you; by toil you eat of it all the days of your life: thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you. But your food shall be the grasses of the field; by the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground — for from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:16–19, Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation
It is first important to recognize the ambiguity surrounding the sin’s nature (Bronner 24). Ancient sources grapple with this. Some rabbinical sources consider Eve’s decision to eat from the fruit to be entirely driven by lust, thereby bringing lust and death to creation (Bronner 26). In a more aggadic version, Satan (attributed to the serpent) found himself lusting after Eve, had sex with her (“injecting lust into her”), which thereby causes all the events of the Fall of Man to ensure (Bronner 26).
While this may be seen as a redemption of Eve to some extent, her presence is considered enough to entice Satan, thereby still deserving the blame onto her. This story is transformed into a construction of modesty, whereby Eve is prescribed rules to prevent men’s enticement, like Satan, including covering her hair and keeping out of the way of men (Bronner 32).
One midrash states, “in the same way Eve disgraced herself and caused her daughters to cover their heads” (Bronner 32). The female body is associated with death, destruction, and danger — something that must be covered and hidden. Modesty becomes the primary occupation of many rabbinic midrashim (Bronner 31). To many, this is the true essence of women — their prototype, and therefore the archetype for all women.
Before continuing, it is worth arguing that modesty within the rabbinic tradition is not consistent throughout the Hebrew Bible examinations. Rabbinic interpretation is often a product of one’s time, needs, and crises. In a world of utter disorder, it would make sense that rabbis would want to add more rigidity to men and women’s roles.
But one must look no further than the Song of Songs, to encounter an unapologetically sexual woman within the Jewish canon and plenty of rabbinic support behind it. Rabbi Akiva famously defended the canonization of this sexually loaded scroll saying,
“For all of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”
Back within the creation narrative, the Medieval midrash of Lilith complicates the story of Eve. In medieval Kabbalist sources, some rabbis engineered a new aggadic figure — the true first woman, Lilith.
Lilith was the original wife of Adam, created from the dust of the earth (Bronner 33). She was brash, insistent on equality, and argumentative. In one particular argument about who should have the ‘active’ sexual position, she becomes so frustrated that she flies away and leaves Adam (Bronner 34). She is the embodiment of the rabbinic tradition’s fears, deviant women becoming an archetype of female rebellion. Unsurprisingly, in the 20th century, Lilith’s meaning transforms again and becomes seen as a positive rebellious role model for women trying to correct the injustices of modern patriarchy — modern nation-saving.
Against the backdrop of Lilith, Eve is seen as marginally better. There is some degree to which her actions appear inevitable, attributed to her female nature. One rabbinic interpretation of God’s ‘punishments’ to Adam and Eve redefines them as prophecy rather than rejection. In this version, God merely describes how the relationship between man, woman, and the earth will evolve (Bronner 24). ‘He shall rule over you’ not because God ordains it to be so, but because that is simply how things will unfold. In His anger, God tells the couple the hard truth, regardless of whether or not He sees it as just.
Contemporary feminists take this interpretation a step further, arguing that God was detailing the injustices men would commit against women, rejecting the idea that this is the way things must be but merely the broken way things are at the moment.
To many contemporary women, then, Eve is a symbol of where all women start, constrained, surveilled, made to imagine their bodies as some evil vessel. Eve is curious, hungry for knowledge of right and wrong. What she discovers is horrifying. In the face of crisis, men will blame and subjugate women to stay in power and have their own needs met. Eve becomes the original victim of men, the woman contemporary feminists are working break free. These Jewish feminists ask, “Can the same fruit that banished us from the garden, bring us back?” | https://medium.com/interfaith-now/jews-women-or-both-850301447097 | ['Allison J. Van Tilborgh'] | 2020-12-22 22:04:01.844000+00:00 | ['Books', 'History', 'Religion', 'Spirituality', 'Feminism'] |
CopyWriting = Good Storytelling | I have to say, one of my all time Favorite things about being a CopyWriter is that I get a chance to be a StoryTeller.
When I was a kid, I watched every movie I could.
I bought every movie I liked too!
In fact, when I moved to my new home…Vietnam🇻🇳
Vietnam = Beautiful Country
I left over 700 DVD’s sitting in my Grandma’s house in Texas.
And I own almost that many movies, in digital format too.
Stories have Always Fascinated me!
I think that's WHY I became a CopyWriter?🤔
I wrote for my college newspaper and my first job out of college was being a paid journalist.
(for The Lewisville News…in my favorite County of Texas!)🇨🇱
But it took me up until a few years ago to FIND CopyWriting.
And I’m super Pumped I did!!!
Because as I sit here, and write ✍🏻 a 8,000 word VSL (Video Sales Letter)…
…I just LOVE being able to take a Reader/Video Watcher down a very specific road = “Story”
This stuff is super FUN!!! | https://medium.com/copywriting/copywriting-good-storytelling-6e6f87609102 | ['Fitness With Animal'] | 2017-09-15 00:50:43.777000+00:00 | ['Copywriting', 'Internet Marketing', 'Marketing', 'Sales Page Copy', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Teach Kids Business Sense Early, Change Their Lives Forever | Greenlight eliminates a lot of struggles. What is it, and how does it work? It’s a debit card for kids. There is a small monthly fee. It’s less than a cup of good coffee per month, for up to five kids, and eliminates most of our pain points. Our bank account is tied to their accounts so that we can automate money transfers from our account onto their debit cards. Kids can check the app on their mobile or computer to see that their payment has been received.
While you can automate payments every Saturday, for instance, we’ve elected to stop the automation. The kids get to make a payment request equal to the fee we’ve previously agreed upon for the work they’ve completed and whether they deserve full or partial payment for the timeliness of a job well done. Extra accountability, if you ask me, for kids to learn how the real world works. Parents can pay the request or decline to pay it if they feel it is different than expected.
Gone are the days of running to the ATM for cash or raiding the penny bank so kids can hold bills and coins in their hands. Our economy is mostly shifting toward electronic forms of currency, even though financial expert Dave Ramsey says, “Cash is still king.”
Final Thoughts
Paying kids for household chores or allowance can be a burden, but it doesn’t have to be stressful. Make kids accountable for doing good work on time by requesting payments for the work they do.
Shopping is straightforward because kids use their own debit card, instead of paying parents back when they forget their money at home. When you travel, kids can use their debit card anywhere a MasterCard can be used.
Stress about money falls away, and kids either do their work or don’t get paid.
I’ll bet you know some adults who can benefit from these principles. Instill family money values in kids early and watch them grow into entrepreneurs who earn 25% more than the general population.
Foster business knowledge in kids and watch them succeed in life. | https://medium.com/publishous/teach-kids-business-sense-early-change-their-lives-forever-684fee7b029b | ['Nicole Akers'] | 2020-09-09 13:48:37.114000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Advice', 'Life Lessons', 'Parenting', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Blockchain and Real Estate — one plus one not always equals two | It’s not very revolutionary to say that Real Estate has one of the most inefficient and expensive transactions processes that exist nowadays. Physical documents for proof of identity and to the lack of accessibility and transparency in the markets increase the time and cost spent by all parties involved in a transaction. Compared to other industries, it is still a real pain to deal with this one.
The market is not efficient. We know that. If there is any financing involved, the sale/rental process becomes even more complicated as many documents and steps become duplicated by both the buyer and the seller. Not fun at all.
Blockchain is clearly not the magic solution to every problem (although some people say it is), but it is clear that it can be used as a really useful tool to cut down unnecessary costs and inefficiencies in this particular case.
By using blockchain & smart contract technology, AREX aims to be the first to create an international real estate market as liquid as stock markets are nowadays. Sounds ambitious, I know, but let us explain.
Real Estate nowadays has three main issues: The price of the properties, the international barriers to trade and the amount of bureaucracy/paperwork. By implementing Blockchain, we want to eliminate the second and third problem.
The tools that already exist will help us to standardize a common due diligence process for investment in Real Estate assets. As a result we will create a common Set of International Standards for Investment (it’s really the highest time to develop it!). Companies and individuals will be required to comply with those Standards to be able to list assets in the exchange.
We know that trading tokenized assets is the future, but only when everybody (including the market, companies and regulators) is ready to adopt it. That being said, not yet.
The main goal right now is to create a real financial market in which its inputs are Real Estate assets. We don’t think blockchain is a magic solution to everything, but it is a tool and an enabler that can make the market work in a much more efficient and liquid way.
AREX wants to use blockchain as a tool for managing properties, certifying documents, providing transparency to the market and develop smart contracts that will later serve for co-investment in Real Estate assets.
We hope to bring some major improvements to the way the industry functions today and reinvent the way we interact with it. We believe that the Real Estate, as messy as it seems, still deserves our hope.
That’s why we’re here.
…
AREX creates a Real Estate Exchange with asset management optimisation via blockchain. Stay tuned for our next article about the detailed plan for our mission. And if you have any questions or comments — please say hello!
Written by Daria Krauzo | https://medium.com/arex-blockchain-real-estate/blockchain-and-real-estate-one-plus-one-not-always-equals-two-11f5d55a083c | ['Francisco Hernández Parga'] | 2018-12-05 16:20:07.987000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Real Estate', 'Proptech', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Finance'] |
18 Digital Marketing Metrics and KPIs You Should Know | Marketing and Sales Performance Metrics
What’s going on with my sales? Is my website effective enough? What’s been the efficiency of our content marketing efforts in the last few months? All of these questions can be answered by marketing and sales performance metrics and KPIs.
Conversion Rate (CR)
Conversion rate is the simplest but not an unimportant metric. The conversion rate is the percentage of users that complete the desired action (purchase, download an app, submit a contact form).
CR = Number of conversions / Total number of visitors × 100%
You can find the number of conversions and the total number of visitors in Google Analytics.
Image courtesy of the author
Once you’ve set your goals, you can see this visualization on the Conversions → Goals → Overview page.
This is a website metric. Clicks mean purchases to a certain degree. The click-through rate is the ratio of users who click a link to the total number of users who view it.
CTR = Number of clicks / Number of impressions × 100%
CTR is often used to measure the success of online ads. But it’s not the only metric to analyze PPC ads efficiency.
This KPI shows if you can save some money on paid ads. The cost per click shows how much you pay when your ad is clicked. CPC is used to assess the cost-effectiveness of an ad campaign.
CPC = Ad costs / Number of clicks
Google Ads shows you this information while calculating the CPC on auctions for your keywords. You can integrate your Google Ads with Google Analytics natively, then complete the integration with other ad services with the help of OWOX BI.
Cost per Action (CPA)
CPA is an indicator that shows the cost of completing the desired action. It also helps you to measure the effectiveness of the marketing funnel. It’s totally up to you which action you consider desired — signing up for a newsletter, requesting a callback, or something else.
Image courtesy of the author
This simple metric is the basis for CPA marketing, where you pay for each conversion that comes from an affiliate source. The pitfalls of this method are that dishonorable affiliates might try to fool you with traffic. To avoid this, refer to our CPA case study.
Cost per Lead (CPL)
This is an even hotter KPI than the previous one! Cost per lead is similar to cost per action, except that you pay for the contact information of a person potentially interested in your offer.
CPL = Ad costs / Number of acquired leads
To calculate this metric, add all your ad expenditures on the way to registration for gated content, for instance, and divide the total expenditures by the number of acquired leads. This metric will show you if your lead acquisition efforts fall within your budget or if you’re spending too much. Keep in mind that a lead is only halfway to being a client and isn’t even a loyal follower.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
The customer acquisition cost includes money spent on marketing and advertising. CAC is the cost of convincing someone to buy your product or service.
Image courtesy of the author
Calculating the total marketing budget can be stressful, but it’s worth trying. It can help you see the bottleneck values in your system.
Abandon Rate
This is the percentage of inbound calls that are canceled before connecting with a call center agent or the percentage of abandoned carts in the retail business.
For call centers: Abandon rate = Abandoned calls / Total number of inbound calls × 100%
For retail businesses: Abandon rate = Number of abandoned shopping carts / Total number of initiated transactions × 100%
You can see the positive side of the abandon rate in Google Analytics after setting a conversion goal for the shopping cart page. The best practice is to track the abandon rate depending on industry average values and audience cohorts over time.
Image courtesy of the author
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Simple and understandable, this is one of the most important digital marketing metrics for measuring ad performance. Return on ad spend is the amount of revenue your business gets for every dollar spent on ads. Use it as the main metric for each digital marketing campaign and you’ll feel the difference between effective and ineffective campaigns.
ROAS = Revenue derived from the ad / Cost of the ad
ROI (ROMI for marketing)
ROI is the queen of KPIs, even among those who have never heard about analytics. Return on investment is a performance metric that’s used to evaluate the efficiency of a particular investment.
ROI = ((Gain from investment — Cost of investment) / Cost of investment )× 100%
You can calculate ROI for almost every process. In most cases, ROI is normalized and must be above 100%. So before you start calculations, find the benchmarks for your particular case.
Average Revenue Per Account/User/Customer (ARPA, ARPU, ARPC)
The average revenue per account (or per user or per customer) shows you the average revenue from an account.
ARPA = Total monthly recurring revenue / Total number of accounts
Check your ARPA now if you’re planning to raise prices. Then check it later. If raising prices was a bad idea, you’ll see it in the ARPA — unless the total monthly recurring revenue increases, the ARPA will fall.
Time to Payback CAC
This metric shows how long it’ll take to earn back marketing costs spent on acquiring a customer. The time to payback CAC metric is especially relevant for SaaS businesses with long sales funnels.
Time to payback CAC = Customer acquisition cost (CAC) / (Average revenue per account (ARPA) × Gross profit)
Gross Profit = Revenue — Cost of goods/services sold
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
The general concept is that MRR is a metric for recurring revenue components of a subscription business. It helps companies predict revenue and realign their sales plans.
MRR = Total fees paid by customers monthly
or
MRR = ARPA per month × Total number of customers per month
Churn Rate
The churn rate is the percentage of customers or subscribers who discontinue their subscriptions during a given period.
Image courtesy of the author
Revenue Churn
Also known as the MRR churn rate, where MRR is monthly recurring revenue, revenue churn defines the loss in revenue from churned customers and downgraded subscriptions.
MRR churn rate = (Churned MRR in the period / MRR at the start of the period) × 100%
Share of Market (SOM)
This metric shows how big your share of the market is.
SOM = (Company sales / Sales in the entire market) × 100%
You can calculate the percentage of the market you have and set the right goals to grow. The biggest problem is getting data on sales in the whole market.
Share of Wallet (SOW)
This metric shows you the percentage of dollars in customers’ pockets that they spend on you. You can get this data through marketing investigations or through focus groups. Focus groups are a tough but interesting way to collect data because your clients will tell you insights that you could never have imagined! Just take the first step to meet them.
SOW = (Total cost of purchases a customer has made from your company / Total cost of purchases the customer has made in the same product or service class) × 100%
Let’s say Ann spent $20 on your handmade cosmetics this month while she spent $120 on cosmetics in general. Your SOW would be 20/120 × 100% = 16.6%. Not as high as expected!
Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
How long do people keep returning to you? Or do they just buy and say goodbye? Getting new customers is much more expensive than reactivating existing customers. The customer retention rate is also called reversed customer churn.
Image courtesy of the author
The perfect customer retention rate is 100%. It means that customers are loyal and stay with you for a while. But if it starts decreasing, pay more attention to your customer service. It worth trying to keep this KPI high.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value can be historical (the sum of all profits from the purchases a customer has made) or predictive (the total revenue your business expects to get from the relationship with this customer).
CLV = Average gross margin per customer / (Customer retention rate / 1 + Rate of discount — Customer retention rate)
Why is CLV so important? Because the longer people stay with your company, the higher your revenue will be. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/18-digital-marketing-metrics-and-kpis-you-should-know-f4f30705f3e2 | ['Maryna Sharapa'] | 2020-11-18 17:31:55.084000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Metrics', 'Kpi', 'Digital Marketing'] |
How To Boost Your WordPress Website With Digital Marketing And SEO | It’s important to have a website for your business as this is a vital part of your digital marketing efforts. So, you decide to make one using WordPress since it’s the most popular website creation tool or Content Management System (CMS) right now. Plus, it’s free and easy to use. Next, you should aim to make your website more visible to online users, and SEO is what you need to make that possible. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s a powerful tool that can push your website to the top ranks of search engine results pages or SERPs. Here’s how you can use the power of SEO to boost your WordPress website:
Choose a Trusted Web Host
Before you focus on SEO, you will need to make your website visible first. WordPress is only used for building your website, but when it comes to making your website live or accessible in the World Wide Web, you will need a web server for it. You can get a web server for your WordPress website from a web hosting service provider or web hosts. Web hosts are companies that own many servers to cater thousands of websites on the internet. The rule of thumb here when choosing a web host is that it has to be closer to your location so that your website loads and performs faster. Some of the most used web hosts for WordPress are HostGator, SiteGround, BlueHost, and Dreamhost.
Consider CDN
As mentioned earlier, it’s ideal that your web host’s server should be located near you. But what if the closest web server to you is still miles away from your target audience and your location? Even if you have the best web host server and you employ the best SEO strategies, when your website fails to load, your efforts will be for naught. The solution to this problem is CDN or content delivery network. Whereas web hosting servers have limited locations and only provides a limited number of servers per client, CDN uses a network of super servers called edge servers to transmit your website’s data to online users. This means that no matter how far your website’s servers are, with CDN, online users and potential leads can still access it at a fast speed.
Optimize the First 100 Words
Once you’re confident that your website will run smoothly when it gets life, it’s time to pack up your WordPress site’s SEO muscles. Your priority for in-page content SEO should be the first 100 words that you write. An intro paragraph that’s packed with relevant keywords can make your WordPress site more noticeable to search engine spiders or crawlers.
Customize and Shorten Your Site’s URL
On a generic form, URLs or your website’s address would look topsy-turvy. Plus, by default, it would bear WordPress on it. You want to put your business or your name upfront, so it has to be reflected on your URL. To own a personalized URL, you will have to pay and register your very own domain name. Once you secure one, make sure that your URLs are trimmed. You can use URL shorteners like TinyURL, Goo.gl, and Bitly. Short URLs also make it easier to send through emails and share on social media sites, especially Twitter, which has a character limit. Better structured short URLs are also easier for web crawlers to read and retrieve.
Write Long, Juicy Content
The best way to keep visitors coming to your website is by making sure that you’re producing quality content. Quality means you are giving your readers relevant information related to what they’re searching online with additional pertinent data. It’s also important to remember that all other parts of your content will also need to have relevant keywords in it. It’s also ideal if you can keep your content long so visitors can take their time digesting what you’ve written. The longer they linger on your website, the more it boosts your website on the ranks as it becomes a recommended page to visit.
Update Your Content Regularly
Aside from maintaining long and quality content, you also have to make sure that you update your content regularly. Every time a new topic or information comes up that’s relevant to your niche, use it to produce fresh content. If your old topics need revisions, update them as many times as necessary. The more you produce new content on your WordPress website, the better it gets noticed by search engine crawlers and online searchers.
Install SEO Plugins
If you’re not an WordPress SEO master, but you want to push your WordPress site’s SEO to the next level, you can use an SEO Plugin instead. SEO plugins are tools to help you add and manage in-page optimization for your WordPress site. Some of these SEO plugins have automatic optimization features, too, so you can avoid the hassle of manually doing the work. Some of the best SEO plugins are Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, SEMRush, and Google Keyword Planner.
Meta-Tags
Another sneaky yet legal way of making your WordPress site more searchable is by using meta-tagging. Meta-tags are HTML codes that you hide within your web page’s source code, so visitors will only see your content. The most crucial parts of your web page that need meta-tagging are:
Header Tags — This is the meta-tag you add to the headers on your content such as H1, H2, H3, and so on.
Image or Alt Tags — Alternative text that replaces images on your web page if it fails to load, and it’s what makes these images readable to web crawlers.
Title Tags — The title of the content found on your website that shows up on the search engine results page.
Meta-Description — The text description found below your content’s title that shows up on the search results page.
Incorporate Links
Adding links on your WordPress website content also adds a boost to its ranking. You can add links to external sites by linking them into relevant keywords called anchor texts. You have to make sure that the external websites you are linking on your WordPress content are secured and authorized websites. It’s also important to add anchor texts that link to other web pages within your website. These are your internal links. Internal links also help keep visitors from leaving your site, thereby increasing its relevance.
Activate Social Media Buttons
Social media is an important driver of leads in digital marketing. After all, there are millions of users found on these sites. You can leverage on the relevance of social media to boost your website by adding and linking social media buttons that will redirect visitors to your social media pages.
Create a Sitemap
You can make your WordPress site even more accessible to search engine web crawlers with the help of sitemaps. Creating a sitemap of your website’s content will make it easier for search engines to index your website because sitemaps act like an overview and quick access file. The most preferable format for a sitemap is in .xml as it’s made up of multiple directories.
Mobile Capability and Responsive Design
To make your WordPress site more accessible by online users anywhere and anytime, you have to enable it for mobile view and make sure that it is responsive. When your website is mobile capable, it’ll have a mobile viewable version when accessed through a phone. Having a responsive design for your website will also make it accessible to other gadgets as the web page automatically adjusts to the screen size of any device. Search engine companies like Google have noticed how important the ease of use feature for users is and have made it a criterion when ranking websites, making it a must.
Conclusion
Reaching online success for your WordPress website will greatly help you achieve business success. This is how digital marketing and SEO in WordPress are making such a great impact on businesses worldwide. The tips mentioned above should be useful for your digital marketing efforts, but you don’t have to limit yourself on the list. You are free to find other ways to add to it as long as you are persistent and committed to reaching your business goals. | https://medium.com/visualmodo/how-to-boost-your-wordpress-website-with-digital-marketing-and-seo-696a3a9a68d0 | [] | 2019-05-02 01:09:48.535000+00:00 | ['WordPress', 'Boost', 'Marketing', 'Digital', 'SEO'] |
Book Review Policy | I accept copies of books for review on an open basis. If you offer to send me a copy of a book to review online (here, Goodreads, Amazon, etc.), I am likely to accept. If I accept, I will guarantee a review of the book. The speed at which I will review will vary depending on the length of the book and my current reading list, but my standard practice is to publish a review within 30–60 days upon receipt of the book. I do accept unsolicited books for review, but I do not guarantee a review in such a case.
When I write a review of your book, I will write the following disclosure at the end of the post: “I received this book as (an ARC/a review copy) courtesy of (name of publisher/person providing the copy), but my opinions are my own.” When I am finished reviewing the book (and after the book has been published), I will donate the copy to a local teacher or to charity unless specifically instructed by the publisher to do otherwise.
Here are some additional helpful bits of information for publicists, organizers, etc.:
I prefer hard copies of books, but only by a little. I gladly accept eBooks (preferable in MOBI format so that I can easily read them on Kindle). My primary interests are in nonfiction books, specifically history, psychology, sociology, government/politics, education, biography, memoir, parenting, sports, entertainment, and the occasional business book. I do not read self-help books. I do read fiction books, but not as often, so I’ll give you some of my favorite books from fiction genres for reference: sci-fi (The Martian, Red Rising), fantasy (LOTR, Chronicles of Narnia), YA/dystopian (Hunger Games, Divergent, Legend), historical fiction (Elizabeth Street). I do not read much fiction outside of these genres. If I don’t like the book, I will be honest, but I will not be harsh. If I write a negative review, I will be very specific about what I did not like. However, I am an optimist and my reviews almost always reflect that personality. I will always post a review on Medium and on Goodreads. If you would like the book reviewed anywhere else, please let me know and I will do my best to grant your wishes.
My contact information:
Email — [email protected]
Phone number and address — upon request | https://medium.com/park-recommendations/book-review-policy-251a6af03278 | ['Jason Park'] | 2018-10-09 17:43:38.746000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Book Review', 'Review', 'Arc', 'Publishing'] |
Scholarly Conversations | Zhihu is a Chinese question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by the community of its users. In Classical Chinese, “Zhihu” means “Do you know?”. Chinese-language internet users nowadays increasingly resort to Zhihu for expert knowledge and insights into various topics.
The scholars in Zhihu evaluating the information by discussing the response with many experts together. Whenever an answer is created, it will be viewed and critiqued by many other users in Zhihu. Everyone can provide their own perspectives to this answer. If most of the users “agree” this respond, it will be pushed to the top of the question. On the other hand, if most of the users in Zhihu “disagree” your response, it will be at the bottom of the website.
Unfortunately, although everyone in the Zhihu is discussing scholarly topics, there is not a rule for the users to determine the authority. Indeed, there are some experts and professionals in this website, but the users cannot determine who is an expert and who isn’t. Thus, the only way that people determine the authority and credibility is to see how many persons press “agree” and “disagree”.
However, some experts are pretty famous in a certain area. When a user creates an account, you will be asked to choose some fields that you are professional or interested in. Once you create a highly-valued answer in a certain field, the other users will “follow” you and sometimes they will “invite” you to answer other questions in the same field. In this way, many celebrities are created and people would prefer to believe their answer more.
In my viewpoint, this website should be improved by validating the answers. The workers in Zhihu should invite some experts to check if the answer is trust-worthy. If the experts agree with this answer, then there should be a sign on this answer. Thus, whenever the users see that sign, they know that this answer is an official-proved answer, which means it is authorized and believable. | https://medium.com/the-open-book/scholarly-conversations-e20da442400d | ['Yunshen Gan'] | 2016-12-16 06:28:53.863000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Quora'] |
Daylighting Melbourne: how we can transform our cities, street by street | Daylighting Melbourne: how we can transform our cities, street by street
Let us Not-Plan. Instead, let’s break urban transformation into a series of small, progressive steps, enabling people, technology, place, and environment to be aligned a little more carefully, and unlocking better streets as we go
Cars have laid waste to our cities. The sister article to this piece lays out how, but also what some cities are beginning to do about it. And within that article is a note about a particular design strategy for unpicking the car-dominated street, bit by bit. This piece expands upon that, working as a kind of extended footnote. Note: as a playbook entry, it’s detailed; so perhaps read it in pieces.
The street is the basic unit of city. It is where the city comes together. It is unique to the city, in a way that other roads, or buildings, are not. It is not the freeway (despite some transport planners’ best efforts) nor is it the residential cul-de-sac or country lane. It is where we live, work and play, where the slightly higher density of interactions forces contradiction and complexity, yet in a way which is entirely everyday. It is, to paraphrase Sennett, where we learn to live well with people who are not like us; in other words, the whole point of cities.
