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Historical Stock Price Data using Python APIs | Get daily and minute level historical stock data using Yahoo! Finance & Tiingo APIs, Pandas and plot them using Matplotlib
Stock market data APIs offer real-time or historical data on financial assets that are being traded on the stock exchanges. See The ultimate guide to (free) stock market APIs for 2020 for a list recommended API providers.
This article assumes that you have some Python fundamentals, Pandas and Matplotlib knowledge. The focus is on the following packages to access stock data:
yfinance — Yahoo! Finance
yfinance package provides access to Yahoo! Financial market data despite unavailability of Yahoo! Finance APIs since 2017. Follow the package link for more information on installation and documentation.
Tiingo has its own API to access data, but we will be using pandas-datareader for this article. An advantage of using the pandas-datareader package is that it converts data into a Panda’s DataFrame object. Access to Tiingo data requires an API key which can be obtained free by signing up for the starter package.
Accessing the Data
The code below shows how to get historical stock price data for Stock symbol MSFT (Microsoft) from 2019 to May 30 2020 using yfinance package.
import yfinance as yf
df = yf.download('MSFT', start='2019-01-01', end='2020-05-30')['Adj Close']
pandas-datareader adopts a similar approach for Tiingo data:
import pandas_datareader as pdr df = pdr.get_data_tiingo('MSFT', start='2019-01-01', end='2020-05-30', api_key='your API key')['adjClose']
DataFrame from yfinance is indexed on Date and the DataFrame from pandas-datareader is indexed on Stock Symbol and Date.
Let’s check the first 5 rows and some basic statistical details like percentile, mean, std etc. from Yahoo! Finance
>>> df.head() Date
2018-12-31 99.540192
2019-01-02 99.099190
2019-01-03 95.453529
2019-01-04 99.893005
2019-01-07 100.020401
Name: Adj Close, dtype: float64 >>> df1.describe() count 356.000000
mean 140.159973
std 23.215575
min 95.453529
25% 124.212427
50% 136.895386
75% 156.751591
max 187.663330
Name: Adj Close, dtype: float64
Similar results from Tiingo:
>>> df.head() symbol date
MSFT 2019-01-02 00:00:00+00:00 99.095845
2019-01-03 00:00:00+00:00 95.450309
2019-01-04 00:00:00+00:00 99.889631
2019-01-07 00:00:00+00:00 100.017029
2019-01-08 00:00:00+00:00 100.742216
Name: adjClose, dtype: float64 >>> df.describe() count 355.000000
mean 140.275875
std 23.151313
min 95.450309
25% 124.253615
50% 136.900906
75% 156.786183
max 187.672002
Name: adjClose, dtype: float64
Let’s plot the Adjusted Close prices from Yahoo! Finance using matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd # Register the converters
pd.plotting.register_matplotlib_converters() # Load the data
df = get_adjusted_close() # Set the style to seaborn for plotting
plt.style.use('seaborn')
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 6)) # Plot the cumulative returns fot each symbol
ax.plot(df)
ax.legend() plt.title('Adjusted Close Price - MSFT', fontsize=16) # Define the labels for x-axis and y-axis
plt.ylabel('Adjusted Close Price', fontsize=14) plt.xlabel('Year', fontsize=14)
plt.show()
plt.close()
Here is the output:
Adjusted close price for MSFT
Plotting data from Tiingo is similar except for passing data to plot as shown below:
ax.plot(df.loc[‘MSFT’])
Cumulative Return
Expressed as a percentage, cumulative return is the total change in the price of an investment over a set time period — an aggregate return (see Cumulative Return vs. Annualized Return). It shows you an overall picture of how a company performs financially. It also allows comparison between multiple stocks as values are expressed in percentages.
Both yfinance and pandas-datareader packages accept a list of stock symbols to download data as shown below. The stock symbol SPY is included as it tracks the popular US index, the S&P 500.
Using yfinance:
import yfinance as yf tickers = [‘GOOG’, ‘MSFT’, ‘SPY’]
df = yf.download(tickers, start=’2019–1–1', end=’2020–05–30')[‘Adj Close’]
Using pandas-datareader:
import pandas_datareader as pdr tickers = [‘GOOG’, ‘MSFT’, ‘SPY’]
df = pdr.get_data_tiingo(tickers, start=’2019–01–01', end=’2020–05–30', api_key=’your API key’)[‘adjClose’]
Let’s plot Cumulative Returns for all 3 stocks using Yahoo! Finance data:
# imports omitted… # Set the style to seaborn for plotting
plt.style.use(‘seaborn’) fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 6)) # Plot the cumulative returns for each symbol
for ticker in tickers:
ax.plot((df[ticker].pct_change()+1).cumprod()-1, label=ticker) ax.legend() # Show y axis in %
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(mtick.PercentFormatter(1.0)) title = ‘Cumulative Returns — ‘ + ‘, ‘.join(s for s in tickers)
plt.title(title, fontsize=16) # Define the labels for x-axis and y-axis
plt.ylabel(‘Cumulative Returns %’, fontsize=14)
plt.xlabel(‘Year’, fontsize=14) plt.show()
plt.close()
And the output:
As you can see above, the Cumulative Returns from MSFT is significantly higher from mid 2019 onwards. However, all suffered a significant drop in 2020 Q1 for well known reasons.
Plotting Tiingo data is very similar to Yahoo! Finance except for accessing data for stock symbols as the DataFrame is indexed by Stock Symbol and Date.
# Plot the cumulative returns for each symbol
for ticker in tickers:
ax.plot((df.loc[ticker].pct_change()+1).cumprod()-1, label=ticker)
Moving Average
Moving Average (MA) is a simple, technical analysis tool. Moving averages are usually calculated to identify the trend direction of a stock or to determine its support and resistance levels.
Here is the code to calculate and plot 20 day MA and 100 day MA.
# Load the stock symbol MSFT – Tiingo (method not shown)
msft = get_adjusted_close().loc['MSFT'] # Set the style to seaborn for plotting
plt.style.use('seaborn') fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 6)) # Calculate the 20 and 100 days moving averages of the closing prices
msft_20_ma = msft.rolling(window=20).mean()
msft_100_ma = msft.rolling(window=100).mean() # Start from 24/05/2019 as there are no data before for 100-day MA
start_date = '2019-05-24 00:00:00+00:00'
ax.plot(msft[start_date:], label='MSFT')
ax.plot(msft_20_ma[start_date:], label='20 days MA')
ax.plot(msft_100_ma[start_date:], label='100 days MA') ax.legend() plt.title('Adjusted Close Price - MSFT', fontsize=16) # Define the labels for x-axis and y-axis
plt.ylabel('Adjusted Close Price ($)', fontsize=14)
plt.xlabel('Year', fontsize=14) plt.show()
plt.close()
And the output:
Further Reading:
1. Python for Finance, Part I: Yahoo & Google Finance API, pandas, and matplotlib | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/historical-stock-price-data-using-python-apis-eb80e8c39016 | ['Sugath Mudali'] | 2020-06-22 14:14:29.125000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Data Science', 'Stock Market', 'API'] |
Is there such a thing as instant virality? | In the last week’s post I showed how over time genuine influencers can make a difference in creating a loyal set of audiences for any brand. However, there are always some brands that are after instantly becoming famous. What should such brands do?
Before we dive deeper into the question let’s understand that this sort of an attempt at best will only bring a blip in the viewership of your content. See the picture below. You could imagine this yellow line to be any number in your digital strategy, from reach to engagement to impressions, etc.
A blip in the social media metrics
One may argue that if we create enough blips such as these we’d end up in a better position as far as increasing the number of our loyal customers are concerned. Well, I’d say this is a matter of return on investment and the nature and personality of the brand and its custodians. There is no right or wrong here but only what suits you best. In my opinion though, the turtle always beats the rabbit. But again this post is about what if a brand needs to immediately become famous, what should its managers consider before planning their campaigns?
Here’s what they should consider…
Seemingly born overnight, a new brand or a product craze happens when collectively, a product and a brand get to be noticed consistently in a large segment of the population. It needs consistent harping about the message in the influence circles and driving them to usage. Most of the time it is accompanied by a breakthrough idea / message, think how Uber launched in India (with their super premium cars they created trial instantly). None of the domestic players (Meru, Mega Cabs, Ola, etc.) at the time could not do what Uber did in one go. It was the right mix of shock and awe coupled with consistent messaging.
To be able to create that shock and awe along with ensuring usage, we must target platforms and strategies to, one, reach the right audience with, two, a strong awe inspiring message and ensure usage with, three, pushing media spends whenever someone searches for the services we provide to be able to reach the threshold level of audience.
Let’s take each of these one by one.
1. reach the right audience
2. a strong awe inspiring message to ensure usage
3. pushing media spends to reach threshold level audience
Reach the right audience
“If you want to party, you have to go where the party is”, if you want your ideas to spread, you need to be involved in the online communities of people who actively share. To ensure that we will need to make enough key people our mouth piece. These key people in turn influence these actively sharing people. Read more about how to pick your set of influencers in the previous post here.
A strong awe inspiring message to ensure usage
Ask your self what do people care about? People don’t care about your brand / product. What people care about is themselves and ways to solve their problems (read narcissists). People also like to be entertained and to be a part of something remarkable. Thus, making a remarkable and big enough idea / message / experience is important. Is there a way we can make a remarkable message that taps into their narcism?
To be able to spread the message fast enough it also needs to be simple. I hear you ask, now simple too? Well yes, the message needs to be simple yet remarkable. Consider this, while mass media can introduce a new idea, most people depend on subjective evaluations from people they know and trust when deciding whether to adopt an idea or not. Ideas spread through people copying what others do — “I’ll Have What She’s Having” mentality. And so it will be important to make the message in a manner that it is simple enough for people to replicate. Simple and immediate, the time and effort required to replicate the idea should be the least possible since people generally do not have time.
Another important ingredient is for it to be selfless or bigger than themselves. Most often these big ideas that spread instantly are selfless, think ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. People want to own the idea that they share, when they share it they say, “I found it and I want you to see it.” A message from another owner such as a brand does not sit well in this sentiment. However, a selfless message about an emotion or society in general fit much better. Besides, there is a narcism angle to sharing here too. If I can feature myself or my ability in performing the idea / sharing the message then I am easily convinced to do it.
Okay, this is well understood you may be thinking, but where should I start, what can the idea be about and how to bring it back to the brand?
Here’s where you need to start. You need to start at a culturally tense topic. The attempt should be to find a universal strand of emotion or culturally tense topic within the target segment. A message that is charged with cultural intensity connects with everyone in the audience and if the message can take you through an unexpected twist then it will tend to wow the audience and if all other factors are conducive sharing becomes more obvious. For instance, we did a campaign called the Breaking Stereotypes for Truly Madly. It reached 7 million people in 45 days. See some visuals here.
Pushing media spends to reach threshold level audience
This is the easy part. If you have confidence in your message just make sure enough people are exposed to it. The rule of thumb here is to ensure a wide net. Use all possible means of exposing the target audience to your message. Remember, repetition is the key. When you activate one channel for media spends ask your self is there another place we can reach the target audience at and then activate that.
Do as much and see whether it changes the results for you. Goes without saying that a product / service worth your audiences’ while is a prerequisite. I’ll be happy to discuss any specific questions or experiences, feel free to write to me in comments. | https://medium.com/drizzlin/is-there-such-a-thing-as-instant-virality-b6710222abce | ['Karan Verma'] | 2017-08-17 14:38:47.958000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Social Media Campaign', 'Marketing', 'Viral Marketing'] |
Sorry | Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels https://www.pexels.com/@tima-miroshnichenko
I gave my best words
and poems to the one who
came before. Sorry. | https://medium.com/scrittura/sorry-2c1c30f1c976 | ['Kevin E. Pittack Jr.'] | 2020-12-10 03:50:14.647000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Relationships', 'Haiku', 'Scrittura', 'Writing'] |
Selling Paragraphs in Envelopes | The birds were chirping, the sun was shining, and the breeze was blowing multi-colored dried leaves off the trees. Main Street was surprisingly filled with people. That was something that had become increasingly uncommon.
Linda and Johnny walked hand-in-hand down the sidewalk alternating their focus between the displays in shop windows and the human activity all around them. There was little conversation as they enjoyed the delightful morning.
Abruptly, Linda pulled her hand away and pointed down the block, “There he is! It’s the envelope guy. See that old man sitting in the tiny chair next to the little folding table? That’s the envelope guy.”
“So he sells envelopes?”
“Well not exactly. He’s a writer. On a piece of paper, he will hand-write a paragraph. He prints; no script, no typewritten words. It’s just one paragraph. Sometimes it seems like a paragraph from a novel, sometimes it’s just a paragraph that stands alone, and sometimes it’s almost like poetry. Each paragraph is original and they are never used more than once. He folds the paper with the paragraph then puts it in an envelope and seals it. Nothing is written on the envelope.”
“Then he spreads all the envelopes with paragraphs inside on his little table. You give him a dollar bill and you can pick and take an envelope. And he doesn’t take credit cards or coins or any denomination of bills other than singles. So then you wave your hand over all the envelopes to find the one that speaks to you, the one with just the right vibes, and you can take it.”
“You’re shittin’ me, really?”
“I’m serious. Sometimes the paragraph is long and sometimes it’s not so long. Sometimes it is very uplifting, sometimes it’s dramatic, and sometimes it’s just silly. Often the paragraphs are very beautiful. They’re like little works of art. And sometimes they even have some specific meaning; something that you personally need to read.”
“So they’re like fortune cookies — except they’re not free.”
“Well, not exactly. For one thing, they are a paragraph, not just a short phrase. And they don’t predict fortunes. And fortune cookies aren’t exactly free since you’ve got to buy a meal first. And the messages in fortune cookies are computer-generated in quantity in some factory. These paragraphs are original, hand-written, and created by someone putting their heart and love into their work. So no, they are not like fortune cookies.”
“Are the envelopes edible?”
Linda rolled her eyes.
As they reached the man’s table Linda handed him the dollar bill she had gotten from Johnny. She then closed her eyes and waved her opened left hand over all the envelopes on the table. She moved her hand round and round several times until it suddenly stopped. She opened her eyes and picked up the envelope directly under her hand. Bowing to the old man, she said, “Thank you so very much. Have a wonderful day.”
The old man smiled, “You’re welcome and bless you.”
Moving her purse up to her shoulder Linda began walking off. She held the envelope firmly between the palms of her hands in front of her heart.
Walking beside her, Johnny asked, “Aren’t you gonna open it?”
“In a minute. Right now I’m feeling the vibes. When an artist puts their heart and soul into something they create that intense creative energy and everything the artist was feeling is embedded in what they create. By holding their work you can feel their creative joy, their love, and every feeling they felt as they created it. That is as important or even more important than whatever they created. We stare at a beautiful painting not just because it’s pretty but also so that we can feel what the painter went through and felt and the beauty the painter was seeing and feeling and expressing. It’s because of the energy, the vibes. I’m feeling the creative energy.”
It was Johnny’s turn to roll his eyes.
“There’s a park bench. Let’s sit down and I’ll read my paragraph…”
Sitting on the riverbank the young woman watched a small lone tree branch flow slowly and effortlessly past her down the river. The tree branch made no sound. Her wistful eyes followed the branch until it was out of sight. She then stood up and proceeded to the top of the hill to watch the sunrise.
Johnny crossed his legs, “Well, he ain’t no Hemingway, that’s for sure. It may be nice and sweet but for a dollar? Seriously?”
“Johnny, I told you it’s mostly about the energy,” Linda refolded the paper and put it back in the envelope then put the envelope in her purse.
“Are you saving that?”
“Yes I am. I have a box of them at home. If I’m wanting to be creative and need some inspiration and to feel some creative energy I get the letters out and hold them for a few minutes.”
Johnny slapped the palm of his hand to his forehead.
“You know what? Let’s go back and this time you can get a paragraph in an envelope.”
“For a whole dollar?”
“Yes, you can afford that. Come on, I dare ya.”
Back at the table Johnny handed over a single and was about to immediately grab an envelope.
“Remember to close your eyes and feel the energy,” reminded Linda.
Johnny covered his eyes with one hand and quickly waved his other hand over the envelopes. Picking an envelope, he uncovered his eyes and said thank you to the envelope guy and he quickly turned to walk away before the man could say anything.
Walking down the street he quickly tore open the envelope and held the page with the paragraph between himself and Linda so that they could both read it…
The cobblestone street was reverberating with intense anticipation. For the young men in the street death could greet them at any minute. The excitement and the fear was palpable. Women cheered them on from windows and balconies. Distant celebratory music echoed in their heads. The men became speechless as they heard the approaching sound of hooves on cobblestone.
“Did you get all that?”
Linda nodded.
Johnny then crumbled up the paper with the paragraph on it as well as the envelope and tossed them into a nearby trash receptacle, “I wonder how much money that envelope guy makes.”
“I doubt it’s enough to pay his rent. But he’s doing what he loves and he’s sharing that. He’s moving a lot of energy and it’s only fitting that some energy comes back his way in the form of money. Personally, I think it’s a creative and innovative idea. I’m surprised I’ve never seen anyone else do that before.”
“Hey Linda, we’ve already window shopped on this side of the street. Let’s cross the street and window shop over there.”
“Okay.”
Linda and Johnny were about to step off the curb but waited as a truck full of tree branches passed by. They then stepped out onto the cobblestones of Main Street to get to the other side. Halfway across the street Johnny flinched. For just a second he thought he heard hooves. | https://medium.com/grab-a-slice/selling-paragraphs-in-envelopes-9d1dc9eb49e3 | ['White Feather'] | 2020-08-27 13:42:44.715000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Innovation', 'Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Writing'] |
Kristin Chenoweth Ditches LGBTQ People | Kristin Chenoweth Ditches LGBTQ People
On Moral Complicity, Morality, and Evil
Tony and Emmy Award-winning Broadway star and self-described LGBTQ ally Kristin Chenoweth will perform in a paid engagement with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in December. She’s no LGBTQ ally.
I write frequently on the topic of moral complicity.
I often note in my writing that one of the main reasons we LGBTQ people still face significant oppression and persecution is that good and decent people won’t take moral stands to oppose bigotry. Too many people are too willing to look the other way when bigotry doesn’t hurt them directly.
People who don’t personally have anything against us support and contribute money to organizations like the Catholic and LDS (Mormon)churches — despite the fact that their money is used to hurt us. They continue to support and participate despite the fact that the organizations preach and promote doctrines that stigmatize and shame us.
They are morally complicit in our persecution whether or not they directly participate in it.
Do you know who Kristin Chenoweth is?
She’s a big Broadway star with a belting voice, huge stage presence, and until recently, a huge reputation for being a staunch ally to LGBTQ people. She’s been honored by notable LGBTQ organizations like GLAAD and The Trevor Project. She credits her moral stance to her best friend who committed suicide in college after being bullied for being gay.
What’s striking is that the Church’s persecution is getting worse rather than better. LGBTQ Mormons feel more stigmatized, more shamed, and more excluded from community life now than they did even 4 or 5 years ago.
LGBTQ people and organizations all over the United States have been shocked to learn that Chenowith will soon star as a featured performer and narrator at this year’s annual Christmas concert series by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.
LGBTQ advocate and former Republican presidential candidate Fred Karger is spearheading an initiative urging Chenowith to cancel her appearance. He’s pleading with her to understand that the LDS church is using her as a smokescreen to legitimize their bullying behavior towards LGBTQ people. Here are Karger’s own words from an opinion piece in the Salt Lake Tribune. —
Although Chenoweth’s paid performance with the Tabernacle Choir was unexpected, the invitation by the church was not. The church often uses smokescreens to appear accepting of LGBTQ people, while at the same time increasing its cruelty toward LGBTQ Mormons by its words and policies that cause immeasurable harm, especially to vulnerable LGBTQ youth. Her mere presence with the Tabernacle Choir gives her giant stamp of approval to the church’s homophobic policies of bigotry, hate and shaming. Surely, the LGBTQ community can expect better from its allies.
Krager is referring to the LDS Church’s infamous November Policy of 2015, which orders the excommunication not only of same-sex couples but their children. Countless families have been ripped apart as the LDS Church ratchets up its persecution and shaming of innocent people. The policy caused a huge spike in already sky-high rates of suicide attempts among teen LGBTQ Mormons.
According to Lee Hale of KUER Radio in Salt Lake City, a recent study at the University of Georgia shows that more than 70 percent of LGBTQ Mormons surveyed met criteria for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the teachings and sermons they heard at church.
Kimberly Anderson, a transgender woman who left the LDS Church, told Hale, “It’s very clear. We are inflicting trauma on our queer youth.”
What’s striking is that the Church’s persecution is getting worse rather than better. LGBTQ Mormons feel more stigmatized, more shamed, and more excluded from community life now than they did even 4 or 5 years ago.
Kristin Chenoweth’s support of the Church shocks the conscience —
Given her own testimony of being moved by her gay friend’s suicide, it’s almost impossible to imagine how she can cooperate with an institution that’s directly responsible for high and increasing rates of teen suicide.
In refusing to back out of the performances, Chenoweth told the Salt Lake Tribune that singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is something she dreamed about growing up in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
She went on to say, “I do think music is a healer and brings people together who might not normally see eye to eye,” and that she hopes “to show nothing but love” in her Salt Lake City performances.
That’s meaning-free, amorphous nonsense.
By lending her imprimatur to the LDS Church, by lending her fame and celebrity to their annual performances, Chenoweth is strengthening their hand. She’s demonstrating that it’s OK for good, decent people to associate with an institution that is causing grievous harm to innocent LGBTQ people.
She’s telling the nation that LGBTQ youth suicide doesn’t matter.
She’s telling all of us that moral complicity is perfectly fine so long as we’re fulfilling a childhood dream. She’s telling us that a meaningless phrase like “music is a healer” is enough to justify participation in evil.
Make no mistake —
What Chenoweth is doing by supporting the LDS Church is actively, objectively evil. She’s increasing human suffering and decreasing human happiness. She’s making bigots stronger while LGBTQ families and children suffer.
I write often about moral complicity. Chenoweth is a jaw-dropping example of a privileged straight woman who makes plenty of nice noises about supporting LGBTQ people, but who (when push comes to shove) really doesn’t care at all.
She can’t be inconvenienced for us.
She won’t be part of the solution for us.
She won’t say no to bigotry.
Sadly, she represents far too many self-described allies. It’s a lot easier to talk about supporting LGBTQ rights than standing up and making sacrifices to do it. Evil institutions like the LDS Church and the Roman Catholic Church continue to get away with causing great suffering because our so-called allies refuse to make them pay consequences for their hateful policies.
I despair sometimes. I just don’t understand.
Will you help us, please? Here’s a tweet from Fred Karger calling on Chenoweth to withdraw from the concerts, tagging her and the Tabernacle Choir.
Will you please like and retweet? And will you add a comment demanding that Chenoweth stop supporting the LDS Church until they agree to stop hurting LGBTQ people?
Haven’t enough of our youth died of suicide already? | https://medium.com/james-finn/kristin-chenoweth-ditches-lgbtq-people-633a174ac322 | ['James Finn'] | 2018-12-02 10:01:00.651000+00:00 | ['Mormon', 'Suicide', 'Christmas', 'Youth', 'LGBTQ'] |
Dear Poets | Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash
Dear Poets
An open letter for the poets
Dear Poets,
I don’t judge you when I read your poems related to anxiety because it’s been a year since I have been doing the same. In your words I can see how you are coping with the sadness. In you art I can the colours which seep through the margin. It’s okay to be vulnerable and hold on to that tiny flicker of hope.
It’s okay to show our chaos to the world.
Dear poets I hear you, it’s okay to break quietly.
Love
A reader | https://medium.com/blueinsight/dear-poets-8fc89a64142e | ['Priyanka Srivastava'] | 2020-12-28 10:15:15.765000+00:00 | ['Open Letter', 'Pandemic', 'Poet', 'Blue Insights', 'Writing'] |
Datum Ipsum: Designing real-time visualizations with realistic placeholder data | What you’ll (probably) see is that your guess on the left alternates from heads to tails often, with few streaks, but the result on the right has streaks. Your guess likely has close to 10 heads and 10 tails, but rarely does the actual result come up an even 10 and 10. These differences are attributable to our assumptions about probability (that a coin flip has a 50/50 outcome) being applied to a larger problem (20 actual coin flips).
There’s even a simple statistical property (called Benford’s Law) that can be used to identify faked data sets. In short, in any large enough data set, patterns emerge in the first digits of each data point: more numbers will start with the digit “1” than any other number. This pattern is so pervasive and counterintuitive that it is often used to prove — in court — that data has been falsified.
Real data is unpredictable
Part of what makes data so tricky to work with is that our assumptions about the shape, domain, resolution, and volatility of a set of data are only just that: assumptions.
Even with the most reliable sets of data — say, an atomic clock — there’s always the possibility of error states or the occasional act of god. These one-in-a-million events are when great data visualization really shines: instead of breaking down in the face of anomaly, they highlight the rarity of the situation and respond appropriately.
But when we’re designing visualizations, how can we predict the unpredictable? It’s almost like something out of a Borges story; outliers aren’t really outliers if we’re expecting them.
Why not design with real data?
Real data sets of all shapes and sizes are easy to come by if you know where to look. There’s a slew of large, well-formatted data sets on GitHub, collected and maintained by the (excellently-named) Open Knowledge group. From financial data to global temperature indexes, these data sets can easily provide a reality check for your designs.
Unfortunately, my experience working with historical data sets fails to overcome some of the fundamental challenges of designing robust visualizations. Here’s why:
It’s too hard to fine-tune. The time series of S&P 500 financials over the past 100 years probably isn’t going to fit your visualization domain and fidelity right out of the box. The benefit of having lots of data to work with becomes a curse when you’re trying to normalize lots of values. It’s too easy to pick and choose. I find myself discarding data when it doesn’t come out quite like I expect it to. Instead of taking the harder route of improving the visualization to handle the data at hand, I’ll just select “better” data.
Let’s use placeholder data instead.
Placeholder data is a lot like placeholder text. It’s a design tool meant to ensure the final product — in our case, a real-time data visualization — matches our mockups. It’s useful in all the same ways placeholder text is useful:
Placeholder data allows a designer to test her assumptions about the product. Placeholder data makes decision-making much easier by providing realistic constraints. Placeholder data sets realistic expectations for clients and stakeholders.
What does placeholder data look like?
Just as with placeholder text, we can achieve varying degrees of placeholder data realism by choosing our parameters very carefully. When mocking up a page layout, I can choose the classic placeholder text “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet …” to help pick the right typeface, leading, measure, etc. A placeholder data version of “lorem ipsum” might look just like random numbers, a sort of meaningless pattern that looks like real data if you aren’t looking too hard. | https://medium.com/mission-log/datum-ipsum-designing-real-time-visualizations-with-realistic-placeholder-data-27b873307ff9 | ['Matthew Ström'] | 2017-03-15 14:53:13.736000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Data Visualization', 'Design', 'Mockup', 'Data'] |
Technology & the Future of Public Education | Elana Zeide, Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska College of Law, on the benefits and risks of emerging technologies in public education.
Elana Zeide teaches and writes about the legal, privacy and ethical implications of emerging technologies as an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska’s College of Law, after a recent stint as a PULSE Fellow in Artificial Intelligence, Law & Policy at UCLA’s School of Law. Recent articles include Student Privacy in the Age of Big Data, The Structural Consequences of Big Data-Driven Education, and Algorithms Can Be Lousy Fortune Tellers. Zeide received her B.A. cum laude in American Studies from Yale University, and her J.D. and LL.M. from New York University School of Law.
The following are her remarks captured from a public panel “The Inclusive Workforce: Strategies to Enhance the Future of Public Sector Work” hosted by the CITRIS Policy Lab.
1. In your piece “Robot Teaching, Pedagogy and Policy” you talk about the role of AI in displacing professional authority, institutional accountability, and public policy making in education. In what ways is AI displacing teacher labor?
It’s important to not only consider the potential displacement of teacher labor, but the displacement of teachers’ authority and autonomy. AI can displace teachers’ autonomy in deciding what students should learn, what is important, and what is “enough” to move students to the next level. Those types of decisions are historically grounded in local and state authority, which are now partly being made by the technology sectors developing AI-enabled teaching tools. The flipside of that is these systems might also be able to improve the kind of tasks that the teachers work on. The tools can eliminate some rote chores so that teachers have more time to focus on the more human-centric interactions and possibilities.
2. What is one concrete strategy that can be employed to better maximize benefits and reduce risks from emerging technologies in public sector work?
One strategy is to promote less traditional educational pathways that are more skill- or certificate-based to allow people to take on less student debt and adapt to changing workforce demands. It’s also crucial to give people an education in soft skills, including interpersonal relationships, critical thinking, communication skills. Those are the skills that are going to remain consistently in demand even as technology changes and they are central to being able to collaborate with technologists.
3. What do you think is the most valuable action the education sector can take to maximize AI’s benefits?
I think there are two actions that can be taken: one is to keep expectations and promises in check and the second is to engage multiple stakeholders. Often in education people become enamored of the next new thing that’s going to fix everything. The world is much too complicated for that. It’s also important for schools and technology providers to interact with a variety of stakeholders when creating and implementing AI systems. Not just the administrators, but teachers, students, and community members who may be impacted. When you create something only with a particular client in mind, especially in a sector like education that touches many different kinds of people, you may end up with solutions that are ineffective or have disproportionate impacts.
4. We are increasingly relying on technology during this time of crisis. Is technology a benefit or a harm to public education?
Technology is great, but we risk over relying on specific technologies. Not everyone has ready access to high quality and recent hardware and software and they end up excluded when technology facilitates most communication, education, and connection. At the same time, students who are learning online are much more aware that technology is not neutral and that nuances make a difference. I think they will start creating and designing systems and business models that don’t pose as many practical and ethical problems. I also think that the pandemic has shown us the need for community. I hope that after this isolation time period that we will create different ways for communities to come together and interact.
5. Would you say utilization of AI in public systems is better to start at the state level or at more of a local level?
From a legal point of view, local governments have been able to overcome legislative inertia and enact facial recognition bans or algorithmic accountability task forces. It’s more difficult to implement creative reforms through state or federal laws. That’s the benefit of the flexibility you can get from local communities. | https://medium.com/citrispolicylab/technology-the-future-of-public-education-be41dbcf4691 | ['Citris Policy Lab'] | 2020-10-30 18:43:34.928000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Internet', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Policy', 'Education'] |
Are we forever bound to our childhood? | They say that adulthood is an extension of our childhood experiences.