For that to happen, we need to rebalance the street as a series of slow and fast layers of change: to enable adaptation and flexibility to the fast moving layers of mobility technologies, in ways that the heavy, distinctly 20th century infrastructure for the car and truck does not, whilst reinforcing the slower, more valuable characteristics of streets, like places for open, social and civic interaction, whether markets, playgrounds, theatre, gardens, or culture and cultures. But put simply, our approach to the former, designing for 20thC mobility, has tended to destroy the latter.
Despite cities making statements to the contrary, the transport planner (really a traffic engineer in most cases) has inadvertently been allowed to define what the street is about — as if we invented streets in order to generate traffic. The street is only incidentally about traffic yet that is largely how it is managed, and so that is what it becomes.
Put traffic engineers in charge of the street and you get traffic. If we put gardeners in charge of the street, we’d get gardens.
From a design and policy point-of-view, we generally are left with the challenge of a toolkit for streets still tuned to 20th century. We have to reverse that now.
Melbourne as a prototype
A few questions spring to mind:
How do we describe new ‘north stars’ to steer with, framed around challenges like climate, health, and social justice? And how can these deliver richer, more ‘everyday complex’, diverse and delightful streets?
How do policymakers and planners uncover new methods for these new outcomes?
How do we elegantly, carefully yet ambitiously take advantage of the new mobility technologies?
How do we really unlock the power of the street by unhooking it from the idea of the car as progress?
How do we take people with us through this transformation, as we reverse the polarity of all that 20th century advertising and engineering?
Whilst helping devise the initial vision and strategy for Melbourne’s Innovation District with my former team Arup Digital Studio, we wanted to explore how we might address these questions, showing how existing streets could be ‘flipped’ over time, describing a different practice to traditional planning, and using a richer array of tools. Working closely with the brilliant Chris Green in my team, we created ourselves a little brief within the broader project, and called on the expertise of Arup’s Global Transport Leader Isabel Dedring. (Chris and I had worked together on numerous projects ‘future street’ projects at Arup, from Sidewalk Labs to Gemeente Amsterdam, and Isabel had actually run much of London’s transport, whilst deputy mayor there.)
With Isabel’s guidance, Chris and I sketched out an approach to transforming a typical inner-Melbourne street by progressively switching out its car-based mobility over time. We wanted to describe how a series of small apparently tactical moves could in fact be strategic, combining to great effect over time, building footholds as we go. Given the ongoing failure of planning to understand tech, it would be important to suggest how to take advantage of today’s technology, and tomorrow’s as it becomes useful. In particular, we wanted to describe a participative approach to interventions, enabling people to engage step-by-step. And crucially, to describe how focusing on outcomes — ends rather than means — and using a ‘North Star’ for societal outcomes, as with mission-oriented innovation, might enable a richer set of values in play.
Generalising wildly, admittedly, such an approach would the opposite of urban planning, a kind of Un-Planning (though not the same as Non-Plan at all, given it still is a directed, design-led practice). It would instead deploy an ‘adaptive design’ philosophy and practice: iterative, agile, engaged, working in slow and fast layers simultaneously, common to interaction design, service design, and other contemporary design practices honed in the tech sector. As usual in my work, it would adapt a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ design philosophy derived from designing on the internet, and thus human-centred, yet try to place this in the context of cities and urbanism, and thus beyond individually-oriented user-centred design, and into the broader circuits of urban systems and the biosphere.
Incidentally, Melbourne could work as a prototype here as it is in many ways a perfect collision of European, American and Asian urban influences. It is its own place—and most of all, Wurundjeri—but at the same time has weathered waves of post-colonial development. Its history includes modified European models (not just British, but also Italian, Greek, and other southern and eastern European cultures), North American urban development perhaps most of all, as usual with Australia, and more recently, significant Asian influence. As such, it is an endlessly interesting and complex place, yet could stand in, almost like a movie set, for many other urban types elsewhere.
Frame by frame
The area in question for us, just outside the central business district of Melbourne, is still in fully 20th century mode—and so it’s typical of many cities. How could it be iteratively transformed to become more valuable, in every sense, via a design process which is equitable, participative and replicable?
We had an overall vision for the district in mind, avoiding the trap of using property development as the engine for change, and instead threading together the existing city via a diverse series of different interventions, creating ribbons of new activity running on the existing streets. (More on this project later, perhaps.) Still, this diagram illustrates how an individual street transformation could be part of a wider ‘play’, progressively weaving a tapestry-like pattern across these grids of city. These activities are all ‘lighter’ layers, generally requiring little in the way of large capital investment, and each capable of being tested and iterated in place. | https://medium.com/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses/daylighting-melbourne-how-we-can-transform-our-cities-street-by-street-2345410741 | ['Dan Hill'] | 2020-09-30 20:18:27.184000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Urbanism', 'Mobility', 'Cities', 'Urban Planning'] |
20 Spots for Remote Workers Who Are About That Latte and Laptop Life | Earlier this year, I wrote about why remote working became my first step towards lifestyle innovation. And I talked about how, as a remote working newbie, different environments seemed to help drive inspiration and productivity, and how, as a result, working wherever WiFi and a seat were available quickly became my new normal.
A coffee shop used to be my quick stop for a morning cup of coffee or tea before heading to the office. Now, often times, it is the office, where I expect to spend anywhere from 15–18 hours a week.
Confession: I love tea more than coffee. But both are great to fill up the hours until it’s acceptable to drink wine.
Do you have days when you’ve said your motivational mantras, have your Brain Food playlist on Spotify and you’re ‘bout your business, pumped and plugging through tasks? But do you also have days where you’ve had the same 80 internet tabs open for hours and counting blades of grass sounds more captivating than your current to-do list?
Because remote workers spend the majority of time in physical isolation from our colleagues and professional networks, a heightened sense of self-awareness is often developed and ultimately, a keen understanding of our respective work styles. In reflection, I’ve found I’ve become especially perceptive to my mood and environment, and my needs to navigate the varying work days in response to those moods and environments.
(outside the Sugar Hill Cafe — Harlem, New York)
For most professionals, work is what has to get done before life starts for the day (frankly, night). For many remote workers, that line is blurred, and with good reason, because we’ve been granted the unique opportunity to blend work into our lifestyle.
Coffee shops offer an experience that their street-side promotional chalkboards try so hard to convey. And having typically been the haven for writers, artists, and other creative types, there’s something to be said about their ability to foster that work/lifestyle blend (via stable WiFi).
So, if you’ve got loads in different area codes (I’m talking about work), here are my top 20 coffee shops across the country worth checking out. Let me know your favorites! | https://medium.com/future-of-work/20-spots-for-remote-workers-who-are-about-that-latte-and-laptop-life-f63b8fb1a70a | ['Tameka Vasquez'] | 2017-12-18 14:00:28.179000+00:00 | ['Remote Working', 'Travel', 'Coffee Shop', 'Virtual Office', 'Productivity'] |
6 Reasons Why You Should Try Flutter as an iOS Developer | Flutter may be the best thing that happened to the mobile development scene in the recent past. It allows me to work faster, and more conveniently, and believe me, it might do the same for you.
So, are you an iOS Developer like me? Yes? Have you befriended a new kid on the block called Flutter? The 1.0 release of this Google-made framework was up in December 2018, but it’s moving forward really quickly.
If you haven’t tried it yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s a fantastic framework — it challenges both existing cross-platform frameworks, as well as native platforms, to become better. To make your decision easier, I gathered a list of features, that in my opinion, put Flutter above other tools used for iOS development.
1. Material Design: Making Prototypes Becomes Easy
I was born to become an iOS developer. Apple products and design made me a little biased towards Apple, and I prefer their UI design over Material Design.
However, I must admit that making good looking apps and prototypes is much easier with Material Design. At least for non-designers like me. This drives me to the first advantage of Flutter — it has dedicated widgets for most of the Material elements. A widget is a basic component used to build UI in Flutter. You can think about widgets, like about UIViews in iOS.
10Clouds’ designers working on one of the projects
Take a look at a gallery of widgets provided by the Flutter team. With a little help from official documentation, you can easily create prototypes that are easy to use and follow the best industry practices. Of course, you are not tight to Material design. Some widgets from a package called Cupertino recreate iOS components.
2. Android Studio: A Great Tool for… iOS Developer
This may be a bold statement, but I think that AppCode is a way better IDE than Xcode. It comes from JetBrains, a company focused specifically on making developers lives easier. If you are familiar with one of their IDE (like WebStorm or AppCode) you will know how to use the rest of them — you can switch from AppCode to Android Studio in no time which is a real time saver when you work on iOS and Flutter application during the same day.
Android Studio works great with Dart and Flutter. Code completion is quick, and syntax highlighting always work. You have great shortcuts for wrapping and unwrapping widgets, renaming and method extracting. There is also one handy keyboard shortcut (Cmd+D) which duplicates a line of code. What a great piece of software! If you really don’t like Android Studio, there is a solution for you as well. You can use a designated plugin for Visual Studio Code.
3. Hot Reloading: See the Changes Instantly
You make adjustments in application UI, and compile Swift application. It takes a long time, so you start working on next thing (like this one from XKCD). Then the application runs, and you forgot what you actually changed. Sounds familiar? When the iOS project grows, compilation can take a lot of time. It is a serious issue. We have to wait for our application, we lost a lot of time, and we can be easily distracted during that time.
Waiting, and waiting…
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
Dart, language that we use to write Flutter applications, has a solution for this. It can compile in two modes. Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation is used when you build an app for production. It takes more time but compiles binary works faster. Just-in-time (JIT) is used when you are developing the application. JIT compilation allows you to see your changes instantly which speeds up development cycles. This feature is often called hot reloading. No more, „app is compiling” excuses in Flutter!
4. Dart: As Easy as It Gets
When the first versions of Swift appeared I was a bit skeptical. Objective-C seemed to be a very good language and developing apps in it was a pleasure. But then I fall in love with Swift. Code that takes 100 lines in both Objective-C files can be written in Swift in 50 lines (or less) in one file! And all that functional programming functions. Oh boy, what a blast.
When I started learning Flutter, the first thing I noticed was Dart’s simplicity
But then Swift started to change, and I have a feeling that these changes are not taking us in the right direction. I’m expecting a modernization of UIKit not KeyPath and dynamicCallable in Foundation. I think they make code less readable. When I started learning Flutter, the first thing I noticed was Dart’s simplicity. No classes in other classes. Simple numeric enums, async/await keywords, easy access control, and a great code formatting. We discussed it in our 10Clouds mobile team, and I said that even a toddler that knows any object-oriented programming language could easily read code written in Dart.
5. Explicit File Import: Bye, Bye, Traumatic Naming Experiences
I’m bad at naming. I named my last macOS application Countdowns. It is a pretty popular word, so obviously I can’t monitor the publications that are mentioning it. In fact, it took me a week to find out that it was featured on Lifehacker.
Swift forces me to give every class and struct in the project different name. Finding a valid name for n-th kind of button that is used in the code may be a traumatic experience. The reason for this is simple — all not “private” and “fileprivate” objects are visible in all files of the Swift module. A solution used in Dart, where you have to explicitly declare what files are you importing allows me to give classes shorted, and still fully understandable names. This also has some disadvantages — you may land with long import list on top of your source code file. But you can fight with that by making listing files that export your interface.
6. No Threads, Fewer Problems
Threads or Dispatch Queues are a great invention to separate our UI code from operations that can be executed in the background. Except they are not. When using threads, we can encounter many problems. Especially when we work with properties that are used between threads. This is like in this old programmers joke: `Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use multithreading”. “Nothhw tpe yawrve o oblems”`.
Dart took a different approach that works great in JavaScript — it’s single threaded. Of course, it doesn’t mean that we can’t do an asynchronous task. We can, but with a help of async/await, or by Futures and Streams. For more advanced users there is also thread-like support called Isolate. These internal workers don’t share a memory, so we don’t have to worry about race condition.
A Serious React Native Competitor
I hope those arguments made your mind up a bit, and you will at least check Flutter’s docs. At 10Clouds we believe that Flutter can be a serious competitor to React Native. It proved to be less error-prone and platform agnostic than RN in our projects. With Flutter Web on the horizon, we will be able to share code with the web as well, which is one of the biggest selling points for RN right now.
Additionally, Flutter is blazing fast. It can be a remedy for React Native UI quirks, and from my experience, it’s proven to be production ready in multiple use cases. And last but not least, from a developer perspective, it’s just fun to work with.
At 10Clouds, we develop outstanding mobile apps. Check out our mobile services website to get more details or just contact us. From business consulting, through choosing the right technology, to delivering perfect code, our team will make the best use of its wide skills to make your product successful. | https://medium.com/beautiful-code-smart-design-by-10clouds/6-reasons-why-you-should-try-flutter-as-an-ios-developer-cc7c898036e1 | ['Kamil Powałowski'] | 2019-05-31 11:21:01.370000+00:00 | ['App Development', 'Flutter', 'iOS', 'Mobile', 'Development'] |
安裝 Puffin 全雲端上網擴充 如虎添翼 | CloudMosa’s mission is to empower the world’s phones through cloud computing and make them universally powerful and useful.
Follow | https://medium.com/cloudmosa-tw/%E5%AE%89%E8%A3%9D-puffin-%E5%85%A8%E9%9B%B2%E7%AB%AF%E4%B8%8A%E7%B6%B2%E6%93%B4%E5%85%85-%E5%A6%82%E8%99%8E%E6%B7%BB%E7%BF%BC-f610b13b64ed | ['Cloudmosa'] | 2020-11-16 02:46:31.644000+00:00 | ['Chrome Extension', 'Web Isolation', 'Cloud Computing', 'Cloud Services', 'Cybersecurity'] |
Consent in Art | It’s irritating how irrelevant consent becomes to people when it comes to art, especially art available (for free, if you know where to look) online. Many seem to think they have any right to decide on an artist’s priorities, or that they have any “right” on the art itself without going the way the artist wants them to, like paying, or using an online portal the artist consented into supplying their art.
Consent, people. It’s not hard! Does the artist explicitly say you can use their art in the way you want to use it? Yes -> Go ahead. No -> Not your decision. No matter how small and irrelevant the use, no matter how much you (think you) need it. It’s not your choice! They decide on their own priorities — everyone decides on their own priorities. Apply your logic to _any_ field outside of art and you quickly see how ridiculous and away from reality, and also common sense, it is.
I’m not creative in any way myself. Hell, I rarely ever created anything artistic all by myself. But even artists sometimes think that way. It’s ok to not think of everything by yourself but it’s not ok to discuss on this beyond education just because you somehow think it’s different for art. Consent is not up to discussion. Ever. In any context. If someone can’t consent, you don’t do stuff to them outside of saving their life or preventing them from having great pain.
Ask any webcomic artist what they think of 9Gag or iFunny. Ask any movie producer what they think of movie piracy. Ask any music interpret what they think of sharing platforms. If you think they wouldn’t care, ask them. No answer? Not your call! They give consent (some even do!)? Go ahead! They say No? You were wrong and have no right on their art, no matter how much you like it. The art is too expensive? Same thing! The artist behaves morally questionable? Don’t support that. The art is not available in your country or any platform you can access due to legal reasons? Ask them to offer it in your country — and try to change the law. Participate politically. Don’t like the situation? Try to change it according to active laws and political structures.
This, of course, applies to every situation, even just sharing webcomics on facebook, altered/translated or not. Dig up the original and embed or link it with credit — it’s not hard. Every small consent violation makes a difference, because it normalizes that. Catcalling, wide-spread and often “well-intended”, hurts. Guys often don’t realize that; many even argue that they’d like, or even want it — even if that’s true even if it happened as often as it does for women, it is not your choice to decide on what anyone else wants, likes and prioritizes. Even victimless crimes, like taking an empty seat you didn’t pay for in a cinema, or pirating art, are drops of water on the heads of integrity and consent. Do you not go voting because your vote “doesn’t make a difference anyway”? No. And if you don’t, you don’t get to complain, that’s common knowledge.
Even small things add up. Everything works this way, still many people think contrary, act according to that and normalize it further. It’s called conditioning, which works with everything in the universe. It’s a good thing small things add up in elections, or for the goals of a torturer that water drops on the same spot for too long drive people beyond their capacities, but people consented into democracy. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else which fits your political views more, but you won’t find a country that’ll let you do all decisions since humanity is advanced enough to know that noone is smarter than everyone else, and noone can sustain themselves on their own either if they want to hold any standard of living higher than Tarzan.
Just like with art. Don’t like the circumstances? Too bad, not your decision, do not use it. Use something else which fits your needs. Noone needs specific, individual art to survive. For comfort, yes, for sanity, in some cases, but there’s consented-to-be free or really cheap art of every major genre in every kind of art you can fall back to if you think you can’t live without it, but can’t afford the art, or don’t want to support the artist. | https://medium.com/consent-culture-a-conversation/consent-in-art-cc6d37c1dd97 | ['Jannis Tenbrink'] | 2020-08-04 22:46:40.430000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Music', 'Consent', 'Media', 'Art'] |
Data Science Scholarships-Full-list Compilations. | Data Science has been described as one of the best jobs in the world consistently, and of course the sexiest job in the 21st century. Data Scientists have on average a masters’ degree and people invest more in gaining degrees in this field.
Currently, a Data Science degree cost more than most of the other courses and some as much as $57,000. This huge cost creates a big barrier for people to enter into this field.
However, there are several forms of financial aids that can help to lessen your financial bill as you enter into the Data Science field. Finding them is a time-consuming activity.
Today, I share with you a complete compilation of various Data Science and Analytics Scholarships and other forms of Financial Aid.
Coursera Data Science Scholarships for Learners in India
Data Science Masters/PH.D. Degree Scholarships
Top 5 Scholarships For Data Science And Machine Learning Programmes
Google PhD Fellowship Program
The only impact that will differentiate you from the thousands of candidates applied to the same job is the proof of skills. Building a Data Science Portfolio is what can ACTUALLY get you your dream job.
REGISTER NOW
The Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship
IBM PhD Fellowship program
The Facebook Fellowship Program
17 Ph.D. in Data Science Scholarships 2020
Comprehensive List of Data Science Scholarships
Women in Data Science Scholarship
20 Great Scholarships for Data Science and Big Data
MASTER OF SCIENCE (MSC) — DATA SCIENCE AND BUSINESS ANALYTICS
15 Data Science Masters Degree Scholarships 2019–2020
Sponsorship Opportunities at CDS
Data Science scholarships 2020–2021
Data Sciences Research and Study Opportunities
The only impact that will differentiate you from the thousands of candidates applied to the same job is the proof of skills. Building a Data Science Portfolio is what can ACTUALLY get you your dream job.
REGISTER NOW
Master of Data Science Scholarship
Masters in Data Science in Canada: Top Universities, Admission Process, Cost, Scholarships, & Job Prospects
Data Science and Artificial Intelligence PhD
81 Data-Science scholarships in Canada
Australian Government Research Scholarship 2020 (Fully Funded)
FELLOWSHIP.AI
MSc Scholarships in Data Science for International Students, 2019
UBC Master of Data Science
Masters in Data Science in Germany — Best Programs for 2020
Data Science MSc
The Data Science for Social Good Fellowship
data science PhD Projects, Programs & Scholarships in New Zealand
The only impact that will differentiate you from the thousands of candidates applied to the same job is the proof of skills. Building a Data Science Portfolio is what can ACTUALLY get you your dream job.
REGISTER NOW
MrBriit
Total Data Science | https://medium.com/total-data-science/data-science-scholarships-full-list-compilations-d2e2738f91f1 | [] | 2020-11-14 01:44:52.109000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Visualization', 'Data'] |
Gifts for the Discerning Graphic Designer in Your Life | If you’ve had the pleasure of working alongside (or living with) a graphic designer, you’re aware that they can be picky creatures — especially when it comes to items they deem worthy of introducing into their carefully designed workspaces/living rooms/wardrobes.
Luckily, the members of Kick Point’s “Design Island” are here to help! Here are some items we’d be proud to welcome into our lives this Christmas — or anytime, for that matter. Of course, taste is unique to the individual, but we hope that this list helps you put a smile on a designer’s face.
Super Sweet Pins by Super Team Deluxe | https://medium.com/kick-point/gifts-for-the-discerning-graphic-designer-in-your-life-e7daeb109320 | ['Emma Butler'] | 2017-11-30 19:05:28.495000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Inspiration', 'Web Design', 'Gifts', 'Graphic Design'] |
About What Works | What Works is an invitation to in-depth, non-obvious thinking about small business in the digital world.
Our goal is to bring you a candid look at what’s actually going on under the hoods of successful small businesses.
You’ll find articles from the host of the What Works podcast, Tara McMullin, show notes on our podcast episodes, and contributions from What Works Network members. | https://medium.com/help-yourself/about-help-yourself-cocommercial-e0e02057ce1a | ['Tara Mcmullin'] | 2019-04-02 16:41:36.676000+00:00 | ['Small Business', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Beginner Tips: Async/Await | Async Cannot Be Used With .forEach
One of the first issues I ran into was using async with .forEach . Unfortunately, it took me a while to realize that they are not compatible. This is due to the fact that .forEach only invokes a function, which means it does not wait for the function to end before moving on with the next iteration. There are a few options when it comes to remedying this. One option is to use .reduce . | https://medium.com/better-programming/beginner-tips-async-await-b4ee13e71f7f | ['Ellen Park'] | 2020-12-18 16:41:24.127000+00:00 | ['Angular', 'JavaScript', 'React', 'Nodejs', 'Programming'] |
Design and Analysis of Firefly Response to the Stimulus | Introduction
The dynamical system in simple words is a system whose state changes over time. The example includes the mathematical model that describes population growth, swinging of a pendulum, or predator-prey model. There are two types of dynamical systems: iterated maps and differentials equations. The iterated maps are used to solve problems where time is discrete, whereas the differential equation is used to solve problems where time is continuous.
Now confining our attention to differential equations, it can be divided into various types: Ordinary or Partial and Linear or Nonlinear, etc. In this report, we will deal with Ordinary differential equations and Nonlinear differential equations.
We can understand the idea of a dynamic system, ordinary and nonlinear differential equations by using an example of a population growth model. In any population, the number of individuals changes over time. The change in population can occur due to various reasons, for example, resource availability, competition, and disease. The simplest model describing changes in the population size is the exponential growth model. For simplicity, we will assume that the population does not interact with its environment and does not get affected by environmental changes. Therefore the equation will be
dn(t)/ dt = rn
Where dn(t)/ dt is a first degree ordinary differential equation, where r is a growth rate and n in the population size. Figure 1, shows an exponential growth in population.
Figure 1: Exponential growth in population.
Synchronization in Fireflies
Synchronization — the operation or activity of two or more things at the same time or rate, often occurs in nature. For example, neurons in our brain, cardiac pacemaker cells, blinking of fireflies in unison.
Oscillators are a system which has some kind of periodic movement and shows steady state behaviour over a period of time [1]. In nature some systems become synchronized through the oscillation phenomena. Oscillator is a huge area of mathematics, therefore, we will only describe phase oscillators in this report.
Entertainment of fireflies
Fireflies are the soft bodied beetles commonly known as lightning bugs for their use of bioluminescence during twilight to attract mates. When the fireflies begin to imitate light. The fireflies blink at their own pace and frequency, however there comes a time when thousands of fireflies start flashing on and off all at once. Most of the fireflies can modify their natural frequencies to match up with the fireflies around it.Here, every firefly is trying to dynamically synchronize its frequency with that of every other firefly. This synchronization phenomenon has been studied by many scholars. We are taking a simplified model from the chapter on Firefly from the book “Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos” -by Steven H. Strogatz. Here in the model
In this chapter, Strogatz examines a model where firefly responds to rhythm of a flashing stimuli. Let us assume that the phase of the firefly’s flashing is given by θ(t) where θ=0 is the instant when the firefly emits the flash. We also assume that θ is 2π-periodic. Therefore, θ= 2πn. Then its natural frequency -the frequency at which it blinks without the presence of a stimuli be θ=ω. Similarly, now let us introduce a stimulus with 2π-periodic phase Θ(t) where Θ=0 is the instant of the stimulus flashing, and Θ = Ω is its frequency.
As we know that, firefly will attempt to synchronize with the stimulus, if the stimulus flashes after the firefly then firefly will attempt to slow. Similarly, if the stimulus is flashing before the firefly then the firefly will attempt to speed up to synchronize with the stimulus. We can describe this model with an equation as
Θ =˙ ω + A sin(Θ − θ) (1)
Where A is a measure of the ability of firefly to change its frequency in response to a stimulus, and (Θ − θ) is a phase difference between the stimulus and the firefly. In order to have a better picture of a above equation (1), we plotted a graph by giving a initial value for ω , Ω and A. Figure 2, shows the curve for phases of firefly and the stimulus.
Figure 2: Phase of firefly and stimulus.
From this equation we can imply that if 0 < Θ − θ < π, which means stimulus is ahead of the firefly, meaningΘ˙ > ω, therefore the firefly speeds up. Similarly, if −π < Θ − θ < 0, meaning Θ˙ < ω, and the firefly slows down.
Now that we have a model, we analyze the firefly’s response to the stimulus. When the entertainment occurs, the difference in phase between the stimulus and the firefly φ approaches a fixed constant. This can show various behaviour in the system : phase synchronization, phase locked, phase drift. Using equation,
φ˙= Ω − ω − A sin(φ) (2)
If the constant is 0, that means that the firefly has synchronized with the stimulus and the firefly and stimulus are flashing together. We can show this phenomenon by solving equation (2) and plotting the graph for φ vs time, where time is in the range of 0 to 2π splitted into 1000, and the initial value for ω and Ω is 11.5564 Hz. Figure 3 shows the phase synchronization.
Figure 3: Phase Synchronization
Similarly, if the constant is not 0 then it can show two different behaviours. The firefly can either be in a phase locked to the stimulus, meaning that firefly and the stimulus have the same instantaneous frequency, but the firefly will always flash behind or ahead by a fixed amount. Figure 4 shows Phase locked behaviour.
Figure 4: Phase locked.
Finally, if the constant is not 0 and if the frequency of the stimulus is too high or too low then firefly will struggle to match the frequency of the stimulus, and thus entertainment will not occur, this behaviour is known as phase drift. Figure 5 shows the phase drift behaviour.
Figure 5: Phase drift
Fixed Point and Stability Analysis
In previous figures (3,4,5) we saw the phase difference trajectories of different behaviour in the system. Now, to analyze the stability of these behaviours, we can examine the stability of the fixed points. Fixed points are defined by f(x)=0, it is a point which remains stagnant when the system changes along with the time. We can examine the stability by plotting a graph for φ˙ versus φ using equation (2). For each type of behaviour, there are different types of stability of the fixed points. For figure 6, stable fixed point is at φ = 0 which corresponds to phase synchronization, for figure 7,stable fixed point is at φ = c where c is a real constant, which corresponds to phase locked, and finally in figure 8 there are no stable fixed points.
Figure 6: Phase Synchronization Figure 7: Phase Locked
Figure 8: Phase Drift
In order for entertainment to occur , φ should move along with c as time move along with the infinity, here c can be any real number including 0, therefore, for the simplicity we consider c=0, which means fixed point , φ˙ = 0. From equation (2), we can write,
0 = Ω − ω − A sin(φ) (3)
sin(φ) = Ω − ω /A (4)
We know that −1 ≤ sin(φ) ≤ 1, therefore equation 4 will be,
−1 ≤ Ω − ω/ A ≤ 1
−A ≤ Ω − ω ≤ A
ω − A ≤ Ω ≤ ω + A (5)
Therefore, from equation (5) we can say that for the entertainment to occur omega should be between ω − A and ω + A .
We also found out that parameter A also affects the behaviour of the system. According to the plot, larger values of A cause phase synchronization, shown in figure 9, whereas smaller values cause phase drift and phase locking shown in figure 10 and figure 11 respectively.
Figure 9: Phase Synchronization Figure 10: Phase Locked
Figure 11: Phase Drift
Firefly synchronization with two stimuli
So far, we were working with a simple model which had one firefly and one stimulus. We can call this a single stimulus case. But how will the fireflies react to the two different stimuli — stimulus 1 and stimulus 2 represented by Θ1 and Θ2 respectively, meaning two different frequencies? We can explore this case by building another model. The model will be the same as the equation (1). For both the models we will use the same parameters for phase of firefly but two different phases for two different stimuli. Let the frequencies of stimulus 1 Θ1= Ω1 and the frequency of stimulus 2 Θ2=Ω1. Let the phase difference between simulus 1 and firefly and phase difference between stimulus 2 and firefly be φ1 = Θ1 − θ and φ2 = Θ2 − θ respectively. Let us suppose a model that predicts the phase of the firefly change be
θ = ω + A sin(φ1) + A sin(φ2) (6)
We can call equation (6), multiple stimuli models. We know that φ1 = Θ1 − θ and φ2 = Θ2 − θ, therefore we can write equation (6) as
φ˙ 1 = Ω1 − ω − A sin(φ1) − A sin(φ2) (7)
φ˙ 2 = Ω2 − ω − A sin(φ1) − A sin(φ2) (8)
Suppose frequencies for stimulus 1 and 2 both are same, then Ω1 = Ω2. As a result φ1 = φ2. This will be the case where we will not have different types of stimuli, the model will act as a single stimulus model.
However, if the frequencies for stimulus 1 and 2 both are not same, then Ω1 is not equal to Ω2. In this case, when the firefly will begin to change its frequency to match that of stimulus 1, phase difference φ2 will increase or decrease, but then phase difference φ2 will also increase or decrease along with the φ2. Therefore, the trajectories of φ1 and φ2 will be uniformly increasing and decreasing. Thus the firefly will never synchronize with the stimuli, but instead will cause phase drift with both the stimuli.
Figure 12: Firefly behaviour with two stimuli
Conclusion
We tried to understand firefly synchronization in presence of the stimulus. In the model which had only one stimulus, showed three different kinds of behaviour — Phase synchronization, Phase locked and Phase drift. Phase synchronization only occurs when frequency of the firefly and the stimulus is the same, otherwise either the firefly and stimulus and in phase locked state or phase drift state. We also tried to analyze behaviour in the change in the resetting strength (A) of the firefly. We found out that large resetting strength may result in phase synchronization, however, less A will cause either phase lock or there will be no entertainment at all. Finally we tried to see the behaviour of the firefly when two stimuli are present. From the model we found out that in presence of two stimuli, if the frequencies of both the stimuli is same then synchronization can occur, otherwise they will not synchronize.
References
[1] The Oscillator Principle of Nature- A simple Observation
[2] Runyeon, Hope. “Firefly Synchronization.” (2006).
[3] Strogatz, S. H. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, with Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994. | https://medium.com/swlh/design-and-analysis-of-firefly-response-to-the-stimulus-2b747e55350 | ['Sanyukta Suman'] | 2020-11-14 19:46:14.694000+00:00 | ['Nonlinear Dynamics', 'Firefly', 'Python'] |
Drinking Like A Man Stopped Me Enjoying Being A Woman | Drink is a feminist issue
When I was a kid, my dad was my hero. He knew everything there was to know about plants and trees, and if he found broken animals he would bring them home in a box for us to (try and) nurse back to health. I loved that soft side of him, and I wanted to be just like him. He worked hard and he played hard too.
After a long day cutting down trees and remaking people’s gardens, my dad would go to the pub. I’d watch him get happier until he was red-faced and silly and not entirely making sense. It looked like fun, and I couldn’t wait to join him.
Cue me, aged fifteen, standing by the bar and ordering drinks. When we couldn’t get served we stole booze from parties or asked older kids to buy it for us from the shop.
From the very start, I wanted to be able to hold my liquor. It seemed important and respectable, and I didn’t give up. By the time I got to university, I’d nailed it. I could drink like the boys. Mostly.
I was proud of the fact that I matched men pint for pint. I felt like one of the lads. Drinking pints was just one of many ways in which I rejected femininity. I resented the incessant gendered double binds.
The pressure to look good while having no vanity. Smooth armpits and legs, but no extra time to get ready. Great in bed, but not too experienced. Getting smashed out of my mind helped me forget about the injustices, large and small.
Alcohol affects women differently
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) being able to drink like a man doesn’t mean that your body is able to process alcohol like a man. As Linda Richter discusses in her book, Neuroscience and Alcohol:
In the past decade, women have shown dramatically steeper increases in alcohol use, risky drinking, and alcohol use disorder relative to men. This is highly concerning since the evidence is indisputable that women who drink alcohol experience its adverse effects, including addiction, more rapidly and intensely compared to men who drink similar amounts.
As women catch up with men in terms of sinking the drink, our relative suffering increases. Not only can women become addicted, and incur damage to their organs more quickly, but our vulnerability to violence and abuse expands too.
In spite of how well you might play pool and come up with witty retorts after four or five pints, your female body is absorbing and metabolizing all that booze differently to the way male bodies process it. Even if the bodies are the same size.
Alcohol is held in the body as body water, not body fat, and as women tend to be smaller, with more body fat, this adds up to it being more concentrated, which leads to them being more impaired than men after drinking equivalent amounts of alcohol.
Many of those times I matched men pint for pint, I walked home in a blackout. And if I dared ask, this was rarely the case for them. People didn’t believe I had lost the whole previous night because I seemed to function normally or thereabouts. Shame and fear quickly taught me to keep my blackouts secret.
After a while, they didn’t seem so bad. Mostly, I woke up at home or in a close friend’s bed, and after some variety of debilitating hangover, life continued as normal. I swore I would drink more slowly next time.
Women’s drunk bodies are treated differently to men’s drunk bodies
I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but in the stories I hear, drunk men get into fights with strangers, and drunk women wake in beds with strangers. And this is the nice side of the imbalance.
“Research typically finds that between 25% and 50% of those who perpetrate domestic abuse have been drinking at the time of assault, although in some studies the figure is as high as 73%.” — Alcohol, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault Report, from the Institute of Alcohol Studies, 2014
Alcohol confuses the issue of consent enough that many women don’t understand that what has happened to them meets the legal definition of rape until long after their assault.
“Researchers consistently have found that approximately one-half of all sexual assaults are committed by men who have been drinking alcohol… Similarly, approximately one-half of all sexual assault victims report that they were drinking alcohol at the time of the assault, with estimates ranging from 30 to 79 percent.” — National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
It isn’t only women this can happen to. The abuse of alcohol makes the whole population more dangerous and more vulnerable at the same time. But women, like it or not, are more vulnerable.
We love drinking because it smooths the edges
It softens social awkwardness and allows strangers to bond quickly. It helps us to relax and stops our minds from worrying over our neverending to-do lists. It allows us to spend time with people that push our buttons without getting too wound up. Alcohol helps us to connect and have fun and unwind.
But it helps to hide from unpalatable truths too. For me, drinking was a way of hiding from the fact that I was female. Because I saw the way women were treated by society and it made me sick. But closing your eyes when a train is hurtling towards you doesn’t stop you from getting hit.
Until I quit drinking, I was unable to make peace with my gender and the discrimination I have faced because of it. The anger that I felt at the world’s treatment of women so consumed me that I had to drink to numb it.
It wasn’t until I finally stopped necking all those lager tops that I was able to really discover and accept the traditionally ‘feminine’ side of myself.
It was so relaxing to stop trying to be something I was not. To enjoy nesting and baking and soaking in the bath. I found a beautiful man who enjoyed these things too. (I’m not trying to put anyone in gender essentialist prison here).
In my early twenties, I scorned being ‘girly’ and stuck close to the boys. I wore baggy jeans and felt like one of the lads, but the men in the group still talked over me once they got excited. (It was the mid-noughties and nobody had heard of micro-aggressions in spite of the term being coined in the 1970s.)
By pretending to be one of them I missed out on being part of a group that truly saw and heard and valued me.
Finding your voice is your responsibility
After I got sober, I was able to understand and make peace with the reality of my existence. I am a woman. An ordinary, unexceptional, typical sort of woman. And that is okay. That is perfect.
It is hard being marginalized by the society and even by the family you live in. You aren’t imagining it. But hiding from the truth of your identity doesn’t help anything.
I write this so you don’t waste as much time as I did.
I spent a decade arguing about feminism with sexist men when I could have been talking to people who shared similar ideas. I could have used my passion in campaigns or art or education, but instead I left it bouncing around the walls of the pub, absorbed by beer mats.
Your voice matters, and it’s your responsibility to do whatever it takes to find it. For me, it began with therapy, which led to sobriety, which led to starting a blog. What does the first step look like for you?
Make a commitment to stop pretending. Discover the obstacles that stand in your way to becoming who you truly are. Ask this question: what prevents you from owning your power?
You don’t have to be special and different to earn your place in the world. You earn it just by showing up. Your community is waiting, but they can only recognize you when you’re being authentic.
If you’re struggling with drinking, know that you aren’t alone.
If you relate to this, and you’re ready for something different, try the alcohol experiment. Do whatever it takes to stay sober for 30 days: go to your doctor, try Smart or AA or Hip Sobriety or Soberistas. Listen to Recovery Elevator and SHAIR podcasts. Read This Naked Mind. Try Moderation Management.
Quitting drinking alone is boring, difficult and for many of us, impossible. There is a whole community of people just waiting to help you. Reach out. Something better is waiting for you.
Keep in touch at beautifulhangover <3
Chelsey Flood is a novelist, lecturer and truth-seeker. She writes stories about freedom, nature and love. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/drinking-like-a-man-stopped-me-enjoying-being-a-woman-ac9cfb614479 | ['Chelsey Flood'] | 2020-05-29 16:38:10.167000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Women', 'Mental Health', 'Addiction', 'Culture'] |
Why Do So Many Americans Believe Trump’s Lies? | Photo by Capturing the human heart, courtesy of Unsplash
Even after the U.S. electoral college made it official that Joe Biden is the President-elect, many Americans continue to believe that Democrats stole the election. According to an early December, 2020, Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely U.S. voters, 47% of Americans believe that it is at least “somewhat likely” that “Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Joe Biden would win.” To be sure, Rasmussen has been criticized by progressives because their survey questions sometimes invite conservative responses. But because that issue is a matter for a different blog, I’m going to trust this part of their recent survey. In fact, Rasmussen reports that one in six Democrats (17%) say it is “very likely” that Democrats stole the election.
The progressive voter in me finds this 17% figure hard to fathom. The psychologist in me is thankful that it isn’t worse. A surprisingly high percentage of Americans do seem to believe Trump’s destructive lie that Joe Biden stole the election. They believe it for a simple and powerful reason: They keep hearing it. To appreciate how powerful, and worrisome, this principle is, you have to know something about how the human brain believes. Research in fields as diverse as human development, persuasion, human memory, language processing, and social cognition shows that the human brain accepts almost everything it processes as true and real. It is only by means of careful, step-by-step reasoning that we ever come to recognize anything that we see or hear as false.
Consider a few examples, which I’ll present in roughly their order of discovery.
The sleeper effect: In the late 1940s and early 1950s, researchers asked Yale University students to read a well-crafted persuasive essay arguing that nuclear submarines were about to become a reality. But these students were told that the source of the essay was the Russian newspaper Pravda. Of course, very few of these students were persuaded. The students probably assumed that a Russian newspaper was not to be trusted. But these same students were also contacted by phone, about a month later. At this point, they reported their opinions on a wide range of topics, one of which happened to be the feasibility of nuclear submarines. The same students who had previously reported that nuclear submarines were an impossibility now reported that the subs were probably on their way. Seven decades later, we know why this belief grew. When students first heard arguments for nuclear subs, they dismissed the arguments as Russian propaganda. But a month later, many of these students remembered the basics of what they had heard but forgot where (from whom) they had heard it. People remember things they have encountered way better than they remember who told them. A recent review showed that sleeper effects are particularly strong when people hear persuasive messages and think hard about them but immediately learn that the messages are from an unreliable source. In the weeks that follow, people begin to believe what they were initially told because they remember the message well but forget where they heard it.
This will work well in the short-run. But in the long-run, it will make you think Tim Howell is famous.
Becoming famous overnight: Research on human memory further supports the view that we have a hard time dismissing untruths. A research team headed by cognitive psychologist Larry Jacoby conducted a series of clever studies in which they told people, truthfully, that the people included on a list of names were not famous. Sebastian Weisdorf, for example, is not famous. Trust me. Shortly after examining the list, most people were very good at reporting that the people on the list were not famous. But as little as one day later, when people saw names like Sebastian Weisdorf (which now felt vaguely familiar), many people were convinced that Sebastian must be famous for something. Why else would people recognize his name?
The perseverance effect: People even accept lies after just having been told that they were lied to. To put this a little differently, classic research in social psychology shows that people are much better at believing than at unbelieving. Long ago, Lee Ross and his colleagues asked Stanford University students to try to tell the difference between real and fake suicide notes. This is a surprisingly difficult task, by the way. By the flip of a coin, half of the students were falsely told that they crushed the suicide note detection task. Others were told they had performed poorly. Then all of the students were told, truthfully, that the feedback they had just received was false — that it had been determined by the flip of a coin. Now, all of the students were asked to estimate just how good they would be if they were to be given accurate feedback about their ability to distinguish between real and fake suicide notes. The lies people knew they had just been told biased their judgments. Those who knew they’d been falsely told they crushed the test thought they’d rock at the real test. Those who knew they’d been falsely told they failed the test thought they’d struggle at the real thing. We human beings are so prone to belief over disbelief that sometimes we believe lies that we fully know to have been lies.
The person taking this True-False quiz guessed correctly that George Washington did NOT have nine brothers. But if you repeat this specific true-false question for several weeks, most test takers will begin to believe that the statement is true.
Believing that which is repeated: Many decades ago, a group of cognitive psychologists led by Lynne Hasher wanted to see if simple repetition promotes belief — even when people are repeatedly exposed to information with zero validity. Hasher and colleagues asked students to answer a series of difficult trivia questions. Students were told, truthfully, that exactly half of the statements they’d evaluate were false. In other words, the average true/false statement had no validity whatsoever. The trivia questions included statements such as “The capybara is the largest of the marsupials.” and “French horn players get cash bonuses for being in the U.S. army.” In case you’re interested, capybaras are not marsupials. But at the time of this study, French horn playing soldiers did get those cash bonuses. But that’s not the point. The point is that students knew that the questions they evaluated was just as likely to be false as true. And here’s where it gets interesting. Hasher and colleagues gave multiple trivia quizzes over about a five-week period. Further, they repeated a few of the specific true-false statements. I’m guessing you can predict what they found. By the end of the study, the true-false statements that had been repeated over the course of the study were evaluated by most students as likely to be true. The simple repetition of dubious information makes that information start to feel true.
Research shows that it’s very hard for you to read this fake statement without believing it.
Believing that which is merely presented: For almost three decades, social psychologist Dan Gilbert and colleagues have argued that the tendency to believe everything we see and hear is so fundamental that the very process of hearing or reading a statement requires us to believe it — at least briefly. That’s right; Gilbert argues that you cannot read even the most preposterous statement without initially accepting it as true. That includes statements such as “Playing the French horn to capybaras makes them float in the air.” In one study, Gilbert’s team asked students to read what they thought were statements in the Hopi Indian language. They might read that “a suffa is a cloud” or that “a nasli is a snake.” All the statements had this simple “Hopi word is English word” format. But on half the trials of this task, students saw a signal indicating that the statement in question was false. But this signal didn’t stop the students from encoding the statements as true. This was particularly true when people had to do two things at once (to process the false sentence while also listening carefully for a tone). As the late psychologist Dan Wegner surely would have agreed, the human tendency to believe what we see or hear is one reason why being told that something is not true can often make people believe that it is. Statements such as “Chris Federico not linked to mafia” convince many people that there is a good chance Chris Federico is a crook.
Social media magnification: These classic studies are but a few in a long list showing that people are predisposed to believe everything they hear and read. The “echo chambers” of social media only exaggerate this basic human tendency to believe the unbelievable. If you’d like to see how popular Facebook has been on the internet in the past 12 months, just check out the chart below, generated using Google Trends. The chart compares the level of U.S. Google search activity for “Facebook” with search activity for the fact-checked “New York Times.” In fact, even “God” cannot compete with Facebook these days.
Unscrupulous people who know about the power of human belief over disbelief need merely to keep repeating lies and misrepresentations. Facebook posts will endlessly recycle the lies. Widespread false beliefs will reliably follow.
Consider how many people still believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Or consider the many Americans who have sent donations to a tax-evading billionaire — to help him with his legal efforts to overturn an election he lost by more than seven million votes. As of December 1, 2020, Trump had received more than $170 million in donations — much of the money from middle-class Americans — to help him fight what he keeps insisting was a stolen election. It is hard to find a more powerful testament to the enduring power of the simple repetition of lies.
One might hope that more than 50 failed lawsuits, including many that were heard by highly conservative judges, would make people reconsider whether Trump was really robbed. But the human mind is strongly prone to belief. Sadly, Trump has proven in the past month that he is willing to capitalize on this human foible and create harm and distrust in millions of American voters. Let’s hope that in the next four years, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can get people to believe simple truths as well as Trump has gotten them to believe dangerous lies. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/why-do-so-many-americans-believe-trumps-lies-bd2446d858a7 | ['Brett Pelham'] | 2020-12-18 19:27:52.789000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Politics And Elections', 'Psychology', 'Propaganda', 'Trump'] |
Installing Hadoop 3.1.0 multi-node cluster on Ubuntu 16.04 Step by Step | There are many links on the web about install Hadoop 3. Many of them are not working well or need improvements. This article is taken from the official documentation and other articles in addition of many answers from Stackoverflow.com
1. Prerequisites
Note: All prerequisites must be applied on name node and data nodes
1.1. Installation of JAVA, SSH and other software utilities
First, we need to install SSH and few software installation utilities for Java 8:
sudo apt install \ openssh-server \ software-properties-common \ python-software-properties
Then we need to install Oracle’s Java 8 distribution and update the current OS.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java sudo apt update sudo apt install oracle-java8-installer
To verify the java version you can use the following command:
java -version
1.2. Creation of a dedicated user and group for Hadoop
We will use a dedicated Hadoop user account for running Hadoop applications. While that’s not required but it is recommended because it helps to separate the Hadoop installation from other software applications and user accounts running on the same machine (security, permissions, backups, etc).
sudo addgroup hadoopgroup sudo adduser --ingroup hadoopgroup hadoopuser sudo adduser hadoopuser sudo
You can check the groups and users using the following commands:
compgen -g compgen -u
1.3. SSH Configuration
Hadoop requires SSH access to manage its different nodes, i.e. remote machines plus your local machine.
First you need to login as Hadoopuser
sudo su -- hadoopuser
The following commands are used for generating a key value pair using SSH
ssh-keygen -t rsa -P “” -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Copy the public keys form id_rsa.pub to authorized_keys.
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub>> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Make sure hadoopuser can ssh to its own account without password. ssh to localhost from hadoopuser account to make sure it is working fine.
ssh localhost
Note: If you get error: ssh: connect to host localhost port 22: Connection refused, then, please try to install ssh-server using below command.
sudo apt-get install ssh
2. Download and Configure Hadoop
In this article, we will install Hadoop on three machines:
The First machine will act as the name node (Master) and a data node (slave), the other machines are data nodes (slaves)
On each machine we have to edit the /etc/hosts files using the following command
sudo gedit /etc/hosts
Each file must contain these rows:
127.0.0.1 localhost 10.0.1.1 hadoop-namenode 10.0.1.2 hadoop-datanode-2 10.0.1.3 hadoop-datadnode-3
Note: if the /etc/hosts file contains the following line
127.0.1.1 <Hostname>
Then you have to delete this line.
2.1. Download Hadoop
We are going to install all the software under the /opt directory and store HDFS’ underlying data there as well. Below we will create the folders with a single command.
sudo mkdir -p /opt/{hadoop/{logs},hdfs/{datanode,namenode},yarn/{logs}
The layout of the folder will looks like
/opt/ ├── hadoop │ ├── logs ├── hdfs │ ├── datanode │ └── namenode ├── yarn │ ├── logs
You can download the hadoop-3.1.0.tar.gz using the following command:
To decompress the Hadoop package you can use the following command:
sudo tar -xvf hadoop.tar.gz \ --directory=/opt/hadoop \ --strip 1
The binary release of Hadoop 3 is 293 MB compressed. Its decompressed size is 733 MB with 400 MB of small documentation files that may take a long time to decompress. You can skip these files by adding the following line to the command above:
--exclude=hadoop-3.1.0/share/doc
2.2. Hadoop Common Configuration
Note: These Steps must be done on the Name node and Data nodes as well.
There are environment settings that will be used by Hadoop, Hive and Spark and are shared by both root and the regular user accounts. To centralize these settings I’ve stored them in /etc/profile and created a symbolic link from /root/.bashrc to this file as well. That way all users will have centrally-managed settings.
sudo gedit /etc/profile
The /etc/profile must looks like:
if [ “$PS1” ]; then if [ “$BASH” ] && [ “$BASH” != “/bin/sh” ]; then # The file bash.bashrc already sets the default PS1. # PS1=’\h:\w\$ ‘ if [ -f /etc/bash.bashrc ]; then . /etc/bash.bashrc fi else if [ “`id -u`” -eq 0 ]; then PS1=’# ‘ else PS1=’$ ‘ fi fi fi if [ -d /etc/profile.d ]; then for i in /etc/profile.d/*.sh; do if [ -r $i ]; then . $i fi done unset i fi export HADOOP_HOME=/opt/hadoop export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:$HADOOP_HOME/bin:$HADOOP_HOME/sbin export HADOOP_CONF_DIR=/opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop export HDFS_NAMENODE_USER=root export HDFS_DATANODE_USER=root export HDFS_SECONDARYNAMENODE_USER=root export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle export HADOOP_MAPRED_HOME=/opt/hadoop export HADOOP_COMMON_HOME=/opt/hadoop export HADOOP_HDFS_HOME=/opt/hadoop export YARN_HOME=/opt/hadoop
The following command will create a symbolic link between ~/.bashrc and /etc/profile and apply the changes made to /etc/profile
sudo ln -sf /etc/profile /root/.bashrc source /etc/profile
Update /opt/hadoop /etc/hadoop/ hadoop-env.sh file and set JAVA_HOME variable and HADOOP_HOME, HADOOP_CONF_DIR AND HADOOP_LOG_DIR variables
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle export HADOOP_HOME=/opt/hadoop export HADOOP_CONF_DIR=/opt/hadoop /etc/hadoop export HADOOP_LOG_DIR=/opt/hadoop/logs
Log out and re-login to your hadoopuser account and check Hadoop installation using below command.
hadoop -version
2.3. Master Node Configuration
First, we have to update the hdfs-site.xml file located a /opt/Hadoop/etc/Hadoop/ to define the name node and data node on this machine and define the replication factor and other settings:
sudo gedit /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop/hdfs-site.xml
The file must looks like:
<configuration> <property> <name>dfs.namenode.name.dir</name> <value>file:///opt/hdfs/namenode</value> <description>NameNode directory for namespace and transaction logs storage.</description> </property> <property> <name>dfs.datanode.data.dir</name> <value>file:///opt/hdfs/datanode</value> <description>DataNode directory</description> </property> <property> <name>dfs.replication</name> <value>3</value> </property> <property> <name>dfs.permissions</name> <value>false</value> </property> <property> <name>dfs.datanode.use.datanode.hostname</name> <value>false</value> </property> <property> <name>dfs.namenode.datanode.registration.ip-hostname-check</name> <value>false</value> </property> </configuration>
Then we have to update core-site.xml file located at /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop and let Hadoop distribution know, where the name node is located:
sudo gedit /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop/core-site.xml
The file must looks like:
<configuration> <property> <name>fs.defaultFS</name> <value>hdfs://hadoop-namenode:9820/</value> <description>NameNode URI</description> </property> <property> <name>io.file.buffer.size</name> <value>131072</value> <description>Buffer size</description> </property> </configuration>
Then we have to update yarn-site.xml file located at /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop/
sudo gedit /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop/yarn-site.xml
The file must looks like:
<configuration> <property> <name>yarn.nodemanager.aux-services</name> <value>mapreduce_shuffle</value> <description>Yarn Node Manager Aux Service</description> </property> <property> <name>yarn.nodemanager.aux-services.mapreduce.shuffle.class</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.mapred.ShuffleHandler</value> </property> <property> <name>yarn.nodemanager.local-dirs</name> <value>file:///opt/yarn/local</value> </property> <property> <name>yarn.nodemanager.log-dirs</name> <value>file:///opt/yarn/logs</value> </property> </configuration>
Then we have to update mapred-site.xml file located at /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop/
<configuration> <property> <name>mapreduce.framework.name</name> <value>yarn</value> <description>MapReduce framework name</description> </property> <property> <name>mapreduce.jobhistory.address</name> <value>hadoop-namenode:10020</value> <description>Default port is 10020.</description> </property> <property> <name>mapreduce.jobhistory.webapp.address</name> <value> hadoop-namenode:19888</value> <description>Default port is 19888.</description> </property> <property> <name>mapreduce.jobhistory.intermediate-done-dir</name> <value>/mr-history/tmp</value> <description>Directory where history files are written by MapReduce jobs.</description> </property> <property> <name>mapreduce.jobhistory.done-dir</name> <value>/mr-history/done</value> <description>Directory where history files are managed by the MR JobHistory Server.</description> </property> </configuration>
Now we have to format the name node
hdfs namenode –format
Finally, we have to add your data node(s) (Slaves) to workers file located in /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop
10.0.1.1 10.0.1.2 10.0.1.3
After configuring data nodes you have to make sure that the name node has a password less access to them:
ssh-copy-id -i /home/hadoopuser/.ssh/id_rsa.pub [email protected] ssh-copy-id -i /home/hadoopuser/.ssh/id_rsa.pub [email protected]
2.4. Configuring Data nodes
Note: Instead of downloading Hadoop you can copy the Hadoop.tar.gz file from the name node to data nodes and extract it. You can use the following command:
scp hadoop.tar.gz hadoop-datanode-2:/home/hadoopuser scp hadoop.tar.gz hadoop-datanode-3:/home/hadoopuser
On each data node you must do the following steps:
We have to update hdfs-site.xml, core-site.xml, yarn-site.xml and mapred-site.xml located at /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop directory as the following:
hdfs-site.xml
<configuration> <property> <name>dfs.datanode.data.dir</name> <value>file:///opt/hdfs/datanode</value> <description>DataNode directory</description> </property> <property> <name>dfs.replication</name> <value>3</value> </property> <property> <name>dfs.permissions</name> <value>false</value> </property> <property> <name>dfs.datanode.use.datanode.hostname</name> <value>false</value> </property> </configuration>
core-site.xml
<configuration> <property> <name>fs.defaultFS</name> <value>hdfs://hadoop-namenode:9820/</value> <description>NameNode URI</description> </property> </configuration>
yarn-site.xml
<configuration> <property> <name>yarn.nodemanager.aux-services</name> <value>mapreduce_shuffle</value> <description>Yarn Node Manager Aux Service</description> </property> </configuration>
mapred-site.xml
<configuration> <property> <name>mapreduce.framework.name</name> <value>yarn</value> <description>MapReduce framework name</description> </property> </configuration>
2.5. Start Hadoop
After finishing the steps above, from the name node we have to execute the following command to start the Name node, data nodes and secondary name node:
start-dfs.sh
It will give the following output:
Starting namenodes on [hadoop-namenode] Starting datanodes Starting secondary namenodes [hadoop-namenode]
Also to start the resource manager and node managers we have to execute the following command:
start-yarn.sh
It will give the following output:
Starting resourcemanager Starting nodemanagers
After that, to ensure that Hadoop started successfully, we must run the jps command on name node and data nodes must give the following output:
On Name node (ignore process ids):
16488 NameNode 16622 DataNode 17215 NodeManager 17087 ResourceManager 17530 Jps 16829 SecondaryNameNode
On Data nodes (ignore process ids):
2306 DataNode 2479 NodeManager 2581 Jps
If you get similar output then all Hadoop daemons started successfully.