In this way, an early tragic episode can stay with us for years and continue to influence us much later in life.
Mine was the passing away of my mum when I was nine. And despite my denial over the years, I can see that I have only started making significant progress in recovering from the emotional scars that it left.
My initial failure to resolve the loss impacted my ability to carve successful intimate relationships.
The psychologist John Bowlby- defined this as the “attachment re-organization” theory, where people with unresolved trauma transition towards attachment security based on their interpretation of the experience.
Emotional wounds and imbalances
Our emotional profile is invariably a response to something in the past.
We all know that this is a list without end.
A matter of cause and effect.
Dismissive parents will likely lead to emotional avoidance.
An overprotective childhood inspires timidity and the inability to manage complex circumstances.
An early environment marked by financial unreliability can spark a need to overcompensate with money and social status
And the loss in my case?
Insecure attachment. More specifically anxious-avoidant.
I mentioned in a previous article how I had struggled to accept the love of my boyfriend’s family.
My early onset of self-reliance has at times bordered on the toxic belief that those I let in will eventually abandon me.
So through the lens of “false autonomy” I had learned to pull away whenever anyone got too close and equally crave attachment from those who were emotionally distant.
We can change.
The danger is that if not careful, we will continue to remain loyal to the early difficult years.
It takes resilience to therefore resist the pull of the past, and turn away from what has become our default responses.
And it begins with…
Self- awareness
The point where we recognise the impact our childhood has on us. Understanding the why and how, opens us opportunities for growth.
My epiphany came at age 26 after a major heartbreak caused me to reflect on my attachment tendencies. I had chosen to get close to someone had very early on displayed emotional detachment.
Change our reactions
A process of separating the past from the present by allowing our adult self to intervene. As children we would have lacked the innate capacity to grasp what may be the best responses thus resorting to under or overreactions.
But as adults we can shed those impulses and instead learn to communicate with clarity.
I know deep down that I want to love and be loved so I ensure that my actions reflect that desire. And when I fear that someone is getting too close, I can communicate my anxieties rather than simply running away.
Consciously choose who or what we want to become.
We are not bound to becoming a product of our environment.
With this in mind, we have the power to envision the type of person we wish to become and take small steps everyday towards realising it.
Our childhood will forever be a part of us but we can choose the interpretation that we allow to unravel. | https://medium.com/swlh/are-we-forever-bound-to-our-childhood-ce89ab252966 | ['Tiffany Sanya'] | 2019-11-21 09:20:37.617000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Life Lessons', 'Psychology', 'Life', 'Self Improvement'] |
China Lander Reaches Moon, Will Return Samples This Month | China Lander Reaches Moon, Will Return Samples This Month ExtremeTech Follow Dec 2 · 2 min read
by Ryan Whitwam
The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program is still firing on all cylinders despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. China’s National Space Administration has announced the Chang’e-5 lander has successfully reached the lunar surface. While there, the robot will conduct various experiments and collect a bit of the moon for return to Earth. If successful, this will be the first new sample of lunar regolith in 44 years.
There was some uncertainty as to the fate of Chang’e-5 early on Tuesday. Chinese media covered the launch on November 24th with great fanfare, but the expected landing time came and went with no announcement. Only after the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) confirmed the landing did Chinese state TV break in with news of the probe’s arrival on the moon.
Chang’e-5 carries an assortment of instruments like a panoramic camera, a spectrometer to determine mineral composition, and ground-penetrating radar. The sample collection module has a robotic arm, a rotary percussive drill, a scoop, and separation tubes to keep individual samples isolated. Unlike the previous Chang’e-4 mission, the latest lander does not have a radioisotope heater unit. That means it won’t survive the coming lunar night — it will have to complete its work during a single lunar day, which luckily lasts about 14 Earth days.
China hopes the mission will be able to collect as much as 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of lunar soil. The last sample from the moon returned to Earth came from the Soviet Luna 24 mission in 1976. It managed to send back 170.1 grams of regolith, by far the biggest haul from any of Russia’s lunar probes. Meanwhile, the US brought back hundreds of pounds of moon rocks during the Apollo program.
After collecting its lunar samples, the Chang’e-5 lander will launch an ascent vehicle that will carry them back into orbit of the moon. China might begin this phase of the mission in just a few days, but don’t expect a live play-by-play a la NASA. The ascent vehicle will rendezvous with the Chang’e-5 service module, which is still in orbit. This spacecraft is equipped with a return module to fly the samples back to Earth. China expects to have the sample containers back on Earth around the middle of December.
Now read: | https://medium.com/extremetech-access/china-lander-reaches-moon-will-return-samples-this-month-8e9e895bb61f | [] | 2020-12-02 13:47:28.443000+00:00 | ['moon', 'Moon', 'Science', 'Space', 'China'] |
The Paid Media Marketing KPIs You Need to Track (and the Ones You Can Ignore) | Whoa. There are a lot of metrics in paid platforms. And I mean A LOT. Impressions, clicks, reach, likes, views, conversions, impression share, ad rank, landing page views, quality score, etc. etc. etc. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and get lost in the never-ending sea of metrics when trying to evaluate and optimize your paid media campaigns.
I feel ya, Michael. I’ll try to help.
The metrics you should care about are completely dependent on your goals, channels, and audiences, and also on what piece of your campaign you’re trying to optimize. You shouldn’t be interrogating the same metrics for a connected TV awareness campaign as you would for a brand search campaign. By the end of this I hope you welcome the plethora of metrics in each paid media platform because you’ll understand the ones you should focus on and the ones you can ignore based on the types of campaigns you’re running.
Funnel Stage: Awareness
First things first, awareness campaigns are the tippity top of the advertising funnel. As the name suggests, awareness campaigns are used to increase the awareness of your brand, product, or service. These campaigns should be focused on getting as many eyeballs from your target market on your ads as possible as efficiently as possible.
Depending on the platform you’re using you should be focusing on impressions, reach, views,and any other metric available to understand the amount of people that are being exposed to your advertising. When evaluating these campaigns, you should be reviewing the efficiency and volume of the exposure of your ads and you should be less concerned about the actions taken on your ads.
It can be difficult to evaluate the impact of awareness campaigns, but they are very important for advertisers. My favorite way to understand if the investment in your awareness campaigns is working is to evaluate the search volume of your brand terms over time. If you’re reviewing the performance of an awareness campaign and wondering why you’re not receiving conversions from the campaign, your expectations are wrong.
Funnel Stage: Consideration
Consideration campaigns are the next step of the funnel. These are used to (drumroll please) increase a user’s consideration of your brand — meaning they’re already aware of you, and your job now is to get them wanting to learn more. An example of a consideration campaign would be a non-branded search campaign.
The main goal of these campaigns is to drive traffic to your site. Depending on the channel, the KPIs for these campaigns are clicks, landing page views, sessions, page engagement, page likes, and traffic. The focus of these campaigns should be driving as much traffic from your target market to your website as possible at the most efficient cost.
Funnel Stage: Decision
Last (step in the funnel) but certainly not least, decision campaigns! Decision campaigns drive conversion actions. Depending on your business this could be leads, form fills, or purchases. These campaigns are used for consumers ready to make a decision to buy based on all the advertisers they’ve considered.
After setting up the conversions in your platforms, these are the easiest campaigns to evaluate success. It’s really as simple as reviewing the efficiency and volume of conversion actionsattributed to your ads.
Evaluating Performance KPIs vs. Optimization KPIs
If you’re still reading this you might be thinking “makes sense, but what if my campaigns aren’t performing well based on the KPIs I should be caring about? What metrics should I be reviewing to optimize my campaigns?” Great question. Let’s dig deeper and highlight some important metrics based on a few popular channels and tactics.
Facebook Retargeting
Frequency. Ad frequency is so darn important when you’re running a campaign with a retargeting tactic or any audience with a defined size. It’s important to keep an eye on this number so it doesn’t get too high. If you see this number increasing to a number you’re not comfortable with, you’ll want to adjust your budget number down or increase your audience size.
There is no perfect frequency number, it’s all dependent on the date range you’re reviewing. I like to just use good ol’ common sense when evaluating whether my frequency is getting too high. If as a consumer you think seeing an ad 14 times in one week seems excessive, your audience does too.
Paid Search
This one is a doozy. There are so many layers when optimizing a search campaign. To optimize a campaign you need to figure out what is slowing down the momentum of your campaign. Is it that you’re driving a lot of clicks that aren’t converting on the landing page? Are your ads not showing up in the auction? Do you have a low CTR? To have successful search campaigns you need to focus on 5 things:
Targeting the correct keywords Setting up negative keywords Bidding appropriately based on keyword importance to your brand and competition for the keyword Driving traffic to landing pages that fulfill the need of search inquiries Writing ad copy that marries the search terms to the landing page experience you’re giving the user
Numbers 1 and 2, defining keywords and negative keywords, are totally unique to your business. But we can diagnose problems in the other three by reviewing the appropriate metrics.
Bidding appropriately based on keyword importance to your brand and competition for the keyword : Using the keyword planner available in Google and Bing, you can project a max CPC to start with for your ad groups — from there you can adjust higher if you’re not showing up in the auction at a high enough percentage to spend your budget.
: Using the keyword planner available in Google and Bing, you can project a to start with for your ad groups — from there you can adjust higher if you’re not showing up in the auction at a high enough percentage to spend your budget. Driving traffic to landing pages that fulfill the need of the search inquiries: Is your quality score low? Or maybe your ad rank ? Search engines often penalize advertisers — which therefore makes your ads not show up as often as possible — if they deem the landing page experience to be poor based on the user’s search terms. Another indicator that your landing page needs to be evaluated is a high CTR on your ad but low conversion rate on the landing page.
Is your low? Or maybe your ? Search engines often penalize advertisers — which therefore makes your ads not show up as often as possible — if they deem the landing page experience to be poor based on the user’s search terms. Another indicator that your landing page needs to be evaluated is a high CTR on your ad but low on the landing page. Writing ad copy that marries the search terms to the landing page experience you’re giving the user: Again, is your ad rank low? Or your CTR? These are both indicators that your ad copy needs to be updated to better align to the user’s expectations based on their search terms.
Programmatic Campaigns
If you’re buying media programmatically through a DSP (at Element Three we use The Trade Desk), an important metric to review is win rate. If your campaign doesn’t seem to be spending enough budget or it’s increasing impressions at a slow rate, win rate is a good place to start. You’re most likely not bidding high enough.
In The Trade Desk, the way you can bid higher while keeping your cost per conversion down is by having a large audience size with multiple bid factors applied, so you bid higher on the most valuable segments of your audience and lower on less valuable segments.
If you’d like to learn more about buying programmatically, here is a blog post about how to get started the right way.
Your Move!
Hopefully this has helped you zero in on some key metrics that are important to the campaigns you’re running and allowed you to ignore some of the less relevant metrics. Remember, all the metrics are helpful, just not all the time. And if you’re looking for more paid media help, check out our blog post about why your paid media campaigns might be failing.
Perspective from Katie Payne, Senior Paid Media Manager at Element Three | https://medium.com/element-three/the-paid-media-marketing-kpis-you-need-to-track-and-the-ones-you-can-ignore-314832e047bc | ['Element Three'] | 2018-09-20 19:26:57.814000+00:00 | ['PPC', 'Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'PPC Marketing', 'Digital Advertising'] |
How to implement a value-object in C# | Everybody uses integers, doubles, strings, and DateTimes. So, they’re a part of the dotnet framework. But every project has project-specific data-types too.
Imagine writing software for a powerplant. The calculations are in KwH, MWh, and GWh. And they are often represented as integers or doubles in the code. It would make more sense to have a KWh data-type instead. So why not create a custom data-type yourself?
How to create a value object
Technically speaking, creating a new data-type is just a matter of creating a new struct or class. To get it to behave like any other data-type, implement the == operator and the != operator. To get it to work with LINQ operations like OrderBy(x => ..), Contains(x), Min() and Max(), implement IEquatable<T> and IComparable<T>.
In this article, we’re using a NuGet package that provides a base-class that provides all of this for us:
install-package DomainDrivenDesign.DomainObjects
Implementing all of the above now is just a matter of writing the following code:
Creating a custom data-type for KwH
This code declares a new class called KwH. Under the hood, it’s a double. It can be compared using the ==, !=, <, >, <=and the => operator.
How to use a value object
Using custom data-types instead of using the built-in data-types has implications. Assume we’ll make a KwH data-type and an MWh data-type as described earlier, and consider this code:
The business rules in your application
Replacing all the ‘int’s in this code with MWh and GWh, does not compile:
The code does not compile
Changing a data-type from integer to another data-type seems a small change, but it is a big difference. The compiler says integers can’t be compared with MWh’s.
Making a data-type explicit means you need to be explicit about what you may do with it. It’s a lot harder to write faulty code this way. It simply won’t compile.
The compiler error is correct. Compare MWh to MWh. Comparing MWh to integers should not work. It’s not explicit whether the value means an amount of MWh, KWh, or eggs for that matter. To solve the error we’ll need to replace the integer with an MWh.
Creating new instances of a custom data-type
Use a factory pattern to create new instances of a custom data-type. Adding a create method to the new data-type does just that:
Use a factory method to create a new instance of an MWh.
And use it this way:
Creating new instances of a data-type.
The single responsibility principle
Having done all of the above still does not make the code compile and reveals a design problem. It violates the single responsibility principle:
GWh can’t be multiplied with integers
The CalculateCapacity method it’s purpose is to limit something to a 100 MWh at most. While doing so, converting GWh into Kwh somehow ended up in this method too. That’s a maintenance problem because conversions potentially end up in multiple places in the code. Changing the same conversion might require multiple files to change.
To fix it, move conversions into the data-type itself:
Make it possible to convert values from one type into another
The following code is the result:
Implementing operators
And the code still does not compile. The compiler says KwH’s cannot be subtracted from each other:
Fix this error by implementing the + and the - operator:
Implementing the operators:
On a more abstract level, types may or may not be subtracted, multiplied, divided, and so forth. Performing an operation does not necessarily mean the result is of the same type.
TLDR
Using the default data-types in the dotnet framework is convenient but it does not protect the developer from writing buggy software. It makes it easy to implement things in the wrong places, too. With a code-base that’s hard to maintain as a result. Use your own custom data-types to let the code guide you to better design and to make it harder to write bugs. Consider the following method:
The business rules in your application
It’s relatively easy to create your own data-types by implementing structs or by using third party solutions like the DomainDrivenDesign.DomainObjects NuGet package. Refactor the method and change it into this: | https://medium.com/vx-company/implementing-custom-data-types-in-c-23b904cfd4ae | ['Albert Starreveld'] | 2020-05-29 07:40:06.646000+00:00 | ['Oop', 'Value Objects', 'Csharp'] |
To Gain Twitter Followers, Follow These Pro Tweet-Writing Tips | Tweeting is Writing, Too
To use Twitter effectively, think more about your audience than yourself
This story is part of Forge’s How to Write Anything series, where we give you tips, tricks, and principles for writing all the things we write in our daily lives online, from tweets to articles to dating profiles.
Tweeting is writing. Twitter gives you the sugar rush of blogging, only with 99% less effort, but, still: It’s writing. I know a lot of online choads don’t use the platform with that mindset. That’s why they suck.
But you don’t have to suck. Being a better writer makes you a better tweeter, and vice versa. You can have a voice on Twitter, but you have to put SOME thought and care into it. I’m not gonna make you do worksheets or anything. But I am gonna teach you to leverage the freedom Twitter gives you to the benefit of both you and your followers.
Because the freedom of Twitter is vast. You can write about anything and anyone. You can BE anything and anyone. That freedom spawns a lot of belligerence, but there’s a sweet spot where you can use that freedom to enter into the fray with good cheer and, against all odds, make yourself the life of the party. You can be the reason OTHER people on Twitter are having a good time. Every tweet you write is the first impression you’re making on someone, somewhere, and you can make a handsome one even now. You just need to follow a few rules:
Be genuine
Don’t douse yourself in protective irony, looking for popularity but not actual human connection. Then you’ll be just like every other guarded dipshit, and your Tweets won’t connect.
Tweet only occasionally
Serial over-tweeters — we’re talking multiple tweets an hour, every waking hour — are a scourge upon humanity and must be dealt with.
But there are people I follow who either pop in just a few times a day or sometimes go a WHOLE day without tweeting. (OMG!) When they do pop up in my timeline, it feels like a treat. Oh wow, Dave is here! Love Dave! It’s just like real life. When you’re fashionably late or fashionably reclusive, you make your mere presence a special occasion.
Aim for under six tweets a day. Same deal with retweets. Hand those out like gold medals.
If you’re tweeting while drunk, tell everyone
When cocktail hour strikes and you feel like shitposting after knocking back a few Schlitzes, by all means declare your intentions to the flock. “Surprise! I’m drunk!”
Now everyone knows things are about to get a little blue. Also, this gives you a convenient out if you happen to tweet your admiration for, say, the Charles Manson. Not wise to let that part of your id slip out. Blame that one on the swig of Popov you just took.
Whatever everyone is tweeting about, tweet about something else
This is not a rule that I follow, which is why people tell me I suck at Twitter. I always roll my eyes at fake intellectuals who complain about Twitter being an echo chamber. But… stylistically speaking, there’s a good chance that you will be tempted to emulate the people you follow, reflecting their voices in your own tweets. That’s been the creative bummer of social media eating the rest of the internet: We all end up saying the same shit.
This is why I follow Russell Crowe. While everyone else is tweeting about the election, Crowe is posting snapshots of a bike ride he took out in the bush, or retweeting an art gallery, or passing along cool news like this!
It’s a respite from the usual flurry of bullshit that I voluntarily subject myself to. YOU can be that respite. You can be a breath of fresh air instead of being one more dude tweeting THIS IS NOT NORMAL YOU GUYS every time Trump releases a suitcase full of cockroaches into a pediatric ward. Speaking of oases…
Tweet about food
Food takes are the sports of Twitter, especially now that American sports aren’t around. Food takes are a grand diversion. They stimulate arguments that you can volley back and forth like a tennis ball without sowing any real enmity (unless you like mayo). Even as the internet threatens to section out humanity into a million hostile and isolated sects, we still all gotta eat.
Know the lay of the land
There’s a universal gallery of stock characters on Twitter. There are trolls. There are Weird Twitter types who occasionally nail a Mitch Hedberg-style one-liner but then also get creepy with women. There are remarkably informative scholars whose studied threads on, like, butterfly molting go randomly viral on occasion. There are cheerfully dickish sports bloggers (that would be me). There are parents who are over parenting (me again). There are brands, all of them DYING to be adored. There are inexplicably wealthy people casually flaunting their cushy lifestyles at you.
If you understand all these groupings, and the strange dynamics constantly mutating around them, then you’ll have a solid grasp of which ones you’d prefer to interact with on a regular basis. You’re a host now. Your feed is your party. To that end…
Don’t try so hard
I have tried to will tweets into virality, thinking to myself, “Oh yeah this one is definitely gonna get aggregated into a BuzzFeed roundup of some sort!” And then the tweet comes and goes. Meanwhile someone manually RTs Ariana Grande with a WE STAN tacked on and it goes through the stratosphere. GRRRRR. I am treating this like a contest, which is pointless.
Personally, my favorite Twitter moments have happened entirely by accident, like when I tweeted this out:
Within minutes, the replies came alive with stories of people’s grandpas. We weren’t having a contest to see who could get RTed the most. We were just having, you know, a good time. I died laughing that night. Twitter just… happened. If you show a genuine interest and enjoyment in what others are saying and doing, it can happen for you, too. | https://forge.medium.com/how-to-be-charming-on-twitter-528ae5c0b00b | ['Drew Magary'] | 2020-05-18 12:44:03.971000+00:00 | ['Twitter', 'Social Media', 'Connect', 'Writing', 'How To Write Anything'] |
Veganism Is Going Through a Racial Reckoning | The truth is, in the United States and even globally, the majority of people who eat plant-based are nonwhite. But the white people have become gatekeepers of the vegan community, especially online with blogs and accounts run by white people dominating Google results and social media feeds.
In the weeks and months following the killing of George Floyd and global protests, the vegan community has been forced into a racial reckoning of its own with white vegans starting to acknowledge Black vegans and other vegans of color. And now, questions are being raised about how to continue to do this work moving forward.
“People didn’t see the value of our pages until now, but that drove us. And now, this is the time,” vegan blogger Afia Amoako said in an illuminating recent VICE article. “The thing that irks us is when the #AmplifyMelanatedVvoices happened our biggest question was: Are you going to support me in the long-term?” | https://medium.com/tenderlymag/veganism-is-going-through-a-racial-reckoning-440055661fb6 | ['Arabella Breck'] | 2020-08-18 23:24:56.783000+00:00 | ['Recommended Reading', 'Race', 'Vegan', 'Equality', 'Link'] |
Deploy Spring Boot App on Kubernetes (Minikube) on MacOS | Let’s move with the scope of this article now.
1. Install Docker
Follow the instruction to install docker on your mac from this docker official link.
2. Install Virtual box
Before installing Kubernetes (Minikube), let’s install virtualBox first. Minikube by default uses hyperkit as the VM, which has some connectivity issues with Docker images specifically on MacOS. So to get rid of those issues, we need Virtualbox as the VM.
Download the Virtual box dmg file for MacOS from this link.
Follow the installation steps and thats it.
3. Install Kubernetes on MacOS (Minikube)
The simplest way to install Kubernetes is by using brew as follow:
brew install minikube
Once the installation is completed, you just need to start it using the Virtualbox VM using the following command:
minikube start — vm-driver=virtualbox
and can check the status using:
minikube status
4. Install network gateways (Istio-ingress)
Now that kubernetes is installed and the cluster is up, we need to install the network related stuff so that our application can talk to outside world and the application is exposed to outside world.
And for all that stuff, we will be using istio as the ingress controller. If you need more details about ingress and istio, please check these links.
To install istio, follow the steps in this link which states following commands:
curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | sh -
cd istio-1.6.8
export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH
//where PWD is path of istio install directory
istioctl install --set profile=demo
If you face problems in installations, try increasing the memory assigned to minikube using below command and re-initiate the istio installation:
minikube config set memory 4096
After that, istio will be installed.
Now we need configure the network gateways using the following steps:
a. Create namespaces
kubectl create namespace istio-system
b. Create istio gateway resources
Now create istio gateway resources using the following istio.yml:
kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
name: istio-ingressgateway-internal
namespace: istio-system
labels:
app: istio-ingressgateway
istio: ingressgateway
release: istio
spec:
ports:
- name: status-port
protocol: TCP
port: 8080
targetPort: 8080
nodePort: 32200
- name: http2
protocol: TCP
port: 80
targetPort: 80
nodePort: 31390
- name: mongodb
protocol: TCP
port: 27017
targetPort: 27017
nodePort: 33033
selector:
app: istio-ingressgateway
istio: ingressgateway
release: istio
type: LoadBalancer
sessionAffinity: None
externalTrafficPolicy: Cluster
and execute this file using:
kubectl apply -f istio.yml
This will create the resources related to istio ingress and network gateways.
c. Create our app namespace
Create a namespace for your application as follows:
kubectl create namespace myapp
d. Create our app gateway which will use istio gateway
And create a gateway resource(myaap-gateway.yml) for your application which will use the above istio gateway for connectivity as follows:
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: Gateway
metadata:
name: myapp-gateway
namespace: myapp
spec:
selector:
istio: istio-ingressgateway-internal
controller
servers:
- port:
number: 80
name: http
protocol: HTTP2
hosts:
- "host.docker.internal"
and execute this using:
kubectl apply -f myapp-gateway.yml
e. Enable istio injection for our app
kubectl label namespace myapp istio-injection=enabled
5. Create docker image
Now we need to create a docker image of our spring-boot application.
As stated previously, this article assumes that you know what is spring-boot, what is docker image and its internal and what is kubernetes yaml file.
To create the docker image of you spring-boot apllication, you need to simply add a Dockerfile in your project root directory and add the commands for docker image creation. For more details on how to create a docker file, see this link.
Our sample Dockerfile is as follows:
FROM adoptopenjdk/openjdk11:alpine-jre
COPY my-app/target/*.jar /myapp/myapp.jar
EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["java", "-jar","/myapp/myapp.jar"]
What is does is simply copies my-app springboot jar to /myapp/myapp.jar, and then executes that jar using java -jar command.
Start docker on you local machine.
Now to create an image from this file, cd to our project root directory in terminal where you just created the Dockerfile and execute the following command:
cd my-app
docker build -t my-app .
This will create an image o f your spring boot application.
6. Create kubernetes yaml file
Now that our image is ready, we need to create a kubernetes yaml file to tell the cluster on how create the deployment, services and pods (all kubernetes related terms).
To check on how to create the yaml file and what all things it includes, please check this link and this link.
Our sample myapp.yaml file is as follows:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: myapp
namespace: myapp
labels:
app: myapp
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app: myapp
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: myapp
spec:
containers:
- name: myapp
image: myapp
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
imagePullPolicy: Never
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: myapp
namespace: myapp
spec:
ports:
- nodePort: 32000
port: 8080
targetPort: 8080
selector:
app: myapp
type: LoadBalancer
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: myapp
namespace: myapp
spec:
hosts:
- '*'
gateways:
- myapp-gateway
http:
-
match:
- uri:
prefix: /myapp
route:
- destination:
host: myapp.myapp.svc.cluster.local
port:
number: 8080
7. Deploy on kubernetes cluster (minikube)
To deploy the application, execute the following command:
kubectl apply -f myapp.yml
And this will create your deployment, pod, replica set, service and virtual service.
8. Port forwarding for myapp service
Enable the port forwarding using following command:
kubectl port-forward services/myapp 8080:8080 -n myapp
and now your can access your add on http://localhost:8080
9. Monitor application deployment (Kiali and Lens)
Now to monitor ur application, you can use kiali using the following command:
istioctl d kiali
which will open a web portal in browser and you can check the status of you pods and deployments. | https://medium.com/swlh/deploy-spring-boot-app-on-kubernetes-minikube-on-macos-df410ef858c8 | ['Karan Verma'] | 2020-08-25 18:22:30.277000+00:00 | ['Containers', 'Spring Boot', 'Docker', 'Deployment', 'Kubernetes'] |
The Outstanding Music of The Outer Worlds | Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds is one of the best games released in the last year. It pairs peerless role-playing game design with audiovisual excellence. It draws on the studio’s experience as a legendary development team in the genre, and reinvents elements of classic games like Fallout, Mass Effect, and BioShock while also having its own funky tone. It’s a well-written, dense, feature-rich RPG adventure that has the epic feel of a massive open world game paired with a more reasonable, easily-finished size.
In addition to exceptional Unreal Engine-powered visuals, the game features a rousing, brilliant soundtrack composed by Justin E. Bell. It is the final ingredient that takes the game from “great” to “ highest tier.” The music is filled to the brim with thrilling majesty, and right from the title screen, it makes you feel like you’re in for a once-in-a-lifetime space adventure. I’ve been replaying the game for a second time this week, and the music is just as excellent on repeat listen as it is for newcomers.
The title screen music is also the title theme of the game, called “Hope.” It’s nearly eight minutes of gorgeous scene-setting sonic delight. It delves deep into the catalog of live orchestra instruments beyond genre-typical horns and strings all the way to the contra-bass flute, and enchants players with a few different takes on the game’s ear-worm main theme. It’s likable from moment one, and perfectly captures the balance of melancholy, earnestness, and old-school sci-fi action that the game contains.
There’s no other way to describe this piece than special. It accomplishes more thematically with its wide range of instruments, dynamics, and emotional oomph than most games do in their first hour. I’ve been humming this theme to myself off-and-on at random since the game first launched in October.
Fortunately, the rest of the soundtrack delivers on the promise of its opening, carefully weaving between “delightful background accompaniment” and the same rousing thrills as the opening theme, while exploring different genres and instrumentation. The soundtrack gets in your face when it needs to emphasize a cinematic moment, such as in “Phineas Escapes,” and also knows how to build effective environmental flavor during player exploration, like in the opening town theme “Edgewater.”
I love the guitar licks that punch through during this song. They give the opening town a little of that classic “Space Western” vibe, while also evoking the haunting and legendary guitar from Matt Uelmen’s famous Diablo soundtrack. This is a pretty great trick. Bell manages to evoke the father of action RPGs and TV’s Firefly all at once, while also doing his own thing that stays true to the feel of this quirky space opera.
One of the the many smart sonic decisions in The Outer Worlds is to occasionally remind players of the opening “Hope” theme, both by weaving strains of it into other tracks, and by using a small chunk of it as the “level up” sound. Each time your character earns new skill points, you’ll hear a little of that iconic music again, and instantly rush back to the excitement of hearing the title screen for the first time.
The game has enough unique music tracks in it that it’s your constant reassuring companion, gently nudging your imagination into thinking the game is larger than it really is. That illusion is helped by fun micro-scale musical details. For example, the game features several different large corporations, and each one has their own diegetic theme music you might hear in a shop, on an elevator, or from a vending machine. It’s awesome that they went this extra mile to sell the completeness of the audio world. | https://xander51.medium.com/the-outstanding-music-of-the-outer-worlds-ada47c7a2d14 | ['Alex Rowe'] | 2020-03-06 21:49:28.300000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Game Design', 'Videogames', 'Audio', 'Music'] |
How To Store Your AWS Lambda Secrets | How To Store Your AWS Lambda Secrets
Do it right, so you don’t have to redo it when your application load increases
Don’t tell anyone your secrets. Do tell people how to store secrets. (Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash)
Most Lambda deployments use environment variables to pass configuration to the deployed function. It’s the recommendation that AWS makes in the documentation, and it’s an attractive choice because it’s easy, encrypted at rest, and allows for flexibility in how you get the values there in the first place.
There are many articles with good recommendations about lambda configurations already. Why should you read this one?
Instead of comparing and contrasting approaches, this is a how-to guide for anyone whose primary values are minimising cost without compromising scalability or security. If you have additional or different needs, I recommend reading the links above as well.
This guide is aimed at small to medium teams working in contexts where security matters, but fine-grained permission management might not.
Just tell me the answer
If you’re here from Google and just want a recommendation, feel free to skip to the end for the summary. If you want the detailed rationale behind the recommendation, read on. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-store-your-aws-lambda-secrets-cheaply-without-compromising-scalability-or-security-d3e8a250f12c | ['Timothy Jones'] | 2019-09-04 18:42:46.454000+00:00 | ['Security', 'Lambda', 'Software Development', 'AWS', 'Scalability'] |
This Thanksgiving, We’re Eating A Pelican | This Thanksgiving, We’re Eating A Pelican
The best alternative to turkey.
Photo by Wayne de Klerk
2020 has been one for the books, and I don’t mean the history books. I mean the recipe books. That’s right. Forget everything else, because this Thanksgiving, we’re not eating turkey. This Thanksgiving, we’re eating glorious pelican fresh out of the sky.
I know what you’re thinking: What the fuck are you talking about? But before you cram your AirPods back in and keep doomscrolling into the future, hoping that whatever vaccine comes out will also make you more attractive, let me let you in on a little secret: Turkeys are fucking lame. They’ve got a dick for a neck, an umbrella for an ass, and a bad attitude. They’re doused with Tryptophan that will make you fall asleep faster than you can say “Make America Suck Again” and have assholes full of gizzard farts. Some say the Tryptophan bit is a myth, but do you know what’s really a myth? Plymouth Fucking Rock. Stop believing turkey propaganda and get you a bird that can fly.
The pelican’s beak is a battleship. Its wingspan the Sydney Opera House; its feathers dictionary pages. It swallows fish the way the whale swallowed Jonah: whole. This is what you need. You need a bird that hunts by plunging into the ocean like a forty-miles-an-hour turd knowing that if it dies well then at least it truly lived.
Let me tell you something else. There’s a little something in each turkey and it’s not stuffing. It’s a desire to bring you down, to the low vibrations of the Earth, to the place where birds can’t fly. What is your tie to the turkey anyway? You didn’t invent it. You didn’t say, “Hey, look at this bird I invented.” Is it because you wanted to be the turkey in your first-grade Thanksgiving play but Mrs. McNally assigned you as the Mayflower? With no speaking part? Is it because when you were waiting backstage before the performance, proud pilgrim Suzanne Baker looked at you in your cardboard boat trash as if she just knew you were going to fuck everything up? Is it because Ricky Wilson got to be the turkey and he also won the best handwriting award that year when you know damn well that his handwriting sucked and now Ricky is a successful sports commentator? Well get over it and clear a spot on your plate for a bird with eyes like halos. 2020 is the year of the pelican.
When the pelican takes to the wind it spreads its wings the same way socialism spreads: like magic. Each feather lifts in an aerodynamic orgasm to match the curvature of Communion bread as the bird ascends further into the celestial sphere, only looking below to judge lesser beings, flapping its wings to the rhythm of Pomp and Circumstance. Unlike the turkey, the pelican has no regrets.
And so I invite you to imagine this: your Thanksgiving table overflowing with festive china, rolled napkins, and trays of casseroles, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, Aunt Judy’s creamed heart-attack pasta, all centered around a grand, flaming pelican.
Now that’s what I call history. | https://medium.com/slackjaw/this-thanksgiving-were-eating-a-pelican-32419d9de8d6 | ['Laura Shepard'] | 2020-12-07 22:52:35.524000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Satire', 'Lifestyle', 'Food', 'Writing'] |
Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting* | Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting*
You are not crazy, my friends.
Los Angeles, pollution-free. Photo: Gabriel Duarte
This is the first part of a series of essays. Read Part II here.
*Gaslighting, if you don’t know the word, is defined as manipulation into doubting your own sanity; as in, Carl made Mary think she was crazy, even though she clearly caught him cheating. He gaslit her.
Pretty soon, as the country begins to figure out how we “open back up” and move forward, very powerful forces will try to convince us all to get back to normal. (That never happened. What are you talking about?) Billions of dollars will be spent on advertising, messaging, and television and media content to make you feel comfortable again. It will come in the traditional forms — a billboard here, a hundred commercials there — and in new-media forms: a 2020–2021 generation of memes to remind you that what you want again is normalcy. In truth, you want the feeling of normalcy, and we all want it. We want desperately to feel good again, to get back to the routines of life, to not lie in bed at night wondering how we’re going to afford our rent and bills, to not wake to an endless scroll of human tragedy on our phones, to have a cup of perfectly brewed coffee and simply leave the house for work. The need for comfort will be real, and it will be strong. And every brand in America will come to your rescue, dear consumer, to help take away that darkness and get life back to the way it was before the crisis. I urge you to be well aware of what is coming.
For the last hundred years, the multibillion-dollar advertising business has operated based on this cardinal principle: Find the consumer’s problem and fix it with your product. When the problem is practical and tactical, the solution is “as seen on TV” and available at Home Depot. Command strips will save me from having to repaint. So will Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser. Elfa shelving will get rid of the mess in my closet. The Ring doorbell will let me see who’s on the porch if I can’t take my eyes off Netflix. But when the problem is emotional, the fix becomes a new staple in your life, and you become a lifelong loyalist. Coca-Cola makes you: happy. A Mercedes makes you: successful. Taking your family on a Royal Caribbean cruise makes you: special. Smart marketers know how to highlight what brands can do for you to make your life easier. But brilliant marketers know how to rewire your heart. And, make no mistake, the heart is what has been most traumatized this last month. We are, as a society, now vulnerable in a whole new way.
What the trauma has shown us, though, cannot be unseen. A carless Los Angeles has clear blue skies as pollution has simply stopped. In a quiet New York, you can hear the birds chirp in the middle of Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge. These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could find a way to have a less deadly daily effect on the planet. What’s not fit for a postcard are the other scenes we have witnessed: a health care system that cannot provide basic protective equipment for its frontline; small businesses — and very large ones — that do not have enough cash to pay their rent or workers, sending over 16 million people to seek unemployment benefits; a government that has so severely damaged the credibility of our media that 300 million people don’t know who to listen to for basic facts that can save their lives.
The cat is out of the bag. We, as a nation, have deeply disturbing problems. You’re right. That’s not news. They are problems we ignore every day, not because we’re terrible people or because we don’t care about fixing them, but because we don’t have time. Sorry, we have other shit to do. The plain truth is that no matter our ethnicity, religion, gender, political party (the list goes on), nor even our socioeconomic status, as Americans we share this: We are busy. We’re out and about hustling to make our own lives work. We have goals to meet and meetings to attend and mortgages to pay — all while the phone is ringing and the laptop is pinging. And when we get home, Crate and Barrel and Louis Vuitton and Andy Cohen make us feel just good enough to get up the next day and do it all over again. It is very easy to close your eyes to a problem when you barely have enough time to close them to sleep. The greatest misconception among us, which causes deep and painful social and political tension every day in this country, is that we somehow don’t care about each other. White people don’t care about the problems of black America. Men don’t care about women’s rights. Cops don’t care about the communities they serve. Humans don’t care about the environment. These couldn’t be further from the truth. We do care. We just don’t have the time to do anything about it. Maybe that’s just me. But maybe it’s you, too.
Well, the treadmill you’ve been on for decades just stopped. Bam! And that feeling you have right now is the same as if you’d been thrown off your Peloton bike and onto the ground: What in the holy fuck just happened? I hope you might consider this: What happened is inexplicably incredible. It’s the greatest gift ever unwrapped. Not the deaths, not the virus, but The Great Pause. It is, in a word, profound. Please don’t recoil from the bright light beaming through the window. I know it hurts your eyes. It hurts mine, too. But the curtain is wide open. What the crisis has given us is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views. At no other time, ever in our lives, have we gotten the opportunity to see what would happen if the world simply stopped. Here it is. We’re in it. Stores are closed. Restaurants are empty. Streets and six-lane highways are barren. Even the planet itself is rattling less (true story). And because it is rarer than rare, it has brought to light all of the beautiful and painful truths of how we live. And that feels weird. Really weird. Because it has… never… happened… before. If we want to create a better country and a better world for our kids, and if we want to make sure we are even sustainable as a nation and as a democracy, we have to pay attention to how we feel right now. I cannot speak for you, but I imagine you feel like I do: devastated, depressed, and heartbroken.
And what a perfect time for Best Buy and H&M and Wal-Mart to help me feel normal again. If I could just have the new iPhone in my hand, if I could rest my feet on a pillow of new Nikes, if I could drink a venti blonde vanilla latte or sip a Diet Coke, then this very dark feeling would go away. You think I’m kidding, that I’m being cute, that I’m denying the very obvious benefits of having a roaring economy. You’re right. Our way of life is not without purpose. The economy is not, at its core, evil. Brands and their products create millions of jobs. Like people — and most anything in life — there are brands that are responsible and ethical, and there are others that are not. They are all part of a system that keeps us living long and strong. We have lifted more humans out of poverty through the power of economics than any other civilization in history. Yes, without a doubt, Americanism is a force for good. It is not some villainous plot to wreak havoc and destroy the planet and all our souls along with it. I get it, and I agree. But its flaws have been laid bare for all to see. It doesn’t work for everyone. It’s responsible for great destruction. It is so unevenly distributed in its benefit that three men own more wealth than 150 million people. Its intentions have been perverted, and the protection it offers has disappeared. In fact, it’s been brought to its knees by one pangolin. We have got to do better and find a way to a responsible free market.
Until then, get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. And on top of that, just to turn the screw that much more, will be the one effort that’s even greater: the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw. The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were fake. The hospitals weren’t really a war zone; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying. You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America. You didn’t see the leader of the free world push an unproven miracle drug like a late-night infomercial salesman. That was a crisis update. You didn’t see homeless people dead on the street. You didn’t see inequality. You didn’t see indifference. You didn’t see utter failure of leadership and systems.
But you did. You are not crazy, my friends. And so we are about to be gaslit in a truly unprecedented way. It starts with a check for $1,200 (Don’t say I never gave you anything) and then it will be so big that it will be bigly. And it will be a one-two punch from both big business and the big White House — inextricably intertwined now more than ever and being led by, as our luck would have it, a Marketer in Chief. Business and government are about to band together to knock us unconscious again. It will be funded like no other operation in our lifetimes. It will be fast. It will be furious. And it will be overwhelming. The Great American Return to Normal is coming.
From one citizen to another, I beg of you: take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all. We care deeply about one another. That is clear. That can be seen in every supportive Facebook post, in every meal dropped off for a neighbor, in every Zoom birthday party. We are a good people. And as a good people, we want to define — on our own terms — what this country looks like in five, 10, 50 years. This is our chance to do that, the biggest one we have ever gotten. And the best one we’ll ever get.
We can do that on a personal scale in our homes, in how we choose to spend our family time on nights and weekends, what we watch, what we listen to, what we eat, and what we choose to spend our dollars on and where. We can do it locally in our communities, in what organizations we support, what truths we tell, and what events we attend. And we can do it nationally in our government, in which leaders we vote in and to whom we give power. If we want cleaner air, we can make it happen. If we want to protect our doctors and nurses from the next virus — and protect all Americans — we can make it happen. If we want our neighbors and friends to earn a dignified income, we can make that happen. If we want millions of kids to be able to eat if suddenly their school is closed, we can make that happen. And, yes, if we just want to live a simpler life, we can make that happen, too. But only if we resist the massive gaslighting that is about to come. It’s on its way. Look out.
—
Thank you to our readers. This essay went around the world to over 20 million people. This is Part I of an essay series. Read Part II here. Read Part III here. Follow Julio Vincent Gambuto on Medium.
Note: The author and Medium have made minor tweaks since initial publication. | https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0 | ['Julio Vincent Gambuto'] | 2020-06-04 23:59:48.643000+00:00 | ['Crisis', 'Coronavirus', 'Economy', 'Economics', 'Politics'] |
How the “Playing Alone Together” Phenomenon Keeps You Writing on Medium | I didn’t know that there was a psychological term for those experiences then. But I will always treasure and tap into the power of doing something “alone together.” We often do it in my family. My husband and children sit at our kitchen counter, each with a computer or a laptop, and play their games. Sometimes together, but also separately their own games, pausing occasionally and talking about what they just did or are about to do.
You probably experienced this in your life many times as well. But you might not have been aware that this very phenomenon might be one of the forces helping you to keep on writing on Medium.
To illustrate how and why, I will quote one for the World of Warcraft players as Jane McGonigal did it in her book Reality is Broken:
“I love being around other real players in the game. I enjoy seeing what they’re doing, what they’ve achieved, fighting with them, fighting against them …, and running across them out in the world ‘doing their thing’ while I’m doing mine. Chuck a heal there, apply a buff here, kill that thing that’s about to kill that player, ask for some quick help or information, gank someone of the opposing faction, scurry and hide before they can gank me, join up for a spontaneous quick group, etc. Thanks, it’s been real and I’m on my way.” — “That’s Right, I Solo In Your MMOs!” (June 09, 2009), Mystic Worlds
You might not be killing any creatures here on Medium, but the process will sound very familiar to you.
You do your thing, and you can enjoy seeing other writers doing theirs. You come across them in the pieces they authored or their responses to your stories. You can ask them “for some quick help or information.” And you can even fight against them by disagreeing with what they wrote, or you can fight along with them by supporting their point of view.
And you can join others in a spontaneous group by, for example, highlighting the same bits as they did. You signal to them and the author that those bits resonate with you, and you join in experiencing the thought those pearls of wisdom conveyed. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/how-the-playing-alone-together-phenomenon-keeps-you-writing-on-medium-e19d20891304 | ['Victoria Ichizli-Bartels'] | 2020-12-07 14:57:29.118000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Community', 'Writing Life', 'Psychology', 'Ideas'] |
How to have very clear ideas: an introduction. | Over the last ten years, I developed a process that can turn a not-very-clear idea into a very clear idea in about two hours. I’ve used it more times than I can count, helping hundreds of entrepreneurs and artists and whoever get clear on what they’re doing. It’s different every time, but this is roughly how it goes.
This is how it begins.
Someone says, ‘There’s something I’m not very clear about that I’d like to be very clear about.
And you say, “OK. What are we talking about?”
And they say, “I want to be clear about my career. Or my new project. Or my life. Or the book I’m writing.”
And you spend a little time working out what it really is that they want to get clear about.
And then you help them get clear. | https://medium.com/how-to-be-clear/how-to-have-very-clear-ideas-an-introduction-1265ac774dbc | ['Charles Davies'] | 2018-08-10 16:58:59.319000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Very Clear Ideas', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Ideas'] |
In Today’s World — What Really Is a Brand? | In Today’s World — What Really Is a Brand?
Let’s start with “we’ve made a mess of brands.”
In the 1950’s, the discipline of brand management was created by CPG companies such as P&G, Unilever and Kraft. That discipline was based on the need to distinguish a product or service from others by creating an identity. Identity entailed functional and emotional benefits. Emotional benefits were conceptualized to differentiate when functional benefits effectively became parity with other products. So, now you have a bit of the history — Cliff Notes version, without going into all of the details.
Today, what defines a brand is starkly different depending on organization, agency partners, channel focus, product management strategy, supply chain structure, etc. The reality is how we define a brand and the responsibility of a brand itself has changed. Let’s look at a number of elements that make up the brand equation.
A brand is only as good as the quality of the product or its ability to meet the expectations of the brand “promise.”
Who the brand is associated with matters (e.g. the retail distribution, brand influencer strategy, etc.).
The quality / responsiveness of customer service is a direct extension of the brand perception.
A brand can be either functional or aspirational.
A brand is accountable.
The role of a brand is a voice in support of a position.
The last item above is the most controversial. So, what does “being the voice” mean? In today’s fractured, highly partisan world of opinions, brands have taken a “stand” on many items — social justice, gender, equality, environment / sustainability, politics, etc. Effectively, brand management, executive leadership and agency creative / strategy have stepped into the abyss in order to align to a demographic or psychographic vs. the historical approach of focusing on the functional or product / service aligned emotional and aspirational benefits.
Today, brands have a tendency to be very selective about what they’re willing to address within the scope of what they stand for based on those responsible for the narrative. Let’s use, for example, Apple. The brand is valued at $205.5B¹ as of ’19. With the power of their brand and the depth of their product dominance within specific categories, Apple has the ability to influence perspectives and change behaviors. Apple has historically stayed true to its core as a brand by focusing on the features, benefits and experiences uniquely delivered by the company. Apple’s executives understand the implications of choices related to their brand. If Apple elected to position itself as an “environmental leader,” the issue of rare earth materials and the impact to the environment caused by the mining of these elements would quickly put the brand messaging out of touch with the reality of the business. This isn’t to say that Apple or any other company that relies on techniques that impact the environment are wrong or misaligned to the “common good.” It just means that they should be careful not to step into a conversation with their brand that creates dissonance. The same could be said for outsourcing / offshoring, pricing, packaging, product distribution, channels, etc. Each decision a company makes has a correlated implication.
We can look at brands including REI, The North Face, Nike, Under Armour, Chobani, Ben & Jerry’s, and P&G for a reference point. The reality is — what brands stand for and represent today is a far cry from the past. The time when a brand owned its ecosystem, which included everything from R&D to the manufacturing plants, to distribution and ultimately messaging and customer service is for most companies, a thing of the past. It you look at the model today, a large portion of companies don’t R&D their own products — instead relying on third-party manufacturers to do both the product design and manufacturing, while the distribution is managed by third-parties and the customer support is outsourced. So, what does that leave behind as the “brand?” — Finance, Ops, Marketing, Advertising, Sales and core IT. Unlike companies such as Russell Athletic, which still owns manufacturing facilities and where the conversation still revolves around terms such as “looms,” most brands are now focused on sales, trends, social data, etc. which drives behaviors.
The former Chief Marketing Officer of Unilever use to say, “A brand is the contract between a company and consumers.” It’s this statement that leads to the thesis: Does a brand matter? Is this a controversial statement? Possibly, but let’s look at the factors that serve as the input to the question.
Are buyers driven by an affinity to a brand or to the following?
Price sensitivity
Availability (Where can I buy it online?)
Time sensitivity
Perspectives of quality (Reviews)
Features and Benefits
Let’s use Amazon or Jane as an example. Yes, I have a house w/ 2 girls and my wife. The reality is, the products sold aren’t known by their brand. They’re recognized by style, price, availability, etc. If you search on Amazon for a bathing suit or for me, a set of hinges for a cabinet door, I couldn’t tell you who the vast majority of the brands are, but I can tell you whether I would buy based on 1. Product Reviews — this is the most important factor; 2. Customer Service / Support Reviews; 3. Product features; 4. Price; and 5. Availability / Delivery Date. In the end, what matters, especially in the digital world as it relates to a brand, is the quality of the product and the supporting service.
With quality driving a number of factors, brand price sensitivity / elasticity is eroded. When you look at Dacor, Viking or Miele vs. Electrolux or Hair, or Delta vs. Waterworks, you see enormous price differences, and in many instances, feature, function and perceived quality of the brand name. In reality, when you search and find 1-star review and comments regarding quality, reliability and customer service responses that reflect a brand’s self-entitlement, the perceived value of a “brand” is diminished.
So, what does all of this mean? First, a brand is complex — built from an intricate interdependency on vision, leadership, quality, value, support and aspiration. Second, the digital world easily exposes the weakest connections within the brand ecosystem. When we ask a CMO and their team to deliver increases in sales volume, improvement in Net Promoter Score (NPS), etc. while not addressing quality, timeliness, product innovation, etc., it’s the equivalent of pushing a boulder uphill. Third, and not least, a brand can easily be perceived as disingenuous when it takes a stand and projects a voice if at the core it can’t live up to the basic tenets of value, quality, meaning and experience. It’s this intentionality that matters — otherwise, a brand stands for nothing more than a logo, tagline and supporting visuals.
Whether you agree or not, I welcome your thoughts.
You can reach me on Twitter — @digitalquotient or on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobmorris/
¹ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2019/05/22/the-worlds-most-valuable-brands-2019-apple-on-top-at-206-billion/#732e3f6537c2 | https://medium.com/swlh/in-todays-world-what-really-is-a-brand-a545d7210658 | ['Bob Morris'] | 2020-11-25 07:17:42.261000+00:00 | ['Branding', 'Branding Strategy', 'Marketing', 'Brand Strategy', 'Customer Experience'] |
What The Film Audience Wants | For a film director, an audience is a group of people who go to the cinema or log into the internet to gain an experience.
Will the experience be good or bad, depends upon the storytelling style and the audience’s taste.
I’ve converted this blog into a short video if that’s your format of choice here
We’ve identified that the audience wants an experience, but what exactly is an experience? It’s something which entices the audience to come back for more or stay away for good.
What is the experience made up of for a film director? It’s made up of three main ingredients, concept, character and story.
These are the three main ingredients when combined together, give the audiences an experience to remember or forget.
Hugo
What is a concept? A concept is the equivalent of a seed that you plant in order to get the fruit. In order to get an orange, you need to plant the seed for an orange. Similarly, a concept is the seed which is the very beginning of the experience which will never grow if the seed isn’t planted right.
Let’s talk about the concept of one of the greatest movies ever made, The Matrix. What is the concept of The Matrix? Neo wants to find out what is the Matrix, this question was the concept of the film and this concept was the seed which gave us everything that came afterwards which brings us to point number two, The Character.
Who was the main character of the film, it was Neo. Was he an interesting main character? Hell yes! Why was he an interesting character? Because of two main traits.
Neo trying to bend the spoon
First, he was an intelligent software engineer. When you present somebody intelligent to the audiences, they automatically aspire to be somewhat like that character because deep down inside everybody aspires to be intelligent. Christopher Nolan took over Hollywood not because he‘s got some kind of a magic wand, but because he is the most intelligent film director and a storyteller of the modern times.
Secondly, Neo was driven by an interesting goal. He wanted to find out what is the matrix and we as an audience knew how it would lead him to find out something we will linger on for the rest of our lives. So, instead of being driven by the desire to seek something cliched like love or money, Neo was seeking the answer to his question, ultimately enlightening him with the purpose of his life. This purpose wouldn’t be to get married, have children and live a normal life, but it would involve something beyond our imagination.
As an audience when we realize this psychological state of the character, we fall in love with that character.
The third and the last point of making up an experience is the fruit itself. When the tree is grown, you receive the fruit which is the equivalent of the story. So what was the story of the matrix? In a nutshell, Neo takes the red pill, finds out what the matrix is, falls into disbelief, accepts the reality, becomes part of the real world, fights an agent, dies, gets reborn, fights the agent again and finally wins.
Now he finally realized the purpose of his life, to fight against the system that has blinded the whole world into believing something that is not real.
Neo is ready for a fight
So once you take a bite out of this fruit, you receive an experience, just like when the movie cuts to black and the end credits roll, the audience receives an experience. Whether you will like the fruit depends upon your taste buds just like loving a movie depends upon the audience’s mindset and how successfully you’re able to change those mindsets much similar to what Christopher Nolan did. He completely reinvented the superhero genre.
Once he was done with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, everybody out there wanted to reboot their superhero franchise and come up with the next hit similar to Nolan’s hit.
You as an independent film director, if you think deeply about these three ingredients, you will realize how most of the ideas in your backpack suck. Just like all the clichéd independent film directors out there, you quickly and randomly come up with a character and a story then jump on to the glorified technical aspects of the movie, especially the cinematography.
Just like Stanley Kubrick, the one thing that cliched film directors care most about is the cinematography. No matter how much you deny, it is the absolute truth about our current independent film directors.
Stanley Kubrick
Hopefully, this blog will provide all the new film directors and storytellers with a fresh perception about concepts, characters, stories, movies and ultimately the experience.
On a closing note, if you’re somebody who wants to become a film director, I wanna know what you know about the audience’s desire?
In the hopes of connecting with film directors and story lovers all over the world, this is Mr. Zeecon, in the making of a great story. | https://medium.com/applaudience/what-the-film-audience-wants-96599913cbb8 | ['Zeeshan Contractor'] | 2020-08-26 04:02:00.122000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Film', 'Hollywood', 'Movies', 'Filmmaking'] |
5 Compelling Reasons to Write About Your Painful Secrets | This article was inspired by a very close friend and is therefore dedicated to her and her healing heart — we’ll call her Athena. Others came to mind as I wrote this with love and an insatiable need to comfort them with my words; they’ll know who they are.
Life is full of tragedy, and I know you’ve suffered through your share.
We grieve for loved ones who pass away, we get divorced and deal with abuse. We fight cancer, go bankrupt and have major fallouts with our families, all of which can play havoc with our lives.
Sometimes it’s too much to process, but we find ways to move through it — don’t we?
We tuck the tough stuff away and push our feelings down. The pain can be so excruciating that dealing with it head-on seems impossible. So we cope by distracting ourselves, like working 24/7 or burying ourselves in other people’s problems. We spend hours in the gym, go for long walks, tell everyone we’re fine and get comfortably numb with our favourite wine, anything to avoid those prying eyes and requests to talk about our feelings.
We refuse to open up as a solution to hurting more.
We feel afraid and ashamed by the turbulence of our inner thoughts and emotions. We decide we must fight to overcome our grief and get a grip quickly or risk falling apart on an epic level.
We also decide sharing our pain leaves us open for judgement, questions we don’t want to answer, and unsolicited opinions we don’t care to hear.
Getting vulnerable seems like a horrible idea.
Crying is for babies, after all, so we hold it back and get angry when we can’t keep our tears in check any longer. We say things to ourselves like, “suck it up buttercup,” “toughen up man,” or “put your big girl panties on,” it’s just another day to endure; you’ve got this.
We tend not to share the compassion we have for others with ourselves.
These tendencies are described as avoidance coping, and it can cause anxiety to snowball because we end up experiencing more of the very thing we’re trying to escape.
But as life piles it on, it gets harder to keep our emotions from bubbling over.
Exceptional people come and go from our lives that make us stronger. Love keeps seeping in to threaten our adamant resolve. Eventually, we feel an overwhelming need just to let go of the past and let God take the wheel.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Unfortunately, I can relate, and I’m guilty of all the above, so I understand completely.
Pain avoidance is a natural and reasonable response to trauma.
Counselling helps, but to be honest, I could never summon enough trust with a stranger to come clean and tell all. So eventually, things started to boil over in my life; I couldn’t get one mess cleaned up before another emerged and threatened to take over.
Ignoring the cracks in my armour as I got older wasn’t working either. We all want to be better, do better and feel better. I found The Change Triangle by Hilary Jacobs to be very helpful as I learned more about why I became so defensive when I felt emotional.
That’s when I realized I’d developed a robust defence system.
It resembled a stone fortress with massive gates and padded walls. My silence (and avoidance)began to hurt me more than my painful experiences had. I decided then to pray for relief, and my guarded, angry heart.
My answer came immediately, and I see now that God has spoken some of those same words to you, my dear friend, that’s why sharing your story is on your mind.
Write, Athena. Share your pain, let the tears fall and smear the ink. Your journey is for a reason and only you have the power to inspire others with it. The process will heal you in return, even if you’re not ready to share your words.
Photo by Sam Hull on Unsplash
Take small steps, but go where the pain is and start writing today.
Here’s why…
“What makes you vulnerable, makes you beautiful.” — Brené Brown
Find Out What You Think — There’s nothing like a satisfying uncensored vent on paper to find out what you sincerely think about things. There is no worry about offending or hurting anyone in the process, so you become uncensored. Reading it back allows you to see what’s eating at you at your core; trust me, you’ll have some ‘’aha’’ moments. Take Leaps Instead of Steps in Your Personal Growth — Writing rather than thinking about your pain is cathartic. The methodical process helps you come to terms with more of your feelings. You’ll see them for what they are, therefore making it easier to separate yourself from the fear and shame that surround them. Your pain will lead to self-awareness if you allow yourself to experience it fully. Protect Your Health — Build a healthy relationship with your mind for your body’s sake. Allowing anxiety and fear to fester too long will eventually cause physical illness. Writing requires using the analytical left side of your brain, leaving your creative right side to relax and play. It will calm your mind, reduce your stress and, in turn, strengthen your immune system. Process your Pain and Grief — Writing about your internal pain and grief helps make meaningful connections between your thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Capturing them on paper allows you to enhance your sense of well being by putting things in perspective. Help Others with Your Story — Finding a way to learn from difficult times in our lives is something we should all strive for as a personal goal. But taking that next step and sharing your story is transformational in your healing process. Your pain will shrink away as you help others with your words. You won’t have to be an expert in anything; you need to get vulnerable while sharing your story. Show others they aren’t alone and that there is hope for us all.
For some, myself included, expressing private thoughts and uneasy feelings can be extremely difficult, regardless of your desire to do so.
Writing in my private journal was the first step to understanding that it wasn’t necessarily my personality that kept me from sharing, but the fact that I’d suppressed so much of myself over the years that I was completely blocked.
It was a struggle to write the simplest things. I’d pushed my emotions away and for so long that it was difficult to pull them back to the surface.
However, as I persisted, the process helped me open up, even though it was just for myself. Reading it back was eye-opening and allowed me to see more lurking under the surface than I realized.
Photo by Jene Yeo on Unsplash
The healing had begun, but I wanted to clear my demons away in their entirety. So eventually, I tackled writing a memoir, and it allowed me to separate myself from that hurt little girl on the pages and see how far I’d come in my life.
Unfortunately, I did have to revisit those horrible and hurtful places to make it happen. I had to feel all that pain again in my heart and my mind as I chose my words.
The process of writing that book took many years. It was full of torment and tears, but the effect was life-changing. I no longer recognize the girl in those chapters. She’s a stranger to me now.
I forgave myself on a profound level and began to love and trust myself again.
I want that for you too.
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.” — Ernest Hemmingway
In my way, and in my own time, I was able to release my anger, shame, and guilt. All my suppressed feelings left me to fill the pages.
Feeling vulnerable and exposed, it once again took all of my resolve to publish it. Knowing that if I could help even one girl in the world, as I had helped myself, it would all be worth it.
My words exist now for those who suffer and need hope. I believe they will find connection, comfort and promise in my vulnerability.
It is the good that has come from the bad.
So write, trust your faith and rejoice in the sweet relief of unblocking your emotions. Stare them down with intention and refuse the control they exercise over you.
You’ve faced too much tragedy in your life to hold it all in. It’s time to share your journey, and now you know that in your heart.
Writing from that very place and working through your pain is a sign of strength you won’t find in the gym. You aren’t protecting those that hurt you any longer; you’re allowing them to hold you hostage.
First, you’ll find forgiveness for yourself, and eventually, for those that hurt you deeply.
Cry hard, grieve, tell the whole truth, let it out, and then let it go.
There is no shame in your story — only hope and healing.
If you enjoyed that, you might find further inspiration in this story.
I’m Liz, the self-empowered, red wine & coffee lovin’’, personal growth fanatic behind this article. I’ve stopped shrinking into places I’ve outgrown, and I’m a fan of straight talk and practical solutions. That’s why I’m here to Empower, Educate and Entertain. | https://medium.com/change-your-mind/5-compelling-reasons-to-write-about-your-painful-secrets-d794c3c33fc8 | ['Liz Porter'] | 2020-10-06 18:17:42.096000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'This Happened To Me', 'Self Improvement', 'Inspiration', 'Writing'] |
Echoes and Voices in Philip Metres’ Shrapnel Maps | Philip Metres’ poem, “Future Anterior,” is structured as a series of questions (and returns) answered by multiple voices. Since this form felt close to the heart of Shrapnel Maps, I borrowed it for this essay.