Note: You may check logs at /opt/hadoop/logs and check if everything is alright, by running hdfs dfsadmin -report command (it must return Live datanodes (3)).
2.6. Accessing Hadoop on Browser
Namenode
Access to the following URL: https://hadoop-namenode:9870/
ResourceManager
Access to the following URL: https://hadoop-namenode:8088/
3. References | https://towardsdatascience.com/installing-hadoop-3-1-0-multi-node-cluster-on-ubuntu-16-04-step-by-step-8d1954b31505 | ['Hadi Fadlallah'] | 2020-11-28 22:27:02.412000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Hadoop', 'Ubuntu', 'Hadoop 3', 'Hadoop Cluster'] |
Changing Hiring Practices to Build a More Diverse Technology Organization | Building a Coalition and Setting Expectations
If you’re working to build a more diverse team, you have to get recruitment onboard as partners. While it may seem natural, it’s not. Recruiting (especially external recruiters) are incentivized to close roles as quickly as possible. Most recruiters I’ve worked with are delighted to help find diverse candidates, but it’s critical to let them know that you understand the whole process will take longer. It’s also essential that their managers understand this.
If you have hiring managers reporting to you, you need to get them onboard and excited about this effort too. One measure of a manager is their ability to hire well. Being serious about diversity will probably mean that they’ll take longer to fill roles for their team.
You may need to assure them that you will take this into account if they miss their KPIs. You cannot set up or hold conflicting goals for your managers. If you cannot prioritize building diverse teams over hitting KPIs, you will most likely fail at both.
One way to handle the increased time to hire is to start sourcing for a role much earlier than scheduled. Spend the time before the position was supposed to open only looking at underrepresented candidates. Create an agreement with your manager that you will be able to hire them if you find a suitable candidate early. If you reach the planned opening date for the role and you haven’t located anyone, you can open the pool to your normal channels without losing time.
Your manager will also need to understand the potential impact of a diversity hiring focus on your KPIs.
With your manager’s support, create a reasonable KPI or OKR as your goal to track your efforts. The OKR should give you not only a target but also some cover if there are challenges to some of the tradeoffs you may need to make because you are hiring more slowly. Share your goal with your team. Update them on your progress regularly. Transparency is essential but also helps to enlist the rest of your team doing their part to help achieve the goal.
At Avvo, my diversity goals were part of my OKRs. I shared our progress with a monthly update to the organization. This repeated communication demonstrated the level of importance I placed on this goal and showed our improvement in real-time.
The good news is that as you make progress towards your goal, your time-to-hire will come down while maintaining or increasing your diversity. It does get easier. You will soon stop making tradeoffs as you continue to improve. | https://medium.com/better-programming/changing-hiring-practices-to-build-a-more-diverse-technology-organization-a-case-study-from-avvo-4ae5e29e11d6 | ['Kevin Goldsmith'] | 2020-06-19 13:21:47.007000+00:00 | ['Diversity In Tech', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'Diversity', 'Programming', 'Startup'] |
Headless UI Components: A Journey With High Order Components, Render Props, and Custom Hooks | High Order Components
We have a component that prints out a simple UI:
For this article, the source code is verified in CodePen :
We want to make the text blue. This can be done by adding the style to line one or passing the style through line three. However, we want this style transformation logic to be reusable for other components too.
A high order component (HOC) is a good choice for this task. It’s a function that takes a component and returns a new component, with additional logic and behavior. It’s commonly defined as follows:
const EnhancedComponent = higherOrderComponent(WrappedComponent);
So, we create a HOC in the following code:
This HOC is named withColor (lines 1-8). It takes props and extracts out color if defined. Otherwise, it uses red as the default color (line 2). The rest props are passed down to the original component (line 5). It’s important to use composition, instead of mutating the original component.
This HOC wraps the original component by a div , styled with color (line 4), which is defined as blue at line 14.
Now we see the text blue:
You may be asking why we created TransformedComponent outside of App , instead directly mutating the original component in the render, as follows:
const App = () => {
const TransformedComponent = withColor(BaseComponent);
return <TransformedComponent value={1} color="blue"/>;
}
React’s diffing algorithm (also called reconciliation) uses component reference to determine whether it should update the existing subtree or throw it away and mount a new one. If the component returned from render is strictly equal to the component from the previous render, React recursively updates the subtree by diffing it with the new one. If they’re not equal, the previous subtree is completely unmounted.
If TransformedComponent is generated inside render, it has a new reference for each render, which would cause unnecessary unmounting.
If you have to put TransformedComponent inside render, the alternative way is to apply useMemo to keep the reference between renders.
withColor transforms the color. What if we also want to change the font style to be italic?
Another HOC is created to transform the font style:
This additional HOC is named withFontStyle (lines 1-8). It takes props and extracts out fontStyle if defined. Otherwise, it uses normal as the default fontStyle (line 2). The rest props are passed down to the original component (line 5).
This HOC wraps the original component by a div , styled with fontStyle (line 4), which is defined as italic at line 24.
Here we compose two HOCs at line 21.
What if we want to transform props in the original component, something like multiple of the original value?
Another HOC will do.
This new HOC is named withMultipleValue (lines 1 - 9). It takes props and extracts out factor if defined. Otherwise, it uses 1 as the default factor (line 2). A new value is calculated at line 3, which replaces the original value at line 6. newprops are passed down to the original component (line 8).
This HOC is applied at line 31, which times the factor, 5 , defined at line 36.
We compose three HOCs in lines 31-33. These lines look a little congested but they can be formatted like this if you have ramda installed:
import compose from "ramda"; const TransformedComponent = compose(
withMultipleValue,
withFontStyle,
withColor,
)(BaseComponent);
If you use Create React App, lodash is built-in and lines 31-33 can be written as: | https://medium.com/better-programming/headless-ui-components-a-journey-with-high-order-components-render-props-and-custom-hooks-811c9677b4cf | ['Jennifer Fu'] | 2020-07-07 16:26:43.687000+00:00 | ['Reactjs', 'Programming', 'Nodejs', 'React', 'JavaScript'] |
COVID-19 News for State, Local, and Tribal Leaders, 10/01/20 | S.R. 95, Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, Arizona. Photograph by Ken Lund, 2010
Welcome to our weekly roundup of articles and resources for state, local, and tribal leaders creating policy to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic as well as steering the social and economic recovery for their communities. Postings below do not convey endorsement of any particular organization or opinion contained in links.
When COVID-19 forced Buffalo to shut down, the University at Buffalo helped the city’s essential 311 call center transition to remote work within 48 hours.
Abigail Echo-Hawk is working around the clock to close discriminatory data gaps.
Telehealth offers significant opportunities to raise community resilience to health threats, to address disparities in healthcare quality and access — and to boost overall health and happiness.
The federal loans were meant to help hospitals survive the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet they’re coming due now — at a time when many rural hospitals are still desperate for help.
Industry is also calling for another $32bn in emergency funding to keep going.
A nonpartisan online competition from October 23rd to 25th for students to write proposals for policy-based solutions to today’s most pressing challenges. Over the course of the policython, teams of one to four members will hear from partners, receive guidance from leading academics whilst writing proposals, and submit their policy memos to policymakers.
A new study has found minimal evidence that the novel coronavirus is transferring inside K-12 school buildings despite reports of students and faculty across the country contracting the disease.
Making climate progress is still within our grasp, but the critical first step is to recognize the perks of collaboration, and then to reach across the aisle.
As coronavirus wreaks havoc on existing structures, we take a look at some visions for cities of the future — and how they hold up.
Draw a map of Chicago and shade the areas with more poverty, pollution and coronavirus. It will start to look like being Black is a pre-existing condition. | https://medium.com/covid-19-public-sector-resources/covid-19-news-for-state-local-and-tribal-leaders-10-01-20-1dc74428c547 | ['Harvard Ash Center'] | 2020-10-01 17:33:56.421000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Tribal Government', 'Local Government', 'State Government', 'Coronavirus'] |
I Blocked My Husband On Medium | I Blocked My Husband On Medium
Better late than never
Photo by Jose Fontano on Unsplash
June 25, 2019
I haven’t done it yet.
But I am strongly considering it.
I don’t want to do it out of anger. Or, maybe I do. I’m just afraid.
I’m fearful of what my husband’s reaction will be. We aren’t in the healthiest place right now.
Medium is my healthy place.
My husband is having a hard time with that. A hard time, like, he’s a writer too all of a sudden.
Doesn’t he see how creepy that is?
I guess not.
I want, no — I need to write.
I’m holding myself back because I know he is all over it as soon as I make a move on here.
It’s bullshit now that I think about it.
It’s confusing as hell that he recently proposed the idea of being polyamorous to me, yet, can’t go a single day without being in my shit. Or let me have independent thoughts and write about them on Medium without feeling the urge to stalk me daily.
Am I missing something here?
Would he be able to handle (and fully consent to) his wife being mind-blowingly intimate and intertwined with another man or woman, completely separate from him?
Huh. That’s definitely another story for another day.
Not today, Medium. Not today.
It took me ten years to find a space where I can be me, not a mom, not a wife, just me.
He’s trampled all over that, not only by making an account (after he found out I had one) but continually checking up on me and covertly one-upping me by publishing articles for his readers.
Those articles seem more like personal rebuttals to me, his wife, now that I think about it.
Is that really necessary?
How could I be the unhealthy one for blocking my husband and having my own space to vent about motherhood and matrimony when he repeatedly disrespects my boundaries?
It’s not about secrecy for me. There is not a single word on here that he hasn’t heard from my mouth first. It is about where the only place I can go right now for refuge.
Medium is the only place where I own my identity.
It feels like he wants to take that away from me.
I can’t let him.
It’s the only scrap of autonomy I have left.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t want to read his stuff. It has too big of an impact on me right now. It’s confusing to be in the middle of my thoughts and have him insert his.
I didn’t join Medium to figure out his shit or for him to read my articles and fix me.
I’m on here to figure it out for myself.
It seems as though neither of us is in a healthy state at the moment. We both need a peaceful place to work on ourselves before expecting our marriage to be a safe space.
I don’t want to block him. I could, but it doesn’t feel right.
Writing feels good.
I need to keep writing.
If I’ve figured out anything from this post, it’s that: I have to keep communicating unapologetically no matter what I do.
I can figure the rest out as I go along. | https://medium.com/recycled/i-blocked-my-husband-on-medium-d48a43d726c | ['Divina Grey'] | 2020-12-20 14:59:55.868000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Life', 'Life Lessons', 'Relationships', 'Self Improvement'] |
Tech Bridging the Accessibility Gap | Artificial Intelligence is helping to boost learning outcomes for deaf students.
Hard-of-hearing and deaf students are, unfortunately, often left at a disadvantage as they have an extra set of challenges to contend with on top of the difficulties that come with adjusting to a classroom environment.
This extra work — keeping up with sign language interpreters while simultaneously reading course material and taking notes — often results in learning challenges and lower grades. However, as technology integration grows in schools, new ways to bridge classroom accessibility gaps emerge.
And that’s where technology can really make a difference, according to Tom Livne, CEO of Verbit. His company has developed a cutting edge transcription process, powered by machine learning technology, that provide 99% transcription accuracy — which he claims is the fastest turnaround time in the industry at any volume.
“Our hybrid model fuses the latest AI technology as well as seasoned transcribers who edit and review each file to polish them to perfection. Our platform is the only solution on the market that incorporates contextual data, specific acoustic models and current events to provide each customer with a tailored model that keeps improving with time.”
Founded in 2016, Verbit has secured $11M in seed funding backed by several prominent venture capitalists. It is now being used by various institutions including Brigham Young University in Idaho, which has used their technology to provide fast and accurate transcripts and captions for their students, particularly those who are deaf or hard of hearing. Prior to working with Verbit, the university was facing major challenges due to a lack of resources, a high demand for services and a large backlog of inaccessible content that required transcription.
Deploying the technology resulted in a much faster turnaround without compromising on accuracy. Automation also allowed the services to be delivered at a much lower cost, which is of course a crucial issue for many education institutions trying to balance their budgets.
“We chose Verbit because, out of the multitude of companies on the market, they were a perfect fit for us. We stay with Verbit because the people are fantastic. The customer service has been incredible. The turnaround time, the accuracy, the editing time — all of those things are truly best- in-class.” Valerie Sturm, BYU-I Coordinator of Services for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
Prior to piloting the automation route, BYU-Idaho employed 11 transcribers on campus, tasked with covering over 500 hours of transcription per week. A high demand for services and too few people to provide them made it impossible to meet students’ needs and recover from a lengthy backlog of requests.
The system relied mostly on student transcribers, who would graduate in due course, meaning a constant need to re-train personnel from scratch, which was highly inefficient. The university found itself faced with a constant backlog of requests for content transcription, which they weren’t able to meet under the old system. At one point the institution had over 1,000 pieces of audio that were never transcribed or captioned. Activities like tutoring sessions or extra content that took place outside of the traditional classroom setting only added to this growing backlog.
This is part of a growing trend which we’ve been seeing at events such as this year’s Microsoft Build, where Satya Nadella launched their company’s AI for Accessibility program. There is little doubt that with the fast pace of innovation we’re seeing in fields such as machine learning, this type of capability has great potential for making society more inclusive for people with disabilities, and that has to be a good thing. | https://medium.com/edtech-trends/tech-bridging-the-accessibility-gap-578348b23a5a | ['Alice Bonasio'] | 2019-01-02 19:42:26.536000+00:00 | ['Edtech', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Accessibility', 'Technology', 'Machine Learning'] |
E-learning platform for kids on Scratch 3.0 | Kids are awesome. So we were happy when one of our clients reached us with the task to create the working prototype of an e-learning product for them.
What Humansee Labs development team build: a working prototype of a new web application designed to help children aged 7–9 learn to code.
Scratch 3.0 (open-source, JavaScript-based web coding environment, code available from GitHub)
The e-learning platform based on Scratch block coding environment. It contains a proprietary floating video player which allows the user to watch the video while coding along with the lesson.
Approach
The Website we build for the client includes a “lesson select” page. We customized Scratch dashboard and visual environment.
Main page with the playlist of all lessons
The user chooses the lesson and arrives at the screen with an incorporated the floating video player and Scratch interface. On top of the page are placed a logo of the company. The user can move and resize the video player. It’s very comfortable when you learn something and repeat it at the same time.
Page with Scratch environment and video lesson
The playlist has the option to include a quiz with few variants of answers. When the user finishes to watch the video lesson starts the test. Each user gets points for his answers in these tests. All points are collected in user’s account.
Personal statistics and My achievements
Key Feature: customized video plugin
Our client decided to use Youtube API instead of using standard built in Scratch video plugin. Our dev team customized this API and made video player which allows:
the user to choose clips from a carousel of options within the chosen lesson;
the player to be moved around the screen and resized;
the user to return to a “lesson select” screen.
the moderator to host a playlist of videos
Result
A working prototype of a new web application for children aged 7–9 which are learning to code. | https://medium.com/humanseelabs/e-learning-platform-for-kids-on-scratch-3-0-ad3460426802 | ['Alina Dementsevich'] | 2018-11-28 14:20:04.360000+00:00 | ['React', 'Javascript Development', 'Web Development', 'Case Study', 'Redux'] |
Working With AWS CLI | AWS provide lots of products or services and for using those services multiple ways are available for us, we can use the GUI console of AWS (Web App) or we can write some automation codes to create our infrastructure. At starting, we always like and are comfortable with GUI as it easy to use but it will not provide us all the options available to satisfy some customized requirements. So, here we are going to use command line interface (CLI) to connect with AWS and use its services.
First of all we should have the AWS CLI software which is very simple to install. For installing AWS CLI you can visit this link,
‘https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/install-cliv2.html’
After that we can run aws command to check if it is installed properly,
For connecting to our AWS account we need a user with some keys (for authentication), So we need to have an existing user or add a user through IAM service of AWS.
Add a user and after creating it save the credentials (Id and key) as we will need it later to configure aws-cli.
We have to attach a policy to give powers to the user we are creating. Here I gave admin access, it will have all the powers except billing dashboard.
We need to configure our user profile using configure command and copy paste the access key ID and secret access key that we got while adding a user in IAM.
aws configure
AWS provide a great documentation to help us dealing with all the services. So, we don’t need to remember any command and just use the ‘help’ anywhere when we are stuck or want to see all available commands and options. It will give a long list, just do enter-enter and we can explore all the commands.
aws help
We are going to use some of the services of AWS to show how to work in CLI,
Following is the task we are going to do through AWS-CLI
🔑 Create a key pair
🛡 Create a security group
💻 Launch an instance using the above created key pair and security group.
💿 Create an EBS volume of 1 GB.
🔗 The final step is to attach the above created EBS volume to the instance you created in the previous steps.
As all these services (key-pair, security group, instance and EBS) comes under EC2 service of AWS, so we will be using aws ec2 command. And to see other sub-commands in it we have the documentation with us (using help). It will give the complete description and list of commands available.
aws ec2 help
Going down we can find a command called creat-key-pair and that is what we want, again we can use help with it to see the available options in it and this is the way we can find and use all the required aws services.
aws ec2 create-key-pair help
So, create a key pair.
aws ec2 create-key-pair --key-name <your_key_name>
But this will print the key as output.
So rather we copy this key, create a file and paste into it we can redirect the output to a file. The following command will create a ‘clikey.pem’ file in current directory and it will contain the generated key-pair.
aws ec2 create-key-pair --key-name clikey > clikey.pem
We have successfully created a key-pair,
2. Creating a security group,
Using the same approach we can create a security group with following command
aws ec2 create-security-group --group-name <any_name> --description "Security Group from CLI"
Looking at the console, our security group is also created.
But there is no inbound rule set and in this case no one can connect to the instance. So, we can also add some rule to the created security group.
aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress --group-name mysg --protocol tcp --port 22 --cidr 0.0.0.0/0
As we can see, we have also added the rule,
3. It’s time to create an instance with the created key-pair and security group.
We can provide multiple options while creating an instance but few are compulsory like image-id and instance type. So again we can use help command to see the documentation,
aws ec2 run-instances help
Let’s pick some of them and launch an instance,
aws ec2 run-instances --image-id <any_image_id> --instance-type <instance_type> --key-name <your_key> --tag-specifications ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=<string>,Value=<string>}] --security-groups <sg_name>
So, here we are creating a t2.micro instance with the created key and security group. I also added a name tag.
This part is also done,
4. Now lets create a EBS volume.
Note that volume should be created in the same availability zone in which our instance is created if we want to attach it. We can see details of our instances (here we want to know availability zone) using describe-instances command.
aws ec2 describe-instances
Now creating a volume,
aws ec2 create-volume --volume-type <type> --size <size> --availability-zone <zone> --tag-specifications ResourceType=volume,Tags=[{Key=<string>,Value=<string>}]
So I created a volume of 1Gb size,
We can see that the status is available and not in use. So, we have created a volume which is not attached.
5. Next, we need to attach this created volume to our instance.
For attaching we will require following options,
aws ec2 attach-volume --volume-id <created_volume_id> --instance-id <your_instance_id> --device <any_valid_device_name>
Finally, we have also attached our volume to the instance.
So, we have done this task to understand how to use AWS CLI for creating and managing resources on AWS cloud with the right approach.
Thank you for reading ! 😃 | https://vikasverma250999.medium.com/working-with-aws-cli-970e26f8a4e9 | ['Vikas Verma'] | 2020-10-15 11:59:21.010000+00:00 | ['Aws Cli', 'Cloud Computing', 'Cli', 'Aws Ec2'] |
Python Dictionaries — in and out. Dictionaries are one of the most widely… | Iteration in Dictionaries
Fig-7: Iterating through dictionaries (img source:real Python)
Iterating through dictionaries are quiet different from another data structures because, in dictionaries we have (key-value) pairs whereas, in lists or tuples we only have one single element at each index and also list on its own is iterable.
Fig-8: Iterating through values in dictionary
Fig-9:various methods in iterating over keys in dictionary
Fig-10: iterating through both keys and values
In order to extract values from dictionary , we need to use .values() method. In the Fig-8, difference between iterating over lists and dictionaries can be seen(in terms of Values).
Similarly, we need to use .keys() method to iterate over keys in dictionary. As you can see in the Fig-9, the same can be done without using “.keys()” method also (it is not anway recommended).
To iterate through both (key-value) pairs at a time in dictionary, we use .items() method. This method returns an iterable collection (list of tuples.
Dict comprehension
These are similar to list comprehension (prior understanding of list comprehension will help in understanding better). I would cover about dict comprehension in very brief manner because it is one of the advanced topic in dictionaries.
Fig-11: Dict Comprehension
Syntax : {__:__for__in__} - it iterates over keys by default. If we want to iterate over keys and values, we should use .items() method. Conditional logics can also be written with in dict-comprehension (see Fig-11)
Methods in Dictionaries
In this part, I would briefly discuss about few inbuilt methods (clear, copy, fromkeys, get, pop, popitem)of dictionary data structure.
1.clear()
Fig-12 : clear and del in dictionary
clear() — — clears all the ‘‘keys and values’’ in a dictionary . But it doesn’t delete entire dictionary object from memory. If you want to delete entire dictionary object from memory, then we need to use del.If you further try to access deleted dictionary then you will get “NameError”, del can also be used to remove single element from dictionaries.
2.copy()
Fig-13: copy method in dictionaries
copy() method will create a duplicate dictionary in different address of the memory. This can be tested as shown in the Fig-13. In this, “==” refers to whether both the values in two dictionaries are same or not. Whereas, “is” refers to whether both dictionaries (original as well as copied) refers to same address in the memory or not. Change in one of the both, will not impact other as both are stored at different addresses.
3.fromkeys()
Fig-14 : fromkeys() method in dictionary
fromkeys() creates key-value pairs from comma separated values. condition to be followed— Key should be an iterable collection to the dictionary. All the iterables in key will be assigned to same value specified in the Value part, as shown in the Fig-14. This is rarely used method for creating dictionaries.
4.get()
Fig-15: get method in dictionary
get() method retrieves a key in an object and return None instead of keyError, if the key doesn’t exist.The biggest advantage is that, it doesn’t throw an error, even though if we try to access a key, which is not present in dictionary.
In Fig-15 —- sample_dict.get(‘a’) is equivalent to sample_dict[‘a’]
5.pop()
Fig-16:pop() method in dictionary
In lists, we use pop() method to remove an element from a list. In dictionaries, we use it to remove a (key,value) pair. pop() method should be provided with at least one single argument corresponding to the key. It removes that particular (key-value) pair from dictionary by returning the value corresponding to the key that was removed. If we try to remove a key which is not in dictionary, then it will generate key-error, which can be overcomed by providing optional argument to it(as shown in last in Fig-16).
6.popitem()
Fig-17: popitem() method in dictionary
If we want to randomly remove (key-value) pair from dictionary, then we should use popitem() method. If any argument is provided to popitem(), then we will get an error because, it doesn’t take any argument.
7.update()
Fig-18: update() method in dictionary
update() will change (key,value) in a dictionary with another set of key-value pairs. It will also overwrites an existing key. It will overwrite and edit the properties however, it won’t remove them if we pass an empty dictionary to update with existing one.
To list all available methods and attributes of a dictionary , use dir(dictionary_oject) | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/python-dictionaries-in-and-out-f1b7a3237a65 | ['Chamanth Mvs'] | 2019-12-16 12:38:58.228000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Python Programming', 'Data Science', 'Data Structures', 'Python'] |
Part 1: Building a Flask Web Application | Elliott Saslow
We will be building a flask server that we can use to post the work that we create in this class. Check out more about flask here
Lets build a website!!