Shrapnel Maps, by Philip Metres. Copper Canyon Press, 2020.
What is shrapnel?
Shrapnel as a noun refers to fragments of a bomb, shell, or other object thrown out by an explosion; debris. Shrapnel is here from the start, in Metres’ epigraphs, which end with Mahmoud Darwish’s words: “my language is shrapnel.”
What is shrapnel again?
In “Act One: Our House Is Now Another House,” the sections are titled by the name of the first-person narrator. The house switches hands and owners. Metres’ poems alternate between Jewish and Palestinian voices. Here, Noah speaks:
Shrapnel is the taste of fear in a mouth, it’s hard metal exterior oxidizing. Shrapnel was named after General Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842), the British soldier who invented the shell, though the sense of splintered bomb fragments, and the need for this term, originated during the First World War. Was shrapnel the accident — or the intended, rippling harm?
What is a map?
Map as a noun refers to a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc. Metres offers a definition of map in “Future Anterior”:
His definition relies on the French future anterior tense, and its construction of auxiliary verb + past participle. It is the tense of potentiality which imagines “what will have been” before an event actually transpires. The map, itself, is a text of possibility and division. Think of chaos theory where all potentials are possible and not yet decided. In a sense, the future anterior is the time of not yet as well as compossibility.
What is a map again?
A map is the past’s presence, the bounded future. The danger of the map lies in its conflation of essentialisms and nations. A map is a record, a document, a text. In “Three Books (A Simultaneity)”:
A map is official, simple. No wail is legible on a map.
What is return?
The Arabic word for return is awda. For Palestianians, awda is directional: a looking back that includes the act of returning to the homeland they fled in 1948.
Section VIII, “Returning to Jaffa,” is dedicated to Nahida Halaby Gordon, whose family fled to the US 1948. In the afterword, Metres notes that the municipal records from the British Mandate are missing. Documents are incorporated into the poem, rendered as text.
“3” is a postcard titled “Tel Aviv (Explore Old Jaffa).” These juxtapostions create a dialogue between images, idylls, and grief. “5” is “Instruction to the Arab Population,” a Hanagah flyer that Gordon found in her father’s papers after his death. The flyer was written in English, directing British forces on how to “handle” Palestinians.
In the final part of this section, Metres speaks from Nahida Halaby Gordon’s inability to forget. He enacts a continuous return as an “Ode to the Orange of Jaffa”:
The return is rooted in the senses and smells, the memory of the orange, the use of the ode as a reconvening.
What is return again?
Section IX consists of a long poem, “When It Rains In Gaza,” organized by couplets. The sixth section of “When It Rains In Gaza” is titled “Al-Awda Means Return.” In 2014, Israel bombed the al-Awda ice-cream factory. The poem circles the question of whether the factory held medicine or terrorism. Narrated from inside Gaza, there is the question of why the factory was bombed. Return’s olfactory component is centered:
In the essay, “Of Seeing, the Unseen, and the Unseeable: Technology, Poetry, and ‘When It Rains in Gaza’.” Metres says he wanted “to hold a space” for the grief and voice of Iyad al-Tibani, the factory’s owner. The poems of different voices recreate Gaza by reconstituting the grief of individual loss. “Whatever Gaza I think I know, it is a Gaza of the mind,” Metres writes, “Not Gaza.” He credits Deema Shehabi’s poetry for giving him the Gaza he knows.
What is family? What is longing?
Family as a noun refers to a group consisting of parents and children living together in a household; all the descendants of a common ancestor. As in “the house has been owned by the same family for 300 years.” Family is how you enter the world and how you leave it. Maybe we all want to be buried near our kinfolk, to rot in a soil that does not reject us, a soil that claims us for its dust.
The connection between longing and belonging feels imminent. It is difficult to read these poems without thinking about the larger project of the nation-state and its imagined communities forged in order to create governable citizens from disparate linguistic, social, and cultural groups. Longing is the act of looking back into the possible future. And belonging is the way longing is mobilized into political claims, the result of identities constructed by exclusivity, competitive, tied to the needs of nation-states, defined in opposition to each other.
What is family again?
“Family” exposes the tensions between narratives of belonging. This land belongs to me and I belong to it. To be displaced from a land is deeply damaging to the social self. The stronger the identification between land and identity, the greater the risk of violence in displacement. Metres repeats his position as various sides argue over the land of Israel — “I shrink again.” The poet, a mapped self, shrinks and watches the construction:
What is a margin?
Metres starts several poems in the right-hand margin as if to separate them by perspective, as if to formally enact the taking of “sides” on the field of the page. In “Marginalia With Uprooted Olive,” he begins:
The outsider, the displaced person, is not a description of a human so much as it is a description of how social forces (and the narrowed eyes of identity) instrumentalize a human, transforming them into an other; the most brutal objectification precisely because it is empty, it is a commentary on the text rather than the text itself. The description of Palestinians as those whose identity only exists in response to Jewishness is marginal.
What is a citizen?
The citizen is someone who exists on a map. Refugees and immigrants are familiar with the role of documents in the denial of their claims to existence. Undocumented humans know the intimate terror statelessness, or existing between official versions, to lack a map’s context.
In “Bride of Palestine: to be read by four people simultaneously,” Metres borrows the form of Greek tragedy to reveal how refugees are created by threats of violence, by laws designed to re/place them. What does it mean to exist outside the visual realm of protection? The Nuremberg trials helped create a legal narrative and foundation for human rights that applied to stateless refugees, particularly Jewish persons. We in the US have forgotten what we never learned, namely, that the stateless are the most vulnerable human beings on the planet. The passported human is powerful in ways that we can’t unpack without looking in the mirror. “What countries could we see, and what countries could we make, if we erased the erasures?” Metres asks in “Dispatch from the Land of Erasures (1),” an essay from 2018.
What is a homeland?
“The map is not the answer…And the birth certificate is no longer the same. No one has to face this question as you have, from this moment till you die, or repent, or become a traitor.”
- Mahmoud Darwish
All notions of fatherlands and motherlands rely on the notion of a state as a family. A family is worth dying for. A family is worth defending. A homeland is the site of national self-defense. In Section IV. “Theater of Operations,” the poems alternate speakers as as a suicide bombing is planned and executed. It is harrowing and heartbreaking. It is the poetry of absolute hopelessness.
What is return, again? Is it a right? It is a form of flight?
In 1950, Israel passed the “Law of Return,” granting all Jews the right to return to a land they had never known except in stories and religious texts. The rise of violent, horrific genocidal anti-Semitism put Israel on the map for many Jews, trapped in countries determined to murder and erase them completely.
But Jews did not return to Israel or to the land of their descendants. Language is interesting here: a Jew ascends to Israel, as in aleh, meaning to ascend or rise. To leave Israel is to descend from it, as in yerida.
Primo Levi spent decades arguing for the “right of Jews to remain dispersed in their diaspora,” to live in the diaspora of their choice, which might not align with the diaspora of their birth. For Levi, citizenship was secular and not rooted in ethnic identity so much as political affiliation. But how can we escape the closeness between religion and politics now? Does the relationship between religious eschatology and identity consecrate violence, make war, itself, sacred? What is a rhetorical question in this context?
The importance of naming is bound in our notions of the sacred, of blasphemy, of inheritance. The unnamed son is erased from the family’s title deeds. The unnamed people are erased from the record of history. In Israel, Palestinians who live there are not called Palestinians. They are called the Arab sector or the Arab minority.
In “Palestinae [Rudimentum Novit [i]orum] [1475]” erases by reference to religion:
And then, what follows in this logic:
But what is a bracket?
The noun bracket refers to a category of people or things that are similar or fall between specified limits as well the pair of marks [ ] used to enclose words or figures so as to separate them from the context. To bracket, as a verb, is place (one or more people or things) in the same category or group. The tension between the act of bracketing and the creation of the bracketed noun, or category, recurs at both the level of form and meaning in this collection.
Brackets set apart in silence. In numerous poems, Metres titles the page with empty brackets while using the poem’s first line as a ersatz-title in the table of contents. This tiny detail may be a poetic convention, and yet the empty, uninhabited brackets feel heavier than in other contexts.
Among the bracket poems, “In the sudden chill, dogwood leaves blush,” where alienation is carried by an external object, namely a t-shirt with two flags and two languages saying peace and hello:
In “My neighbor’s handshake is firm”, the empty brackets serve a similar formal function, designating an interior absence.
There are inhabited brackets as well. “[The Daily Contortions]” is hard to read, hard for any parents to observe the hurt that exclusion roots in their children, and when this exclusion is tied to race or religion or ethnicity, those hurts are internalized as lessons about life. About the limits of friendship. About the burdens we ask children to carry in the name of their fathers. History is bigger than our children, big as we make it, and Metres’ intimate rendering of a father in “the daily contortions” is visceral:
It is as if the potential for pain, for something lodged inside the skin, kins the shrapnel to the splinter. It’s only a small thing, the smallest ache. What is heritage?
Forget heritage. What is time?
This book makes its own time. By combining and cross-pollinating multiple dates, postcards, chronologies, travelogues, indices, intertextual references, and polyphonies, Metres transcends ordinary time, undoing the linearity which assumes that history has an end, and everything happening must happen so that an end will come to pass. In the US, fundementalist Christian eschatology urges an acceptance of conflict in the Middle East as fated, kinned to religious faith, or part of the coming redemption. Metres efforts to bring nonlinear time to the page invoked an anti-eschatological gesture. The poet in exile bears witness to longing and nostalgia. The displaced poet bears witness to the absence of placehood. At some point, the voice is inflected by the future anterior. But there is no fate, no final religious redemption, that plays on the stage of this book. There are people dying in the name of nations that become their own deities.
Metres wanders into the expanse left by Darwish’s warning against trying to write a history, since the act of writing a history is means of leaving the past behind when “…what is required is to call the past to account.”
“Do not write a history except that of your wounds,” Darwish continues, “Do not write a history except that of your exile.” The history of the wounds is documented, mapped, voiced, recorded. Outside the tension of conflict, there is the tension of Metres’ refusal to relax into ideology or political platforms — he doesn’t rest in a safe place from which to assert national claims. He doesn’t attempt to carve out this space in his poems. He often speaks from inside the empty bracket.
And Darwish responds: “You are here — here, where you were born. And where longing will lead you to death. So, what is a homeland?”
What claims does the poet lay against the past? What is history?
In this immense cartography and its interior archaeologies, we are given both Israel and Palestine, a house, a homeland, an olive heaven, a bullet-rich hell. We are given the extremes in each of us: the urge to plant orchards alongside the desire to build fences, the need to belong combined with a mission that frees us from accountability for our individual actions, the individual conscience quieted by a Nuremberg defense.
What is the line between collective guilt and cultural preservation? Growing up as an immigrant in Alabama, I learned how to belong by unlearning my native language. The powerful needed a history that justified the enslavement of Black persons in order to legitimate their platforms. What I learned from Alabama history books was the plantation’s myth of prosperity and southern charm. It was complicated teachers who screened “Gone With the Wind,” who taught about hierarchies as if they were natural, growing from merit, who romanticized enslavement alongside magnolias.
Darwish observes that the history teacher “earns his livelihood by telling lies, as the history becomes more remote the lies become more innocent and less harmful.” Thus history is part of the disputed terrain — all maps lay claim to particular historical understandings and relationships; all maps re-vision the past to ground a mic for the future. All maps are horrible, hopeful beings.
In Shrapnel Maps, the tension between the ancestor and the descendant continues in Metres lineations of time, in the posters and maps and images which revise and review as one reads. Does hope, itself, alter to accommodate erasure? Darwish’s own grief and longing shaped my reading, as did Kazim Ali’s essay, “Genre Queer: Notes Against Binaries,” which shows how Darwish’s own thinking changed to accommodate mappings. Ali tracks the shift in Mahmoud Darwish’s poetics from the early (hopeful) “My homeland is not a suitcase” to the later (actual) “My homeland is a suitcase.”
Again, I return to Darwish’s words, his musings: “Perhaps because it is trans-temporal, the Palestinians’ return will possibly materialize one day, and their exile will have become one of choice, not coercion.”
This question of choice haunts Metres’ mapped poetry. By alternating between a polyphony of shifting voices, and letting these voices to carry the weight of their histories, we see how the burden of fears harden into bias. It is the hardening, itself, that Metres illuminates and excavates. It is the map. It is the absence of those who cannot exist on the maps we have made for them. It is the terrible power of nations.
*
[Notes and sources: See Archive of the Future Anterior for a fascinating digression in the future anterior tense. All Mahmoud Darwish quotations come from Mahmoud Darwish. “The Homeland: Between Memory and History.” Journal of an Ordinary Grief. Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi. Archipelago Books. Brooklyn, NY: 2020. For Kazim Ali’s essay, see Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker, Bloomsbury 2013. For more on genre-bending and queering, see the blog associated with this book. For Metres’ essays, see Philip Metres. “Dispatch from the Land of Erasures (1).” Boston Review. May 18, 2018 and “Of Seeing, the Unseen, and the Unseeable: Technology, Poetry, and ‘When It Rains in Gaza’.” New Ohio Review. Summer 2020. For a playlist associated with this book as well as readings by Metres, see Copper Canyon Press.] | https://medium.com/anomalyblog/echoes-and-voices-in-philip-metres-shrapnel-maps-4caa18c38a89 | ['Alina Stefanescu'] | 2020-10-14 17:16:53.470000+00:00 | ['Review', 'Books', 'Palestine', 'Literature', 'Poetry'] |
8 killer Typography Tips To Maximize Your Design Skills | Come the time when typography has become the lifeblood of your brand image. The advanced web designing junkies swear by good typography because it creates a visual logic screaming the many messages the marketer wants to deliver.
Typography is a basic skill that has intense bearing on the brand image. To tell you, there lay a series of heavy-weight typography rules but we are here to teach you the most basic pointers that straighten things up for you. The thumb-rule is, however to try and make the text readable less exhausting, crisp and entertaining.
Establishing hierarchy
Most effective typography is based on hierarchy of messaging. It promptly trains the visitors, through the discreet usage of font style, typefaces, size, heights, where to start reading and how to keep reading as they navigate.
It not only enhances the readability but also the subject matter of the content besides holding the reader’s attention. Among other technicalities however, adjusting the size is the commonest way to establish hierarchy.
Eg: Headlines, titles and calls to action are presented with different font sizes.
Accentuating the readability:
via: zingdesign.com
Above said is the key part of your typography. Stylish but difficult to read fonts rather adversely affect the message.
For example, there are many logos with small script fonts to be seen that are pretty challenging to read. One must be careful while choosing a multi-faceted typeface. After all, easing out things to the reader is the motto. One mustn’t leave them guessing.
Choosing the right alignment:
source: webdesignerdepot.com
Alignment is vital because the overall look of the text depends on it. Besides, it helps the whole process of deciphering the information effortless for the readers.
One must be careful about the Flush left, center and flush right alignments. However, choosing the flush left alignment is the most safe-sided option because our eyes are used to it.
Limiting the fonts:
Using regular font is the delivery mechanism and typeface is the creative bent to it. Do not treat a single design with more than two font families. If need be, try bold, italics versions of the same font.
Tracking:
Otherwise called the letter spacing, it is used to adjust the space between words so that they look even.
By taking care of the uniformity, tracking also enhances the readability. The range of characters and their density is hugely affected by tracking.
Leading:
via: slideshare.net
While tracking is maintaining the space between the words, leading has the same application on lines. No denying that readability of your text is hugely impacted by leading.
The type size of the base lines should be 20 percent greater than the font size. This means, a 10 point font should have 12 point leading. The ratio however, can be adjusted as per the desired effect.
Kerning:
via: 99designs.com
Kerning refers to the white space between the individual letters or characters. There are many fonts that come with default kerning value which makes the space between letters look normal. Furthermore, adjusting the kerning of your brand font escalates the visual appeal.
Kerning is a smart hack and the designer must know when to kern. Also, there is certain letter combos that are likely to raise problems should be pacified by kerning. Here’s referring to the letters that sit too closely and letters with huger spacing than the rest.
Font pairing:
via: 22s.com
A good typographer has to know which fonts to pair together. This is the basic requirement whatsoever.
A strong knowledge on the basic gives you liberty to experiment with contrasting pair like Sans Serif + Serif, Script + Modern, Thin + Heavy. Hence, a good outcome of the experiment makes your text stand out, well-formatted and not to mention, well organized. | https://medium.com/freebiesmall/8-killer-typography-tips-to-maximize-your-design-skills-d707db3c1090 | [] | 2017-03-24 20:16:24.976000+00:00 | ['Typography', 'Design Process', 'Design', 'Tips'] |
Putting a Face on Coronavirus Introduction | Putting a Face on Coronavirus Introduction
This virus is not anonymous: it bears all our names
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
I am a social creature exploring my environment from in front of my computer screen. As I scroll through social media, I encounter all the hues of emotions: denial, anger, depression, resolution, contentment . . . Each person who shares how COVID has changed their life has a story to tell.
With a desire to illuminate people, I developed an activity to connect faces to this insidious disease. People where asked to participate in a project. Everyone who participated was asked the same questions and their responses developed into poems sharing their experiences.
What is your age and sex? State two things you love to do? What do you celebrate? Life is _____________ What object represents COVID? (Think of a symbol) Why is it like COVID Two words that describe the object What does COVID smell like? If COVID was an animal which one would it be? How does the animal move? What sound would this animal make? What is your favorite food? What is your most disliked food? What do you want to shout from the mountain tops? Make one statement about the pandemic.
Below are the first two poems of this project | https://medium.com/faces-of-coronavirus/putting-a-face-on-coronavirus-introduction-444d70ec14a1 | ['Brenda Mahler'] | 2020-12-13 01:56:05.938000+00:00 | ['Faces Of Covid', 'Poetry', 'Introduction', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19'] |
Why I like blockchain | Image source: crypto-news.net
Bitcoin is the first thing that comes to mind regarding blockchain, and then the gold rush second. Get rich with a new tech which is in its infant days; who gets in now has a chance in the first wave as it was with the industrial revolution, IT revolution, gold rush and, as it stands with blockchain, all of them combined 😃
But I am more interested in the fundamental changes this technology can bring in our society.
Being an entrepreneur, I love building systems and understand social systems. If you look at the entire society as a system, every individual is an actor in the system. Every system has functional rules, incentives and penalties. This is how the economic circuit works.
If the whole world would be a monopoly game, we need rules, incentives, penalties to make sure everyone plays the game in a fair and rewarding manner. As the game grows from 4 to 6 to 8 to 10 players, more issues can occur. As the game grows to 7 billion people many issues appear, considering that players speak different languages, have different cultural background and value systems. This makes it a huge hassle to create a consistent system for all players while trying to be fair to all parties involved.
Nowadays the game is played with different rules, incentives and penalties and huge administrative costs at this scale. Blockchain has the fundamental ability to create a consistent ecosystem for all players, and insure that all parties have clear rules, incentives and penalties, without the huge hassles of present day administrative and non intentional or intentional biased ruling.
There are multiple applications of this technology, but I will brain-dump a fews macro perspectives.
Property
fundamental change on how we report to property
The ability to trade is based on trust. I trust that I have the ability to own what I trade, and the counterpart owns what is traded. It seems a normal state of facts, but not so normal in present day circumstances.
How we see and report to property has been in a continuous change depending on the legal system in the country you live in.
But no matter the country and legal system where one resides, any trade has 2 characteristics:
a central authority establishes the rights for the asset traded
any trade is denominated in a currency which is centrally owned and ruled
These have multiple direct and indirect implications.
Establishing the rights to owe the asset by a state authority leads to bureaucracy and overhead costs which do not add value to the asset itself, translating into difficulty in trading especially over different legal systems.
Denominating the asset in a local or international currency creates a global market where the value of the asset has a lot to do with monetary policy, transactions costs and money regulations that, once again, influence the trading value of the asset, but does not add value to the asset itself.
For example, you are a music composer in Europe and want to sell your music in Asia. You must sign a contract with a record label company which certifies your digital rights for distributing the music. The central authority validates your ownership of the asset created. For this “courtesy”, the record company takes a hefty part of what you make either from the sale price or by adding it to the sale price, and usually both.
Going through distribution channels and payment systems, more commissions are paid to different payment systems, leading to currency differences. Again this is done by taking a cut from the asset sold value or by adding these fees to the asset sale value (many times both).
Blockchain allows you to create your music with digital rights embedded and sell it using cryptocurrencies without the need of an established authority to guarantee it is yours — the blockchain structure guarantees it is yours and that it is original.
Store of value
But to be sure it is a store of value , you must be absolutely sure that you own it and the possibility of being deprived of your possession is as low as possible. With central banks and governments controlling the entire monetary circuit, your money might not be your money if the bank or government decides otherwise (see ex-communist countries or bail-in events during post 2008 recession).
If you secure your blockchain data (money or any type of info it posses), there is no way other people can access it, not even a central authority, without your expressed consent.
Moreover, the value of your holdings is determined by supply and demand. Especially in the beginning, it is pretty normal to wildly vary, but it is a fairly more transparent mechanism than a value set by a central organisation.
Considering money, even if inflation is embedded in the network (token) mechanism, there are stakeholders which have a voting power in the mechanics, leading to a multi-decisional process with more parties at the table, for the environment’s economics.
Unit of account
Being completely digital, the money is easily fractional compared to traditional currencies without the administration cost behind it, in the traditional FIAT system.
Medium of exchange
Freedom to trade — one should be able to trade freely as her/his conscious dictates. As the control of monetary circuit is regulated and/or restricted, this is not possible. If one engages in trades which might later on be considered of antisocial nature or not obeying the law than the person will face the consequences of the system. But restricting the person to freely trade even with good social intentions is a big drawback.
Cost of trading — It is way lower as the digital, secure and trustless* nature of the system means less administration than with normal FIAT currencies where central authority costs a lot to issue and maintain the system with all the regulations, manpower and establishments behind them to keep the system in place.
It becomes easy to trade across traditional borders (countries, continents) as the cost and time of sending $1 to your friend standing next to you and to a person in a different country, jurisdiction, continent is the same.
Micro transactions — one specific usage is in micro transaction ecosystem like here on medium. If I want to gain money from writing this article I think a fair price would be 1 cent per each reader. But the cost of processing 1 cent from each reader is way higher than the 1 cent I will be receiving. So this means to be able to transact I must set a price high enough to cover the administrative cost of selling which means I can not offer it in this price range.
Blockchain enables with low fees the ability to create micro transactions and makes it possible for me to see you this content for 1 cent. Otherwise the would most probably be to high for you to make a payment and would mean I can not earn from what I produce
*Trust-less
Trust among people works based on a track record that your actions are in good will and will not hurt me or might even benefit me. It is built over time, evaluating one’s actions and their repercussions on me. If I meet someone new, I should trust that (s)he is who (s)he says (s)he is, that her/his money is worth what (s)he says it is worth, and so on.
This can work in a small village where everyone knows everyone, but in a global system we rely on central authorities to guarantee this trust.
Your ID is your proof of identity and your money is guaranteed by a government.
Blockchain means I can trust your money have value no matter who you are, and even that your identity is true as it has been validated in a much more secure manner than any government could ever do it. On top, I can also have access to your history and track-record if YOU CHOOSE TO SHARE THEM WITH ME, something that, until now, was restricted only to government institutions.
So the system itself is a guarantor of the participants and its components as it is not possible to alter it (so far at least 😃 ).
Decentralised
We used centralised systems as they are the normal way of managing systems with multiple components in a more efficient way. Take for example traffic, you are heading out of your house with the purpose of getting fast to work. You take what you know is the fastest route. In the same time, another 10.000 leave to work taking what they also know is the fastest route. All of you find yourselves stuck in a terrible jam.
A central processing unit would see this and establish rules for directing traffic so this would not happen the second time.
But this poses multiple issues:
the central processing unit (a person or an institution of more people) could present several flows
the speed of decision could be lagging behind the speed of what is actually happening in reality (many traffic issues)
the way the central processing unit interprets the information might be biased and decisions might be good only for a small percentage of the participants
the central processing unit might transform into a bad actor for several reasons and intentionally make decisions to the advantage of a small few, and to the disadvantage of great majority.
Now, as the technology allows it, there is no need for a central authority as Waze takes real time input of data and presents every participant to the traffic with the best option suiting his/her need to arrive fast to destination.
If we apply this for legal system, monetary system, and all other social system, it results in a better way of reaching decisions for the best interest of all participants in that system.
It does not necessarily rule out a central authority, but even in this case the ability to deal with systemic information and take into account the best interest of all participants is greatly improved and in most cases it rules out the intentional bad actor.
Transparency
Transparency means the ability to see an actor in the system walks the talk, and/or his track record. While this might pose some privacy issues, for what means a community and the common use of resources, it is crucial to have this kind of transparency and each party playing the game to have transparency on what is happening in the system.
Stake
Our participation in any system is based on the incentives the system offers. But if we feel disengaged in that system in any way, in the best case scenario, our participation is mandatory by some form. Blockchain ability to allow communities to form as they see fit around a certain monetary valuation (like having their own coin) and having a stake into what is happening with that coin and that community, allows people to feel connected with the system, and actively participate, not based on mandatory enforcing rules, but on the natural envelopment.
On blockchain, you can participate in communities where you believe in the product, in the community and you have a sense of identity not only with the product, but with the basic economic output: the money = the token. There is a personal relationship.
You can have a stake in the system decision making and you are at the table actively participating if you choose to do so and the structure allows it (many blockchain systems allow and encourage participative governance).
Participative governance
It enables members of the community to participate in a secure transparent way to the ruling of the community, removing the bad actors and fraud factors from actual participative systems.
The most basic implementation can be done with elections. Each person has only one vote to allocate and it can be done in a private secure way without the suspicion one person votes multiple times.
As it can be private, any person in the organisation can see the results real time but without knowing how a specific person allocated the vote, or publicly transparent at individual level — seeing how a person allocated their vote
this can apply to a company, a small or big organisation.
One major advantage is that the administrative cost of organising a fair transparent vote is almost zero (without the PR and marketing of course)
Another application can be for running public budgets of the city hall. Participants can vote easily on major decisions of how and for what budgets are allocated
Contractual trust
A contract is the will of 2 or more parties agreeing on certain terms and conditions.
As it is done now parties must relay on an institution to enforce conditions of contract if parties breach contractual terms. these leads to timing and cost issues which do not add value to the relationship, administrative hassle
Blockchain through the usage of self executing smart contracts enables the contractual agreement of all parties to be “set in stone” and self execute based on specified conditions
Let’s say we agree that I will execute a small number of tasks for which you will pay per task 10 dollars. As I execute each task according to specifications (quality, time, etc) the money are automatically released to me. The fear that you will not pay on time or at all simply do not exist anymore
Or maybe I want to fund an organisation based on specific milestones. Upon reaching each milestone the funds are released. this way both I and the organisation has security.
Empowering communities
If you are an artist you can be part of an artist community, but the economic incentives are measured in the same currency as everyone’s else. For example, in a country with a strong artistic community which contributes in an exceptional manner with 15% to the country’s GDP, this community gets paid in the same currency as all other even though its buying power should be priced different.
Through blockchain, the artist community can create its own token freely floating on exchanges and the parity is set by market value and people trading with that token. What is more, there is a sense of attachment to economic incentives as it is more rewarding to be able to spend your community token artist-coin versus general FIAT currency everyone uses.
Banking the unbanked
The problem with poor people is that the cost of issuing money and establish their identity to be part of the monetary system is higher than what they can produce in terms of economic value translated into that specific currency.
This does not mean they can not produce value. But the administrative costs of issuing money to them is high so economically, as it stands now, it does not make sense. With blockchain removing the identity and administrative costs, they can benefit of being part of any economic and monetary circuit they are able to provide value.
Unleashing potential
Easy access to funding from community enables creative people’s access to resources without friction. A programmer can easily create value through what he does best, programming an app that creates value for someone, with much more ease than in the actual context where he must convince a few investors to allocate initial capital.
The crowdfunding pool can easily consist of programmers alike, each with a small investment, but with numbers equal or even more than the traditional investor who may not understand the tech and be unable to validate the idea. This happens many times and not for lack of knowledge, but for the lack of communication skills as the parts do not understand each other properly. It is difficult for a programmer who knows how to create code to express differently about his creation and misalignment in communication generates impossibility of discussing at the same level.
This applies to many other areas where creation can be understood by some who are somehow connected in that domain of interest.
Also, investing based on trust (trusting the team, the idea, etc) becomes a more democratic tool of finding resources. I know a lot has to be solved to make this run long time as it is not clear now what will happen with those tokens and how the regular Joe will gain value on the long-term. But these are things to be resolved, the logic and tech behind them are here now.
Prosperity
Generating inflation has been a must for all economies as a measure of progress. An economy without inflation means stagnation and deflation is the worst nightmare, even worst than recession. As people create value and are able to create communities around that value, the participants invest and the value raises. This creates inflation, but it is a different kind of inflation generated not through printing money, but by inventing money. This money gain value and, overall, the price inflates. When prices inflate, more and more actors are stimulated to produce even more economic value. | https://medium.com/swlh/why-i-like-blockchain-fca09ca8e081 | [] | 2018-01-24 20:30:21.772000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Economics', 'Bitcoin'] |
Visualisation of ranked choice voting in R | Visualisation of ranked choice voting in R
Tables with gt and animation with tweenr
I recently returned to the R package avr , which runs a range of alternative voting procedures, to add more functionality, and in the process, got to grips with two visualisation packages: gt and tweenr . Each provides a different solution to the problem I had, which was how to take a count table from the multiple rounds of a Single Transferable Vote (STV) count, like this
and make it visually appealing.
Nicer table formatting
gt is a comprehensive approach to styling tables for HTML output. The basic usage is to prepare a data frame, pipe to gt() to turn the tabular data into HTML, and provide styling options through further piped operations. Some examples of how this works are
df %>% gt() %>%
#set width of columns named with a digit (the round number)
cols_width(
matches('\\d') ~ px(30)
) %>%
#change font to bold in cells selected by both column and row
text_transform(
locations = cells_body(matches('\\d')),
function(x) ifelse(x=='E', sprintf("<span style='font-weight: bold'>%s</span>",x), x)
) %>%
#add background colour to cells based on value
data_color(
columns = vars(`1`),
colors = scales::col_numeric(
palette = c('snow','pink'),
domain = NULL
),
alpha = 1
) %>%
#add a column group header
tab_spanner(
label = "STV rounds",
columns = matches('\\d')
) %>% ...
While this to a great extent can be used as an alternative to kableExtra , one particularly nice feature of the latter that can be used with gt is its sparkline functions, such as spec_hist . This article provides a great explanation of how to convert the output, resulting in this code in my case:
... %>%
mutate(Preferences = purrr::map(Candidate, function(c) get_candidate_ballot_profile(votes_as_ballots, c, n_candidates)),
Preferences = purrr::map(Preferences, kableExtra::spec_hist, col='lightgray', breaks=seq(0.5, n_candidates+0.5, 1), lim=c(0.5, n_candidates+0.5)),
Preferences = purrr::map(Preferences, 'svg_text'),
Preferences = purrr::map(Preferences, gt::html)) %>%
gt() %>% ...
where get_candidate_ballot_profile converts the vote data from a list of ballots to a list of counts of numeric preferences for each candidate. map is used to apply the transformations to each candidate (row) in the data frame.
Without too much work, I was able to produce this version of the count table:
The sparkline histograms show the full preference information for each candidate, and the shading on the first preference votes column highlights the most important part of the count process (since the majority of a candidate’s final vote total usually comes from first preference votes).
Some great examples of what can be produced with gt with a bit more effort can be seen in the results of the recent RStudio table contest.
Animated count
To show the STV count as an animation, I wanted to use a dot plot and show individual votes moving from one candidate to another. Although avr processes lists of ballots (lists of preferences), I based the animation on only the output count table (see above), so that it could also be used on real-world votes, where the individual ballots are not available.
The basic usage of tweenr to create an animated gif is
#build a data frame from the input data, repeated across multiple frames
animation_data <- df %>%
filter(...get data for the first state...) %>%
keep_state(10) %>%
tween_state(
df %>% filter(...get data for the second state...),
ease = 'cubic-in-out', nframes = 15, id = id_column_name
) %>%
keep_state(10) %>%
etc. #save a plot of each frame
for (i in 1:max(animation_data$.frame)) {
animation_data %>% filter(.frame==i) %>% ggplot() + ...
ggsave(filename=sprintf('frame%03d.png',i), ...)
} #convert the images to a gif using imagemagick
animation::im.convert("frame*.png", output = out_gif_path, convert='convert')
The tween_state and keep_state functions replicate the input data frame for a specified number of frames, and in the case of tween_state , numeric values are incremented to move from the previous state to the new state, in a manner controlled by the ease parameter.
When applied to a plot, this can move objects in the plot (points, etc.) according to their id in the input data frame, but only if we are in control of the positioning of the objects in the plot in each frame; therefore, ( gg )plot geoms that position the data automatically for the user, such as geom_dotplot , don’t work well with the animation package. Instead, I constructed a dot plot manually using geom_point , to allow different points (ids) to move between different pairs of candidates. This required some unwieldy code to generate coordinates for each vote at each round of the count: candidates need to be ordered vertically according to their position in the count as of that round, and when votes are transferred from a source candidate to a target candidate, they should be added to the end of the target candidate’s line of dots.
The result is not particularly interesting for this toy example vote, but the method can easily be applied to much larger votes (see below), by using points to represent batches of more than one vote, depending on the total number of votes involved in the count. Through the animation, it is possible to see how one candidate’s transferred votes are divided among the remaining candidates.
Note that there is a newer package from the same author, gganimate , which builds upon tweenr . For many use cases this package is very convenient, because if the input data is in tidy format, the transition_states function can be added to a ggplot object in a very similar way to facetting, and movement of individual points can be controlled using the group aesthetic. However, in my case I could not find an easy way to handle the varying candidate order on the y-axis or the round-dependent annotation of candidates as ‘Elected’, so I stuck with the greater control of applying tweenr functions manually, looping through frames and saving one image per frame, and converting these to a gif using imagemagick (via the animation package).
The count animation function can also be used for larger, real-world examples, if the count table is supplied manually (knowledge of the individual ballots is not required). Here is the 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly vote in the Upper Bann constituency, where 5 seats were available. Candidates are coloured by political party.
Or this nail-biter in the 2017 Scottish council elections, which came down to 13 votes, out of 11,000, for the last of the three seats. While finding this example, I realised that STV, globally, is not as widely used as I had thought, or as I think it should be.
Summary
The avr package can process votes using STV and several other ranked choice voting methods, and generate a report of the results, including the tabular display presented above, and analysis of the vote transfers that occurred, which gives insight into the relationships between the candidates (who tends to transfer votes to whom). It is available on Github. | https://towardsdatascience.com/visualisation-of-ranked-choice-voting-in-r-888f51134870 | ['David Mulholland'] | 2020-12-30 04:04:54.681000+00:00 | ['Voting', 'Data Science', 'Editors Pick', 'Visualization', 'Politics'] |
Why Inner Spontaneous Sounds are not Tinnitus | First, let’s get this out of the way.
Tinnitus is the name of a symptom, not a specific disease. The word means that sounds are experienced, but have no identifiable source. It may be a symptom of a disease if they are not voluntary — i.e., you cannot choose to hear them sometimes and not hear them at other times. It’s only in the case where they are involuntary that they are truly a disease symptom. After all, if you can turn them off whenever you want, then you’re clearly not suffering.
Pixabay | Creative Commons CC0
Because tinnitus can be caused by ear damage, or other organic issues — even drinking too much coffee for some individuals — and in such cases the tinnitus is involuntary, most doctors and specialists take the presence of any sound without an identifiable source to be evidence of damage or disease.
But aside from an actual organic issue being present, which can include structural damage to the brain or body, what the underlying disease actually is, in the case of most tinnitus symptoms, is not known to medical science. Therefore, there is a problem with labeling all cases of tinnitus as evidence of disease. It is truly an unscientific and insupportable diagnosis, given that so little is known about the origin of these spontaneous sounds — in most cases.
But let’s take a closer look at the occurrence of what is sometimes labeled: “meditation-induced tinnitus” and see if it is justified to ever take it as evidence of disease and/or physical damage.
Meditation results in a calming of the mind through a reduction in the mental chatter which is responsible for most of the distractedness in our lives, as well as being the primary source of our stress. By reducing mental chatter, momentary voids are left during which we can become aware of various inner spontaneous sounds that have no identifiable source, starting with the silence of those voids.
But, unlike organically-caused tinnitus with which you don’t have the choice to pay attention to it and bring it into your focus of awareness, or not pay attention and have it recede into the background gracefully, until disappearing entirely, with “meditation-induced tinnitus” you do have that control — as long as you can control your attention, which is, of course, the ability to concentrate that is one of the first goals of mind-training.
It is this lack of control over the former, organically-caused, type of tinnitus that makes it a dis-ease for those people who suffer from it, while the latter, controllable sort, isn’t a bother — again, as long as you can control the focus of your attention. If you can turn your attention away from these sounds and no longer hear them, then how can they be considered evidence of a disease?
And we shouldn’t overlook the fact that meditation-induced tinnitus arises as a result of meditating. It is a known result of certain types of meditation.
Another point that must be considered is that the “ringing” of organically-induced tinnitus blocks out other sounds, making it hard for the sufferer to hear less intense sounds. This is one of the characteristics of organically-induced tinnitus that makes it a malady for those who suffer from it.
On the other hand, inner spontaneous sounds that arise when we quiet our minds can be exceptionally loud and yet you can still hear even the faintest of external sounds that your physical hearing is normally capable of. In fact, one of the hallmarks of using inner spontaneous sound as a support for meditation is that as you concentrate on these resonant sounds and you pick out more and more subtle ones, you still hear the more powerful tones, as well as any unblocked¹ external sounds around you. The inner spontaneous sounds don’t go away until you release them from your attentional focus, and they don’t block subtler sounds.
It should also be noted that one of the few effective treatments for tinnitus symptoms is learning “mental coping techniques” that teach you how to turn your attention away from the sounds. These “mental coping techniques’’ are nothing more than meditation techniques repurposed to helping individuals who are experiencing tinnitus.
But in the case of organically-caused tinnitus, these techniques just make the presence of the ringing more bearable, muffling it slightly by directing the attention away from the ringing — but it is still always there and not subject to your desire to “turn it off,” thus it is truly evidence of a malady.
Interestingly, the first inner spontaneous sound that most people can access is a metallic-like squeal that grows more shrill the more your attention is unwaveringly concentrated, but which fades into the background as your attention becomes distracted. Perhaps this is evidence that what most doctors view as a physical disease symptom is in fact simply an indication of the strength of one’s attentional focus in life.
This would also mean that the effectiveness of the “mental coping techniques” is derived, for the most part, from their application to inner spontaneous sound, and not, as normally assumed, to an organically-caused disease symptom.
Another one of the hallmarks of the use of inner spontaneous sound as a meditation support is that it seems to significantly increase auditory sensitivity over time even to external sounds, so that you hear more of the external sound around you, even being able to pick out individual sounds that are normally too faint to hear among the surrounding cacophony of sound.
To sum this up, there is, at all times, a clear distinguishability between inner spontaneous sound and external sound. External sounds arise and pass away, like the notes in a song, while inner spontaneous sounds are always there if you turn your attention towards them, and while their intensity may vary, they remain present until you turn away from them. And it is this characteristic of inner spontaneous sound that makes a world of difference in their effect upon us.
ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།
Footnotes:
¹ Normally, when using inner spontaneous sound as a meditation support, external sounds are blocked out so that they do not become a distraction to meditation. | https://medium.com/tranquillitys-secret/why-inner-spontaneous-sounds-are-not-tinnitus-ae3b9b1017ac | [] | 2020-05-10 15:05:58.682000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Science', 'Sound', 'Mind', 'Tinnitus'] |
A letter to new design practitioners | Eventually, the design is YOU
When first I started doing this kind of work (human-centered design) — having freshly graduated from IIT Institute of Design (ID) — it was almost a new century, and I felt a sense of reinvention. I had acquired a plethora of knowledge and a lot of new skills that promised to take me into new terrains and challenges. I was thrilled and terrified and only partially prepared for what was to come.
I started consulting as a sole practitioner for clients who needed design researchers. I viewed my job as a way to be professionally curious and insightful about very specific topics like researching shopping behaviors for rice cake in retail, or turning Levi’s jeans labeling into a wayfinding system from store aisle to pant label.
This was how I stumbled onto a real need, and it led me to becoming very busy for the next eight years. I did plenty of design research on CPG research projects, consumer electronics, and what I thought were some “wickedly complicated” healthcare projects, which included following specimen samples around hospitals to understand collection systems. I did ethnographic studies on families medicating their kids with ADHD.
This work was indeed “wickedly complicated,” but little did I realize that was just the warm-up. It wasn’t until I started the INSITUM Chicago office — about 10 years ago now — that the true meaning of complexity became clear. The learning curve was steep.
In the movie The Matrix, Keanu Reeves gets an upgrade via directly porting in to a computer to instantly learn Kung Fu, among other things. Perhaps this is coming, but for now we have to learn in real time, sometimes painfully, through lived experiences.
Our first project was a collaboration with a respected peer, and we were looking at how companies used a suite of market data and digital tools to obtain, organize, understand, and transform information into knowledge in order to figure out how it all flowed through large organizations. My hard skills, even my ambition, really didn’t take me that far into the deep end of this project, but one saving grace I had learned at ID did help me: I had learned how to learn. Quickly.
You are never finished learning
The skills I acquired in graduate school certainly have had a long shelf life, and have taken me through many sets of challenges — of that there is no doubt. I am still grateful for the patience and depth of my ID professors who helped essentially to rewire my mind.
Ultimately, as the markets change, new skills become important, too. I can point to a lot of softer skills I learned that also helped me professionally: true collaboration, designing deeper ways to listen to people, as well as practicing ways to communicate what is essential to share knowledge or direction with others. However, continuous learning is on the top of this list for me.
For many years I was a solo design researcher, and it wasn’t until later that I ran my own teams. I was a good interviewer; I had great recall; I got organized (not really a natural trait of mine); and my abilities to craft insights seemed to regularly satisfy my clients. Times change though, and when I opened the office, there were even more new things to learn. I had to transform my thinking from running a design research team to building a company with offerings, accounting, dependable resources, (and how does this new sales thing work?), and why do we have to write so many proposals to get a project? There was a lot of learning going on all of the time.
Fast forward a decade — I am a partner at Insitum, and we continually evolve from lessons learned combined with our anticipation of future needs. “I” am now a “we,” with 200+ awesome designer/researchers who passionately rise to address every new challenge of this new era.
To stay on the top in our field, we have listened to market needs and responded by developing nine distinct practices (we continually learn how to respond). All of them have a common root in human-centered research, which we call Strategic Research at Insitum. We don’t believe research is an end in and of itself, so we often connect research to designed “things” ranging from Products to Brands to Services and Digital Transformation. We also have two sectors we focus on, both interesting in their own right: Healthcare and Social Innovation. These different areas of focus help us to grow our capabilities and focus on the most urgent problem types.
There is one additional practice that we call Organizing for Innovation.
Complexity is the new normal: ‘Organizing for Innovation’ takes it up a notch
We have always provided some amount of training for our clients (many of my partners and some of our staff also teach at the university level), but we’ve seen an emergent organizational need in recent years to help clients set up, practice, and deliver innovation at an organizational level. In response to this, we have developed Organizing for Innovation.
Many of our clients are companies trying to find ways to operationalize this on a global scale. Working at this scale represents a huge effort, incredible vision and trust, often across very different locations with separate cultures and business units. Not all employees are aligned, or agree on how or why they should be changing, so it can get quite interesting, and very, very complex.
When we help our clients set up their organizations for innovation, we do not do so to the exclusion of everything else. To do this sustainably, we know we need to include internal company areas like people, processes, tools/technologies, and strategies. This need has been increasing over time and has emerged as a critical capability that companies require to compete in their markets. Organizing for Innovation has shown us the “next level” meaning of complexity.
I wish I could say there is a reliable, repeatable process for setting up innovation practices, something that works every time. In reality, each company is different, and has its own unique set of challenges and capabilities. We address these differences for each unique situation. We turn our skills as design researchers toward the inside of the company, cataloging capabilities, processes and needs in order to understand the current state. We help leaders define and align on a future vision and strategy for where innovation may take them. We define new processes, often taking into consideration many of the older methods and behaviors and integrating them. In this way, many who have seen this “transformation” before (often many times) see this new process as familiar and are much more likely to adopt it.
In essence we help leaders create bridges to get to this new state with its new ways of working, as it’s rarely easy for anyone to make this kind of radical change.
Of course, our other research and design work is ongoing, complex, and still important. I highlight Organizing for Innovation because it’s big, messy, political, and sometimes very frustrating work, but also rewarding as it promises to transform the company. It requires additional skills from design research, though it also includes them. It requires industrial scale patience, empathy, mentoring, translating, and a good dose of diplomacy. It also requires constant learning.
From our point of view, it’s as much statesmanship and power brokering (Ben Franklin) as it is design and innovation process (Charles and Ray Eames). And it’s worth doing both.
Similar to the digital transformation that is disrupting many industries, Organizing for Innovation is poised to be a massive disruptor to change the way many organizations are structured and operate. By comparison, Digital Transformation has been enabled by great advances in technological capability. But with Organizing for Innovation, we are limited only by the social and behavioral limits of how we imagine we should be organized to conduct our work. It takes our core design skills, but it also takes a lot more.
When we give ourselves permission to really figure out these new models of organizing, we will see massive rewards in human potential being realized. This disruption is not being held back by technology constraints. What is beautiful about this set of challenges is that we are only limited by our own confined sets of cultural norms and legacy ideals. And as designers, we seem to continually evolve what it means to be designing in this age.
Come here us discuss more about this on April 4th in Chicago!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/exploreid-design-leaders-tickets-54304094007
Other Articles by Ric Edinberg:
Part I: Designing Organizations: What’s wrong with efficiency?
Part II: Designing Organizations: How Efficiency Became King
Part III: Designing Organizations: Efficiency needs some company
Part IV: Designing Organizations: The Perennial Search for Inspiration
Part V: Designing Organizations: What’s next? Designing Organizations for the 21st Century
Is Design Thinking Really Bullshit?
Write your code
What art school taught me about managing a business | https://medium.com/iit-institute-of-design/a-letter-to-new-design-practitioners-f9da8eb34029 | ['Ric Edinberg'] | 2019-03-07 00:21:49.807000+00:00 | ['Design Leadership', 'Service Design', 'Innovation', 'Design', 'Design Thinking'] |
Writers Be Wary, We Love Misery and Happiness Doesn’t Sell | Writers Be Wary, We Love Misery and Happiness Doesn’t Sell
Why your happy ending or character might not sell your book
Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash
As writers, we need to be aware of this fact when we are creating fiction. I was reminded of it recently when submitting the third chapter of a novel to a genre-specific literary group for commentary. It came back with a resounding no. Here are the reasons they provided, pretty much verbatim, that my bruised ego had to contend with.
The chapter is not in keeping with the style of the first two you submitted (Yes, I knew this and it had been intentional, I was introducing a new character)
Your character and his environment are too happy and do not appear realistic to the reader.
The content is in keeping with the initial chapters (score one for the home team)
So there it was. My efforts to inject a little joy into the world were all for nought. I had lost sight of the real world and started writing fairy stories. I was annoyed with myself. I knew this and should have known better.
It set me to thinking about this unspoken rule of realistic fiction writing and storytelling. I mention realistic because the rule doesn’t apply to stories aimed at children or family- novels. Fairy stories and books aimed at a younger reader are allowed to dip into the ‘happy world’. In fact, it’s encouraged.
The exact opposite is true of children. Their carefree, optimistic, happy outlook colors their view of the world and they still see fluffy blue clouds and furry pink bunnies everywhere. As parents, we encourage this and choose books that reflect this made- world. Happy stories, happy characters, and happy endings.
Adults don’t share this view. They see the world differently, as a place of heartache, misery and unhappiness, where the characters are engaged in a constant battle to survive. Feed your audience a plot and characters that lack these components and they will reject the fairy tale. It’s not reflective of the world they know and believe to be true.
So what is the psychology that drives this morbid outlook and how as writers can we exploit it to create believable fiction? More importantly, where is the happy line and when do you know you’ve crossed it?
“what’s left for writers is to depict the negative, the darkness, the bleakest possibilities”.
This quote is from author Ben Marcus, and he bases it on Kafka’s dictum — The positive is given. We are born into misery. The expectation of happiness is not a given and needs to be achieved, if only temporarily, for fleeting moments, by acts of suffering and sacrifice.
This dismal view of the world is a common theme espoused by many psychologists, Jordan Peterson a noticeable example. The link will take you to his. video lecture on the subject if you’re not already too depressed. It is an oversimplification of a complex issue because we’re dealing with the human psyche. It is a generalization that you need to pay attention to as a writer though, because that’s what generalizations are. They exist because they are reflective of the larger part of a group.
Sure, there are outliers. People who don’t ascribe to this philosophy and look for positives and happiness everywhere they go, but they don’t matter to you. Not if you’re in the business of making money from your writing. It’s the masses you need buying your books. If money is not a motivating factor then by all means pen novels for the outliers.
Believable stories are driven by plot and character and it’s your characters, above all else that need to conform to this view of the world. Your readers want to see themselves reflected in your flawed creations. Creations that endure suffering and heartache. Real pain. Only then, once the reality has been established can you allow your character glimpses of happiness and success.
Create a happy character with a great life and you evoke jealousy and dislike along with disbelief in the reader. You highlight their own misery in the most painful way possible and loose any hope of the essential bonding process with your character.
So how much happiness and how much success? Where do you draw the line. I think that is largely determined by your plot and characters. There is no hard and fast rule for this, no 80/20 coefficient that you can apply. It’s different for each situation. You could argue it’s just like life. You never know what’s going to happen next and that’s where your magic comes in.
Misery wasn’t always the flavor of the day. Charles Dickens and Jane Austin’s novels attest to this. How they would fair on today’s best seller lists is open to debate. Our modern reader is the product of a far more complex world than the one encountered by Dickens and Austin’s public. Stephen King is a master at the art of exploiting the modern day readers desire for this darker side of life. Take the last chapter in his final book of the Dark Tower fantasy series. The hero, Rowland, finally reaches his goal, the room at the top of the tower.
His discovery brings home with painful clarity the futility of all his many sacrifices. All the suffering, all in vain. It’s is a heart wrenching end to a long and arduous journey and the moment is bereft of any happiness. Fate it would seem, has screwed Rowland of Gilead. There’s a feeling we can all identify with. A feeling we should strive to replicate in our writing.
Now you might not like King or be a fan of the genre. That’s not really the point. It’s his book sales that are at issue and all across the world millions have endorsed him, millions have bought into the reality he has created. Why? Simply because they found it believable, they identified with it and the misery and suffering reminded them of someone they know. Intimately.
Happy writing, just not too happy. | https://medium.com/lighterside/writers-be-wary-we-love-misery-and-happiness-doesnt-sell-b3d6659a42f7 | ['Robert Turner'] | 2019-12-15 09:33:28.976000+00:00 | ['Character', 'Writing Tips', 'Plot', 'Lighterside', 'Writing'] |
Illustrated: 10 CNN Architectures | Illustrated: 10 CNN Architectures
A compiled visualisation of the common convolutional neural networks
(TL;DR — jump to the illustrations here)
Changelog:
28 Nov 2020 — Updated “What’s novel” for every CNN.
17 Nov 2020 — Edited no. of layers in last dense layer of Inceptionv1 from 4096 to 1000.
24 Sep 2020 — Edited “What’s novel” section for ResNeXt-50.
How have you been keeping up with the different convolutional neural networks (CNNs)? In recent years, we have witnessed the birth of numerous CNNs. These networks have gotten so deep that it has become extremely difficult to visualise the entire model. We stop keeping track of them and treat them as blackbox models.
Fine, maybe you don’t. But if you’re guilty too then hey, you’ve come to the right place! This article is a visualisation of 10 common CNN architectures, hand-picked by yours truly. These illustrations provide a more compact view of the entire model, without having to scroll down a couple of times just to see the softmax layer. Apart from these images, I’ve also sprinkled some notes on how they ‘evolved’ over time — from 5 to 50 convolutional layers, from plain convolutional layers to modules, from 2–3 towers to 32 towers, from 7⨉7 to 5⨉5— but more on these later. | https://towardsdatascience.com/illustrated-10-cnn-architectures-95d78ace614d | ['Raimi Karim'] | 2020-11-28 05:57:48.099000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Towards Data Science', 'Convolutional Network', 'Deep Learning', 'Visualization'] |
Rage | Poetry
Rage
The sweetness belies a hard, bitter, toxic core.
Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash
My heart is a ripe peach. Soft flesh, life’s blood
Flayed open to the bitter almond core -
A poisoned kernel you carelessly mistook
For a nut. Bite deep, and taste the juices.
In silence, as war, we call no truces.
Memory turns crumbling pages of the book
You call a mind, illustrated no more.
Just letters, words, and colors in a flood.
Touch me, and I will set my hair on fire
While you scream, to prove I still burn for you. | https://hollyjahangiri.medium.com/rage-d7d5575b675c | ['Holly Jahangiri'] | 2020-07-01 05:13:24.651000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Emotions', 'Poetry', 'Writing'] |
What a vacation can teach you about life, happiness, and your career | Three years ago, I was having the time of my life. Managing a social media care team at an ambitious tech startup meant 12-hour workdays, quite a bit of travel, and very little sleep. It was crazy, but I was loving it.
I’d just made the switch to marketing after 10 long years in sales and tech support, and it was my first startup experience. Surprisingly, adjusting to the new workplace was easy. I was working with a great bunch of people, and even the long hours were fun. My first startup job was off to a great start!
My first startup job was off to a great start!
Fast forward 10 months and I wasn’t feeling the love any more. The daily commute was too long, and I was working late evenings on most days. We were growing fast — from 30 to 500+ people in a year — and yet, work was piling up. I’d be working in the cab on the way to the office, on my way back, and some more at home. It was exhausting.
Left with no time for family, friends, and myself, the pressure of being always-on was getting to me. I was so frustrated that I wanted to quit.
Vacation, all I ever wanted
I had to get away, so I took a vacation instead, and it changed my life. The catalyst? A family of digital nomads that I met on the beaches of Gokarna, India. Ann and Lavie were traveling the world with three kids. They were working full-time jobs, being full-time parents, homeschooling the kids, and traveling all the time! I soon realized that while it wasn’t as easy as they made it look, I could learn a lot from them. My experiences from that vacation helped me put things in perspective, reassess my priorities, and achieve a better work-life balance.
Here’s what that impromptu vacation taught me about life, happiness, and my career:
No job is worth your health, really Good mental health unlocks a new you Happiness is in the now, not the distant future
No job is worth your health, really
A paycheck is important, of course, but stressful jobs can cause harmful health disorders and more. Hectic workdays meant I got by on just five to six hours of sleep and skipped meals without batting an eyelash. Not a big deal, until I started feeling tired and depressed all day, every day. Recurring migraines made me less productive, so I put in more hours to get things done, worsening the situation. Taking a vacation gave me a much-needed break to re-assess these habits and observe how they were impacting my health.
I tried to take better care of myself after the vacation. I talked to my manager about the situation, got better at delegating work, and tried to stop letting work follow me home. Years of slouching in a chair had unfortunate side-effects on my waistline, so I followed a friend’s advice to do a little cardio every day.
Taking lunch breaks with colleagues helped avoid the temptation to skip meals. The hardest part was getting out of work on time, but by doing that I could go to bed early and get at least 8 hours of sleep every day. Surprisingly, I found myself being more productive even though I was working fewer hours than I used to.
Good mental health unlocks a new you
A healthy mind in a healthy body simply does better work. Moodswings, anxiety, and depression are invisible productivity-killers, so managing mental health should be a top priority. Good mental health gives us a sense of purpose and the ability to deal with everyday challenges — at work and at home. It’s as important as physical well-being and unlocks the best version of ourselves.
Long work hours, bad eating habits, and little sleep had turned me into a grouch with a very short fuse. The vacation was a chance to de-stress and relax, and Ann’s passion for meditation turned out to be infectious. Before long, I was meditating every day to get my thoughts in order after a long day’s work. The best part? It helped me become more self-aware, so I was now more motivated and less anxious at work every day.
Try it for yourself with apps for guided meditation like Calm or Headspace.
Happiness is in the now, not the distant future
Pursuing happiness is all well and good, but it’s important that we focus on being happy in the now. Being miserable now is not a magic bullet to future happiness; I’d been chasing a vague idea of what success might look like while losing sight of the why.
At that point, I’d been working for about a decade, transitioning from sales to tech support to marketing. I’d moved cities half a dozen times and the last move was just a year ago! This vacation was the first time I stopped to take stock and I had a lot to be happy about. But I wasn’t… and I wasn’t sure what I could do to fix it.
There was no easy or instant solution. Lavie and I chatted about how he adopted a minimalist backpacker lifestyle and gave up a comfortable job to travel the world as a freelance photographer, but I knew that wasn’t for me. I like my comforts and I love shopping too much. ;) But I did learn from them how less can be more, and I saw for myself how a better work-life balance could lead to a happier, more fulfilling life. | https://medium.com/flock-chat/what-a-vacation-can-teach-you-about-life-happiness-and-your-career-9effd11314b9 | ['Kesava Mandiga'] | 2019-12-24 14:24:37.757000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Work Life Balance', 'Life Lessons', 'Vacation', 'Startup'] |
Self-Sabotage | Hey friend,
Since Halloween, Lauren and I have been hiding a giant bag of candy in our dresser to make sure that Golda wouldn’t find and eat it all. And because of that, I’ve been eating a piece of candy or two every day. I don’t want to. But I do.
Here I am, going back day after day for a Crunch or Almond Joy. That’s right. Not even the good candy. One minor slip has devolved into a complete backslide.
Given the circumstances of the year, maybe I should be more forgiving. Reflecting on my 2020 goals, I notice that a majority of the big ones are not complete. But because I couldn’t travel abroad, run in a race, or take an in-person training I’ve somehow given myself permission to slack off on other goals.
Maybe a lot of us are feeling like that. That a few slips this year has let us take ourselves completely off the hook to do the things we hoped or planned to do. Sure, we also need to be self-compassionate. It’s ok that we didn’t push ourselves this year– global crises are not the best time to start (or finish) that novel.
But let’s talk about what’s going on here. Self-sabotage. It’s not good for us but we all do it. Let’s go…
5 Possible Reasons We Prevent Our Own Success
After some research and personal reflection, I’ve distilled the reasons why we self-sabotage into 5 categories. Knowing we all get in our own way, it might be helpful to see which ones resonate and to catch it while it’s happening.
The Need for Control
Sometimes I choose to pull the plug on something just to control the outcome. While I may have a fear of failure, I fear even more not knowing what will happen at the end of this project/interview/relationship. It’s scary to just throw myself at the fates and see what happens. Control feels safe, even if it means I fail.
False Beliefs
I may tell myself that I’m unworthy or undeserving. (AKA Imposter syndrome– that I don’t believe I should get what I have or don’t belong in a place of power or influence). I may believe that the things I want are meant for someone else. So rather than prove myself wrong and get it, I hold onto those beliefs and make myself fail, proving that I’m right.
Buying Into Myths of Success
We’ve heard that the road to success should be hard. So when I come up with an idea that works or grows quickly, I feel the need to dig in my heels and make things more challenging for myself because wins should take hard work.
Valuing Other People’s Opinion Before Our Own
We never really work on self-evaluation. We give our homework to our teacher to grade, we put work in front of classmates and friends and executives to judge. So we get used to trusting outside opinions first. The voices that we hear in our heads almost always start as voices outside our heads. So the doubt and insecurity I feel began as criticism from my friends, parents, teachers, and bosses. If I could just get better at listening to my own opinion and trusting that what I’m doing is good, maybe I wouldn’t feel the need to doubt myself.
Choosing Harmful Behavior That Previously Helped Us
I seek bad habits because they once worked. Like food for comfort, candy for reward, alcohol as escape, procrastination as motivation. These things may have had benefits when I first tried them, but then harm me over time when I’m seeking success and require focus and discipline.
Any of these sound familiar?
On Going To Bed Too Late
There’s an episode of Seinfeld (S5E3 FTR) where, in the opening monologue, Jerry discusses this idea of delaying sleep. He’s night guy and he loves to stay up late. And what about getting up after 5 hours of sleep with a hangover? Oh that’s morning guy’s problem.
Staying up too late is a form of self-sabotage.