Goals:
Website with home page and about page Flask server to handle calls AWS EC2 set up so that you can access the website remotely Smart Contract?
Part 1. Building the website:
To begin, we are going to be uing the command line to build out a folder system.
Create a new folder called flask_website: mkdir flask_website Create new folders within flask_website mkdir static mkdir templates Make a server file: touch server.py
Open flask_website folder in your favorite code editor
The Static folder will contain all of our javascript and css files.
The templates will contain all of our html pages | https://medium.com/future-vision/building-a-flask-web-application-a66acafea2d2 | ['Elliott Saslow'] | 2019-06-14 04:26:54.079000+00:00 | ['Flask', 'Web Development', 'Python', 'Developer', 'Servers'] |
Top Five Tips to Get Your Story Curated | The majority of the people face the same problem when they start their journey in story writing and making it publish. As for a beginner, it is a bit hard to get noticed without getting a helping hand for their valuable work to get seen. Here, In the article, I will be discussing the top 5 points that you should keep in mind to increase the change of your story get curated.
These are the points that I have observed in most of the stories I have read. And, I applied the same techniques to my stories and found that most of my stories got curated with those approaches. It is not true that by applying these five techniques your stories will definitely get curated but these are the essential steps that help your stories in a curated list.
Always Check for Grammar Errors: Whenever you write something and send your article to any publisher. On the publisher side, All the publishers have their editorial team. Where a human being is sitting there any deciding if your article should get publish or not. And, if your story will have lots of grammar mistakes or any punctuation error, then the editorial person will get frustrated and will end up switch to the next article as they have many article requests in a row.
Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash
2. Use Authentic images: Believe it or not, but, this is the central portions that make makes the reader spend more time over your story. Reading just a complete text data lost the interest of the reader and the reader will scroll to the conclusion and will switch to another exciting story. Image or other graphical contents make the view light and make the mind feel comfortable. We should also take care of the accountability of the photos we used. We should refrain from using images directly from the internet as they might bring copyrights issues. Use images from Pixabay, Unsplash, StockSnap, Flickr, Pexels, Burst, The Stocks. These resources are open sources and free to use.
3. Cover Picture A Story Driver: Cover picture makes the article more catchy and attracts more attention to the people. Sometimes people don’t read the title and only look for the cover images as the cover image itself provides the solution to their problem they are looking for. The cover picture should not be a random one but should depict your story or should somehow relate to your story so that a reader can understand what this story is going to be. If the reader comes to your story by looking at the cover and doesn’t find what he/she was looking for then the reader might move to another story.
Photo by Chase Clark on Unsplash
4. Always add Title & Subtitle: Title & Subtitle plays a significant role in taking the attention of the public. Your title should define your story in a few words, and also you should refrain from using your title as a click-bait as if your title doesn’t satisfy the content then the reader might lose the interest of your upcoming posts. Also, here in the medium, you will get more audience by both article's views count and the claps.
Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash
5. Adding Conclusion: Most of the time, we thought that I had written an excellent article with no Grammar mistakes, proper formatting, and also no copyrights infringements. Still, the publisher rejects it by submission. Sometimes conclusion works as proof if you have delivered whatever you have said. This is the best way to check the quality of an article quickly. You must add a conclusion to your article. The conclusion should be in short, defining what you have discussed in the above article.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Final Closing Points
Congratulations, You have completed the lesson of Five most important checks to do before submitting your article to Medium. Those were the points that play significant importance for the article. These points define the quality of an article. Now, It’s your time to reviews these 5 points and makes your article publish. Good Luck with your Medium Journey. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/5-points-to-avoid-getting-rejected-by-the-publications-7e36f26d1db9 | ['Pranjal Saxena'] | 2020-09-28 00:46:39.196000+00:00 | ['Tips', 'Marketing', 'Data Science', 'Audience', 'Marketing Strategies'] |
I’m A Nobody, and That’s A Good Thing | Do you ever angrily stare at the screen after finding errors in your recently published piece? I do. Why didn’t I see that before? The truth is, only a few people are going to see that error. Well, at least in my case.
In this age of social media, young adults just like me look around at some of their peers and feel like they’re failing at life. Maybe they had to stop attending college for some reason. They could have chosen not to go in the first place. We look around at some of our peers blossoming in their chosen careers with nice cars, a nice apartment, and a pure bred puppy.
However, I promise you that puppy has peed on a pair or two of their expensive shoes and possibly pooped on their costly rug. I know; I once had seven of them to care for. Their life isn’t as great as their social media accounts display.
Social media accounts are simply curations. Most people aren’t brave enough to post their failures for the world to see, and nobody should have to. We don’t have to be on this stage acting out every chapter of our lives.
I’m a nobody, and that’s a good thing.
I don’t have 10K+ followers. I don’t have to agonize over how crisp my line up is or how white my teeth are or where how rare my Jordans are. Honestly, I’ve always loved being in the background. It’s comfortable back there.
Social media is a gift and a curse.
Creators now have these amazing platforms to share their work, build their audience, and get support. On the other hand, people are obsessing over likes, follows, and branding themselves into something profitable. Somehow “thigh gaps” became a thing that some teen girls and young adult women starve themselves to achieve.
Instagram, Medium, and Twitter have allowed me to grow as a man and as a writer. I’ve met some amazing people along my writing journey. I wouldn’t trade that for the world. At one point, I did fall into the trap of obsessing over stats and number growth. I had to remind myself that the right people would find my work in time.
Indya Moore, an amazing actor (Pose on FX) and phenomenal activist, read the article I wrote about her a while back and shared it with her fans. I didn’t get a big boost in audience from it, but I didn’t care. The fact that she liked it enough to share was more than enough for me.
Being a nobody gives me a beautiful opportunity to grow.
Take a look at kids in the spotlight today. Every mistake or chance they take is highlighted and pasted all over every social media platform and gossip site. Do you remember when Jaden Smith wore a skirt? Take a look at Dwayne Wade’s family as they unconditionally support his daughter.
Today, someone can fall in the classroom and become an internet meme. Everyday there’s a new clip of someone getting beat up or humiliated in countless different ways. Being a “nobody” is becoming harder and harder each year.
I get to fail in peace.
Some of my articles flop. At times, people don’t like the fiction I’m working on. This is my time to fail over and over again. Failure is a great teacher if you’re willing to listen. I wince whenever someone’s mistakes are blown up all over social media. What if that was me?
No one is giving me a hard time if a piece I write doesn’t do well. People aren’t analyzing my stats and trying to figure out how much money I’m making each month. Instagram has become a tool to meet and network with some amazing people from painters and writers to entrepreneurs and small business owners. It’s no longer a place to obsess over likes and followers for me.
If I stop in the middle of a story, a few people might be upset with me, but I won’t receive any death threats. I can write an inaccurate piece on accident, and I won’t be shunned forever for it. I get to fail freely.
I get to experiment freely.
If I wanted to write about cowboys or even a Red Dead Redemption 2 fanfiction, I could. If I wanted to write about a boy getting kidnapped and taking to a school of magic, I could.
I can write about video games one day and LGBTQ news next. I can venture out and take a more journalistic approach and see how that works for me. I can write fiction based on my video game characters.
This is my time to find what works for me, and I don’t have to do it in the spotlight. If people don’t like something, the worst that will happen is 1–2 negative comments. Then I’ll just write something else.
At my age, my job is to fail — and fail a lot. That’s how I’ll figure out what I want to do, where my passion truly lies, and exactly what my calling is. | https://medium.com/brian-the-man-behind-the-pen/im-a-nobody-and-that-s-a-good-thing-1ad8f7ba9dd8 | [] | 2020-08-07 09:01:00.922000+00:00 | ['LGBTQ', 'Life Lessons', 'This Happened To Me', 'Growth', 'Writing'] |
Data Science Minimum: 10 Essential Skills You Need to Know to Start Doing Data Science | Data Science is such a broad field that includes several subdivisions like data preparation and exploration; data representation and transformation; data visualization and presentation; predictive analytics; machine learning, etc. For beginners, it’s only natural to raise the following question: What skills do I need to become a data scientist?
This article will discuss 10 essential skills that are necessary for practicing data scientists. These skills could be grouped into 2 categories, namely, technological skills (Math & Statistics, Coding Skills, Data Wrangling & Preprocessing Skills, Data Visualization Skills, Machine Learning Skills,and Real World Project Skills) and soft skills (Communication Skills, Lifelong Learning Skills, Team Player Skills and Ethical Skills).
Data science is a field that is ever-evolving, however mastering the foundations of data science will provide you with the necessary background that you need to pursue advance concepts such as deep learning, artificial intelligence, etc. This article will discuss 10 essential skills for practicing data scientists.
10 Essential Skills You Need to Know to Start Doing Data Science
1. Mathematics and Statistics Skills
(I) Statistics and Probability
Statistics and Probability is used for visualization of features, data preprocessing, feature transformation, data imputation, dimensionality reduction, feature engineering, model evaluation, etc. Here are the topics you need to be familiar with:
a) Mean
b) Median
c) Mode
d) Standard deviation/variance
e) Correlation coefficient and the covariance matrix
f) Probability distributions (Binomial, Poisson, Normal)
g) p-value
h) MSE (mean square error)
i) R2 Score
j) Baye’s Theorem (Precision, Recall, Positive Predictive Value, Negative Predictive Value, Confusion Matrix, ROC Curve)
k) A/B Testing
l) Monte Carlo Simulation
(II) Multivariable Calculus
Most machine learning models are built with a data set having several features or predictors. Hence familiarity with multivariable calculus is extremely important for building a machine learning model. Here are the topics you need to be familiar with:
a) Functions of several variables
b) Derivatives and gradients
c) Step function, Sigmoid function, Logit function, ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit) function
d) Cost function
e) Plotting of functions
f) Minimum and Maximum values of a function
(III) Linear Algebra
Linear algebra is the most important math skill in machine learning. A data set is represented as a matrix. Linear algebra is used in data preprocessing, data transformation, and model evaluation. Here are the topics you need to be familiar with:
a) Vectors
b) Matrices
c) Transpose of a matrix
d) The inverse of a matrix
e) The determinant of a matrix
f) Dot product
g) Eigenvalues
h) Eigenvectors
(IV) Optimization Methods
Most machine learning algorithms perform predictive modeling by minimizing an objective function, thereby learning the weights that must be applied to the testing data in order to obtain the predicted labels. Here are the topics you need to be familiar with:
a) Cost function/Objective function
b) Likelihood function
c) Error function
d) Gradient Descent Algorithm and its variants (e.g. Stochastic Gradient Descent Algorithm)
Find out more about the gradient descent algorithm here: Machine Learning: How the Gradient Descent Algorithm Works.
2. Essential Programming Skills
Programming skills are essential in data science. Since Python and R are considered the 2 most popular programming languages in data science, essential knowledge in both languages are crucial. Some organizations may only require skills in either R or Python, not both.
(I) Skills in Python
Be familiar with basic programming skills in python. Here are the most important packages that you should master how to use:
a) Numpy
b) Pandas
c) Matplotlib
d) Seaborn
e) Scikit-learn
f) PyTorch
(ii) Skills in R
a) Tidyverse
b) Dplyr
c) Ggplot2
d) Caret
e) Stringr
(iii) Skills in Other Programming Languages
Skills in the following programming languages may be required by some organizations or industries:
a) Excel
b) Tableau
c) Hadoop
d) SQL
e) Spark
3. Data Wrangling and Preprocessing Skills
Data is key for any analysis in data science, be it inferential analysis, predictive analysis, or prescriptive analysis. The predictive power of a model depends on the quality of the data that was used in building the model. Data comes in different forms such as text, table, image, voice or video. Most often, data that is used for analysis has to be mined, processed and transformed to render it to a form suitable for further analysis.
i) Data Wrangling: The process of data wrangling is a critical step for any data scientist. Very rarely is data easily accessible in a data science project for analysis. It’s more likely for the data to be in a file, a database, or extracted from documents such as web pages, tweets, or PDFs. Knowing how to wrangle and clean data will enable you to derive critical insights from your data that would otherwise be hidden.
ii) Data Preprocessing: Knowledge about data preprocessing is very important and include topics such as:
a) Dealing with missing data
b) Data imputation
c) Handling categorical data
d) Encoding class labels for classification problems
e) Techniques of feature transformation and dimensionality reduction such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA).
4. Data Visualization Skills
Understand the essential components of a good data visualization.
a) Data Component: An important first step in deciding how to visualize data is to know what type of data it is, e.g. categorical data, discrete data, continuous data, time series data, etc.
b) Geometric Component: Here is where you decide what kind of visualization is suitable for your data, e.g. scatter plot, line graphs, barplots, histograms, qqplots, smooth densities, boxplots, pairplots, heatmaps, etc.
c) Mapping Component: Here you need to decide what variable to use as your x-variable and what to use as your y-variable. This is important especially when your dataset is multi-dimensional with several features.
d) Scale Component: Here you decide what kind of scales to use, e.g. linear scale, log scale, etc.
e) Labels Component: This include things like axes labels, titles, legends, font size to use, etc.
f) Ethical Component: Here, you want to make sure your visualization tells the true story. You need to be aware of your actions when cleaning, summarizing, manipulating and producing a data visualization and ensure you aren’t using your visualization to mislead or manipulate your audience.
5. Basic Machine Learning Skills
Machine Learning is a very important branch of data science. It is important to understand the machine learning framework: Problem Framing; Data Analysis; Model Building, Testing &Evaluation; and Model Application. Find out more about the machine learning framework from here: The Machine Learning Process.
The following are important machine learning algorithms to be familiar with.
i) Supervised Learning (Continuous Variable Prediction)
a) Basic regression
b) Multiregression analysis
c) Regularized regression
ii) Supervised Learning (Discrete Variable Prediction)
a) Logistic Regression Classifier
b) Support Vector Machine Classifier
c) K-nearest neighbor (KNN) Classifier
d) Decision Tree Classifier
e) Random Forest Classifier
iii) Unsupervised Learning
a) Kmeans clustering algorithm
6. Skills from Real World Capstone Data Science Projects
Skills acquired from course work alone will not make your a data scientist. A qualified data scientist must be able to demonstrate evidence of successful completion of a real world data science project that includes every stages in data science and machine learning process such as problem framing, data acquisition and analysis, model building, model testing, model evaluation, and deploying model. Real world data science projects could be found in the following:
a) Kaggle Projects
b) Internships
c) From Interviews
7. Communication Skills
Data scientists need to be able communicate their ideas with other members of the team or with business administrators in their organizations. Good communication skills would play a key role here to be able to convey and present very technical information to people with little or no understanding of technical concepts in data science. Good communication skills will help foster an atmosphere of unity and togetherness with other team members such as data analysts, data engineers, field engineers, etc.
8. Be a Lifelong Learner
Data science is a field that is ever-evolving, so be prepared to embrace and learn new technologies. One way to keep in touch with developments in the field is to network with other data scientists. Some platforms that promote networking are LinkedIn, github, and medium (Towards Data Science and Towards AI publications). The platforms are very useful for up-to-date information about recent developments in the field.
9. Team Player Skills
As a data scientist, you will be working in a team of data analysts, engineers, administrators, so you need good communication skills. You need to be a good listener too, especially during early project development phases where you need to rely on engineers or other personnel to be able to design and frame a good data science project. Being a good team player world help you to thrive in a business environment and maintain good relationships with other members of your team as well as administrators or directors of your organization.
10. Ethical Skills in Data Science
Understand the implication of your project. Be truthful to yourself. Avoid manipulating data or using a method that will intentionally produce bias in results. Be ethical in all phases from data collection, to analysis, to model building, analysis, testing and application. Avoid fabricating results for the purpose of misleading or manipulating your audience. Be ethical in the way you interpret the findings from your data science project.
In summary, we’ve discussed 10 essential skills needed for practicing data scientists. Data science is a field that is ever-evolving, however mastering the foundations of data science will provide you with the necessary background that you need to pursue advance concepts such as deep learning, artificial intelligence, etc. | https://towardsdatascience.com/data-science-minimum-10-essential-skills-you-need-to-know-to-start-doing-data-science-e5a5a9be5991 | ['Benjamin Obi Tayo Ph.D.'] | 2020-07-24 05:00:07.523000+00:00 | ['Professional Development', 'Python', 'Data Science Education', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Why Photos of Ourselves Are Sometimes Disappointing | Familiarity Works Against Us
If you’re anything like me, you can’t stand photos of yourself in a certain light. The wrong angle, the wrong lighting, or the wrong hair day. All are enough to ruin the photo.
We assume we look abnormal, or different to how we usually do; because the photo we are looking at doesn’t match our pre-existing schema of ourselves.
But maybe it’s not that you’re having a bad hair day, or are standing in an unflattering light. What if you actually look like that? It could be that you’ve just become accustomed to seeing yourself a certain way, and you find any other perception weird.
The mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968,) states that the more we encounter a stimulus, the more we like it. Therefore, we find attractive what we are familiar with.
And we’re familiar with a certain self-perception. For years, we’ve told ourselves we look identical to the person we see in the mirror. When we see a version of ourselves that doesn’t match that, it throws us off as weird and unusual.
That’s not to say that we don’t look like the person in the photo, or that this version of ourselves is ugly. All it means is we’re not used to seeing ourselves in that light.
Mirror, Mirror (On the Wall)
We prefer objects, people, and thoughts that we are familiar with. And the self-image we know best is the one we see in the mirror. Our mirrored self is the version of ourselves we know best.
But when we look in the mirror, our image is reversed. It depicts an inaccurate and distorted reflection of your body.
The truth is, you’re not familiar with your face. All you’ve ever seen is a reverse of it. Yet photos present your face as it appears for real/not reversed, and that’s why you look different in them.
That’s not to say you look worse or less attractive than the person you see in the mirror. In fact, others often think our mirrored self is less attractive. As highlighted by research undergone by Mita et al (1977), found that, while most of us prefer our mirror image, others prefer photos of that individual that show your “true image.”
On this account, it’s not that you look worse in a photo. You just look different. | https://medium.com/publishous/why-photos-of-ourselves-are-sometimes-disappointing-29b44acc8b6e | ['Jon Hawkins'] | 2020-12-15 12:43:27.938000+00:00 | ['Advice', 'Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Self', 'Psychology'] |
Stitch Fix accelerates design sprints by collaborating in Figma | Personal style service Stitch Fix made waves in November as the first tech IPO led by a woman in 2017. Since then, its market cap has nearly doubled. The company won the hearts of consumers with an elegant app and website experience that makes receiving (and in some cases returning) a monthly box of clothing fun instead of daunting.
To adapt to their growing user base and the ever-changing nature of the web, Stitch Fix uses design sprints — like hackathons for design — to troubleshoot challenges. From the get-go, they’ve relied on Figma to stay aligned and on track, according to Stitch Fix Head of Product Design Ellen Beldner.
“Figma unlocked collaboration across departments, so that everyone could solve the tough problems together.” — Ellen Beldner, Stitch Fix Head of Product Design
Step 1: Sprinting in the Cloud
Now that they’ve completed over half a dozen successful sprints, we sat down with Ellen to learn how our cloud-based design platform fits into each part of the process.
The best design sprints start with ideation, whiteboarding, and a ton of crumpled up Post-it notes. Stitch Fix designers, engineers, marketers and project managers test out solutions until the perfect one emerges, shining with straightforward simplicity. Then the real fun kicks off: designing a prototype using Figma.
Because Figma runs in the browser, the team doesn’t waste any time during this transition. Everyone can open a shared file with a simple URL — from the PMs using PCs to the comms designers who are diehard Mac loyalists.
Ellen explains:
“The reason I think Figma makes this terrifically easy is because: 1) You’re not dealing with the back and forth files. 2) Other people don’t need to install any crazy software in order to see what you’re doing. 3) There is one source of truth. It isn’t just that it replaces Sketch. Figma replaces Sketch, InVision and Zeplin.”
With Figma, the design sprint attendees can skip the usual steps — buying, downloading and installing a menagerie of applications — and move straight into prototyping.
Step 2: Brainstorming and critiquing in tandem
In this early prototyping stage, design sprint attendees inevitably hit some challenges. Perhaps their oh-so-simple feature idea is far more difficult to execute than they’d expected. In other cases, changing one part of a flow ripples through the rest of the user experience in an unexpected way. To work through these kinds of hiccups on tight deadline, teams need to collaborate quickly and effectively.
“It isn’t just that it replaces Sketch. Figma replaces Sketch, InVision and Zeplin.”
Here’s a common design sprint scenario: One person needs immediate feedback on a wireframe, so they ask others for a second opinion.
Without Figma, people would either need to huddle around one person’s computer, effectively stopping the design process, or export and email the file.
Stitch Fix avoids all that using Figma’s Multiplayer feature. If anyone on Ellen’s team needs feedback, she scrolls to their trouble spot and immediately rattles off suggestions. She also leaves feedback via Figma’s commenting function, or quickly draws a mock-up in the file to demonstrate her suggestion.
“There’s no possible way for something like Sketch or Photoshop to do this job,” Ellen explains. “You’re going to have four people working on four different versions of the file and you’re not going to be able to see what people are doing.”
Ellen says this makes detailed feedback much easier, erasing the need to schedule meetings for walk-throughs. During one particularly hairy sprint, a designer showed her eight or nine ideas. Ellen went through each one, left comments, and sketched a few mockups to illustrate her points. The designer was then free to pop back into that same URL to study the critique whenever she wanted.
“Everyone is able to edit the same source of truth in the same file at the same time, and that lets us work so much more quickly and coherently,” she tells us. “When we are creating prototypes of a higher fidelity, Figma makes it much easier for everyone to stay aligned.”
In short? Figma shuts down potential project management chaos before it even begins.
Step 3: Shared components kill the busy work
Time is of the essence during a sprint. Teams have zilch wiggle room for busy work, like replicating the same icon over and over in every design frame. This is where Figma’s shared components — reusable instances of UI elements — come into play.
“Everyone is able to edit the same source of truth, and that lets us work so much more quickly and coherently.”
During one sprint Ellen’s team prototyped a card-based design system. It was a serious challenge because it meant testing which combination of cards would be most effective for certain users. To do this, her team took advantage of Figma’s shared components feature.
When they changed the master component all of its instances would also change, saving them a ton of time on useless busywork. Not only that, but designers could drop in instances as Ellen forged ahead to the navigation tab. This gave everyone more time to gnaw over high-level problems.
“I want my team to spend time thinking about high level UX problems, rather than mindlessly repeating busy work,” Ellen says. “Figma helps them do that.”
Step 4: Other departments jump in to wrap up
A design sprint is a hybrid beast of multiple departments, not just designers refining the same prototype ad nauseum. Marketing, engineering and design sweat side by side in the sprint trenches.
Figma runs in the browser (think: Google Docs of design), and everyone can jump in the file at the same time. As a result, the design team works in parallel instead of sequentially. To do their part of the job, developers and copy whizzes don’t have to wait for designers to finish wireframing.
“I come from a history of collaborative work cultures, something that’s very important for me to recreate here at Stitch Fix,” Ellen tells us. “I love the way Figma makes it easy for people to pull up what another designer is doing and make a comment.”
The marketing team especially benefits from Figma, a surprising revelation considering they don’t normally work with design tools.
“I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but working inside of a design tool is usually a nightmare for copywriters,” Ellen says. “They have to write and edit copy strings for every single element. Trying to do that in a way that is efficient is crazy.”
“Working inside of a design tool is usually a nightmare for copywriters.”
Now the copy team pops in during the later stages, spritz a headline here and some microcopy there before engineering builds everything out. They can test out what text length displays best and experiment accordingly.
“When we used Sketch in previous sprints it was difficult because we had to constantly update each other,” she explains. “Grabbing the text from marketing meant opening up Google Docs and copy pasting.”
Stitch Fix’s stamp of approval
“Figma unlocked collaboration across departments, so that everyone could solve the tough problems together,” Ellen concludes. “I highly recommend it for accelerating design sprints to a higher level.”
Have you or your company used Figma during a design sprint? We’d love to hear your story! Please reach out to us via Twitter or email: [email protected]. | https://medium.com/figma-design/stitch-fix-accelerates-design-sprints-by-collaborating-in-figma-d78c460e66a | ['Valerie Veteto'] | 2018-04-06 18:06:20.666000+00:00 | ['UI', 'Case Studies', 'Design', 'Technology', 'UX'] |
How Easy Is It to Change Someone’s Mind? | Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
Have you watched the Social Dilemma on Netflix yet?
If so, what was your reaction? A mere shrug, and yeah we all know or did you throw your devices out of the house?
I was one of those that threw the phone to the other end of the room. Watching the show I had light bulb moments as to why you see the small dots wiggle when someone is replying to you.
Obvious when pointed out, but. I. had. no. idea.
And now I’m pissed off because all they want is my attention and my being — not much, but time is one thing you can never get back.
Yet what chilled me to the bone more than anything during that documentary was when one of the developers mentioned his fear for the future: a civil war.
Far fetched? maybe, but maybe not.
Take the UK. The UK has a long history of civil wars, the earliest recorded was in 1088, the most recent 1649–51.
Now fast forward to 2020 and we are living the polarity that 24/7 algorithms programmed to drain your attention have produced. They are designed to re-enforce your opinions, keep you in your echo chamber of beliefs and generally keep you feeling you’re in the right.
Perfect for dividing friends, families and nation-states.
Yet I’m old enough to remember when you could be best friends with someone you disagreed with. Now you simply get cancelled and struck from Facebook friendship.
It’s all so clever, and yet so stupid!
An example used in the Social Dilemma to highlight the ways the algorithm pushes you down a rabbit hole was by using the idea that the world is flat. If you believe this and are looking into it, you will get more information to re-enforce that idea. It doesn’t matter if what you are searching for is true or false, you will get more information/fake news to confirm your bias.
Which is crazy, right?
And which leads me to the question, can you change someone's mind in such a divisive world?
I believe we can if we can bring back the art of conversation. Not only can we bring back empathy and understanding this way, but also an agreement to disagree without cancelling out another person; we can bring back the art of a right proper chin wag.
Which is actually enjoyable.
Entered into with the spirit of learning and understanding, exploring others opinions can be an interesting experience.
When was the last time you felt your brain changing gears as it took in new information that challenged you?
When did you last feel it digest, rub up against existing thoughts, beliefs and opinions, and then the breakthrough as you learn something new, becoming humble for a minute, maybe even uncomfortable, growing as a person and see ing the world in slightly different colours?