There are two main theories why we stay up too late for our own good. Both are subconscious, we don’t always know the reasons we do things or can explain them.
One theory goes that in childhood, we romanticize the late night. That’s what being an adult is about– staying up late and doing whatever it is adults do. Parties and eating and drinking and socializing. All the magic and excitement happens at night. And we’re exploring the thrill of the night…even if it just means doom scrolling in bed next to our partners.
Another theory states that we don’t see future versions of ourselves as us. We see them as someone else entirely. So Seinfeld wasn’t so far off with this idea of night guy and morning guy. But there are more. Young guy doesn’t see the urgency to save money so old guy can retire. Hungry guy leaves fat guy with the calories.
One way to overcome this theory is to introduce our current self to our future self. Write a reflection about life in the future, looking back on today. Or write a letter to a future self. (Futureme.org is a great site for this).
Going to bed too late is a form of self-sabotage.
For whatever reason we choose to stay up, we may help ourselves by finding virtues and excitement in the morning. To create rituals or activities that we look forward to in the daylight. And to introduce our night self to our day self not as opposites or enemies, but as the same person.
The Opposite of Self-Sabotage
Every Saturday morning for the last year, I take about 10 minutes to water my plants. I don’t have that many (although that depends on who you ask; less than 10 if you’re curious). There’s something meaningful learning how each plant is doing and having a ritual to care for them. I’m creating conditions for them to grow and flourish (I haven’t killed a plant in over 2 years).
It’s not far off from being a parent. I read an article this week about that analogy. It references a new book called “The Gardner and The Carpenter.” The premise is that some parents are gardeners– carefully creating conditions for optimal development. And some are carpenters, trying to craft and shape their children.
The article discusses one of the theories author Allison Gopnik explores in the book, on love and care. Most of us believe that we take care of people and things because we love them. We visit our grandparents and make soup for our sick friends because we love them. But Gopnik believes the opposite is true.
We develop love for something because we cared for it.
When we mend our clothes. Or put together IKEA furniture. Visit friends in challenging times. Cook for our family. Nurture an infant. That’s when the bond forms.
So where am I going with all this?
I believe that the opposite of self-sabotage is self care.
We may self-sabotage because we don’t want to deal with the consequences of success, or because we want to be in control, or because we believe things should be hard. But we don’t spend enough time taking care of ourselves.
Self-care is about listening to ourselves, giving ourselves rest and solitude, treating ourselves to our favorite thing because it’s been a hard year (or hard day, or heck, just because we DO deserve nice things).
’Tis the season for self-care. For rest. For self-compassion. For self-forgiveness. For reminding ourselves that we are deserving of all we have and more.
When we take care of ourselves, we can get out of our own way, and create space for love.
Thank You
Thanks for opening the email refrigerator this month and poking around inside. As ever.
If you enjoyed this, feel free to send it along to someone else who might.
And if you’re inspired or feeling curious, I’d love to hear a reply with what you’re thinking about or what this made you think about.
Wishing you a restful December and a safe and healthy one, too. Please stay at home as much as you can and wear a mask when you go out. These days, that’s part of taking care of yourself and taking care of each other.
And now you know one more good reason why.
With gratitude,
Jake | https://medium.com/email-refrigerator/self-sabotage-cf0a61029879 | ['Jake Kahana'] | 2020-12-28 03:19:23.184000+00:00 | ['Coaching', 'Self-awareness', 'Resistance', 'Self Sabotage'] |
Scaling Up Smart: 4 key tips on successfully using cloud-native technology to scale your infrastructure | In this post, I’d like to share some high-level takeaways for engineering managers and backend teams to help them successfully scale their operations while avoiding some of the most common pitfalls and short-sighted decisions.
This article follows up on a first post published by Jordan Pittier, lead backend engineer at Streamroot, and a presentation of our journey at HighLoad Moscow this past November. These shared our experience and the challenges we faced throughout the process of moving from a VM-based to a container-based architecture and migrating our infrastructure to Kubernetes running on Google Cloud.
Introduction and Context
Let me start by giving you a little bit of context about Streamroot and why we take the time to tune our kubernetes Engine architecture not only to scale but also to make our architecture more resilient.
Streamroot is a technology provider that serves major content owners — media groups, television networks, and video platforms. Our peer-to-peer video delivery solution offers broadcasters improved quality and lower costs, and works in tandem with their existing CDN infrastructure.
One of our (and our customers’) biggest challenges last year was scaling to the record-breaking audiences of the FIFA World Cup. The 2018 World Cup proved to be the largest live event of all time, with Akamai registering 22 Tbps on peak and more than doubling the previous traffic record set by the Super Bowl (1).
Streamroot delivered the World Cup for TF1, the largest private broadcaster in France, as well as national television networks in South America. To be able to serve our customers at this scale, we needed to scale our own Kubernetes engines and be able to scale faster. We needed to:
Handle massive traffic, with hundreds of thousands of requests per minute to our backend
Scale to huge spikes in minutes, at the beginning of each World Cup game
Ensure a 100% fail-proof, entirely resilient, robust backend able to withstand any failure. As a sports lover, I know that it is completely unacceptable to have even two minutes of downtime during live sports…
And last but not least, we had to do all of this with a startup scale team of only a few backend engineers…
If you are interested in our scaling journey over the past few months and you wish to dig more into the technical details, you can have a look at our talk at the HighLoad++ conference in Moscow made by Jordan Pittier and Nikolay Rodionov and our slides here.
Takeaway # 1: New things are not always good things: Tread lightly with cloud-native technology.
Kubernetes has seen exponential growth since joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and there is increasing interest in this complex solution, which is a combination of open-source cloud-native technologies. Last December, The CNCF’s KubeCon+CloudNativeCon gathered more than 8,000 attendees from all over the world in Seattle.
Figure: CNCF Annual Report 2018 [2]
Kubernetes is one of the Cloud Native technology components. Many other components also exist, some part of the CNCF foundation (https://landscape.cncf.io/) and some outside the foundation, such as Istio.
Cloud native technology is still young, and there are various new components springing up in a different field every month: storage, security, service discovery, package management, etc.
Our advice: use these new components with caution, and keep it simple (, stupid). These technologies are new, sometimes still rough around the edges, and are evolving at an incredible pace. There is no point in trying to use all the latest shiny technologies, especially in production, unless these are motivated by a real need. Even if you have a large team of talented engineers, you need to take into consideration the cost (in resources and time) to maintain, operate and debug these new technologies which can sometimes lack stability.
As a manager and CNCF ambassador, I recommend following the CNCF classification (https://www.cncf.io/projects/ ) to select the native components having a sufficient maturity level. The CNCF-defined criteria include a rate of adoption, longevity and whether the open-source project can be relied upon to build production tools. Today Streamroot harnesses only 3 projects (Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy), which are at these maturity levels and have “graduated” according to the CNCF foundation. A large number of the components out there are still at the incubating or sandbox stages. You can still use these, but keep in mind that you will face some risks: stability, bugs, limited community, learning curve, etc.
Most importantly, understand that even if there may be widespread confidence that all native projects in the incubating or the sandbox stage may be able to fill in the blanks and become mature for production, it is also a question of not multiplying the complexity of your architecture. Make sure to ask yourself the following before adding any new components from the CNCF or outside the CNCF:
Do I really need this component?
Am I solving a real problem in my infrastructure?
Are my engineers going to be able to handle it now and in the long run?
Figure: CNCF Project Maturity Levels [2]
Takeaway # 2: Control your costs
When starting a significant project like moving your service from a VM-based to a container-based architecture supported by Kubernetes, your primary focus is likely not cost but having a successful migration. While the cost of your backend may not be an immediate or medium-term concern, it is something to take into account from day one. I highly recommend that you track as early as possible your Kubernetes Engine scaling costs for the following reasons:
To have a clear vision of your resource usage and the efficiency of your software. A backend team’s primary concern is delivery, and it is often difficult from a management perspective to relay the importance of efficient software and resource usage.
To discover room for improvement in your architecture. Triangulating the information from monitoring and cost progression helped us identify improvements in our architecture. In particular, we were able to reduce our costs by 22% by simply better adapting our instances to our usage, and understand better how the resources are used and consumed.
To take advantage of volume-based cost savings. Most cloud providers, including Google Cloud and Amazon AWS, offer interesting discounts for commited instances. Don’t hesitate to use infrastructure cost accounting (and reduction) to your benefit. Once you reach a certain spend, even a 10% cost reduction can add a few thousand, or even dozens of thousands of dollars back into your budget, which can be used to send your teams to conferences, or even hire a new resource to build your product faster!
To illustrate my third point, GCP provides a sustained use discounts option that offers significant discounts for long term committed instances. For example, if you commit a resource for an entire year, you get a flat 30% discount (for once, it’s actually nice to see the bill at the end of the month!). Those discounts can run up to 57% (!) for a 3-year commitment. Of course, I suggest waiting at least 6 months before committing anything, in order to identify the average CPU & RAM resources you are using at minimum.
Don’t fear! You do not need to be an expert in corporate finance or billing to track your costs effectively. For example, you can enable cost alerting per project by default if you would like to track your monthly usage, and then use the CSV export to feed into your favorite spreadsheet tool. Alternatively, on GCP, you can enable the Bigquery Billing Export option for a daily export of all of the details of your resource consumption. Then, take a few minutes to build a simple dashboard with an SQL export or Excel (do not forget to ask your engineers to set the resource labels correctly in order to identify the different lines).
Takeaway # 3: Isolate and keep your production safe
Many blogs and articles recommend that you use only one K8s cluster but use different namespaces for your different environments (Dev, Staging & Production for instance). Namespaces are a very powerful feature that can help you organize your Kubernetes resources and increase the velocity of your teams. But that kind of setup doesn’t come easily: you need to make sure to have a polished CI/CD environment in place, to avoid any interferences between your staging & prod environments, as well as “stupid” mistakes like deploying the wrong component in the wrong namespace. When reading this, you might think: “sure, but we have a super smart team, so we’ll be able to handle it.” Stop right there: everyone makes stupid mistakes, and the more stupid the mistake is, the more chance it has to happen… So unless you want to spend your most stressful days extinguishing fires in production because you pushed a staging build there, you MUST spend a few weeks building a top notch CI/CD workflow if go with the namespaces option.
On our side, we chose another option to keep our environments separated: we decided to create fully autonomous clusters for our staging and production environments. This eliminates all risks of human error and security failure propagation, as both clusters are completely isolated. The downside of this approach is that it increases your fixed costs: you need more machines to keep both clusters up and running. But the safety and peace of mind it brings is more than worth it for us.
Moreover, you can mitigate the cost overhead by using ephemeral instances with GCP, which are 80% less expensive than normal instances. Of course this comes with a catch: those instances can get shut down at any time if Google Cloud needs them for another customer. But as we use them for our staging environment only, losing one machine doesn’t really impact us, and we even learned to use it at our advantage. It is for us the perfect test to see how our architecture reacts to a random failure of one of our components: a sort of perfectly unpredictable red team trying to destroy the system, given you for free by Google Cloud.
Takeaway # 4: Unify and automate your workflow from the start
When you start a new project, the last thing you want to think about is how you will be sharing your code with other developers, or how you will be pushing your builds between production and staging when you need to do an emergency rollback. It’s normal and very wise: there’s no need to over-optimise before you have actually built anything that you can show to the world. But on the other hand, it’s a common mistake to let these questions sit latent for eternity because you don’t have time and need to release the next feature that is going to make your product finally cross the chasm and magically bring millions of users. My advice on this would be to take the time to create a simple and efficient workflow as early as possible.
First, as soon as you start collaborating with other people, you should take a step back to create a unified and easily transferable development environment. 10 years ago, that wasn’t an easy feat: you needed to configure special VMs on everyone’s computers, or hack together conversions between your Mac & Windows users. It was a real nightmare and caused a lot of unnecessary and undebuggable issues. Today, thanks to containerization tools like Docker, it can be done in less than a few days, so why not implement it from the start? This will greatly simplify the lives of all your developers and make the onboarding of new employees easy and straightforward. It’s a very small investment for all the weeks of debugging and setting up that you will save.
Second, as soon as you have production traffic, you should think about creating a simple but efficient QA/CI/CD workflow. No need to over engineer too early, but we are very lucky to live in the golden age of automation & CI tools that give you the possibility to implement an automated first class CI & CD without trouble. The list is long of tool CI compliant with kubernetes API, example in version 10.1 GitLab introduced integration with Kubernetes or Jenkins X. Most of those companies offer low cost plans for small scale projects, and free plans for open-source projects, so you really don’t have any excuse not to use them! It’s not rocket science, and will save you both time, energy, and numerous headaches, and make your developers’ life a lot easier!
Summing it all up
Kubernetes and Cloud Native offer great technologies that bring simplicity and support to build a scalable and resilient solution on the cloud. It won’t be long until we take Kubernetes for granted as a ubiquitous part of the cloud technology as we do technologies like Linux and TCP/IP today.
Thanks to our successful migration to these services, we were able to durably scale our infrastructure to World Cup audiences and beyond. During the biggest sporting event in history, we delivered more than 1.2 Tbps of traffic with zero minutes of downtime — and all of this with a team of only two backend engineers. We are now able to handle video streams with millions of viewers, with tens of thousands of new requests arriving per second on peak.
Thanks to the best practices that I have discussed in this article, we were not only able to achieve our short-term delivery goals but also the long-term scalability of our infrastructure from an architecture, cost and resource perspective. To sum up our key takeaways:
Use Kubernetes and cloud native carefully and pragmatically, when the tool corresponds to a real need.
Think about the future today, whether it comes to cost, separating environments or putting in place automated workflows. The more effectively these challenges are incorporated into your project from day one, the less time and fewer resources you will waste adjusting later on when these considerations become mission critical.
As a startup, we are always striving to keep on improving our tech and workflows, and after all the lessons learned during our scaling journey, we are looking forward to tackling our next challenge: building a multi-cloud architecture! Check back soon to learn more, and if you are interested in taking part in these exciting challenges, check out streamroot.io/careers.
[1] Akamai measured a peak volume of over 22 Tbps. That’s 3 times the peak they saw in the 2014 edition.
[2] CNCF Annual Report 2018 : https://www.cncf.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/CNCF_Annual_Report_2018.pdf | https://medium.com/streamroot-developers-blog/scaling-up-smart-4-key-tips-on-successfully-using-cloud-native-technology-to-scale-your-e4b521003f94 | ['Reda Benzair'] | 2019-03-08 10:34:40.126000+00:00 | ['Cloud Native', 'Cncf', 'Backend Development', 'Docker', 'Kubernetes'] |
Yes, You Can Unschool Your Child This Year | Are you feeling anxious about the back-to-school season?
If so, you are not alone.
In the last week, the federal government has demanded that schools resume in-person classes this fall. At the same time, cases of COVID-19 are soaring across the U.S.
You might worry that sending your child back to school is risky. Afraid that in the close quarters of a classroom or a school bus, the virus will spread like wildfire.
Your school safety plan, if you’ve seen one, doesn’t seem to provide enough protection, and vague promises that COVID-19 doesn’t seriously impact children are not reassuring.
Or, you might fear that given the prevalence of the virus in the U.S. today, schools will not reopen as scheduled. The disaster that was remote learning will continue. Children will have to teach themselves. And securing child care will be a logistical nightmare.
Things are changing rapidly. What you plan for today may be completely different tomorrow.
Distance-learning worries
Even if you prefer to keep your child home, the thought of continued distance learning can incite panic.
You may be experiencing flashbacks of never-ending worksheets. Or trying to share internet access among too many family members.
You may be bristling at the thought of meltdowns over complex calculus problems. Or terrified of conjugating French verbs.
Especially if you studied Spanish.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that you already have a full schedule. Caring for other children, running the household, trying to work…
Even if you are lucky enough to work from home, your full-time job is…well, a full-time job. Taking on all the extra tasks of managing learning is time-consuming and exhausting.
But dreading the upcoming school year is no way to spend the last few weeks of summer vacation.
We don’t have to repeat last spring. There is a better way.
You can opt-out of virtual learning altogether.
Enter unschooling.
An introduction to unschooling
Unschooling is a broad term that encompasses a variety of educational practices. Rather than a particular learning strategy, it is a philosophy where each student defines for themselves exactly what unschooling will look like.
Think of it like homeschooling, but with more freedom and less parental oversight.
Unschooling bypasses established curricula and state standards. Instead, it allows each student to explore their own interests and create their own course of study.
Unschooling is not homeschooling. In a traditional homeschool model, adults act as “teachers” and select curricula, texts, and assignments. With unschooling, children take the lead. Adults remain on the sidelines to offer support, guidance, and encouragement, as needed.
Unschooling focuses on a self-guided exploration of learning and life. It operates on the premise that children are innately curious. Even without the formal constraints of school, children can and will learn on their own timeline.
Unschooling provides many amazing benefits for students and families.
Benefits of unschooling
Educational Equity
The standard school curriculum is often characterized by systemic racism and colonialism. Many schools are run by white administrators, school boards, and teachers. White biases, whether conscious or not, are reinforced in textbooks or perpetuated by law.
There is also a great deal of inequity in school funding. Some schools operate like prisons. They have decades-old textbooks and antiquated technology. Others have sprawling campuses and tv studios.
Unschooling helps equalize this playing field, and it provides an alternative to children seeking a more inclusive education.
Students can select what, where, when, and how they study. They can access a variety of resources offering different viewpoints.
Unschooling exposes students to current ideas and encourages them to construct knowledge. It is a safer, kinder way to learn.
Critical Thinking Skills
Large bureaucracies like schools operate on compliance. The curriculum, standardized tests, and rules all discourage critical inquiry.
Students who do engage in critical thinking are often viewed as disrupters. Sometimes they are even penalized for challenging the status quo.
Unschooling encourages kids to engage in critical thinking. Because learning is self-directed, children select topics that are relevant to them. They ask questions and locate relevant information. They analyze data and question embedded assumptions. They challenge existing beliefs and generate multiple solutions. They assess possible outcomes and make informed decisions.
The process of working on interdisciplinary projects and answering real-world problems requires students to use higher-level thinking skills to solve complex problems.
Grit
Grit is the persistence and perseverance to achieve meaningful goals despite obstacles. It is a significant factor in achievement.
Being smart is not enough. People must believe that they can and will overcome adversity through hard work.
Unschooling helps children acquire grit. Since children are free to choose what to study, they are more invested in learning. They will stick with a difficult topic longer because it matters to them.
Self-discovery
Unschooling is self-directed learning. This allows children to focus on what’s most interesting to them. Whether that be the Ming Dynasty, the SpaceX program, or how to code video games.
Instead of the government setting the agenda, kids choose what to study. And they choose things in which they are interested.
Unschooling often results in children discovering passions and talents early in life. This allows them to prepare for careers that are purposeful and fulfilling. It also leads to happier lives.
Creativity
Unschooling also inspires creativity. Learners are not provided with a “template” or “sample” of how to do something. Rather they must come up with their own original ideas.
There are no time constraints. A project does not have to be completed in one class period, one week, or even one semester.
There are no restrictions on which materials to use or how to use them. Children experience the unfettered discretion to make choices. To experiment. To have fun. To flex their creative muscles.
Interdisciplinary Learning
Traditional schools teach subjects in isolation. Often it is difficult for students to see how different topics relate to one another. They struggle to translate information learned in one setting to a different situation.
Unschooling allows children to approach learning thematically. This helps them recognize connections between disciplines and leads to a much deeper understanding of a topic.
The ability to see connections also prepares students to solve complex problems.
Personalized Learning
Unschooling allows children to have a personalized learning experience. This is not possible in a traditional classroom.
Unschooled children can set the pace and depth of their learning for each topic. This eliminates boredom that comes from mastering material quickly. It also eliminates the frustration that comes with being slower to grasp something new.
Unschooling allows children to work at the level that’s right for them.
There’s no need to be stuck reading third-grade literature if a child reads at a seventh-grade level, or spend weeks on fractions if the child understands them intuitively.
Entrepreneurial Skills
Many young unschoolers start their own businesses. They may sell art or cakes or homemade soap. They may raise money for animal shelters or veterans groups. They may create apps. Through these experiences, they learn math, English, science, and social skills.
The experience of building a business also gives unschoolers a chance to practice many of the soft skills that will impact future performance. These include critical thinking, risk-taking, creative problem solving, communication skills, initiative, organization, record keeping, dedication, hard work, discipline, and responsibility.
Running a business also requires making mistakes. And learning from them. Unschoolers who have successful businesses learn the importance of revising an idea, design or product until it’s perfect. This success breeds confidence.
Life Skills
Unschoolers can also explore a variety of life skills through home projects. Activities like cooking, construction, or gardening provide opportunities to learn math, science, and design while developing practical everyday skills.
Traditional schools rarely provide instruction in these areas. Unschoolers, however, can develop proficiency in basic daily tasks, leading to increased confidence and independence.
Health Benefits
The value of enough sleep cannot be overstated. A traditional school schedule is not designed with teens’ physical health in mind. Time for adequate sleep is a very real benefit of unschooling that has a huge impact on learning.
Most adolescents are sleep-deprived. School starts too early and the days are too busy and too long. When you consider homework, jobs, activities, and sports, there are not enough hours in the day for rest.
Sleep deprivation brings exhaustion, anxiety, and depression. It also leads to an increased risk of high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes, and heart disease. It may compromise the immune systems and contribute to obesity.
Children who are unschooled can sleep later, taking advantage of their natural biorhythms. They can choose the best time to study different subjects. This makes it easier to learn new information and keeps them healthier.
Parents Don’t Have to Micromanage Learning
Finally, parents are not responsible for facilitating learning. You don’t have to monitor assignments, message teachers, or upload documents. You are free from hounding your children to complete meaningless work or ensuring they participate in Zoom lessons.
You also don’t have to play teacher. If you opt for the traditional homeschool route, you are in control of your child’s education. You have the responsibility of providing learning experiences that ensure your child achieves the learning goals.
With unschooling, learning is self-directed. Children choose what to study, explore subjects that interest them, play, read, write, make, and experiment. Adults have a supporting role. You may offer assistance as needed, help connect ideas, or introduce new material. You can offer suggestions and ask questions, model inquiry and arrange field trips (if permitted).
But, you don’t have to teach content each day.
This is great news because it frees you up to focus on your work.
Final thoughts
l know the idea of unschooling can be a lot to digest. To many, it seems like a radical departure from what we expect education to be. This is especially true in comparison to how traditional schools operate. But remember, school is designed for efficiency. Its purpose is to educate large groups of students and prepare them to be obedient employees.
Unschooling is a different strategy altogether. One that lets the child lead the way.
If you want to learn more about unschooling, this website is full of excellent information. A list of homeschooling requirements for all 50 states can be found here. | https://medium.com/ninja-writers/yes-you-can-unschool-your-child-this-year-648a7b2daa45 | ['Lisa Walton'] | 2020-07-31 19:19:59.476000+00:00 | ['Current', 'Coronavirus', 'Education', 'Parenting'] |
You’re Thinking About Your Hourly Rate All Wrong | Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Most people have at least somewhat caught on to the fact that time is a valuable resource and should be, well, valued.
Every now and again I hear something that indicates that someone has worked through the basic concept of how they value their time and are using it to make decisions.
The problem is they usually don’t do it well.
Most people seem to take their salary, divide it by the number of hours they work, and boom, they have a calculation for what their time is worth.
So if you make $50,000 a year, your time is worth roughly $25 an hour.
Under this framework, if you’re making $25 an hour and thinking of picking up some extra work on the side, you should scoff at something that looks like it might bring in $15 an hour, right?
You can also confidently say that it only took you an hour at work to make enough money to pay for that $25 meal, right?
Don’t be so sure. Here are five reasons why your hourly rate calculation doesn’t make much sense and your thinking needs an overhaul.
1️⃣ Context is King
If you are making three times what you are spending, then using your current hourly rate to value your time makes sense.*
You don’t need to be wasting your time when you already have plenty of money.
On the other hand, if you are struggling to make ends meet, you don’t really have room to turn your nose up at a solid opportunity, even if it’s less than perfect.
If you need the money to dig yourself out of a hole, put away your pride and take what you can get.
*I would actually say that even in the situation of abundance your hourly rate isn’t much good in valuing your time since you should value your time much higher than your current hourly rate
2️⃣ The 8pm on Wednesday Test
You might think you are worth $25 an hour, but can you make $25 from 8–9pm this Wednesday evening?
What I’m getting at is that if you have a salary, you can’t earn more just by working more. In fact, the more you work the less you make per hour.
Your time isn’t truly worth $25 an hour if you don’t have the ability to command $25 for another hour of work.
Ironically this is an area where being paid hourly can be an advantage over being salaried, but only if there is an opportunity to work overtime — which is far from being a given.
3️⃣ The Income/Savings Can Grow Passively
Say you’re 25 years old and making $50,000 a year, or about $25 an hour at your 9–5.
You decide to take on some extra work at $15 an hour and invest it in a total stock market index fund in an IRA. You won’t pay any taxes on this income since it’s going into an IRA.
Let’s just consider the first $15 from the first hour you worked. If we flash forward to the time you are 31 or 32 years old, chances are that your initial $15 is now worth closer to $30.
So how much money were you making an hour? $15? Or was it really $30/hour?
Flash forward to the time you are 40 and the initial $15 investment is likely worth closer to $60. By age 48 it could be $120.
The same thing applies to the time you invest saving money. Money that you save is also tax-free since you paid the taxes when you earned it, and you can invest it so that it grows.
4️⃣ Your True Hourly Rate at Your Job is Worse Than You Think it Is
The way most people think about there hourly rate is to divide their salary by how many hours they work.
So for instance, if you have a regular 9–5 job with a $50,000 salary, you would figure that there are 260 business days a year, minus 10 holidays and 15 vacation days, leaving you 235 eight-hour working days, or 1,880 hours.
$50,000/1880=$26.60/hr.
Simple right?
Nothing is ever that simple. First of all, you forgot your commute. A half hour each way means an extra hour each of those 235 days that you worked, so really you worked 2,115 hours, not 1,880.
Your hourly rate is actually $23.64.
Well, that’s still not bad, right? We went from rounding down to $25/hr to rounding up to $25/hr.
Except we’re not done.
Most people don’t actually work 9–5 since lunch doesn’t count. So you actually work 8–5.
You’re now up to 2,350 hours and down to $21.27 an hour
Not only can we add adjustments to your total hours, we can take them away from your salary as well. The cost of your commute is an expense you wouldn’t have without a job*. So is your professional wardrobe. So is childcare. So are all the vices in your life that help you deal with the stress of your job.
And I haven’t even mentioned taxes yet.
The fact is, you make well less than $50,000 a year on a $50,000 salary, and even when the money you do get to “keep” hits your bank account, some of it goes right back out the door to pay for all the expenses associated with having a job.
This concept of adding in the hidden time commitments of a job and subtracting the hidden costs to find your “real hourly wage” is one of the key contributions of the personal finance classic Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin.
*For many people, the cost of their commute is just gas and the maintenance brought on by wear and tear. However, if you have a two-car family that could be a one-car family without your job, the cost of your commute is the entire cost of owning the car including more significant expenses like depreciation and insurance
5️⃣ It’s in Your Best Interest to Blur the Relationship Between Time and Money
The two primary resources at our disposal for making money are time and money.
Money can be invested to passively make more money, but unless you got really lucky, you need to initially make some money some other way to make this strategy work.
That means that most of us are going to need to invest time into making money until we’ve made enough money that we can invest the money to work harder than we can.
Most people have an intuitive understanding of this, but because they only have a vague notion of how to actually make money, they get way too caught up in the connection between time and money.
As I argue in this post, the foundational principle behind making money is that you need to sell something. Yes, you can sell your time, but you might be better off investing your time creating something you can sell besides time.
Just like when investing money, investing time doesn’t yield results immediately, but if you stick with it, your efforts can scale.
For instance, I recently invested some time this year writing and publishing a personal finance book on Amazon Kindle. Although it has made money every month it has been out, I haven’t made enough to have earned a decent hourly wage for the time I put into it.
Yet.
The book can still sell copies even though the work I put in is pretty much over.
Writing on Medium is a similar story. I make some money here every month, but nothing impressive.
Yet.
Each useful story that I write not only brings me some revenue, but it also grows my audience allowing the potential for any given post to make more in the future.
Each post is a new opportunity to discover my writing and for me to prove the value that my insights can offer.
Oh, and just to tie the two time investments together: the followers I acquire on Medium might some day become readers of my book.
It’s hard to do the work necessary to achieve scale, but the nice thing is that your efforts tend to be synergistic, even if it’s hard to see in the beginning.
Putting it All Together
So how should you think about your hourly rate?
Ideally in the long run you wouldn’t think about it at all. The relationship between how you spend your time and how you make your money will have become so fractured that it no longer really means anything.
If money is tight however, that’s not a luxury you can afford. For you, it’s probably worth actually walking through the exercise of calculating your “real hourly wage” that I started in the fourth point.
This will give you perspective into how much of your life your unnecessary purchases are costing you and will motivate you to tighten up the purse strings and find ways to increase your income.
Next I recommend that you start investing your time into creating something you can sell besides time. It could be a product, a skill, anything that someone values enough to pay for.
Your time is precious. Invest it wisely. | https://medium.com/moneybrain/youre-thinking-about-your-hourly-rate-all-wrong-c57adda05ca0 | ['Matthew Kent'] | 2019-03-04 11:58:12.828000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Personal Finance', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life', 'Self Improvement'] |
How to Automate Design Tokens in a Design System | How to Automate Design Tokens in a Design System
Colors, spacing, font weights, and font sizes are all design tokens
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash.
In a design system, there is traditionally a distinction between the design and the code. We have designers working on what the components will look like and developers who will implement these components. However, some effort is required to keep both of them in sync.
So when I started a new design system, I wondered if it would be possible to eliminate some of this friction. The idea became to create an automated process that would keep design tokens of the design tool in sync with the code behind it.
Design tokens are what keep our design system consistent: Colors, spacing, font weights, and font sizes are examples of tokens. In an ideal world, they follow a sequence (4px, 8px, etc.) and are always chosen from this sequence.
What’s the benefit of this automated process? Well, let’s say we don’t have any automation in place and a designer makes a change to the color blue. They would have to communicate with developers to make the same change in the code. Can you see how this can result in an out-of-sync problem? By contrast, in the workflow of the automated process, the designer makes a change and it’s automatically reflected in the code.