Harvard University has published an article about changing minds in a business setting, but I believe we can use the ideas expressed for the personal too.
They give a couple of suggestions, it’s a basic 2 ways to do x article, but they start with the suggestion of first finding the root of the disagreement.
The ‘why’ the other person disagrees. And you do this without judgement.
Find out where that other person is coming from, why do they hold that opinion? What is it about the life that has led them to X?
Then they suggest you note the inclusion or absence of emotion.
This to me is the crux of the matter.
We are emotional beings and despite what anyone tells you, they rule the roost. If there are emotional factors driving opinions, then they need to be treated differently to unemotional ones.
If someone is emotional, you can lay all the facts out in front of them and they will very often refuse to see them.
E.g. showing someone they will save money by buying X over Y is a logical, unemotional (most of the time) situation.
Showing someone that doing something in a different way may be better than the way they have been doing it, is not so easy, because there will be emotions invested.
So how do you do it? How do you change minds?
Harvard gives two examples, the cognitive conversation and the champion conversion.
The cognitive conversation is as it sounds, it’s less emotional and is about presenting a strong argument. Using a strong presentation, minimal emotion and relying upon the other person being unemotional and logical. Think back to the idea of X being cheaper than Y.
The champion conversion is more about building relationships. It’s about getting to know the other person, maybe bringing in someone they admire and like to the conversation.
I would add here finding common ground is always a good move, and generally, this is a more long term strategy.
Once you know them well enough, you can have slightly more controversial conversations with them, areas where you may disagree. When you know someone on more than a superficial level, you can communicate with them on a deeper level, and they will hopefully be more open to listening to you too.
Then the real conversations can take place, and perhaps minds are changed.
It is this art that we are losing; the art of the conversation. Included in that art is the art of relationship building, the art of listening, and the art of willing to disagree without hatred because sometimes we can’t change another’s mind, no matter how hard we try.
And sometimes, that’s OK. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-easy-is-it-to-change-someones-mind-2e1a60e5f73c | ['Katie Knight'] | 2020-10-24 15:32:48.613000+00:00 | ['Netflix', 'Psychology', 'Humanity', 'Social Media'] |
Importing GSON into Eclipse. | This is a supplementary guide for the simple blockchain from scratch Java tutorial series.
What is GSON.
Gson is Java library created by google that enables you to get a JSON representation of a Java Object. Read more about it here.
Downloading GSON.
You will need to download Gson Jar ( “gson-2.6.2.jar” ) from the maven repo. Make sure to keep a note of where you saved it.
Creating a User Library for Gson.
Open Windows >preferences in the Eclipse menu, and navigate to the Java >Build path > User Libraries tab. Click new and enter a new User Library name: like “gson_lib” and hit ok. With “gson_lib” selected press Add External JARs and find the gson-2.6.2.jar you downloaded. Apply and Close.
Adding the User Library to a package.
Right click your package in package explorer > Build path > Add Libraries. Select User libraries and then press next, now just tick “gson_lib” and click finish.
Import it with import com.google.gson.*; | https://medium.com/programmers-blockchain/importing-gson-into-eclipse-ec8cf678ad52 | [] | 2017-12-17 06:27:54.348000+00:00 | ['User Library', 'Eclipse Ide', 'Tutorial', 'Java', 'Gson'] |
Hellion | Image from Pixabay
Spellbound hellion
Nuisance of the hen house
Hellhound yelling on
Good news since the Zen drought
What is it boy? What do you want?
Sniffing at traces, your face looking gaunt
What is it girl? What do you see?
I’m shushing the bushes,
you’re showing your teeth
I should take note
from the fur and the fangs
Stop dwelling on death,
the birth of Big Bangs
It’s riddled with mystery
Armed to the eyes
I muster the lust to combust in my mind
But
I haven’t the time
Instinct and innocence
Pull it into the pulpit
Suffocated by raving droolers
Drowning in conspiracy spit
Another sacrifice for the Lord of the Horde
It’s hit or miss
Some make it out with a bite and a scratch
Others, unlucky
Forever detached
It’s warm in the swarm
but it comes with a catch
No longer natural
primal and free
When you vacate your headspace
for hellion seeds
Overgrown tangles
your feet in the weeds
How you’ll ever shake loose
A mystery to me | https://medium.com/literally-literary/hellion-cb9af56b2f4f | ['Scott Leonardi'] | 2020-12-25 05:32:27.163000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Writing', 'Abstract', 'Poetry', 'Creative Writing'] |
4 Important Reasons to Answer Others’ Programming Questions Online | 3. A Good Reputation Can Help You With Marketing
Of course, when you are a startup, you want to make money and promote your product. Helping others in areas in which you are very well versed and perhaps one of the best in the world will clearly push you forward. Becoming an expert on different platforms, helping others with your answers, and showing the depth of your knowledge can obviously improve your chances of getting new clients.
Photo by Merakist on Unsplash.
The CEOs of most tech startups are also people who are tech-savvy and often visit such platforms — or at least their head developers might share some solutions with them from such platforms. If they notice that you understand these issues much better than them, they can turn to your startup for help and become your client. As such, this path is also very important and can be useful. | https://medium.com/better-programming/4-important-reasons-to-answer-others-programming-questions-online-5751e84f60fa | ['Elvina Sh'] | 2020-10-05 20:46:49.882000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Startup', 'Learning', 'Technology', 'Education'] |
10 UI/UX Trends in 2020 | It’s the new year, and time for another list of design trends! Tbh, design trends hardly see a drastic change with the onset of a new calendar year. It’s more like a smooth gradient; trends change gradually over the years. Drop a few years in the timeline, and then take a look at design styles. It is now that you will notice a stark difference.
With the onset of 2020 the internet is already flooded with articles on new design trends in UI/UX. While most of them brood on aesthetics and animation styles, I would like to tread on a slightly different path.
I feel that aesthetics and animation ideas cannot and should not bend the knee to trends. These are the outcomes of a creative mind, and creativity should not be restricted by opinions. I had once read on an advertising board:
Teach your child how to think Not what to think.
Well, while others guide you on what to design, let me talk about how to design. | https://uxplanet.org/10-ui-ux-trends-in-2020-3be03597dfe7 | ['Design Studio'] | 2020-02-04 08:15:52.229000+00:00 | ['UI', 'Design', 'Trends', '2020', 'UX'] |
The Service Reactor | The service reactor is this work-in-progress model to demonstrate how a virtuous user research cycle and a commitment to discovery-validated delivery will generate enough proven insights to power a small city.
That’s a lot of made-up vocabulary designed to just consolidate this shit to a single sentence, so let’s break this down.
A “virtuous user research cycle” describes a system where your effort to make sense of some data results in the design of the next test to perform, the results of which return to the system.
“Discovery-validated delivery” is a requirement that end-user facing features of a product or service won’t be pursued until their demonstrable need and solution can be proven by existing user research.
A chain reaction beginning by cataloging raw data — survey answers, interview transcripts, a/b results, and so on — creates tactical and strategic insights, some aspects of which require more validation thus foreshadowing the next round of tests. Like a nuclear reactor, discovery-validated delivery creates pressure to perform those tests, which continues the chain reaction.
The chief product of the service reactor are insights that we use to validate our business decisions. At small scales, examples of these insights are:
evidence we need to rethink our menu structure because it’s confusing users,
indication that users need a way to opt-in to plain-text emails,
validation that this call-to-action works better than that one.
But as the catalog grows over time, new patterns emerge among unrelated sets of data, and that compounding value directly correlates to the scale of new insights. These are demonstrable proof that there is need among the userbase for entirely new services, let alone features. What’s more, because the service reactor creates insights as the byproduct of a process rather than insights that are specifically sought-out, the resulting service ideas may be orthogonal to your existing service provisions.
This is the drill maker getting into the business of designing entertainment units*. A service reactor powers the “innovation mill.”
The most important ethic I’m trying to convey with the service reactor is that while it is a vision to motivate an organization’s investment in ResearchOps, it is fundamentally user centric. Over time, there is no part of a service or product that is not derived from user research. The reactor ionizes the air with user centricity. You can’t help but breathe. | https://medium.com/the-metric/the-service-reactor-5cfb3c3b1e98 | ['Michael Schofield'] | 2019-09-10 14:12:14.847000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Service Design', 'User Experience', 'Podcast', 'UX'] |
In the beginning, there was void * | In the beginning, there was void *
A tale of evolving code and unintended consequences
In honor of the imminent release of ‘Software Engineering at Google’, which I highly recommend, I thought I’d relate a tale of how software evolution and feature creep can go wrong in ways which, while feeling great at every step of the journey, yield a net outcome a decade later that is a disaster with a surprisingly large blast radius. This is my modest parallel to Tony Hoare’s ‘billion dollar mistake’, or Dennis Richie’s ‘most expensive one-byte mistake’ and, coincidentally, it involves both pointers and zero-terminated data-structures.
It all begins innocently enough. The year is 2009. A colleague of mine has a large number of dot products that need to be sped up to improve the scalability of a large-scale optimization problem. At the time, floating-point computation isn’t a common bottleneck for our workloads, and we don’t have off-the-shelf solutions readily available: bringing in a BLAS library is overkill, and there are simpler and definitely more fun things to do for someone like myself, who loves to write gnarly math code and mess around with vectorized Intel instructions.
No sweat, I’ll hack together a quick dot-product implementation using SSE intrinsics, and some hand-tuned unrolling for good measure. There is a very clever way to leverage the terrifyingly beautiful Duff’s device and express unrolling without abusing the pre-processor, at the cost of an equally scandalous abuse of the C syntax. I love it. One wrinkle: SSE instructions like to operate on 16-byte aligned data. Our toolchain doesn’t always provide that guarantee at the time, and compiler hints are still somewhat compiler-specific. No problem: I’ll just allocate a bigger buffer and add a data pointer to the closest 16-byte boundary to enforce alignment.
But wait, if I’m going to put a restriction on how the data gets allocated, it is now very tempting to make sure the contract is enforced via proper typing. So let’s wrap that naked pointer into a new data structure: float * becomes something like aligned_scoped_array<float>. Hey, this opens up new possibilities: dealing with edge effects, when using SSE instructions, is always most of the actual code, and easily alleviated when doing linear algebra by zero-padding the data up to multiples of 16 bytes, which plays nicely with my data alignment tricks. Great: let’s enforce that in the data structure, since we now control it. Done, it’s all very very fast now. Moving on.
Wait. Did someone say linear algebra? Can we process those dot products in batches instead? By then we’re really into BLAS territory, but let’s not rewrite everything just for a basic matrix multiply: just add another dimension to the array, a function that performs the 2D multiplication, and we’re good to go. Aligning and padding the data also means we can step through it without any further pointer indirection, which makes the code short and elegant. Of course, anyone who has read any of the literature on BLAS, notably the seminal Goto paper on the topic, knows that short and elegant probably leaves a ton of performance on the table, because considerations around cache performance can get quite complicated. The right answer is likely not to try to roll out your own implementation, but … it’s fun and it feels like progress, right?
Hang on. Can you do the same for quantized representations? Oh, but yes! In fact, I wrote this nifty paper on how mixing unsigned and signed fixed-point representations works amazingly well for neural networks. BLAS has nothing to offer in the space of fixed-point math, while all alignment and padding considerations still apply. So I’ll just add a specialization for int8*uint8 products, and we’re done. Magic.
By now, you’re probably beginning to see a pattern. Feature creep, slightly suboptimal decisions at every step of the way, the illusion of progress and decisions that are increasingly difficult to walk back from. Fast forward a few years down the road, and my one-off wrapper for a naked pointer has become a fully-fledged, tentacular matrix library, pedantically called FastMatrix. It supports x86, ARM and CUDA. It handles float, double, int8, uint8, int16 and int32. It compiles for Android and iOS. It has moved to a general ‘util’ directory in our shared codebase. It is being used by deep learning codebase as well as a growing number of projects, most of which I have never heard of. It is also sitting in a respectable position on the list of biggest consumers of CPU cycles on our Google-wide profiling dashboard. What’s not to love?
Well. It also has a terrible, maddeningly inconsistent API, in part because different hardware vendors have optimized for different data types and layouts, and I failed to abstract away those implementation details. It is also stuck in an evolutionary dead-end: forcing control of the data layout just to save a few CPU cycles and lines of code turns out to be a terrible idea, because much of the benefit disappears in all the data movements that it typically forces the users to go through. Its mere existence impedes progress towards better-supported, more comprehensive, BLAS-aware solutions such as the awesome Eigen library, which has gained support for fixed-point operations in the meantime. Its CUDA port is full of antipatterns, which I cringe at seeing cut-and-pasted elsewhere in the codebase. We also made a misguided attempt at supporting dynamic dispatch of some of the algorithms across instruction sets, which, if the caller isn’t careful, may cause leakage of compilation units for the wrong platform into one’s binary, and cause obscure crashes that are near impossible to tie back to the original root cause because the binary doesn’t even have to invoke the offending code to be tainted. Oops. It’s all fun and games until ads SRE come a-knocking.
Did I ever mention Google that rejected me when I first applied as a software engineer? They may have had a point. That library needed to die.
But by then, all these major design flaws had also paid short-term dividends: it is pretty fast. It’s there. Due to the somewhat loose, C-like API, it’s easy to add features to it, or copy-paste it piecemeal. Removing some of the most egregious maintenance nightmares would likely either cost thousands of CPU cores, or hundreds of software engineer hours: performance-sensitive code is extremely difficult to reason about, because while it’s safe to assume it has decent coverage for correctness, performance coverage is very difficult to achieve: a 10% speed regression could cost a mere microsecond or overload a datacenter, and you may not be able to tell the difference until someone deploys a binary with your changes a few months after the change is committed. By then, other repositories that I had no visibility into had started to rely on it, including its gnarliest implementation details, and I’d reached pandemic-levels of infection.
The year is now 2020. It’s been a decade. The monster is not entirely dead, though I’ve hacked a great number of its heads. Its demise recently got a significant boost from a die-hard fan of the library, who has fortuitously decided to leave the company. Don’t tell them: I gleefully deleted all their code the very same day. In my 12 years here, I have proudly removed more than 1.5M lines of code from our repository, yet these tendrils stubbornly remain. In retrospect, the best decision I made in recent years was to insist that TensorFlow not depend on any of it.
Donald Knuth famously said that no code is ever fully debugged until its last user has died. Obviously, Knuth doesn’t work at Google, or he might have said ‘… its last user and all of their colleagues …’. Even if the code is dead, some of its antipatterns survive, either in people’s heads or via good old-fashioned copypasta. Titus Winters, co-author of the aforementioned book, loves to say that ‘Software Engineering is programming integrated over time.’ One issue is that the time constants involved can be measured in decades, and rarely does someone stay in any job long enough to see their mistakes unfold. Decisions made locally, incrementally, can quickly poison an entire codebase and become terrifyingly difficult to walk back from, particularly as people move on to other, shinier problems.
Coda
When I started working on the DistBelief codebase a number of years later, I immediately noticed something surprising: the innermost structure that held the neural networks was a naked ‘void *’, nothing more. I looked up who wrote that heresy, and, of course, that turned out to be Jeff Dean. Oh. I timidly asked: ‘Jeff … but whyyy???’ His answer was simply: ‘well, we don’t know what we’re doing yet, so let’s not bake any assumptions into the data structures that we can’t walk back from.’ Sure enough, the right data layout to use in this context was extremely non-obvious: you can use one to optimize for forward inference on CPU, but it penalizes the speed of the backward pass during training, and the backward pass is roughly 2X more expensive than the forward pass. But in production you mostly just run inference, so that may be the right tradeoff? It depends, because on GPU it’s almost exactly the other way around. These tradeoffs took some time to settle, and eventually we codified a type system, a layout and removed the naked pointer. The lesson? Sometimes it is better to let Hyrum’s law (another noted co-author of the upcoming book) work in your favor and defer API contracts until you understand how your users will (ab)use them, instead of committing to an API early and becoming its victim. | https://towardsdatascience.com/in-the-beginning-there-was-void-f3fdfa2830c | ['Vincent Vanhoucke'] | 2020-03-12 15:04:17.708000+00:00 | ['API', 'Machine Learning', 'Software Engineering', 'Coding', 'Software Development'] |
Edie’s Three | Edie’s Three
Top 3 for Sunday, October 27th
(Photo by Author)
Write What You Think, Not What Others Want
By: Sergey Faldin
Before coming to Medium, I never used to write non-fiction. I’ve since discovered that although it isn’t my first love, I’ve got a pretty good knack for it; but I have been struggling with content topics. Always wondering what I should be writing about, what do people want to read, what will they like, what won’t they like?
I love writing personal essays, but I’ve tried to stay away from them as much as possible (with the exception of a handful), simply because I didn’t think they would be well-received. Reading this piece today was like getting one of Oprah’s infamous ‘aha moments’. “Write what you think, not what others want” — and the audience you need will come to you.
What you think, what you want, is what you know best. It’s what comes easiest and most naturally to you. That will be reflected in your writing. You’ll be more believable, more ‘readable’. Just be you.
What About the Bees?
By: Sylvia Clare MSc. Psychol
So, I kind of have this thing for bees. I think they’re sweet little creatures that keep the world alive and get next to no credit for it. They’re feared, killed, hated, and people seem to have no clue that without them, we wouldn’t be around either.
I love Sylvia’s article, and it has inspired me to look into different types of plants for next summer so that I can attract a more diverse group of little buzzers! If you want to do your part for our little winged friends, have a read!
No More Shame: A Journey of Body Acceptance
By: Tiffany Amoakohene
We live in an age where body positivity and body acceptance is “trending” right now, but at the root of it, fat-shaming is still very much alive and thriving.
I’ve struggled with weight my whole life, and it took me decades to come to the realization that in order to get healthy, I need to love myself the way I am first. I know that I need to lose weight, but for me, it’s a lot less about physical appearance, and more about whole health. My mother is a diabetic, needing to inject herself daily. She has high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and her heart isn’t in fantastic shape. My family also has a strong history of various cancers.
I know I need to find a healthy weight so I can set myself up for the best possible ‘golden years’.
I’ve stopped fat-shaming myself when I started to love myself. But I see it and hear it all the time. People not only fat-shame others — their friends, colleagues, perfect strangers, children — but they do it to themselves as well! This has to stop. There has to be a massive mind-shift change, and the focus has to be put on the causes and solutions versus pointing out the visual.
I love this article for the fact that it ends with acceptance and love. | https://medium.com/top-3/edies-three-eaac3e243b0d | ['Edie Tuck'] | 2019-10-27 23:26:36.848000+00:00 | ['Body Image', 'Self Love', 'Bees', 'Writing', 'Top 3'] |
Stop Selling Me Empty Writing Promises | Obviously, one of the appeals of platforms like Medium is the chance, however small, to make money writing. Yet many must, like me, quickly realize that isn’t the real value here for us. What I have found here are people to read what I write, and, once in a while, encourage me to keep going. I don’t anticipate that someone like me will get many followers, or make more than a few cents (which is why I no longer put posts behind the paywall).
People reading what I write is huge for me. I’ve never been able to share my writing like this before.
The thing is, when I first came here, I read a few of those “how to make money writing” posts. Who wouldn’t want to make some change doing something they love? But, at a certain point I tried to stop. I had noticed some of these posts are truly empty of quality and insight. I unfollowed several publications that seemed dominated by such posts.
You know, the ones that promise to teach you how to write 10 million words a day, or whatever nonsense, “market” myself, game the system, make a ton of money by selling this or that thing tangentially related to writing.
There are absolutely posts that offer real help and tips to people trying to start or maintain writing as a career. Some of these posts are absolutely amazing, and contain valuable insights.
But it’s clear to me that some of these people are just out to make money, here or elsewhere, off of writers, by writing about how to make money writing.
I’d be interested to see how many top earners on these platforms are those claiming to be helping beginning writers. Because, in this case, the more they dominate publications and are promoted, the less there is for the beginner writers themselves.
Also, you may have noticed: Some of these are super manipulative!
I don’t know who exactly needs to hear this. You probably know who you are, (if you ever read this, which I doubt):
Stop using the marketing tricks you are pretending to teach me, on me. Stop exploiting that side of me as though you are actually interested in “solving my problem”. You are hustling. You are manipulating. You know it, because you brag about it in these posts.
I am just here to write and read. If you are here to offer sincere help, that’s great. If you are here to manipulate those of us who love to write, or are eager to improve, I’ll say this: | https://medium.com/the-haven/stop-selling-me-empty-writing-promises-6874423e7e87 | ['Erica Ball'] | 2020-12-22 18:21:32.498000+00:00 | ['Writers On Writing', 'Humor', 'Rant', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips'] |
Writing Character Driven Stories | Writing Character Driven Stories
Turning the wheel over to your characters to drive where your novel will go
Photo by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash
When you’re writing your story, do you prefer to focus on the characters or on the plot?
Well, it’s not entirely one or the other. Plot drives the story. It gives us tension and drama and a place for our characters to exist.
But characters make us feel. They give us someone to root for (or against). They develop and interact with the plot, molding themselves as they follow the yellow brick road of story direction.
Characters have to interact with the plot, otherwise we’d just have awesome people doing normal stuff. There’d be no conflict, nothing to develop the character. That’s why we throw in plot, obstacles, and consequences to action. Those things help mold the character into who they will be at the end.
The End… the elusive finish to your book. You might have an idea, but maybe you don’t. You might have a plan but it feels like you’re forcing your characters to follow a set path to the right when they really want to go left. Maybe to get there you have to force a character to do things they wouldn’t normally do.
There comes a point where your characters might have a better grasp on their own story than you do. Here are some ways to help you write character driven stories, or better yet, hand over the reigns of writing to your characters and give them power over where things will end up.
Connect with readers through realistic characters
Readers don’t want flawless characters. They would pass through the story without any issues, fighting the bad guy and prevailing on the first try. No, readers want to connect with the characters and become emotionally invested.
How does that happen? Realistic characters that have flaws and display unique personalities. Readers want to see themselves in the character. They want to imagine they are going through the same challenges and finding their own inner strength. They see someone they love and they want to root for the character that displays similar characteristics and emotions.
Interact with the world
There once was a man who was scared of birds. Birds exist only outside his house. Man never leaves house.
Well, that’s a boring story. Character driven novels should force the character into the world you’ve built. Make them do something. They need to interact with the world and be immersed in activities that will help shape them.
Man must go outside to put the trash away or get groceries. He makes it to the store without seeing a single bird (yay), but on his way out, a bird flies overhead. Does he drop the groceries and run? Does he use the food to defend himself? What interactions will he take to either withdraw or grow as a person?
Think of the worst, and then make it happen
What would your character strongly dislike or what do they never want to happen? Well, make that happen.
Consider the story above. The man is terrified that this bird will swoop down and attack him. So, what happens if it does? The bird swoops down, continually taking dives at the man’s head. He’s panicking…
Focus on the inner growth
What is your character’s biggest flaw? How can the character overcome that flaw, or at least use it to their advantage, by the end of the story? Those are the sorts of things that can help you figure out where the plot should be going or what obstacles it should present to your character.
Are there challenges that can help your character overcome their flaws or fears? Put them in. Let your character tell you what they don’t want to happen and then make it happen. Show their inner turmoil to finally gather the strength within themselves to overcome the challenge.
And now we see inner growth. The man above is panicking, terrified, unsure of what to do. There’s a moment of clarity as the bird stands between him and the car. But something changes. Is it a look of curiosity in the bird? There’s a small injury on it’s leg that prevents it from standing still, which is why the bird is constantly flapping and cawing.
The man realizes that the bird is just as terrified as him… because he’s hungry. Our man braves the little bird and offers him a slice of bread, inching closer to his biggest fear. Instead of screaming, the bird lets out a soft coo and accepts the bread without biting the man, flying off to a nearby tree where little birdies are happily waiting for food. Our main character learns that not all birds are bad, and they are only looking out for their survival. Inner growth. | https://medium.com/swlh/writing-character-driven-stories-7d6dea88aae9 | ['Laura Winter'] | 2020-11-18 02:55:00.647000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Character', 'Character Development', 'Writers On Writing', 'Writer'] |
Embarking on a Chaos Engineering Journey | How to begin thinking about Chaos Engineering
“Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system
in order to build confidence in the system’s capability
to withstand turbulent conditions in production.” — https://principlesofchaos.org/
How do you turn a chaotic mess into a manageable system? Photo by Rick Mason on Unsplash
Today’s computer systems are very complex and vastly distributed. Microservice architectures can quickly become giant piles of legos on the floor, leading to difficulties in troubleshooting failures, extending downtime when incidents occur, and increased anxiety when making changes to production. Chaos Engineering can bring your platform to the next level by increasing the resiliency of the platform itself, increasing the preparedness of the developers and operators to respond to production incidents, and increasing the confidence developers have for making changes to production.
Often times, Production environments are treated like a House of Cards. It’s a fragile work of art. Please don’t change anything, we don’t want it to fall over.
It’s time to clean up the mess, and build a sturdy production environment that developers have confidence in. So how do you begin a chaos engineering program in your organization, especially if you are worried about knocking down your house of cards? There are many important ideas to keep in mind when starting off with chaos engineering. The idea of breaking things can seem intimidating at first, but trust me, you already are breaking things on purpose every-time you develop new code.
Test Driven Development, the first thing I ever learned in my introduction to software construction class in college. Never write a line of code for your program before having a functional test suite. Your test suites must include test vectors designed to break your code. No test suite is complete without testing what happens when you enter invalid inputs or supply the program with a barrage of edge case anomalies. No one ever expects these issues to happen frequently, but any good programmer understands that a user will do something unexpectedly, and if you haven’t tested for it, your code will break, or at the very least, perform unexpectedly.
A map of the Internet connections, circa 2005. Your production environment feels like its own universe sometimes.
If you are going to test your code, why not test how it operates in the production environment? Production environments are so large and complex now that no one individual can be certain of how anything will behave in all circumstances. Do you know what will happen to your service if the database it relies on is no longer reachable? What if just the queries take longer to complete all of a sudden? What happens to your service when a dependency breaks for a dependency of your service? No one person is going to have this answer, but you can discover the answers and begin to develop an understanding of the emergent properties of your production environment through chaos engineering and testing for failure scenarios.
Testing for failures is an essential step in the development cycle. Avoiding failure tests will only provide for more uncertainty in your code, less confidence in making changes, and longer time to resolution for incidents you were unprepared to respond to. The next question becomes, if it is so important to break things, how do I begin breaking things responsibly?
It takes time to become resilient. Start small. Plant the seeds, and nurture them as they grow.
When starting off with Chaos Engineering, start small. A lot of Chaos Engineers will call this idea limiting the Blast Radius. The idea is simple: minimize the impact of your failure test. When designing a failure scenario to test for, don’t start with a black hole test to see what happens when AWS has an S3 outage. Start Small. Design a test that only impacts the behavior of your service. If you are uncertain the test will not effect an upstream or downstream dependency or system, do not perform the test. Only increase the blast radius after validating the resiliency of everything within the blast radius.
Observability enables resiliency. Photo by Daniil Vnoutchkov on Unsplash
Observability is an absolute must for Chaos Engineering. When you begin breaking something in production, you are going to want to see what is broken. There will be things that you expect to break, as well as things that you don’t expect to break. If something unexpected breaks, it will be near impossible to fix without any observability. I suggest having three forms of observability:
Observability: Spiderweb view of your infrastructure. It is necessary to see what is running on what, and where all of those things are, and what they are connected to. Traceability: Flame chart style or any other visual form that lets you see an entire call chain on demand. If a call goes through multiple microservices, where did it go wrong? Time Series: Graphs of only the important stuff. It is necessary to have dashboards that display the condition of your platform. Be careful with making these too complex as too much information can overwhelm users instead of aiding them.
Bend, don’t break. Turbulent conditions can catalyze resiliency or destruction.
Chaos Engineering can bring your platform to the next level by increasing both the resiliency of the platform, as well as the preparedness of the developers and operators to respond to production incidents. By introducing a healthy dose of chaos into your systems, you can begin experimenting with possible failures that will affect your platform. This will strengthen your confidence in the platform by aiding you in understanding the emergent properties of the platform.
Overall, undergoing this process of chaos engineering, you will become more prepared each day to resolve actual production issues. Chaos engineering will enable you to avoid future production issues that you can foresee happening, as well as to reduce the amount of time that is needed for resolving a production issue you did not foresee happening. There are many valuable ways to adopt and implement chaos engineering within your organization, and many companies and organizations have found these practices to be valuable and successful. | https://medium.com/cloud-native-the-gathering/embarking-on-a-chaos-engineering-journey-e02f33064207 | ['James Gordon'] | 2019-10-22 16:39:15.646000+00:00 | ['Microservices', 'Programming', 'Chaos Engineering', 'Resilience', 'Testing'] |
About Me — Paul Gimsay. Veteran, peacekeeper and writer. It is… | About Me — Paul Gimsay
Veteran, peacekeeper and writer. It is never late to start
Visit to the Orphanage by Author
Take what life gives you and run the formula.
This has been my mantra while growing up. Everything happened to me by fate, or rather providence. It is not only my story; it is the same story for millions of children from my part of the world who grew up with one parent.
My name is Paul Gimsay. I come from Plateau State in North Central, Nigeria. I am the first son but second in a family of 3 boys and 3 girls. We were all raised single-handedly by a mother, who saw to it that we acquired the basics of life and education.
The famous Actor, Marlon Brando, said that sometimes your destiny changes when you lose your father. This clearly summarizes my story.
I grew up confused as to what to do. The lack of a father figure to provide guidance was obvious.
I had so many strengths, but I didn’t know because there was no one to point them out to me. I was very good in sports and strong with schoolwork. I had a strong passion for books — I read everything from fiction, non-fiction to biographies. This gave me the foundation I needed.
Growing up, all I wanted to do was to go into the academic world, become a professor and add to the body of knowledge in my field of expertise. This never happened as fate decided otherwise.
I joined the army at an early age and served for 26 years. I gave all my youth to serving my country. It gave me the opportunity to travel and see the world. I was able to support my siblings financially. It was the best decision of my life.
The army opened a new vista for me. I settled for the Signals Corps and became Signals Officer for all my years of service. The army provided the sponsorship for me to go college and study Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering.
I was launched into peacekeeping in Liberia in 1991. I served with the Nigerian Battalion 7 as the Regimental Signal Officer (RSO). This was part of the sub-regional peace enforcement forces ECOMOG, under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
My journey into peacekeeping continued in 2006 when I joined the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) to head the Communications and Information Technology Section (CITS). I primarily identified field communications requirements and recommended to the Head of Mission. This is then passed to the Head of the Darfur Integrated Task Force for review and adoption.
I have been in international peacekeeping operations working as information systems manager. My areas of expertise include Innovation Leadership, Digital Business Transformation Management, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Strategy and Leadership.
My motivation for writing on Medium
I was a Medium member for two years before I joined the Medium Partner Program in January 2020. My motivation came from three triggers.
When the world closed early this year due to COVID-19, I decided to take up writing to kill time. I wrote in FB, LinkedIn and Twitter from time to time, but I wasn’t regular due to lack of time. The reviews were good, and I had sizeable followership.
My daughter started her blog this year. I was not only thrilled but captivated with her simple writing. This inspired me; after all the apple does not fall far from the tree. I had it in me too.
As a storyteller, I have seen immense benefits in learning by doing, listening and sharing experience. Every story shared brings with it an experience which must resonate with someone, somewhere.
Storytelling helps to connect to humanity as you never know who it touches.
Presently, I write for two publications in Medium — The Innovation and An Ingenious Piece (An Idea). Thanks to Quy Ma, I have started now on About Me Stories. I write mainly on leadership, self-empowerment and growth, entrepreneurial leadership, innovation, sports and digital business transformation.
Life Philosophy
I take time to visit Orphanages occasionally. When I cannot visit, I make donations in cash and kind. This is my way of giving back and touching lives.
The picture above speaks for itself. I visited one of the orphanages in Kenya and the experience was life changing. I saw determined kids who want the best out of life. Talking to them showed that it does not matter how you start, once the opportunity presents itself, you will grow.
I donated money for books because I strongly believe that a hand that puts down a book is never the same. I benefited a lot from reading and should therefore share the same message.
All it takes is one idea from a book to impact one’s life forever.
Family and work
I live and work in Nairobi, Kenya with my family — my wife, 2 sons and one daughter.
There are so many experiences to cherish in Kenya with its abundance of tourist attractions such as the Maasai Mara wild. The annual migration is always a sight to behold.
Ranging from Safari trips, mountain climbing, hiking and the white sand beaches, the choice remains yours to make if you visit Kenya. | https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-paul-gimsay-13147c9116d9 | ['Paul Gimsay'] | 2020-12-28 13:02:36.754000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Life Lessons', 'Giving Back', 'Writing'] |
Five tips for getting stakeholders aligned | can be a long road from a lead’s initial interest to the close of a deal, and taking a deal all the way to the closing meeting only to watch it fall apart can be excruciating.
Fortunately, as a salesperson, you can avoid a tragic ending if you get stakeholder buy-in early. Whether you’re working directly with the decision maker, or several stakeholders are involved in the project, you can follow these steps to keep your deal on the right path.
1. Communicate directly
Nothing is worse than playing a game of telephone when you’re trying to close on a project with multiple stakeholders or decision makers.
To avoid mixed messages or the sharing of impartial information, enlist your contact to help you get all stakeholders in the same room (or on the same conference call) so that you are sharing information just once.
Confident closers know their product or service is valuable, and may even decide not to meet with a potential client unless everyone is present. After all, a prospective client who isn’t willing to get all decision makers in one place is throwing up two very big red flags:
They’re disorganized. If the issue is that the prospective client simply isn’t organized enough to get everyone there, that’s a sign that you may be entering into a project with a company that may not be ready to work with an organized, process-driven team. Unorganized clients slow down timelines, re-negotiate project scope, and even question the process. Consider whether this really is an organization you want to work with. They’re not ready. If your contact isn’t willing to gather all decision makers in one place, then the prospective client is not ready to close. Much of the time the contact is still trying to determine if she thinks you are the right fit for the project and will not go to bat for you with others in her organization until that internal conflict is resolved. If you find yourself in this situation, take a step back and ask yourself if you are trying to close the deal too quickly. If so, slow down and work on building the relationship. Nothing kills a prospective deal as quickly as a pushy salesperson.
2. Understand their needs
Every stakeholder brings their own agenda and expectations to a new project. While it would be nice to think that every project team has discussed all expectations and worked out any potential conflicts before approaching you about a project, this usually doesn’t happen.
In order to get buy-in from all stakeholders you must understand their perspectives and expectations, not just assume you know what they want. Ask questions of each team member. Where you see potential conflicts, approach it head on with the goal of resolving these conflicts into win-win situations for everyone.
For teams of stakeholders that seem very fractured or unsure of what they are looking for, you should approach them with the idea of pursuing a funded Discovery to uncover their real needs, both from their perspective as well as the perspective of their end users.
If you’re not sure what an effective Discovery looks like, check out Madison Ave. Collective’s free guide to Discovery.
3. Demonstrate expertise and ability to do good work
Your firm begins demonstrating expertise and ability to a prospective client with the first impression, whether that is the first visit to your website, an email from a trusted referral, or the conversation you created on that initial cold call.
That first impression, however, is often forgotten by the time you get to the closing meeting. Stakeholders on projects of any size always have anxiety over whether they are pursuing the right project, choosing the right agency to work with, or even whether they should pursue this project at all. Ease this anxiety and uncertainty by showing them that the project they are about to undertake with your firm is nothing new to you. Have work samples to share with them of similar projects you’ve worked on, and talk to them about what makes your firm’s process an iron-clad recipe for success.
4. Demonstrate value in the project
Budget is always a hot button topic. The quickest way to show a client that the budget is realistic and worth spending is to demonstrate a return on the investment. Sometimes this can come in the form of metrics from past projects you’ve worked on, like an increase in site traffic or views of a social media campaign. Others may prefer to see cold hard dollar signs showing them how the project will affect the company’s bottom line.
If you feel that you have developed a fair and competitive estimate for the work, but face push-back from the prospective client, hold strong to your estimate, especially if it fits within the budget figures they’ve given you in previous discussions. While there are prospective clients out there who will try to bully you into a better rate, remember that your work has value that is established by both your work’s quality and by the market. If your work is of high quality, then by giving in to these bullying tactics you may be undercutting your own value in the market in the long run.
If you have a prospective client that you know is budget-sensitive, consider developing a phased proposal for closing, where “phase 1” meets all the client’s basic needs (and maybe a few wants), comes in solidly under budget, and is developed in a way that makes it easily scalable. Phases two and possibly three meet the client’s biggest want, help them to plan and budget effectively, and hopefully creates several more projects for your future project pipeline.
5. Highlight their role (and value) in the process
Some stakeholders have trouble letting go of control. If you do a good job asking the right questions in point 2, understanding their needs, you will identify these individuals early. With these people, highlighting how they will play an important role in helping to guide and develop the project can be a crucial tool for getting their buy-in.
* * *
Effectively implementing these five efforts will help you close more deals, identify issues before they become problems in the project itself, and even eliminate clients you don’t really want (and just don’t know it yet!)
Share your own tips for getting buy-in from stakeholders in the comments! | https://medium.com/madison-ave-collective/5-tips-to-getting-stakeholders-aligned-a396e1e4f6d6 | ['Logan Hoffman'] | 2016-06-20 18:31:07.425000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Sales', 'Business Development'] |
React Patterns — Writing Clean Code | Photo by Zoë Reeve on Unsplash
React is a popular library for creating web apps and mobile apps.
In this article, we’ll look at how to clean up our React code.
Multi-Properties
If we have lots of attributes or props, we should put them in their own line.
For instance, we can write:
<Content
foo="bar"
anotherProp="baz"
onClick={this.handleClick}
/>
This way, we can see each prop clearly.
The props should have one indentation.
This way, we won’t have long lines that we’ve to scroll through.
Conditionals
We often have to write conditional statements or expressions to display something conditionally.
For instance, we may write:
let link;
if (isLoggedIn) {
link= <LogoutLink />
}
return <div>{link}</div>
However, that’s hard to read.
It’s even harder is we have multiple components and conditions.
To make this shorter, we can use an inline expression instead:
<div>
{isLoggedIn && <LogoutLink />}
</div>
This works because if isLoggedIn is false then the 2nd expression won’t be evaluated.
But if it is, then it will.
If we want to display something for the alternate case, instead of writing:
let link;
if (isLoggedIn) {
link = <LogoutLink />
} else {
link = <LoginLink />
}
return <div>{link}</div>
We can use a ternary expression to make this shorter:
<div>
{isLoggedIn ? <LogoutLink /> : <LoginLink />}
</div>
If we have longer boolean expressions, then we should put them in a function instead of writing them out:
const canShowSecretData = () => {
return dataLoaded && (isAdmin || userHasPermissions)
}
And then we can use that in our conditional expression to render something:
<div>
{canShowSecretData() && <Secret />}
</div>
If we have a class component, we can also define a getter:
get canShowSecretData(){
return dataLoaded && (isAdmin || userHasPermissions)
}
Then we can use:
<div>
{this.canShowSecretData && <Secret />}
</div>
Computed properties can also be put into a function.
For instance, we can write:
const getPriceAfterTax = () => {
return currency * (1 + taxRate);
}
In a class component, we can also write:
getPriceAfterTax() {
return this.props.currency * (1 + this.props.taxRate);
}
If it’s in a class, we can also use a getter:
get priceAfterTax() {
return this.props.currency * (1 + this.props.taxRate);
}
There’s also a render-if package that lets us pass in a component to conditionally display.
We can install it by writing:
npm install --save render-if
For instance, we can write:
const canShowSecretData = renderIf(
dataLoaded && (isAdmin || userHasPermissions)
)
Then we can conditionally render our component with:
<div>
{canShowSecretData(<Secret />)}
</div>
Alternatively, we can use the react-only-if package to create a component that’s conditionally rendered with the high-order component that comes with the package.
To install it, we write:
npm install --save react-only-if
Then we can write:
const SecretDataOnlyIf = onlyIf(
({ dataLoaded, isAdmin, userHasPermissions }) => {
return dataLoaded && (isAdmin || userHasPermissions)
}
)(Secret) ... <div>
<SecretOnlyIf
dataLoaded={...}
isAdmin={...}
userHasPermissions={...}
/>
</div>
Now we don’t have to have logic in our expression to display Secret in the JSX code.
We pass in the expressions to check before rendering something as props.
Loops
To render a list of objects, we use the map method.
For example, we can write:
<div>
{users.map(user => <p key={user.id}>{user.name}</p)}
</div>
Note that we’ve to use the key prop with a unique ID so React can keep track of the list items properly.
This is more important if we’re changing the entries dynamically.
Control Statements
There’s the jsx-control-statements package to let us render items conditionally, especially where there are multiple cases.
We install it by writing:
npm install - save jsx-control-statements
Then in the .babelrc file, we add:
"plugins": ["jsx-control-statements"]
Then we can write:
<If condition={canShowSecret}>
<Secret />
</If>
If we have more than one case, we can write:
<Choose>
<When condition={...}>
<span>if</span>
</When>
<When condition={...}>
<span>else if</span>
</When>
<Otherwise>
<span>else</span>
</Otherwise>
</Choose>
When is like case and Otherwise if like default in a switch statement.
Photo by Roksolana Zasiadko on Unsplash
Conclusion
There are many ways to render things cleaning in React components.
If we have lots of conditional statements, we may want to use those packages listed.
If we want to render a list, we use the array’s map method.
JavaScript In Plain English
Enjoyed this article? If so, get more similar content by subscribing to our YouTube channel! | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/react-patterns-writing-clean-code-9535f211a6a9 | ['John Au-Yeung'] | 2020-06-18 06:51:23.173000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'React', 'JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Web Development'] |
Slope/Bump chart in QlikView | Visualizing ranking based on a metric for a given dimension over a time period is possible in QlikView chart object. Slope or Bump chart helps visualizing data for a top n analysis and change in ranking over the time period.
The visualization below shows ranking of Product Segment over a time period of six year. The chart help us to see the ranking of each Segment every year, and increase or decrease in the ranking. The top 3 ranking has remain same over the period of time, but changes are visible for ranking between 4 to 8.
Ranking of Product Segment over Year
I will demonstrate creating the above visualization in QlikView app. I already loaded the sample data and the model in the app.
Data Model
The Bump chart needs to two dimension and one measure. For my example, I will use the following fields for dimensions and measure :
Year for the DimDate table as first dimension Segment for the DimProduct table as second dimension Sum(Units*[Unit Price]) to calculate Rank
Below are the steps to build the above visualization:
Add a New Sheet object -> Chart.. On the General Tab enter the appropriate title, and select Line chart from the Chart type. Click next to Dimension Tab
General Tab
3. On the Dimension Tab add Year and Segment fields to the Used Dimension
Dimensions Tab
Turn off the Label for both dimension. Click Next to Expressions Tab
Dimensions Tab
4. Enter the ranking expression in the Edit Expression box and Click OK to close the box
Rank(Sum(Units*[Unit Price]))*(-1)
In the Label box enter Sales Rank
Expression Tab
Check the Symbol and Values on the Data Points check boxes. Change the Symbol to Dots, and Line to Smooth from the drop box.
Click on the Next button to Style Tab
6. Click on the Next button to Presentation Tab
Increase the Line Width and Symbol size
Presentation Tab
Click on the next button to Axes Tab
7. On the Axes Tab, check on the Hide Axis option
On the Dimension Axis, check on the Show Grid option. Select Thick Line on the Grid Style option
Axes Tab
Click the Next button to Colors Tab
8. Click on the Next button to Numbers Tab
Change the Number Format Settings to Integer, and change the Format Pattern to #,##0;#,##0
Number Tab
Click on the Next button to the Font Tab
9. Click on the Next button to the Caption Tab
Turn off any Special Icons, and Allow Minimize and Allow Maximize options
Caption Tab
Click Finish button to add the chart to the sheet.
10. Resize the chart to improve the chart readability.
Bump Chart
11. There is Null value in the Segment field. Right click on the chart and select Properties from the menu option.
Click on the Dimension Tab, and select Segment from the Used Dimensions. Check on the Suppress When Value is Null option and click OK to close the Chart Properties box.
Suppress Null on the Dimension Tab
12. The Legend on the right side of the chart takes spaces and it is difficult to read and check ranking for the Product Segment.
Turn it off on Presentation Tab of the Chart Property
Turn off the Legend on Presentation tab.
13. The chart is readable but the Product segment legend to color is missing. Adding the Product segment value to each line will provide better information.
Bump Chart without legends
14. On the Expression Tab of the Chart property add a new expression as
If(Year = 2011 or Year = 2016, Segment, ‘’) and empty label
Turn off the Line option
Turn on the Values on Data Points
Add Product Segment Label
Click OK to update the chart
Bump Chart with Dimension values
The hard coded value can be replaced with variable assigned using the Max and Min from the Year Field.
The chart organizes the Product segment ranking for the time period Year and thier changes in the position. | https://k-shivanand.medium.com/slope-bump-chart-in-qlikview-a3b21de24563 | ['Shivanand Kamath'] | 2020-12-17 01:56:06.980000+00:00 | ['Qlikview', 'Bump', 'Visualization', 'Visual Design', 'Ránking'] |
Storiqa Presented Multicurrency Payment Solution at RISE 2018 HK | More than 16,000 visitors, 700 journalists, 760 start-ups from 120 countries attended the most powerful tech conference RISE, bringing together some of the most brilliant minds in tech from around the globe. Storiqa COO Andrian Galkin gave a presentation on Growth Summit stage, which is dedicated to the companies of the future: startups were given an opportunity to present their ideas and share their experiences. Andrian Galkin presented the company, highlighting our multicurrency solution Storiqa Wallet.
“RISE conference is a perfect place to present your company and meet other technological startups and giants. Storiqa is pleased to be able to share and exchange our developments as a blockchain marketplace and e wallet, we had a great time sharing our successful token sale and product development as a platform” says Senior Vice President, Alan Wong.
Also, we met reporters, anchors, and bloggers from the most influential international media.
Anastasia Taved (Storiqa PR director) and Steven Ten (cryptoticker.io)
Anastasia Taved gave an interview for cryptoticker.io. You will find the articles using links:
For all German speaking members:
Forbes Contributor Sam Ameen interviewed Andrian Galkin:
Moreover, Michelle Chang, TED Talks moderator, has invited Storiqa to lead next technology section of TED Talks in HK in January.
RISE 2018 — a great event for the world’s biggest companies and most exciting startups. The audience is very modern and is not confused challenging and bold ideas. IoT, AI, AR, blockchain were discussed at the conference most actively (what a surprise). “The optimism at the RISE technology conference here in Hong Kong is palpable” says BBC and we absolutely agree. We are sure that the number of supporters of cryptoshopping with STQ will increase! 🚀 | https://medium.com/storiqa/storiqa-presented-multicurrency-payment-solution-at-rise-2018-hk-e8a0d8f046f9 | [] | 2018-07-19 17:51:32.085000+00:00 | ['Event', 'Startup', 'Storiqa', 'Stqbusiness', 'Crypto'] |
Two Sides of The Same Distribution: Permutations | Two Sides of The Same Distribution: Permutations
Recently, I’ve been spending more time getting to know the statistical side of the python programming language primarily in relation to visualizing certain characteristics and ideas. I thought I would share a quick tutorial on how one might go about determining whether two populations share a common distribution. The data that I will be using is NBA data sampled from the 2016 season and exhibits features such as the player’s name,the team they play for, their position, their age, their height, their weight, their salary and college attended.
For this example I will be focusing on player position in relation to salary earned.
First, you probably want to do an inspection of the features that you’re most interested in to get a feel for the spread of the data. Below is a boxplot showcasing the salary distribution as it relates to player position:
I should also note that all missing values had been discarded from the dataset reducing the number of observations to 364 rows from 458.
As you can see from the above boxplot many of the positions have similar distributions. The IQR’s for all plots seem to overlap, but there are some distinctions in that the center position appears to, on average, pay the most while the shooting guard position posesses the smallest median salary. That being said for this example, I’m interested in determining if the distributions between two groups are similar and by the looks of it the point guard position and power forward position have like distributions.
We can use permutations to recreate samples of both sets of salary information as it relates to the positions and reassign the new values to assist in the creation of an empirical cumulative distribution plot which will be subsequently compared to the individual ecdf’s of our original data.
First, we want to seperate salary information by each of the positions ultimately creating two seperate arrays. This is relatively straightforward using the pandas library of python
Secondly, we want to construct our function that will help in the construction of the ecdf’s.
then we would like to create a function that will take both arrays and combine them, permute them and then reassign them.
If the salary distributions for either position are essentially the same then it shouldn’t matter if we were to freely reassign samples from either distribution .
The above plot was generated by simulating fifty permutations and plotting each distributions respective ecdf. The dark blue line demonstrates the ecdf of the original point guard salary distribution while the red line denotes the ecdf of the original power forward salary distribution. The haze in between are the repeated ecdfs of the fifity permutions executed. If the two distributions were indeed similar then we would expect to see the original empirical distribution functions overlap with those of the permutations. In this graph we see just that! Implying that the distributions are indeed similar.
To further illustrate that the distributions are alike we can dig a little deeper by establishing a test statistic, the mean difference between the two original distributions. If we use the same logic as above we can use permutations to reconstruct this test statistic repeatedly and ultimately compare it to the actual or observed value.
Dummy function for test statistic
The above plot was constructed by generating 10,000 samples of our test statistic via the pre-defined functions we assembled earlier. The dashed line represents the observed value which is $456,081.27.
Where permuted_diff represents the permutation of 10,000 samples we can assess the probability of obtaining the observed value or some value more extreme, commonly known as the p-value. In this case the p-value is rather large and thus we have no evidence that suggest that the two distributions are not alike. | https://medium.com/statistical-discourse-by-phil-frederick/two-sides-of-the-same-distribution-permutations-a1548c593b3e | ['Phil Frederick'] | 2019-10-22 18:53:14.077000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Tutorial', 'Statistics', 'Python'] |
No, “The Crown” Doesn’t Need a Disclaimer That It’s Fiction | No, “The Crown” Doesn’t Need a Disclaimer That It’s Fiction
Who would believe it anyway?
Image available from IMDB.com
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen;
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us . . .
And please, God, please, make her look good on Netflix.
Since 2016, the streaming service has been home to The Crown, a series about the life and reign of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. Over 73 million households have watched the series; mine is one of them. Season 4 just dropped, and it looks like it will be even better than the first three. I can’t wait to dive in and laugh, cry, maybe throw pillows at the screen.
One emotion I don’t expect to feel: confusion.
The show is fiction. Historical fiction, yes: the characters were, and are, actual people. But as I watch, I know what I’m seeing is artifice based on events, not the events themselves.
This puts me in a minority, apparently.
British Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden thinks The Crown should include a disclaimer emphasizing its untruth. Earl Charles Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother, agrees: “People see a program like that, and they forget that it is fiction.” Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Princess Margaret in the series, is also on board, saying the producers have “a moral responsibility to say, ‘Hang on guys, this is not … it’s not a drama-doc, we’re making a drama.’”
Few people, I think, confuse documentaries and dramas. Documentaries have narrators. They use still photos and video clips, and awkward interviews with college professors. They don’t hire Bellatrix Lestrange, Dick Solomon, or the Eleventh Doctor for live-action sequences. You don’t watch a documentary and think, “Is this real?” Questioning whether something is real is proof that it was written as fiction.
Besides, every viewer has the opportunity to Google anything they find weird or curious. In fact, that’s part of the viewing experience, according to one critic:
Consider Peter Townsend, the equerry whose doomed romance with Princess Margaret is depicted in the show’s first season. In the month before “The Crown” debuted in November 2016, Townsend’s Wikipedia page drew an average of 669 visitors a day. In the month following its debut, the number of daily visitors grew exponentially to 45,676.
The series is full of nuggets like this, showing the crew’s fealty to research, which is handled by a five-person team (most shows use only one or two). I pause episodes to look up stuff all the time, which means I’ve learned more about British history from my sofa than any classroom chair. I haven’t learned it from the show; I’ve learned it because of the show, which calls into question generations of critics who claimed that TV makes us stupid.
Crirics like Frank Lloyd Wright, who called television “chewing gum for the eyes.”
Harlan Ellison, for whom it was “the great enervator of the American people.”
Ray Bradbury, who called it “that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”
To them, I say: shut up, bitches. The Crown is active viewing. A worldwide, real-time study group. Fortnite for fact-checkers. | https://medium.com/fan-fare/no-the-crown-doesnt-need-a-fiction-disclaimer-828c3b5e01ad | ['Anthony Aycock'] | 2020-12-17 13:28:56.465000+00:00 | ['Television', 'TV Series', 'Britain', 'Hollywood', 'Writing'] |
How to Scrape a Static Website | A really quick tutorial
Prerequisites: Knowledge of React.js will be required for this tutorial.