In this article, I will take you along the process of how to set up an automated process for keeping design tokens in sync between design and code. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-automate-design-tokens-in-a-design-system-189d3e6fd103 | ['Tom Buyse'] | 2020-04-06 01:43:06.603000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Design Systems', 'Programming', 'Front End Development', 'Web Development'] |
Abstract Base Classes in Python: Fundamentals for Data Scientists | Abstract Base Classes in Python: Fundamentals for Data Scientists
Understand the basics with a concrete example!
Photo by Joshua Aragon on Unsplash
In Python, abstract base classes provide a blueprint for concrete classes. They don’t contain implementation. Instead, they provide an interface and make sure that derived concrete classes are properly implemented.
Abstract base classes cannot be instantiated. Instead, they are inherited and extended by the concrete subclasses.
Subclasses derived from a specific abstract base class must implement the methods and properties provided in that abstract base class. Otherwise, an error is raised during the object instantiation.
Let’s write a Python3 code that contains simple examples of implementing abstract base classes:
from abc import ABCMeta, abstractmethod class AbstactClassCSV(metaclass = ABCMeta):
def __init__(self, path, file_name):
self._path = path
self._file_name = file_name @property
@abstractmethod
def path(self):
pass @path.setter
@abstractmethod
def path(self,value):
pass @property
@abstractmethod
def file_name(self):
pass @file_name.setter
@abstractmethod
def file_name(self,value):
pass @abstractmethod
def display_summary(self):
pass
Photo by John Duncan on Unsplash
Defining an Abstract Base Class
Python provides an abc module for the abstract base class definition. We need to import ABCMeta metaclass and assign it to the abstract class we want to define.
from abc import ABCMeta, abstractmethod class AbstactClassCSV(metaclass = ABCMeta):
.....
.....
Inside the abstract base class, we force the subclasses to implement the path and file_name properties with the use of @abstractmethod decorator. Note that the properties are not implemented and empty as abstract classes are used only for defining the interface.
@property
@abstractmethod
def path(self):
pass @path.setter
@abstractmethod
def path(self,value):
pass @property
@abstractmethod
def file_name(self):
pass @file_name.setter
@abstractmethod
def file_name(self,value):
pass
Again, with @abstractmethod decorator, we can define an abstract method and force the subclasses to implement the display_summary(self) method.
@abstractmethod
def display_summary(self):
pass
At this point, if we try to instantiate an object of AbstactClassCSV abstract class, we get an error.
abc_instantiation = AbstactClassCSV("/Users/erdemisbilen/Lessons/", "data_by_genres.csv") Output: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "ABCExample.py", line 119, in <module>
abc_instantiation = AbstactClassCSV("/Users/erdemisbilen/Lessons/", "data_by_genres.csv")
TypeError: Can't instantiate abstract class AbstactClassCSV with abstract methods display_summary, file_name, path
Photo by Benoit Gauzere on Unsplash
Creating a Concrete Subclass Derived From an Abstract Base Class
Now that we have our abstract base class (AbstactClassCSV) is defined, we can create our subclass by inheriting.
Below, I created CSVGetInfo concrete class, by inheriting from AbstactClassCSV abstract class. Therefore, I must strictly follow the interface provided by the abstract class and implement all dictated methods and properties properly in my concrete subclass.
class CSVGetInfo(AbstactClassCSV): """ This class displays the summary of the tabular data contained in a CSV file """ @property
def path(self):
""" The docstring for the path property """
print("Getting value of path")
return self._path @path.setter
def path(self,value):
if '/' in value:
self._path = value
print("Setting value of path to {}".format(value))
else:
print("Error: {} is not a valid path string".format(value)) data_by_genres = CSVGetInfo("/Users/erdemisbilen/Lessons/", "data_by_genres.csv") Output: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "ABCExample.py", line 103, in <module>
data_by_genres = CSVGetInfo("/Users/erdemisbilen/Lessons/", "data_by_genres.csv")
TypeError: Can't instantiate abstract class CSVGetInfo with abstract methods display_summary, file_name
As to demonstrate the case, I only defined the path property and leave the file_name property and display_summary method not implemented.
If I try to instantiate an object of CSVGetInfo in such state, the above error is raised.
That is how abstract classes prevent improper subclass definition.
class CSVGetInfo(AbstactClassCSV):
""" This class displays the summary of the tabular data contained
in a CSV file """ @property
def path(self):
""" The docstring for the path property """
print("Getting value of path")
return self._path @path.setter
def path(self,value):
if '/' in value:
self._path = value
print("Setting value of path to {}".format(value))
else:
print("Error: {} is not a valid path string".format(value)) @property
def file_name(self):
""" The docstring for the file_name property """
print("Getting value of file_name")
return self._file_name @file_name.setter
def file_name(self,value):
if '.' in value:
self._file_name = value
print("Setting value of file_name to {}".format(value))
else:
print("Error: {} is not a valid file name".format(value)) def display_summary(self):
data = pd.read_csv(self._path + self._file_name)
print(self._file_name)
print(data.info())
As we defined all required properties and the methods dictated by abstract class above, now we can instantiate and use the objects of derived subclass CSVGetInfo.
Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash
Key Takeaways
Abstract base classes separate the interface from the implementation.
They make sure that derived classes implement methods and properties dictated in the abstract base class.
Abstract base classes separate the interface from the implementation. They define generic methods and properties that must be used in subclasses. Implementation is handled by the concrete subclasses where we can create objects that can handle tasks.
They help to avoid bugs and make the class hierarchies easier to maintain by providing a strict recipe to follow for creating subclasses.
Conclusion
In this post, I explained the basics of abstract base classes in Python.
The code in this post is available in my GitHub repository.
I hope you found this post useful.
Thank you for reading! | https://towardsdatascience.com/abstract-base-classes-in-python-fundamentals-for-data-scientists-3c164803224b | ['Erdem Isbilen'] | 2020-06-27 10:32:55.350000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Data Science', 'Oop', 'Abstract Base Classes', 'Programming'] |
Take Your First Step into the Quantum Realm | You’re Thinking So Classically
Take Your First Step into the Quantum Realm
An Introduction to Quantum Gates and Quantum Circuits
By Author using Canva
Getting started with quantum computing may seem intimidating and just plain puzzling if you looked online where start, you were probably lead to the same results I did when I first started getting into quantum computing. Everywhere I looked said, to get started, I need to have some good knowledge about quantum physics, quantum mechanics, and basic linear algebra. Once I did, I needed to learn how to use Qiskit (Python library to program quantum computers) or another programming tool to start building quantum circuits and implementing quantum algorithms! And don’t let me get started on needing to learn how quantum algorithms work!
Things got very complicated very fast, which can be quite discouraging! 😖
But…
What if I told you that you could start building quantum circuits, with only basic knowledge of basic quantum gates and without any kind of coding?
Yes 🤩
You read it correctly; we will build quantum circuits without using any code what so ever.
The way to do that is by using special tools called quantum circuit simulators. To use any of those tools, you only need to know the definition of the three basics of quantum computing, qubits, superposition and entanglement, and what some basic quantum gates do.
We will start with the basics of quantum computing:
Qubits: The basic unit of data in quantum computing. A qubit can be either in state |0⟩ or state|1⟩ or a superposition of both states. Superposition: A term that refers to when a physical system exists in two states at the same time. Entanglement: When two or more qubits share a special connection.
You can find more in-depth information about qubits, superposition, and entanglement in my article “The Three Pillars of Quantum Computing.”
Now that you know the fundamentals of quantum computing, we can start talking about basic quantum gates and then start building some circuits using them. | https://towardsdatascience.com/take-your-first-step-into-the-quantum-realm-a13e99fab886 | ['Sara A. Metwalli'] | 2020-10-20 14:39:00.515000+00:00 | ['Information Technology', 'Technology', 'Computer Science', 'Science', 'Quantum Computing'] |
Have You Written Your Life User Manual Yet? | Have You Written Your Life User Manual Yet?
On the search for meaning in life
The floor is made of intercalating black and white tiles and the temptation to not step on the white ones is too big. Even as grown-ups we can make games out of daily components of our lives — or keep playing the ones we have since we were kids. And what is a game but a set of rules with a purpose? Step on the white one, game over.
Our ability to make sense of things, be it for work, or be it for sheer playfulness, is immense. As we play an instrument, our ears know right away if the next key we play fits in or sounds weird.
Life is rich; it offers us the possibility of intrinsic and extrinsic meaning. These can be separated or combined depending solely on our individual perspective.
Dancing, listening to music, humor, the pleasure of togetherness can all be an end in themselves, for they are joyful. By intrinsic here I mean anything that is not an instrument to accomplish something else.
I could use my dance to impress the cute guy across the dance floor, to burn calories and/or to win a dance competition — all extrinsic. I can do my analytical work to make money and pay the bills (extrinsic), to solve a social problem that needs analytical support (extrinsic), or/and because I actually enjoy solving puzzles (intrinsic). All meanings can co-exist.
Note that the extrinsic meaning of something can be created by me or created by the outside world. Let’s say I am hungry and eat my greens. Sure I need nourishment, but society keeps telling me to eat my greens because it is good for me. Maybe I don’t even enjoy them as I eat them while looking at my phone. Maybe I didn’t consciously choose to eat greens from within, as much as because “I know I should”.
I am not saying everything needs to be joyful and fun. I am still to find out how putting out the trash could possibly be fun. No.
It’s about alignment.
Every extrinsic meaning created by myself (without bullshit) is potentially fulfilling.
However, beware of meaning created by someone else. If I don’t fully believe in something, by default it does not resonate with my heart and, sooner or later, it will crack. Every “should”, “have to”, “must” has a trace of conditioning derived from a belief system.
We accept social conventions with our minds, but the final judge is our hearts.
What does not come from our hearts, sooner or later gets us frustrated. We can try to deceive ourselves as much as we want, but if the point is not given in full honesty with our hearts, they won’t satisfy us. It’s like when we are just playing along. They will be a weight on our shoulders, a tick-box to be checked, an energy drain, a joy killer. | https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/whats-the-point-of-life-2a15b1755248 | ['Aline Müller'] | 2020-11-06 08:32:45.046000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Self', 'Philosophy', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement'] |
America Lost. America Found. | Photo credits: Tom de Boor, Adobe, et al
They’ve all come to look for America. -Simon & Garfunkel O, let America be America again The land that never has been yet — – Langston Hughes
America is a land of being and becoming. A democratic republic that has been in existence for 244 years. And a nation still in search of itself.
The nature and results of this year’s presidential election prove this search will take years, and possibly decades, to reach the “more perfect union” envisioned by the founding fathers. Joe Biden’s winning the presidency by a narrow margin, in an extremely divided country, both nationally and within these so-called “United States,” attest to that stark reality.
The presidential election was more proof that 2020 has been the year of living dangerously for Americans. 2020 was also the year of magical thinking by the President regarding COVID-19.
Because of this many Americans did not live through the year. They died prematurely.
Others lost their lives in police confrontations. Others lost their jobs. Others lost their businesses. Others lost hope for racial justice. Others lost faith in the American dream. Others lost the ability to be civil. Others lost the capacity to respect their fellow man and woman. Others lost themselves and their family and friends.
The losses have been staggering and far too many to enumerate. We identified some of the primary areas of repression and regression earlier this year.
Can that which was lost be found again? Can new things be discovered to replace those things which were lost? Those are questions to be addressed later in this piece.
For now, let’s look briefly at the impact of these losses on the American psyche and spirit. The New York Times Sunday Review (Review) published on November 1, two days before the election, was titled “What Have We Lost?” The introduction to that section stated, “All 15 of our columnists explain what the past four years have cost America, and what’s at stake in this election.”
Here is a sampling of what those columnists wrote about, as noted on the introductory page of the Review. Nicholas Kristoff: Trump has exploited and betrayed my friends. Jennifer Senior: Trump has normalized selfishness. Bret Stephens: Republicans have trashed their reputation. Frank Bruni: I don’t look at America in the same way. Roger Cohen: He severed America from the idea of America.
On the day after the election New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman opened his opinion piece , “We still do not know who is the winner of the presidential election. But we do know who is the loser: the United States of America.” Friedman went on to state, “We have just experienced four years of the most divisive and dishonest presidency in American history which attacked the twin pillars of our democracy — truth and trust.”
Friedman calls trust and truth pillars. We see them as the glue that holds democracy together. No matter what they are labeled, or which order they come in, truth and trust are integral to a functioning democracy.
This is why many have put a focus on those two factors at this pivotal time. The Pew Research Center (Center) is a definitive source of information on trust and truth.
In February, 2020, the Center published an article titled, “How Americans View Trust Facts and Democracy Today,” summarizing its extensive research in the area since 2018. Early on, it states:
The center’s work delves into the confluence of factors challenging the essential role that trust and facts play in a democratic society: Americans disintegrating trust in each other to make informed choices, their apprehension at the ability of others to effectively navigate misinformation, and the increasingly corrosive antagonism and distance across party lines, where even objective facts can be viewed through a prism of partisanship.
With regard to the truth, the Center notes, “Republicans and Democrats say they can’t agree on ‘basic facts’.” And, “A survey measuring five news related statements (ones that could be proved or disproved based on objective factual evidence) and five opinion statements found that only about one-quarter (26 percent) correctly identified five factual statements as facts and just 35 percent identified all five opinion statement correctly as opinions.”
In late October, 2020, former presidential candidate and mayor of South Bend, IN, Pete Buttigieg released his book, Trust. In a phone call with the New York Times, Mayor Pete said, “There is unquestionably a crisis of trust and trustworthiness in our country — trust in our institutions, trust in each other, global trust in America as a whole.”
At the outset of January, 2020, in our first blog posting of the new year we named trust our word of the year for 2019. We explained, “We select trust not because of its presence in 2019 but because of its absence…In the year 2019, trust was absent on almost all fronts, including in the president; in government; in institutions; in the free press and the news media; in social media; and, most problematically, in each other.”
Much has been lost in this year which is drawing to a close. What has been found during that same time period?
The most important and overriding finding, because of this contentious election cycle and its outcomes, must be that America as a country and we as citizens are extremely divided.
There was a general understanding that there was a deep divide and considerable polarization in the U.S. The voting results put a magnifying glass on the extent of that separation.
They shed light on the fact that the differences between the sides — or the tribes, as some have called them — is a chasm and not a crevice. That chasm is urban-rural, racial, sexual, educational, generational, religious, and regional.
It is one thing to read survey studies and polling statistics. It is another to see the citizens’ voices expressed through the ballot box, singing very different tunes: God Bless the USA versus We Shall Overcome.
The revelation is that, while many of these voters may live in the same state, the Trump supporter and the Trump opponent are miles apart in terms of the state of their minds on Trump’s performance and the issues that matter most to them. That makes it exceptionally difficult for them to hear and understand each other’s perspectives and positions.
To illustrate this point, consider this description of Trump supporters provided by Roxanne Gay, contributing opinion writer, in the “liberal” New York Times, written on November 5 after the election,
The other United States is committed to defending white supremacy and patriarchy at all costs. Its citizens are the people who believe in Qanon conspiracy theories and take Mr. Trump’s misinformation as gospel. They see America as a country of scarcity, where there will never be enough of anything to go around, so it is every man and woman for themselves.
Compare that to this commentary on the motivation of Trump supporters provided by Rich Lowry, editor of the “conservative” National Review, on October 26, a little more than one week before the election:
Besides the occasional dissenting academic and brave business owner or ordinary citizen, Trump is, for better or worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tides that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between He’s the vessel for registering opposition to everything from the 1619 Project to social media’s attempted suppression of the Hunter Biden Story. To put it in blunt terms, for many people, he’s the only middle finger available to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American culture.
There are the parameters of the chasm which must be bridged. This insight is depressing but not debilitating.
It defines the nature and extent of the problem. It indicates the level of heavy lifting that will be required to create a sense of shared unity among the citizens of this great nation.
While this division/polarization/chasm finding is distressing, there are other findings that this election has revealed that are inspiring. Three primary ones include: the level of civic participation; the hard work done to maintain and ensure election integrity; and the continuity of the American democracy.
Historically, America has not been known for high levels of voter turnout. The average turnout of the voting eligible population in the presidential election years from 1980 to 2016 was in the 50 percent range. Various studies have shown that America ranks near the bottom of democracies in terms of voter turnout.
There are a variety of reasons that American citizens don’t exercise their rights to vote: They include apathy, alienation, and a hodge-podge of state-run voting systems that can make participation difficult.
In this election, the citizens overcame all of those obstacles and turned out in close to record-breaking numbers. According to Professor Michael McDonald of the University of Florida, who runs the United States Election Project, 160 million people voted this year.
That is a turnout rate of 66.9% and the highest rate since 1900 when the rate was 73.7%. In that year, the voting eligible population pool was much smaller and did not include women or Asian Americans. This makes this year’s turnout, which beats the average turnout from 1980 through 2016 by approximately 10%, even more awesome.
What has also been awesome is the excellent job that those people who work in election offices in states and counties across this country do to ensure the integrity of the election process. They have persisted this year to do their duties in an objective and rigorous manner, as they have in the past, despite the fraudulent charges being levied by the President and a few of his conspiracy theory compatriots about election fraud.
Those poll workers efforts have been complemented by the volunteer efforts of poll watchers from both parties who collaborate rather than compete to ensure the election votes are cast properly and tallied correctly. Ed Crego’s wife, Sheila Smith, volunteered as a Democratic poll watcher in Sarasota, Florida for six days including election day and was uplifted by the civic spirit, dedication, and professionalism of all involved.
Few citizens understand or appreciate the honest and hard work that the poll workers do to make casting ballots easy. Sarasota Herald Tribune columnist Carrie Seidman served as a poll worker in Sarasota County’s precinct 233 on election day this year.
In her column the next day, she describes her work for the 12+ hour day in detail. It included greeting voters, checking IDs, overseeing tabulation machines and, because of COVID-19, wiping down “every stylus pen and surface with disinfectant after any contact from one of the nearly 2,000 voters we would process.”
Ms Seidman also describes her interactions with voters and her co-workers, concluding, “It’s easy to make assumptions, of course but ultimately I had no idea how any of these people marked their ballots. Nor did I know the allegiances of my fellow poll workers all of whom were kind, generous, and collaborative.”
The Democrats and Republicans working in America’s polling places protect and make democracy work fairly and fully for all. And because of their impartial and patriotic contributions, the 2020 results are unassailable, and American democracy will continue to move forward rather than being pushed into retrograde.
There was considerable worry before the election that a Trump victory and four more years in office would be deleterious for, and possibly even destroy, the American democracy. Numerous articles and op-ed pieces were devoted to the destructive potential of this election in the run-up to November 3.
For example, Brian Klaas, opinion contributor for the Washington Post, penned a piece titled, “To Save Democracy, Vote for Joe Biden.” The Editorial Board of the New York Times authored one titled, “You’re Not Just Voting for President. You’re Voting to Start Over.” And David Frum, former speech writer for George W. Bush, wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “Last Exit from Autocracy,” subtitled “America surved one Trump term. It wouldn’t survive a second.”
Joe Biden has now been declared the president-elect. But that does not mean the future of our democracy is guaranteed.
There is no question that President Trump has governed in an autocratic fashion and contributed to a deterioration of the American democracy. He is not the root cause of it, however. Truth be told, the decline of our democracy predates Trump’s presidency.
As we stated in a 2019 blog titled “The Enemy of the U.S. Democracy is Us”,
A strong and thriving democracy depends on numerous factors. The primary ones include civic knowledge, a belief in and commitment to a representative democracy, and trust in our governmental institutions and each other as citizens. Sadly, the citizenry of the United State does not score well on any of those factors. In fact, our grades for all of them fall in the failing range.
Joe Biden’s election represents the opportunity for us as citizens to unite and to improve our report card. His election provides that because it brings the right leadership, plans, and agenda for the nation in these divisive and trying times.
One of the standard clichés in politics is that the person newly elected to office should be ready to govern on day one. Because of the former vice president’s significant knowledge and substantial prior experience, he will be ready to govern well before day one. There will be no learning curve.
The same can be said for the team that Biden will bring with him to run the American government. Vice President Biden’s campaign has had a transition team in place, working diligently to prepare for assuming the reins of government and restoring normalcy to government operations, since the summer.
On November 7, in a front page article, the New York Times reported that the transition team had accelerated its transition planning, and that “the first senior officials in a Biden White House could be named as early as next week.” The same article noted that “The Biden camp has prepared for multiple scenarios….in case Mr. Trump refused to concede and his administration would not participate in a Biden transition.”
In terms of plans, the Biden campaign is putting a comprehensive and robust set of plans in place to be implemented in priority order. At the top of that list, are COVID-19 and economic plans.
On Monday, November 9, President-elect Biden announced the members of a 13 person coronavirus task force/advisory board
convened to prepare a science-based approach to get covid under control. That task force will be co-chaired by former U.S. surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Adminstration commissioner Dr. David Kessler, and Marcella Nunez-Smith, associate dean of health equity research at the Yale School of Medicine.
Then there is Biden’s agenda for the nation. It is an agenda of unity.
It is not an agenda for plutocrats, populists, or progressives. It is an agenda for the people. It is not an agenda for the red states or blue states. It is an agenda for the United States. It is an agenda to bring people together.
Near the opening of his victory speech on November 7, President-elect Biden declared,
I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn’t see red and blue states but a United States. And who will work with all my heart to win the confidence of the whole people. For that is what America is about: the people.
Later in his speech, Biden spoke directly to Trump supporters, saying;
And, to those who voted for President Trump, I understand your disappointment tonight.
I’ve lost a couple of elections myself But , now let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.
Those are meaningful words and a powerful message. Coming from someone else, they might not be believable. But coming from Joe Biden as the messenger, they are. Because he is the message and this is the way he has lived his life of public service.
On December 23 1776, during the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the time that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from their service; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
Joe Biden is asking all Americans to join with him in the search for America during this time of crisis. We believe in America and Americans. We believe that concerned citizens of all stripes will hear his message and will enlist with him to discover common ground and the common good.
When they do what America has lost will be found. There will be truth and trust once again.
Originally published by the Frank Islam Institute for 21st Century Citizenship. For more information on what 21st century citizenship entails, and to see exemplars from around the world, please visit our website. | https://medium.com/swlh/america-lost-america-found-65b510d0a5a9 | ['Frank Islam', 'Ed Crego'] | 2020-11-13 06:16:31.986000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Trust', 'Elections', 'Democracy', 'Biden'] |
Inside the Disturbing World of Crime and Artificial Intelligence | where algorithms we can’t fully understand claim to foresee the future
Intro
A handful of sci-fi writers possess the remarkable ability to almost empirically predict the future, and more often than not, it’s their grim visions which come to haunt us in the present. In “Brave New World”, Huxley foresaw the dangers of genetic engineering before it even became a thing. The legendary writer understood the hypnotising effect of mass consumerism, as well as the perils of humanity’s urges to “program” a society towards perfection, relying on numbers, data, and seemingly rational, utilitarian calculations, on so-called objectivity. On the tyranny of science and numbers.
Orwell placed his lenses over politics and language as systems of controlling thought, but it was Huxley who envisioned the pivotal role technology would play in our futures. Other writers like Phillip K Dick also didn’t fail to appreciate the power of big tech, seemingly predicting where it would take us with surgical precision. Dick wrote Minority Report in the 1950s. The short story — adapted by Spielberg into a movie of the same name — envisioned a future society where a system known as PreCrime predicted criminal activity, thus preventing it from happening.
Fast forward to 2020… where predictive policing technologies geared towards stopping crime are alive and well; while artificial intelligence finds its foothold in facial recognition software aiming to spot a criminal by scanning his or her face. As more powerful jurisdictions implement these innovations without fully understanding them, a cautionary tale is in order.
Stopping Crime: Predictive Policing
Across the United States, police departments continue experimenting with various AI-led programs known by the umbrella term “predictive policing”. Some attempt to predict the scene and time of a crime. Others identify potential criminals or even victims. These algorithms sort through and analyse heaps of historical crime data such as the time, nature, location where past crimes occurred, offering indications to police on things like where vehicles should be patrolling, in what areas; if and when there might be a shooting; where the next car break-in might occur; who may might be the next victim etc.
The company PredPol has made a name for itself in the industry, attributing its algorithm with the ability to improve crime detection in cities by up to 15%. Originally designed to forecast the aftershocks of earthquakes, the PredPol algorithm attempts to predict the place and time of crimes within 12 hours, with data updated on a daily basis. According to its own data, in 2019, 60 police departments across the US used PredPol’s services. The LAPD, an old and loyal customer, was an early pioneer in implementing such technology back in 2008. The LASER program identified areas with high likelihood of gun violence, and pinpointed the individuals likely to perpetrate them.
“So the LASER program was designed on the metaphor that they were going to, like laser surgery, remove the tumours, the bad actors from the community” Andrew Ferguson, Washington University law professor and expert on predictive policing
LASER was shut down in 2019 after internal audits revealed serious problems and inconsistencies in the methodology of flagging individuals deemed by the system to be potential criminals. Around 50% of individuals deemed “chronic offenders” had either none or one arrest for violent crime, and around 10% had no meaningful interaction with police.
Teenager Conor Deleire learned about the system’s deficiencies the hard way. Sitting alone in his car in Manchester, New Hampshire, simply waiting for a friend, the teenager suddenly found himself surrounded by police, soon to be later zapped by a stun gun, blasted with pepper spray, and eventually arrested. The area where he had parked his car was flagged as a ‘predictive hot stop’ — the likely scene of a crime — and just being there was enough cause for suspicion. Deleire turned out to be innocent. Well, almost. Resisting arrest ended up being his only charge — raising questions about the extent to which the system was predicting criminals, or creating them.
The algorithms operate on skewed and biased data, to the disadvantage of minorities especially. Take routine stops by law enforcement. The US Justice department of Justice data points to the fact that black men are five times as likely to be routinely stopped without cause as whites. The consequence of such data being fed to the algorithms is the exacerbation of existing inequalities.
Does Predictive Policing Work?
Ask many law enforcement officials whether predictive policing works, and they’d likely answer with a resounding “yes”. Manchester police credit its own program (which led to the Connor Deleire situation) with reducing property crime by 25%. How they directly attribute this drop to the program itself remains unclear. Nonetheless, the US isn’t alone in implement AI in its battle with crime. Its police departments which have abandoned the program are also met with their counterparts overseas.
In Kent, the United Kingdom, PredPol’s software appeared more accurate than human analysts in predicting the locations of street crime. Over 8.5% of all street crime happened in “pink” areas pointed to by the software. Human police analysts lagged behind at 5%. Nonetheless, proving just how the software helped reduce crime proved more challenging, contributing to the Kent police force scrapping the program in 2018.
“PredPol had a good record of predicting where crimes were likely to take place,..What is more challenging is to show that we have been able to reduce crime with that information.” John Phillips, Superintendent of Kent to the Financial Times
Transparency
Despite optimism in many police departments surrounding the program’s effectiveness, other studies have proved far less optimistic for predictive policing proponents, and their hopes of justifying its presence in the criminal justice system. This 2013 report by the RAND corporation found predictive policing to be ineffective in reducing the homicide rate in Chicago through its attempt to identify would-be shooters.
Overall, studies have generated ambiguous results. A study by the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law concluded that we cannot definitively state whether predictive policing works.
Not only do we not know if predictive pbut also how predictive policing works: what exact data the police feed to the software, or how it’s obtained. The lack of transparency of information on the part of police departments raises questions on whether the technology is applied in legal and ethical manners.
In 2019, digital rights group Upturn sued the NYPD in an attempt to force them to reveal records over “mobile device forensic tools” which gave law enforcement officials access to mobile phone metadata, including location and allegedly some forms of encrypted communication. The NYPD in general has developed a sort of notoriety for lawsuits by civil rights groups and individuals demanding more accountability. The department, like other agencies, doesn’t make clear what data exactly is fed to its predictive policing software and often resists journalists’ demands for accountability, provoking courtroom battles.
This raises serious questions about how exactly the software is being used, to what ends, and what the police is hiding.
Spotting The Criminal
If predictive policing sounds like stuff from sci-fi stories, assertions about AI’s ability to link criminality with facial features should send shivers down our spines. The old practice of judgement on someone’s character based on their appearance is known as physiognomy. The advent of artificial intelligence has breathed new life into this dangerous practice, placing it under the dome of apparently ‘objective’ numbers. After all, who can argue with data?
In 2016, a study conducted by Chinese scientists Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University produced some pretty unsettling results. Their deep-learning AI could supposedly determine whether a person had a criminal record or not, simply by scanning ID images of their faces. Facial features appeared to be a prediction of criminality: The authors gave somewhat detailed examples of what the data showed: individuals with criminal records had on average a 23% larger curvature on the upper lip, as well as a smaller distance between inner corners of their eyes. The accuracy with which the software could determine whether someone was a criminal was 89%.
This research has reignited an old ,controversial and discredited claim in criminology. In the 18th century, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso argued that criminals had distinct physical features, in some cases similar to apes: their ears were of unusual size, they had asymmetrical faces, and long arms.
It doesn’t take a genius to link this sort of language with the pseudo science of Nazi propaganda in the 1930s as well as racist discourses today. Such language — much like human conclusions derived from technology and data — operates on the illusion of objectivity.
The Illusion of Objectivity
Research shows that humans are themselves pretty handy in spotting a criminal by looking at his/her face. Humans make that distinction pretty well according to a study by Cornell University in 2011. So if humans can do it, then of course machines can, too, just better. And that is actually the bottom line: Machines can be biased in the same way as humans, especially when they operate on human-derived data. If we feed AI with data which itself is “dirty”, it will reproduce our biases. The attraction of machine learning and the use of AI is often based on the (wrong) assumption that AI is impartial. Except it’s not. Let’s return to our example of facial features and criminality — are the inputs and outputs objective or prone to significant bias?
What is a ‘criminal’ anyway?
The output here is the outcome, or the verdict if you like — criminal, or not criminal. The Chinese system of justice makes that call. Can we trust the Chinese government’s (not exactly free from abuses of human rights, and questions about rule of law) judgement on who exactly is a criminal? Does an “objective” definition of a criminal actually exist? By my understanding, the word criminal is often ambiguous, and varies from country to country, changing through time. Even the authors of the study admit that many of the ‘criminals’ present in the database of empirical data (ID scans) committed minor, non-violent offences.
Not to mention methodological issues evident in the inputs, supposedly ‘controlled-for’ ID photos obtained by the researchers. Sample images of “non-criminal” types in the study reveal them all to be wearing white-collared shirts, while none of the “criminals” are.
Also, as y Arcas observes:
“the authors cannot reliably infer that their web-mined government ID images are all of “non-criminals”; on the contrary, if we presume that they are a good random sample of the general population, statistically some fraction of them will also have engaged in criminal activity.”