Let’s say you want to pull data from the frontend of a website because there’s no API available. You inspect the page and see that the data is available in the HTML, so how do you gather that information to be used in your app? It’s rather simple, we’re going to install two libraries and write less than 50 lines of code to demonstrate the scraping of a website. To keep this tutorial simple, we’ll use https://pokedex.org/ as our example.
In terminal:
create-react-app scraping-demo
cd scraping-demo
npm i request-promise
npm i cheerio
2. We’re going to start by using request-promise to get the HTML from https://pokedex.org/ into a console log.
In App.js:
3. Sometimes you may come across a CORS error blocking you from fetching. For demonstration purposes, try fetching pokemon.com
rp("https://www.pokemon.com/us/pokedex/")
You should see an error like this in the console:
4. You can get around CORS by using https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com. Simply add that URL before your desired fetch URL like so:
rp("https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/https://www.pokemon.com/us/pokedex/")
Now you should be able to see the HTML from pokemon.com show in your console.
5. But we won’t have to use cors-anywhere for rp("https://pokedex.org/") , so let’s proceed
6. Now that we have the HTML, let’s use the cheerio library to help us grab the exact data that we want from desired element tags. In this example, we’ll grab all the names of the pokemon then display them in a list.
In App.js:
7. You should see a list of all the pokemon names display onto your screen:
It’s that simple! You scraped those names from the HTML without having to directly access any backend. Now try scraping the examples on http://toscrape.com/ for practice. Enjoy your new abilities! | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-scrape-a-static-website-846bd9c6ed28 | ['Robert Chen'] | 2020-11-07 14:44:02.600000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'React', 'Frontend', 'Data', 'Web Scraping'] |
The Hardest Stoic Spiritual Exercise and Why It’s Crucial for Happiness | Zeno, the founder of Stoicism in ancient Greece, is said to have begun his studies in philosophy by tutoring under Crates, a cynic. One of the first things that Zeno learned, as a result, was to practice not being ashamed of things that were not shameful.
To reinforce this lesson, Crates apparently had Zeno walk around with a pot full of lentil soup in public places. When he saw that Zeno was embarrassed and tried to keep the pot out of sight, Crates broke it by striking it with his staff. Zeno ran away, mortified. When he did, Crates called out:
“Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you” (DL 7.3).
And, of course, nothing bad had happened to Zeno. He only worried that other people might think ill of him. And this worrying about what other people thought was something that Zeno eventually learned to overcome.
It’s something that you and I, everyone really, must learn if we are ever going to be happy and live a good life.
Because if you want to achieve that goal, if you want to live a good life, then you need to be (relatively) unconcerned with other people’s opinions for two reasons. First, you will otherwise end up living the life that they think you should have, not yours. Second, you will otherwise end up playing a game — the recognition game — that you cannot win.
I think the first point is obvious. If you are always trying to please other people, to live by what they think, then there will be nothing left of your life for you to decide.
The second point is pretty obvious too: there is always a bigger fish. If you think that you can win the recognition game, you are wrong.
To illustrate, think of it this way. Marketers developed what is called a Q-Score to measure how popular various celebrities are. Their goal was to allow large firms to use those scores to more effectively advertise to their fan base. At one point, Obama was on top of that list. Now, he’s not (because he’s just not in the news as much). Even if you win at that game, in short, you will be replaced.
What these points mean is that we all need to learn, we all need to practice, not worrying about other people’s opinions about us. And while there are actually harder Stoic actions — such as dying freely — this practice is the hardest of the daily activities you could perform.
The 20th-century philosopher of Greek antiquity, Pierre Hadot, called these practices that help you become a better person “spiritual exercises,” because they are like medicine for your soul, rather than your body.
To put the goal memorably: to live an invulnerable life, you must practice daily vulnerability.
In less paradoxical language, to achieve Stoic happiness, where events outside your control don’t ruin your life, you have to address the sources of your shame — you have to be vulnerable.
The exercise of vulnerability understood in the way that people normally think of that concept then, is nothing but courage, as the Stoics thought of that. That’s my main claim.
What I am going to do is explain two spiritual exercises concerning shame and vulnerability following the Stoics, so that you can learn to live a happier life. In that explanation, I’ll also make my case that what’s at stake is courage.
Let’s begin with the easier version of these exercises.
Social Vulnerability
We no longer have the Republic that Zeno wrote, but apparently it was controversial in classical antiquity. He prohibited the building of temples, law courts and gymnasiums in his supposed “utopia.” Further, Diogenes tells us,
“He bids men and women wear the same dress and keep no part of the body entirely covered” (DL 7.33–34).
Why would Zeno want people to wear androgynous clothes that didn’t cover all parts of your body?
The Stoic lesson here seems to be that people become too conscious of what other people think about them, and they try, wrongly, to conform to social norms. These include how certain genders should act and the idea that some parts of the body are shameful.
This doesn’t mean that to practice Stoic vulnerability you should wear a sack cloth or wander around naked (though maybe Zeno would have liked nudism?).
To practice social vulnerability, the main thing you need to do is learn not to be trapped by social categories and expectations about them. I’ll give you some examples broken down by gender (since that’s an important social category).
For men, the challenge can be put this way: can you do “girly” things? Could you, for example, order a Cosmo as a drink? Could you go to a Yoga class?
For women, the challenge can’t be to perform masculine activities — at least not simply. The reason is that when women do masculine things, they still tend to be thought good, or at least not so bad. A woman, for example, who can chug a beer in four seconds will command the respect of the bros at the local bar.
A better example, then, might be the no-makeup challenges that you see celebrities perform occasionally. When not using makeup, women aren’t explicitly crossing into masculine categories — it’s just vulnerability.
A friend of mine practiced vulnerability as a woman in an unusual way. She had been dating a guy (also a friend) for a bit. After going to dinner, the meal just didn’t sit well with her. So she simply announced that fact and then farted in the car. Not exactly the sexiest thing for a woman to do, but her boyfriend laughed it off … and they’re engaged now. So something good came of that show of vulnerability.
How to Practice This
Whatever your gender, what you are after is an “affective cognition”, a feeling. The thought goes like this:
They are looking at me … and I’m not as I’m “supposed” to be.
The Stoics called this an immediate impression. It’s not fully rational yet. You need to stop yourself from just agreeing to these impressions, so that you can figure out if they are right.
The crucial part is to discern whether the evaluative portion of that feeling makes sense. Yes, they are looking at me. But that’s not a big deal. Also, yes, I’m not conforming to social norms — I’m not as I’m “supposed” to be. But why does that matter? Why is that bad?
What was so wrong about Zeno holding a pot of lentils in public? What’s so bad about a guy ordering a Cosmo? What’s so terrible about a woman farting? Nothing.
Find that feeling and learn to separate out that part that holds that it’s a bad thing. It’s not. Your life as a whole is not going worse because of what “they” think. But if you give into that irrational first impression, then it just might.
How This Exercise Will Shift Your Life
This spiritual exercise will build your courage. I hope that’s obvious. It takes courage to wander around in public holding a pot of soup, or with a big girly Cosmo (if you’re a guy). It takes courage to fart in front of your boyfriend and hopes that he’ll still like you.
But you need the courage to live your life and not the life that “they” say you should live.
To understand how much that is worth, consider it this way. Can you put a price tag on living your own life?
Suppose a billionaire says that they will pay you a very large sum of money if you agree just to live according to their every whim for a year. How much would you ask for?
What if it was for ten years? How much would you ask for in that case?
Then why are you giving your life away for free? Why are you right now doing what “they” say without charging anything at all?
Personal Vulnerability
The second kind of spiritual exercise turns on what might be called “personal vulnerability.” Unlike the last group, the focus isn’t on social categories. Rather, it’s on what you think about yourself as a person.
Are you an athlete? A chemist? An entrepreneur? A writer? Those are categories of personal self-conception. They’re also where our deepest vulnerabilities lie. Zeno again proves to be a useful guide here.
After having practised and having taught philosophy for a while, Zeno realized that he still needed to improve his logical knowledge. So he went to go learn from the logical philosopher Polemo at his school … and Polemo noticed.
He called Zeno out saying:
“You slip in, Zeno, by the garden door — I’m quite aware of it — you filch my teachings and give them a Phoenician twist [to pass them off as your own]” (DL 7.25).
Zeno continued going anyway.
Think about that for a little bit. Zeno thought of himself as a philosopher, taught as a philosopher, made a living by his reputation as a master philosopher. Yet, despite this, he realized that his understanding of logic could use some help. So he then went to the school of another philosopher as a student. Then, the master of that school made fun of him for it … and Zeno still went.
The vulnerability at stake here (like the last one) isn’t about a trauma (go to counselling for that), but it is about something really personal. It’s about how you think of yourself, and about your vulnerabilities at the core of your identity.
I’ll give you another story to flesh out the practice. To be fair, and consistent, I’ve got to do one about myself.
So I’m a professional philosopher in the university system of the United States. This means that I’m supposed to be able to research, get my work accepted at peer-reviewed public conferences, and get it published in peer-reviewed journals. The core of who I am is wrapped up in this.
Three years into graduate school, I had not figured this process out. I was supposed to be smart. But I couldn’t get anything accepted into conferences, much less into peer-reviewed journals.
My wife started grad school two years after I did. She was also a theatre major as an undergraduate student and switched into philosophy. Yet she was able to get her work accepted into a peer-reviewed conference her very first year, and she did that while I was still struggling.
I took the advice of “keep on keeping on,” and after much trying, I finally landed … a commentary … on another graduate student’s talk.
The mountain of rejections was difficult to handle, in part because conference applications tend to (or at least tended to) come twice a year, and there’s a lot of lag time in between. So your failures linger for months.
I figured it out eventually … after doing something a little like Zeno. I decided to let go of the idea that I knew how to write philosophy.
Instead, I set myself the task of reviewing a stack of journals to figure out commonalities among all the publications. I worked as a sociologist, basically, coding up what was published, how common certain topics were, etc.
Then, after an embarrassing amount of time doing meta- work, I discovered that philosophers only make about 15 publishable types of arguments. Really only four of those are both accessible to grad students and regularly appeared in print. And of those, two looked to be the most regularly published. I focused my efforts on just those formats … and it worked.
So, I ate humble pie about something at the core of my identity until I figured it out. That’s the idea at stake in the Stoic exercise of personal vulnerability.
How to Practice This
Just like in the last practice, there is a feeling and train of thought at work here. It goes something like this:
I’m supposed to be an x.
Xs are people who do y.
But I’m failing at y.
So I must be a failure as an X.
And because of that, I am a failure.
There is an insidious slide going on here, and you need to stop the spiral.
I’m not going to say that you need to stop thinking of what you are doing as failing. It was crucial that Zeno recognized that he was, really, failing at his logical exposition. It was crucial that I recognized that I didn’t know how to write professional academic papers. Neither of us could have improved without those realizations.
What you need to stop is the slide from outcomes, what you are failing at, to states, who you are. That’s the mistake. The challenge, in a question, is: can you think just the facts of this matter and let the irrational evaluation go?
Here’s another way to think of this practice: can you tell your own shame story? Maybe not to someone else, but at least to yourself?
You want to get to the point where you can recognize past shameful events as just what happened. You need to learn to accept them as what they are, and that they are ok.
How This Exercise Will Shift Your Life
Facing failure is hard. Facing failure about the most intimate aspects of your personality is exponentially more difficult.
But you have to do it. You need the courage to recognize what is going on, to face the sources of your shame, and then address it.
To think about how much this is worth to you, imagine a scenario parallel to the last one.
Suppose that you meet a billionaire and, because he is bored, he gives you the following offer. He says: I will pay you an enormous sum of money, name your price. You only have to give up ever achieving your dreams. And when you think of new dreams, you cannot pursue those either.
You can live a life of ease. You won’t have to work, and you can travel. But you can’t ever achieve anything of value. In fact, as soon as you become modestly good at something, you must quit, forever.
To be clear, this is not just about pursuits that could give you status or recognition. You can’t even be good as a parent or a lover. Those are achievements too, and they are especially valuable, so you can’t have those either.
How much money would you demand in that case? Would it ever be worth it?
Then why are you giving up on yourself for free?
Stoicism as a Way of Life
Practising vulnerability is exercising courage. And without courage, you will not accomplish anything that has real value, that is good, in your life.
That has been my primary thesis, and I hope it makes sense now.
This piece began from a conversation I had with a contemporary, practising Stoic. We had an intuitive disagreement.
He couldn’t put his finger on what he didn’t like about my article “Why Happiness is ‘Flow’ for the Stoics and How You Can Sustain it.” At base, he thought that the example that I used of Stoic flow was too “soft.” He wanted a “hardcore” Stoicism.
To his mind, Stoicism should focus on more exemplary deeds, like Cato the Younger’s suicide. Not the daily life of ordinary people.
Those are good points, but I worry that pitching Stoicism in that way makes it a haven for machismo. Giving into machismo will prevent the growth you need; it’s cowardice masquerading as courage.
The Stoics didn’t need external validation of their masculinity (or femininity), because they deliberately practised addressing their sources of shame; they practised vulnerability.
This is the hardest practice you can do on a daily basis. It’s also the most important.
I hope you learned something and thank you for reading. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-hardest-stoic-spiritual-exercise-and-why-its-crucial-for-happiness-d98b48ea17ad | ['Sebastian Purcell'] | 2020-10-13 13:16:39.152000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Life Lessons', 'Stoicism', 'Philosophy', 'Personal Development'] |
Changing input size of pre-trained models in Keras | Keras is a useful API for deep learning that also includes various pretrained models that you can used for transfer learning.
UPDATE! Now works with tf.keras!
The Keras API
Keras is a high level API (Application Programming Interface) for deep learning. That is it does not itself implement deep learning functionality but is built on-top of existing deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow and provides improved functionality, faster implementation cycles, and added features. One of its most useful features is that it provided access to a large pool of existing deep learning models which are pre-trained on ImageNet (a rather time consuming and computationally demanding process). Hence, it facilitates transfer learning which is the process of re-purposing an existing deep learning model for another task.
One of the challenges/limitations of the existing approach is that the deep learning models come with reconfigured architecture and support a particularly input image size. But what if we want to use them for a smaller or larger image size?
Well thankfully there is a workaround for this which I discovered recently on this stackoverflow post. I will go through this process in this post and will also post a colab link to the code so that anyone can freely play with it.
Deep dive into code
The main function that performs the modification of the network to support the new image size is the following:
The function that creates a new model based on the JSON specification
The function first changes the input shape parameters of the network. At this point the internals of the model have not been registered. To register them we first convert the keras model to the JSON specification and then read it back essentially converting it to the keras model. Through this conversion the model is recreated but using the provided tensor shapes as input thus it modifies all the internal parameters to fit to this particular image size.
Lets look at a real example next. Lets consider the MobileNet V1 model which makes use of depthwise separable convolutions and is considered an efficient deep neural network for image understanding tasks (classification/detection/segmentation). When loading the model with ImageNet weights you can only specify a few input size images otherwise an error message is prompted on screen. By examining the input size of a loaded MobileNet model we observe that the default input size is 224x224.
Initial MobileNet Structure with input 224x224
Using the change_model function with an input size of 130x130 (which is not listed on the default MobileNet inputsizes)on the initial MobileNet model effectively changes its receptive input image size.
new_model = change_model(MobileNet,new_input_shape=(None, 128, 128, 3))
Adapted MobileNet Structure for input size 130x130
Notice that the input size has been halved as well as the subsequent feature maps produced by the internal layers. The model has been adapted to a new input image size.
Lets test it on an input image. For this we use an image from the cifar10 dataset which comes with keras and features similar classes to ImageNet. This makes it easier to reproduce the results since all is build in to keras. We load a truck image as shown below (image number 1 from the default cifar10 dataset as included in keras). Since the cifar10 images are of size 32x32 we upscale it to 130x130 and proceed to classify it with the modified MobileNet.
(top) cifar10 original image of size 32x32 (middle) resized image (bottom) MobileNet Predictions
Notice that the network outputs relevant labels, even though the image is blurry and almost half of the size it has been trained on demonstrating that the weights have been loaded correctly and the network retains its discrimination capabilities which are useful for transfer learning.
Remarks
Keras is a powerful tool and the pre-trained models it provides facilitate an excellent starting point for deep learning projects. Re-configuring the input size allows for a greater flexibility in choosing the best model. However, there are some pitfalls that should be considered. First, the original models have been trained on a particular image size and changing the input can affect the original classification accuracy. Also, changing the input size may not be possible when the network layers are trained for a specific input size and have a hard-coded number of parameters such as in the case of fully connected layers. In such a case the original weights will not be loaded for those layers and the fully connected layers will have a different number of neurons depending on the resulting feature map dimensions. One way to alleviate this since the main purpose is transfer learning, is to substitute the fully connected layers at the end with global average pooling operations that do not depend on the width and height of the feature maps. As is the case with almost everything in the deep learning domain the best results come after experimentation and empirical evidence. Enjoy Coding!!
💻 Colab Notebok is here | https://ckyrkou.medium.com/changing-input-size-of-pre-trained-models-in-keras-3dfbe3ca3091 | ['Christos Kyrkou'] | 2020-11-27 08:52:41.704000+00:00 | ['Keras', 'Deep Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Neural Networks', 'Develpment'] |
Handling imbalanced data: | Handling imbalanced data:
Predicting customers canceling phone service
In this project I am trying to predict customers that are cancelling phone service in order to do something to retain those customers.
The data-set I am using for this came from openml.org, and you can click here for the direct link to this data-set.
Imbalanced Dataset
This dataset was imbalanced which brought some challenges to it. First lets take a look at the imbalance:
Amount of customers staying or cancelling
To deal with this, I used the SMOTE method of up-sampling data. I tried using ADYSN as well, however it did not preform as well. This is probably due to ADYSN also making random noise, which for this problem, just lessened how well the models were able to predict the outcome.
Due to how the data-set is, I decided to optimize for recall, while still taking into account accuracy to a certain extent. This was due to wanting to correctly predict as many customers leaving as possible, while still holding the false positives as low as possible.
I used cost-benefit analysis to grade the models. The calculation for that was as follows: From the information I had, the average monthly bill was $60. I then calculated that over the length of a 24 month contract, which came out to be $1,440. I then decided on a promotion amount of $500, just for calculation purposes.
Any True Negatives, or customers that are correctly predicted as staying, do not add or subtract anything.
Any False Negatives, or customers that would be canceling but are predicted as staying are a loss of $1,440 each.
Any True Positives, or customer that would be canceling and are predicted as canceling, would be offered a promotion so the gain would be $1,440 - $500 = $940.
Any False Positives, or customers that are predicted as leaving but are not, would be offered the promotion and therefore would be a loss of $500.
Correlation of features
Another thing I noticed at the beginning was about the correlation of the features:
Not a lot of correlation to the target, which was the ‘class’ feature, a few at about .2, also minutes and charge are correlated almost %100. That made sense, as at the time this data was made minutes were the most important part of a bill.
Modeling
When I was contemplating the amount of features and the correlation issue, on one hand having a lot of correlation between charges and minutes but on the other hand not many dominant features. I therefore thought that random forest would work best with this type of data due to how it randomizes the features and data for each tree, then makes predictions off the entire forest. I tested a few different methods with their basic default hyper-parameters and random forest did preform the best. The results I got for my test data, after optimizing it a few times, was this:
The cost — benefit of this was $71,320 or for the actual gain to retain the customers that would be leaving would be $589 per customer that would actually have previously left, if all 121 customers that we predicted to be leaving would then stay.
After doing 5 fold cross validation the average cost-benefit for the test set was $51,152.
Cross validation
Just a note on cross validation when dealing with imbalanced data. As you should only smote training data and then predict on the real test data, that limits how you can do cross validation. The regular cross validation methods would not work with this.
In order to combat that, I used Stratified K-Folds, which takes the same amount from each category so you end up with similar splits for each fold.
Then I got each split and applied SMOTE to the training data, trained the model on that. Saved the scores for each fold then averaged them.
Here is the sample code:
skf = StratifiedKFold(n_splits=5) # Set up the splits X_trains2 = {} # Make dictionaries for each train and test split
X_tests2 = {}
y_trains2 = {}
y_tests2 = {}
for i, (train_index, test_index) in enumerate(skf.split(X, y)): # Get the folds and make the index number the key in each dict
X_trains2[i] = X.loc[train_index]
X_tests2[i] = X.loc[test_index]
y_trains2[i] = y[train_index]
y_tests2[i] = y[test_index] scores2 = [] # Make a list to put all scores into
train = 0 # Setup to save all train scores
test = 0 # Setup to save all test scores
cb = 0 # Cost-Benefit numbers for i in range(5):
smoted_x, smoted_y = sm.fit_sample(X_trains3[i], y_trains3[i]) # SMOTE the training splits
rf5.fit(smoted_x, smoted_y) # Fit the model
trainpred = rf5.predict(X_trains3[i]) # Predict train (not Smoted)
testpred = rf5.predict(X_tests3[i]) # Predict test
train += recall_score(y_trains3[i], trainpred) # Total all train recall scores for each loop
test += recall_score(y_tests3[i], testpred) # Total all train recall scores for each loop
cb += cost_benefit(y_tests3[i], testpred) # Total the Cost-benefit scores scores2.append((i, recall_score(y_trains3[i], trainpred), recall_score(y_tests3[i], testpred))) # Append a tuple of index, train recall total and test recall total) print(f’
{recall_score(y_tests3[i], testpred)}’)
cm(y_tests2[i], testpred) # Print a confusion matrix
print(classification_report(y_tests3[i], testpred))
print(train/5, test/5, cb/5) # Print the total scores / # of Folds
Feature Importance
After having a good model to work with I was then able to look at the feature importance to see what I could figure out from it with regards to bettering the interpret-ability of the model to then be able to use that for future business decisions.
I did some feature engineering to combine all the minutes and all the charges into 2 features. As those 2 features are highly correlated, I dropped the minutes column. I also dropped all call number columns, as well as the state and account_length columns as they were close to 0 on feature importance.
I also dropped number_vmail_messages as it was highly correlated with having a voice mail plan.
I ended up with 4 features, here they are with the corresponding importance:
Top Features
Running the model with only these features, with 5 fold cross validation brought the cost-benefit to $56,964.
This showed me that the model got better by combining and dropping features based on the feature importance.
Analysis of Features based on importance
After looking into features relationships, the most significant thing that jumped out at me was that anyone with a bill over $72 was much more likely to leave. That can be seen in this visual:
The numbers for over $72 bills were as follows:
Leaving: 315
Staying: 247
Considering that in the general data there is a 85% staying to 15% leaving rate, to have more people leaving at the higher rate then staying is very important.
This also was consistent in checking how customers with bills over $72 crossed over with the other features.
If we would offer a $500 promo to everyone with a average bill over $72 then per customer staying we would be gaining $547, which is similar to what we would get over the entire data-set.
I would suggest looking into this more to see how best to handle customers with higher bills to retain more of them.
Recommendations
My final recommendations would be to offer some sort of promo to customers.
To figure out how much should be offered and what sort of promos would be most successful in retaining customers.
To research more how to retain customers with higher bills.
Please leave feedback if you have thoughts on this and if you would like to see the code used for it, that can be seen here. | https://towardsdatascience.com/handling-imbalanced-data-4fb691e23fe9 | ['Levi Raichik'] | 2019-08-26 15:48:27.498000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Imbalanced Data', 'Python', 'Machine Learning'] |
Germany Diary: Leaving Berlin, New Year’s Day 2020 | Germany Diary: Leaving Berlin, New Year’s Day 2020
Train ride into the unexpected
Image courtesy of the author
Here I am again, sat at the same table in the same carriage of this Flixtrain, just over a day later. Sadly I haven’t been able to strike up conversation with anybody — though I have moved tables to be closer to the four isolated, silent men spread across the edges of this carriage. I may open conversation with the one beside me, who is reading China Miéville’s collection of short stories that we studied at uni earlier this year. That would be something to talk about.
However, I did manage to sleep for an hour in my original seat in the dark corner at the back. I have now ostensibly moved to the middle of the carriage to use the overhead light for the purposes of writing, but I am really here to be closer to those seated alone. I want to talk to someone again as I likely won’t get much more sleep until I get back home and crash into bed.
I’m thinking hard about Australia again, how I feel I would be a lot more comfortable, more socially at ease, when in an English-speaking territory. I was unhappy with how much of a burden I felt at the party last night in Ziggy’s apartment, being the sole non-native German speaker, and how much I felt excluded as a result of this…
The difficulty of navigating a room choked with cigarette smoke and densely packed with strangers is significantly worsened when all speak a language of which I have only the most cursory understanding. I felt as though they begrudgingly spoke to me in English in the same one way placates a lost child until they can be offloaded onto their parents.
Hm.
I do wish I would not always be the first (only?) person to open channels of communication in day-to-day life. I wish more strangers would come up to me for a change. I think I am tired of Germany now because I am often told its inhabitants are so closed-minded and unwilling to open themselves to strangers; that does bum me out. I look forward to returning to Australia as I will be able to converse with greater ease and I think I shan’t feel like such an outsider…
My lack of linguistic proficiency won’t be an obstacle there; I hope to revive my Australian accent as well. Gosh, I do feel lonely right now. I dislike sitting in the close vicinity of others and merely exchanging brief instances of hopeless eye contact. I wish I weren’t so involuntarily solitary right now — I am not shy but I am tongue-tied with the uncertainty of speaking in a foreign country.
I do not like that, I have decided. Perhaps this is my realisation (resolution?) of this new year, that I do not wish to live as an expat; that the unambitious desire to live within a comfort zone, after having experienced the alternative, is what may best suit me. Perhaps I belong in Australia more than Europe, because my need to communicate openly and without impediment is predicated upon a need to feel rhetorically secure. I need to know the language.
The ability to converse with strangers, and to erode barriers of Bluetooth headphones and the seclusions of smartphone usage, can be more easily achieved in a country with one shared language — I really am more comfortable in English-speaking territories. This is a fair assertion I personally make after living outside of my birthplace for such a long time.
I think now is the best time for me to have decided that I need to return home, to return to Australia… | https://medium.com/prismnpen/germany-diary-leaving-berlin-new-years-day-2020-4680a0aa1ab9 | ['Liam Heitmann-Ryce'] | 2020-12-23 14:38:23.852000+00:00 | ['Berlin', 'Journey', '2020', 'Storytelling', 'Creative Non Fiction'] |
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