How is the AI picking up on these data flaws to reach its conclusion? We’re not sure.
What about structural causes of criminality?
So what do premature conclusions about face and criminality infer?
That facial features are an innate characteristic (ignoring the environmental and developmental impacts), and that no structural biases exist within and between them. That criminality is innate, and can be pinpointed to certain types of people. But take poverty as one such structural ‘bias’. Many studies intuitively indicate that economic upbringing and social class (in other words background) leave lasting marks on people’s faces. Would it not be logical to argue that the real predictors of criminality are largely structural? socioeconomic background, upbringing, income, education etc? These are in themselves obviously tied to demographics like race — whose people share certain features — and might be disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. Are they naturally, innately inclined towards committing more crime as evidenced by coded, written features on their face? No. Do existing systems — like predictive policing — exacerbate their disadvantaged position by feeding into the cycle of discrimination? Yes.
Would it not make more sense to remove incentives for crime, rather than claim that some are naturally predisposed to commit them? Rather than using data to predict the area a crime might take place, why not invest in poor communities? Predictive policing and AI exemplifies a misguided societal approach which extends beyond crime, where treatments are designed to cure the symptoms, while ignoring the causes.
Can artificial intelligence replicate systemic biases? Of course it can. You may have heard of an algorithm called PULSE capable of turning a blurry, highly pixelated image into clear, high-resolution ones? It’s the same algorithm which systematically turned images of black politicians like Barack Obama into white males. How did this happen? We’re not exactly sure but the answer may lie in the predominantly white datasets which the machine worked on, or as claimed by the software’s creators.
“It does appear that PULSE is producing white faces much more frequently than faces of people of colour…This bias is likely inherited from the dataset StyleGAN was trained on […] though there could be other factors that we are unaware of.”
The unaware part is key but also problematic, because:
“Machine learning does not distinguish between correlations that are causally meaningful and ones that are incidental.”
The Inexplicability of deep-learning A.I processes
We often don’t understand how or why algorithms reach a certain outcome or conclusion, especially given the nature of cutting-edge AI technology known as deep learning. This is the process whereby an algorithm can “itself learn what to look for”, without human instruction setting parameters for what data to uncover. The human just gives the A.I a goal, and the A.I itself determines how to reach that goal: for instance: “match the facial features with criminality”. Large chunks of how it does so remains impossible to disentangle due to the complexity of the neural network on which the algorithm is based. The algorithmic mysteries become particularly problematic when the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of its outcomes pertain to direct judgement’s about a person’s character. Criminality is such a judgement.
In some cases, the inexplicability of AI is set aside for more important issues. Take medicine. An algorithm known as Deep Patient which analyses tons of medical records of individuals patients proved very strong at predicting the onset disease, often those which humans least understand, like schizophrenia or liver cancer. But how exactly does the Deep Patient make that prediction? What are the intricacies of its calculations and pattern associations? We’re not sure. Of course, in this relatively non controversial case we shrug off this lack of knowledge in honour of something we deem more important: saving lives.
But in an era where artificial intelligence already helps determine who makes parole and at what cost, who gets hired for a job while hugely powerful institutions like banks, the military, corporations and employers, increasingly rely on them , not fully understanding the processes and mechanics of how these decisions are reached — while ignoring the system’s potential to replicate human biases — becomes a problem in need of being seriously addressed.
Policy and conclusion
A start-up known as Faception claims its algorithm can analyse your picture and tell your personality. Meanwhile, news spreads that a “homeland security agency” is cooperating with the same company to pinpoint potential terrorists, which the start-up claims capable of identifying with 80% accuracy through a face scan. The same accuracy applies to the software’s alleged ability to identify a paedophile. How it does so is not clear.
Indeed, a rift is growing between the growing complexity of deep-learning AI neural networks, and our ability to understand them, thus keeping them under control. Which is why the European Union is pushing for making AI outcomes explicable as a key tenet of its guidelines for future technological engagement. In the body’s own words:
“Whenever an AI system has a significant impact on people’s lives, it should be possible to demand a suitable explanation of the AI system’s decision-making process. Such explanation should be timely and adapted to the expertise of the stakeholder concerned (e.g. layperson, regulator or researcher). High-level expert group on artificial intelligence, European Commission
The European Union’s strategy might be the sensible approach, but may also prove difficult to implement in practice, given the growing importance of deep-learning algorithms across various industries, and the implicit temptations to implement them and make life easier. Approaching AI with caution will require a strong political will to balance between its short and long term strategic benefits, and the threats it poses — to privacy, civil rights, jobs and economic stability to name a few. The key is making sure the technology doesn’t make uncontrolled leaps beyond our powers to keep it in check, so that it can do what technology should do: improve our lives, while striving to make our societies fairer and more sustainable. | https://medium.com/swlh/inside-the-disturbing-world-of-crime-artificial-intelligence-8d8ac5d94e05 | ['Olivier Sorgho'] | 2020-12-07 22:34:47.578000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'World', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Crime', 'Politics'] |
High Noon | High Noon
Confrontation with the new moon
I
Is your sun in Leo?
Every time I hurt your pride,
you hide behind the clouds.
II
Your gazes are enough,
don’t touch me with your hands.
Your laughter is magic,
my shadow needs the royal seal of
your overflowing spring.
III
When your silence speaks,
my nerves emit light.
When my silence speaks,
your nerves head to the darkness.
Can we have a dialogue when our nerves sleep?
IV
My lover is
Ever giving,
Ever warm,
Ever funny and
Utterly inextinguishable
only when he cannot see his
shadow. | https://medium.com/genius-in-a-bottle/high-noon-daa7b6a0b6b6 | ['Nidhi Agrawal'] | 2020-12-26 22:17:35.678000+00:00 | ['Astrology', 'Creative Writing', 'Poetry', 'Lifestyle', 'Writing'] |
Why a Tennis Racket Led Russians to Believe the Earth Was Going to Flip | When doing so, unless you are a very coordinated person, you likely realized then when you caught whatever object you rotated, it not only rotated about the axis you turned it about but also did a small little turn along another axis. That abnormal behavior that breaks our intuition was described in the tennis racket theorem or more commonly known intermediate axis theorem.
In essence, this theorem states that rotation about the first and third principal axes of an object is stable while the rotation about the second or intermediate axis is not. But what does that mean?
What’s an Intermediate Axis?
To understand the theorem we must first understand what an intermediate axis is. Any 3-dimensional object has a number of principal axes of rotation, usually one along each of its three coordinate axes (x,y,z). For an iPhone, they are the axis along the direction where the charger is plugged in from the bottom, an axis perpendicular to the screen at its center, and finally the intermediate axis, which is the axis perpendicular to the side face of the phone and passing through its center. These three axes can be identified by their moments of inertia.
Moments of Inertia
The moment of inertia of a rotational object is basically how hard it is to move that object. For example, if you had a meter tall ball of aluminium, it would require much more torque (Force applied at a radius) to get it rolling as compared to a small ping pong ball. Different shapes have different moments of inertia, as shown in the table below which displays some common rotational objects.
Different moment of inertia calculations for different shapes. Image from http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/
The 1st axis of a rotational object is generally the one with the smallest moment of inertia, which is the one going through the bottom of the phone (in the direction a charger plugs in). Rotating around this axis requires the least amount of force to accelerate it because the mass distribution is close to the axis. Along the 3rd axis, which goes through the screen, the mass distribution is furthest away, and therefore spinning about this axis has the greatest moment of inertia. In these two axes, any disturbances or rotations in other axes are mitigated and result in stable rotation about that axis. On the other hand, in the 2nd axis, or intermediate axis, any disturbance is amplified and results in the object’s angular momentum being transferred to other axes.
Brief Description of the Physics
Image from David Muller’s Youtube Channel, Veritasium
Using conservation of angular momentum and Euler’s equations, the unstable rotation can be observed mathematically. When rotating around its first axis, it can be assumed that the angular velocity is greatest for that axis while the other axes have minimal angular velocities as they are small disturbances. By taking the derivative of the second equation and substituting, it is observed that rotation about the other axes are opposed and cannot be magnified. The same follows for the third axis.
Euler’s equations
For the second axis, however, when differentiating the first equation and substituting, it is evident that small disturbances around other axes cause the object to flip. I suggest reading the papers themselves, this Wikipedia article, or this mathoverflow thread.
How was this discovered?
In 1985 cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov was sent to save the Salyut-7 Soviet Space Station, which needed a great rescuing. The mission was so incredible that a movie, “Salyut 7” was made from it. When unpacking supplies, Vladimir Dzhanibekov spun off a wing-nut that was attached to a bolt, and as he watched it move through space, he observed the strange behavior of the nut flipping around periodically even though no force was applied to it. Years later, in 1991, a paper was published called “The Twisting Tennis Racket” and explained that a tennis racket makes a half turn through an unstable axis. This paper had no mention of the behavior Vladimir Dzhanibekov observed, mainly because the Russians hid his findings and observations for almost 10 years. Why did they hide it?
The End of the World
Cosmonauts and the Russians believed that since the Earth was a rotating body, it too could flip over during its orbit. Thankfully, this hypothesis was disproved. In space, astronauts rotated objects like cylinders, which, as expected, rotated stably around their first and third axis. However, a liquid-filled cylinder rotated about its first axis is not stable. Although some would expect that it should because kinetic energy and angular momentum are conserved, energy in a liquid-filled cylinder is dissipated in forms such as heat and results in the object rotating about its axis with the largest moment of inertia.
Conclusion
The Intermediate
Sources
A lot of good information was from Veritasium’s youtube video, I highly suggest watching it: https://youtu.be/1VPfZ_XzisU
Explanations of the physics and math behind this theorem: https://thatsmaths.com/2019/12/12/the-intermediate-axis-theorem/ | https://medium.com/illumination/why-a-tennis-racket-led-russians-to-believe-the-earth-was-going-to-flip-7ecaa9199921 | ['Sajiv Shah'] | 2020-12-05 00:47:07.159000+00:00 | ['Mechanics', 'Physics', 'Science', 'Astrophysics', 'Earth'] |
What We Have May Not Amount To A Hill of Beans | This May Make SuperHeroes Of Us All
What We Have May Not Amount To A Hill of Beans
But this is Our Hill, and these are Our Beans!
The world is flat, the world is flat.
That’s what I’ve always been told
To suggest otherwise would be far too bold.
We listen and learn, and yearn to earn
Are we ever sure our ideas won’t just burn?
Some say the time has come to start a blog,
But who can focus when others just hog.
The toilet paper in supermarkets now runneth over
So why is it most, are still not touched by clover.
The government has been visible, compassionate and strong
But one wonders, did they really not know, all along?
R Kelly believes he can fly, believes he can touch the sky
So why is it this song makes everybody want to cry.
Our world has changed, so many things to rearrange!
A house with many rooms, but still no space
Is this what’s become of the human race.
We long for a time when we’re were one
Yes, one for all, and all for one.
Brothers, Sisters, and Grandma too
We huddle together with a good brew.
Zoom Zoom, please take us to the moon
To interact with friends and foe, or even, any average Joe.
We are not alone, We are not alone
We still have our subscription iPhone!
So it’s not all sadness, or sorrow or lament
But what good is sentiment, if you can’t pay the rent. | https://gary-cfo-as-a-service.medium.com/what-we-have-may-not-amount-to-a-hill-of-beans-51b2438f9ac8 | ['Gary Bailey - Monetization Manifesto'] | 2020-04-03 17:29:08.168000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Love', 'Poetry', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life'] |
Grants of up to €120,000 now available for newsrooms reporting on global development | Media organisations can now apply for the last round of the European Development Journalism Grants programme. Eight grants worth €112,500 on average each will be awarded to media outlets in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom to report on global development topics during the course of one year.
The deadline to apply is 18 January 2021 at 11:59 pm CET. The Call for Proposals with the full eligibility and selection criteria can be found here.
About the programme
The European Development Journalism Grants programme encourages media organisations to go beyond their usual reporting approaches and set a new and distinctive agenda for development coverage. Reporting regularly on development topics during one year provides the opportunity to create awareness and engage audiences.
An image from the reporting project of New Internationalist, a grantee of the previous round of the European Development Journalism Grants programme.
Over the last five years 19 media organisations across France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK have received funding through this programme. Awarded media organisations include CNN Global (UK), Dagens Nyheter (SE), De Correspondent (NL), De Volkskrant (NL), Euronews (FR), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (DE), Die Welt (DE), New Internationalist (UK), Spiegel Online (DE), The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (UK), Vanity Fair (FR) and VPRO (NL).
“The Publisher Grant was a catalyst for As Equals, CNN’s series on gender inequality. Its support meant we could focus on the least developed parts of the world and gave us the scope to go big on a single issue and produce ambitious pieces of impactful visual storytelling.” — Blathnaid Healy, Director EMEA, CNN Digital
The most recently awarded projects featured in-depth reporting on critical issues, informed and engaged audiences, and resonated both with readers and the communities they reported on. They brought together innovative approaches, thorough research, fresh ways of reporting, state-of-the-art presentation methods and innovative storytelling techniques.
Who can apply
Media organisations with audiences in one or more of these countries may apply: France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden or the UK. Media can apply alone or in a coalition of outlets, for instance between media in different countries, or between a major general-interest news organisation and a smaller outlet with specific expertise and audience.
Closing date: Monday 18 January 2021 at 11:59 pm CET
The applicant — or, in the case of consortia, one of the applicants — should be an opinion-forming news or broader journalism organisation with a track record of accurate, fair, and responsible quality reporting. The project should focus on one or more of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and directly address one or several of the first six Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): No Poverty; Zero Hunger; Good Health and Well-Being; Quality Education; Gender Equality; Clean Water and Sanitation.
The project should deliver regular instalments that are thematically connected over a period of 12 months which are recognisable as a series. Applicants need to demonstrate that the projects benefit from their organisation’s full ownership and that the coverage has full editorial support during its entire run complete with the requisite “above the fold” placement and accompanying promotion.
How can you apply? Entries need to be submitted online through this application form. The deadline to apply is 18 January 2021 at 11:59 pm CET.
The Call for Proposals with the full eligibility and selection criteria can be found here.
Do you have further questions?
If you have any further questions on the application, eligibility or selection criteria please send an email to [email protected].
About this fund
The European Development Journalism Grants are supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the past five years, this funding programme has supported 19 media organisations from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK to report on global challenges. The European Journalism Centre, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has committed over €6.5m to support the development journalism ecosystem. Together, we’ve funded over 200 projects and supported more than 350 grantees to publish in over 200 outlets worldwide. | https://medium.com/we-are-the-european-journalism-centre/grants-of-up-to-120-000-now-available-for-newsrooms-reporting-on-global-development-614b09dd38c6 | ['Adam Thomas'] | 2020-11-26 09:36:35.717000+00:00 | ['Sustainable Development', 'Journalism', 'Updates', 'Media', 'Funding'] |
How I “Cured” My Anxiety to Live a Life Worth Living | Lots of people ask me how I “cured” my anxiety.
In fact, just the other day, a good friend of mine called me. He’s one of those guys that parties like a rockstar.
Work hard. Play hard.
That type of guy.
Early in the convo, he asked, “Hey, your brother said you’ve been through some shit — like anxiety and stuff. I’m having some problems of my own and wanted to talk about it.”
We spent about an hour talking.
He told me his story — the anxiety, panic attacks, feelings of impending doom — and then I told him mine. Mostly though, I just listened.
Toward the end of the call, he bluntly asked, “So, how did you finally cure your anxiety? How did you get rid of it?”
I love him to death, but at that moment, I felt sorry for him and the long journey ahead on his road to recovery.
Let me explain.
Anxiety Doesn’t Ever Go Away, At Least Not Really
I would never say that I have “cured” my anxiety. That’s just silly.
Would you ever find yourself saying you’ve cured your feelings of anger, lust, sadness, or surprise?
No…
Anxiety, like the rest of those feelings, is fleeting. And, usually, it’s not permanent.
Have I gotten a handle on my anxiety? Yes.
Would I say it’s gone forever? Absolutely not.
Am I able to continue living my life anyway, happy as can be? You bet your ass I can.
My Story
I didn’t always feel this way. When I was 17 and first experiencing the ill effects of stress and anxiety, I did what everyone else would’ve done — I went to the doctor.
“There must be something wrong with me to feel this way,” I thought to myself.
For most of my life, if I felt sick, I went to the doctor, who gave me a pill and told me to sit on my ass and wait until everything got better. I didn’t have to do or change anything while it worked its magic. Pretty awesome, right?
Western medicine led me to believe this was how healthcare worked.
You feel bad.
You take a pill.
Problem solved.
I had been conditioned to believe doctors had all the answers. Then, anxiety came along and wrecked my world.
Over the 5+ years I spent dealing with anxiousness, panic attacks, night terrors, and hypochondriasis, my beliefs on the system were shattered. Everything I thought I knew about health flew right out the window.
At my worst, I was home from college sleeping in the same bed as my mom — crying and feeling legitimately scared to fall asleep. Sleep paralysis is fun. At my best, I was out with friends, putting on an alcoholic mask to enjoy life for a few hours.
I saw doctors, specialists, therapists, you-name-it. Every one of them offered me a pill to make my problems go away. None of it worked.
Each time I saw someone new, I had to explain my ever-growing sob story. At the beginning of those appointments, the doctor would ask, “So, what brings you in today?”
“Well, it all started…”
And 10 minutes later the doctor would give me a puzzled look then say “I think we can take care of this.”
A few days later, after little to no improvement, I’d already started thinking about my next appointment.
I naively hoped each new professional would be the one to finally fix my life. But with every failed attempt, I slipped further and further into depression.
One fateful night- my “hero’s journey” moment as I call it — I had had enough.
I decided no more doctors. No more feeling like shit. No more feeling bad about myself.
That night, a fire lit inside me as I had never felt before. It’s as if I had hit rock bottom and my only way back up was to rise to the occasion. Think Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises. | https://medium.com/illumination/how-i-cured-my-anxiety-to-live-a-life-worth-living-f6ff642e8973 | ['Jason Gutierrez'] | 2020-12-10 09:45:01.665000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Life Lessons', 'Anxiety', 'Life', 'Self Improvement'] |
About Existence Of Human.. | “In human life alone, one can experience the Soul [i.e. our real Self]. There is no other life form, not even that of the celestial beings, wherefrom we can attain the experience of the Self [Self-Realization]”These are the words of Param Pujya Dadabhagwan, an enlightened being.
The purpose of our existence, therefore, is to seek our true identity; and as a result, attain liberation. Liberation means freedom from the worldly sorrows and the endless cycle of birth and deaths.
Every living being has to traverse through countless of life forms before it can acquire a human life. The benefits of human birth are enormous. It is only in human birth that:
· We can bind merit karmas which help us find and get onto the path of liberation.
· We can realize, really ‘Who am l’?’.
· We can attain liberation exclusively from a human form.
Who am I?
Due to the closeness of the body and Soul, a third entity i.e. the ego, naturally transpires on its own. We are really a Pure Soul. However, we wrongly believe our self to be our body and name. This wrong belief is called ego. Due to this wrong understanding of believing ourselves to be what we are not, our vision becomes deluded and we lose sight of the pure Soul that we really are.
We think, feel and believe that, ‘I am this body, I am so and so (the reader may insert his own name here), I am her Aunty, I am a daughter, I am a wife, I am suffering, I am jealous.’ Believing so, we take over the pain, suffering and happiness, which in reality, is happening to the body, not the Soul. Further, whatever the body does, we assume that ‘I am doing it’; whatever our mind thinks, we feel, ‘I am thinking’.
Hence, owing to our ignorance of the Self i.e. not knowing ‘Who am I?, the wrong beliefs of ownership and doership come into existence. And thinking ourself to be so and so, we harness good and bad intentions internally, which in turn bind merit and demerit karmas.
We bind karmas in this life, which will come into fruition in the next life. Based on our karmas, our rebirth happens in one of the following life forms:
· Celestial,
· Human,
· Animal, or
· Hell.
Presently, we have taken birth in human form. Therefore, now, our earnest desire ought to be only one i.e. to meet Gnani, the Liberated One, who can grace us with Self-Realization!!! Eventually, we will surely find Him one day, and shall also seek His divine grace.
However, until that happens, our immediate purpose of this life should be to try and make a difference in the lives of living beings around us, in a positive way. For this:
· We shall maintain a pure inner intent of, ‘I do not want to hurt any living being through my mind, speech or actions.’
· Further, we will spend our life with an intention to help others, in whatever way possible.
· And if we ever happen to harm or hurt others or make someone unhappy, we will immediately do pratikraman. I.e. apologize before God, with sincere repentance in our heart, and a vow to not repeat the same mistake in life.
When you have such inner intents imbibed into your being, and you do instant pratikraman if you hurt the other being, you bind enormous merit karmas, which will help you rise and make you meet Gnani, so that you reach your ultimate goal in life!!
Self-Realization is our purpose of existence, and it is verily our ultimate goal in this life
Soul is our real Self; it is our true identity. However, the veils of ignorance have all along kept us in complete darkness.
But just like a lit lamp can enlighten other lamps; similarly Gnani, the Enlightened being, can awaken our Soul and bestow upon us the light of knowledge of the Self that, ‘Indeed, I am the Pure Soul!’
Thus,
Our sole purpose of existence is to meet Gnani and attain Self-Realization; and following His teachings, progress on the path of liberation to set our Self free from all worldly sorrows and the cycle of birth and death, that follows.. | https://medium.com/dadabhagwan/about-existence-of-human-d8715f129b9c | ['Dada Bhagwan'] | 2020-12-11 05:32:08.269000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Spirituality', 'Soul', 'Self Improvement'] |
The Cathartic Act of Writing | The Cathartic Act of Writing
How writing can heal your soul
Yesterday I read a very moving piece written on Facebook by my nephew. He was eulogizing his father, my brother, who passed away a few days ago.
The piece was incredibly moving, a personal and intimate view of his relationship with his father and how death had given him perspective. Their relationship had been troubled and often filled with conflict, but there had been love.
I suspected the piece was not for his father, but for himself. A way of helping him cope with his feelings of loss and the grief. An attempt to make sense of it somehow. I called him after reading it to tell him how much the piece had touched me. I asked him how he was doing.
We discussed the piece and he said he felt relieved, unburdened. The words had allowed him to give vent to his emotions. He’d wept whilst writing it. I knew this. I could sense the tears in the writing, but it wasn’t just heartache.
There was something else there. A feeling of lightness, almost happiness in the piece, which made it all the more poignant. There was an acceptance and gratitude for the time he’d had with his father, the lessons learned and the life shared.
The letter was in effect a celebration of the time he’d shared with him. His words to me on the phone echoed this.
I felt I was in a confessional. These were words I could never speak aloud, but the privacy of my writing allowed me to express them, and as I wrote, the heaviness lifted. I will be alright now. I know this. Somehow, the writing, the words, have healed me.
My nephew is young still, twenty eight this December, and he is gifted. He has the ability and command over his language to create images of beauty and capture you in their spell. It now seems that his eloquence of phrase has repaid him in a way he could never have envisaged.
How much of our lives do we pour into our writing? I thought about this after we’d said our goodbyes. How much of our soul do we bare in our written words, freed from the judgement of critical ears? Things we would never dream to say out loud, flow effortlessly onto paper and in doing so, allow us the catharsis of confession. The unburdening of soul.
In this space we are truly free. Our sins seem trivial, our pain lessens and our losses become bearable, all because of the words that pour out of us. Unspoken, but committed to paper. In this space, we are safe. Safe from the prying eyes of the world. Safe from judgment.
I have experienced this myself, as I am sure many of you have. Our readers feel our pain, share our joy and shed our tears. They celebrate with us and they commiserate with us.
It is only we, the writers. that know the true cost of the emotions we lay bare for the world and it is only we that can reap the true benefit of these unspoken lines that offer us redemption. True catharsis.
If you’ve lost someone recently, if you’re grieving or if you’re simply at odds with the world, write. Empty your pain and grief into the words on the page before you. Allow the power of those words to heal you. They most surely will. | https://medium.com/lighterside/the-cathartic-act-of-writing-5f542463a68d | ['Robert Turner'] | 2019-12-15 08:19:04.757000+00:00 | ['Writing Life', 'Writing', 'Writers Life', 'Lighterside', 'Writers On Writing'] |
How One Pivotal Designer Escaped the Export-upload Abyss | The developer-designer handoff is an imperfect thing. In theory, a designer finishes a UI and sends it to the engineer to code, like a whistling baseball pitch that’s then bashed into the outfield. In reality, the process looks more like a volleyball game. Back and forth the files fly through the Interwebs as both parties cross their fingers they don’t accidentally work off an outdated document.
This was the experience of the design and engineering team at Pivotal, the software and services company based out of San Francisco. Colby Sato, one of Pivotal’s Product Designers on their Platform Monitoring team, would spend days managing the developer documentation on each project.
“You’re never done designing — things are always changing because you’re always getting fresh information,” Colby said.
Days spent on dev documentation
To keep the engineers in the loop about design updates, Colby would export the design frames as images, then upload those images to engineering cards in Pivotal Tracker (Pivotal’s project management tool). That happened 15–20 times per project.
Left: A Pivotal Tracker card with static images of designs; Right: A Pivotal card with an always up-to-date Figma link
The engineers’ used hundreds of cards for each project, so Colby would have to spend hours searching for the right cards. Sometimes, he would occasionally forget to update an image and engineers would work off the wrong file.
“It loses time for the developer and it’s embarrassing,” Colby said.
The Figma way
Then Colby’s manager introduced him to our tool, Figma. We’re a lot like Google Docs for design.
Colby loves the fact that his Figma design files are in the browser, which means they’re always up to date, accessible from any computer, and shareable with a link (no software downloads necessary). The tool also has a commenting function for explaining how frames are supposed to function.
Pivotal designer Colby Sato works with product manager Melanie Matsuo
“It’s not just a design tool — it’s a design management tool in a way,” Colby said.
Once Colby used Figma, he no longer had to update the developer cards when designs changed — he just made sure to include the Figma link when the card was first created.
“I don’t need to worry about the engineers going to the right file, I know they will,” Colby said. “It easily saves me two days of work per project.”
Comments in context
Figma also helped shorten Pivotal’s design reviews and make them more effective, according to Colby. At the company, engineers take part in design critiques weekly. They used to write down their notes on post-its and share aloud one-by-one, a slow, laborious process.
“Post-it notes are without context — they’re like floating ideas,” Colby said. “People reading theirs out will drone on. But with Figma we can understand them better because the notes are attached to the design itself.”
A Pivotal design in Figma, with pins showing comments
While engineers reviewed the design, Colby could watch everyone’s activity in the file, following their cursors around. If developers focused on a part of the design Colby didn’t need help on — like a component that’s set by Pivotal’s style guide — he could prompt them in the right direction.
“It gives the person receiving the critique more control over what they want feedback on,” Colby said.
Ultimately, Figma eased the developer to designer hand off and sped up the design critiques. That made it easier for Colby to work with his counterparts at Pivotal. It gave them more time to focus on the quality of the work itself, instead of the logistics of tracking updates and feedback.
“At Pivotal, we feel like a team that has input from everyone in developing a product is going to build a better product,” Colby said. “Figma enables that.” | https://medium.com/figma-design/how-one-pivotal-designer-escaped-the-export-upload-abyss-da9f2264ca92 | ['Carmel Deamicis'] | 2017-11-09 18:28:04.932000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Programming', 'Design', 'Case Study', 'UX'] |
This Is a Turning Point Moment for Work Culture, but What Do We Do With the Social Isolation? | This Is a Turning Point Moment for Work Culture, but What Do We Do With the Social Isolation?
How the pandemic will lead us away from others and into ourselves, and (possibly) back again
Over the past 50+ years, our culture has prized the individual to an extreme degree. Coupled with dramatic advances in technology, our culture’s hyper-individualism has led to a crisis of the self. You might even say the lack of self. It’s a fundamental lack of knowing ourselves. Part of this is a lack of means. There is very little sense of a greater community who can work with and through us to help us find our way (further up and further in, as C.S. Lewis’s Aslan and others said in the Narnia tales.)
In one sense, it may seem ironic that an emphasis on the individual has led to a lack of the individual’s very self-understanding. In another, with a little understanding about who were are collectively, it makes all the sense in the world.
COVID-19 may prove to be a watershed moment on many fronts. How will the health system respond? What about educational institutions? What about work culture and the mindset that requires employees to be physically present from 9–5 when it’s already been proven in study after study that employees who work less hours are generally happier and more productive? The fact is, many of us can get more done from our homes and working on our own time. With our urban centers and highways increasing in density and congestion every year, many of us will find we must work from home. What will be the result of this mass migration into our homes and online?
This is a classic “crisis and opportunity” moment, and it holds true for the public and private sector. From a business perspective, it’s basic economics: your employees will be more productive. If they’re not at least as productive as they would be sitting in the office, then you can’t trust them with their time anyway. Employers should maybe manage better? If you really can’t trust them, they’re not a good employee. Also, if you want to attract and keep the best talent, you’re going to have to go remote.
As employees, we’ll have more time (because we’ll be more efficient with our time), but here’s the kicker: we’ll been even more alone. Without the socialization of the work culture, we’ll need to find community. Some of that community will be found from real-live human-to-human interaction with the locals. Some of it will, strangely enough, be found online. Big Self is at work on providing these very opportunities during this time of crisis like through our virtual inner circles initiative, which are filling up fast.
The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic of 2020 will disrupt industries and economies. This is a turning point moment. It will bring the welcome news of recognizing that the old ways of viewing worker productivity are just that — old. But it also brings a new set of issues for our wellbeing. Crisis and opportunity.
But therein lies yet another opportunity. Within the increased isolation will be the opportunity of more time, and more incentive and desire to reach out and connect, and to — finally, belatedly — work on ourselves. No one said it would be easy, but no one said it would be this possible.
For more on what the Big Self movement is all about, check us out at the Big Self Society on Facebook. | https://medium.com/big-self-society/this-is-a-turning-point-moment-for-work-culture-but-what-we-do-with-the-social-isolation-91bc9396a676 | ['Chad Prevost'] | 2020-10-12 12:54:41.707000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Remote Working', 'Work Life Balance', 'Personal Development', 'Coronavirus'] |
DETOX \ RETOX | In this day and age of moon juices and sun potions, paleo and keto diets, intermittent fasting and CrossFit regimes, wellness and health has catapulted to fame and we want in. For the longest time, the dream has been sex, drugs, and rock‘n’roll. Now, we want to live a great healthy lifestyle and party like a rockstar.
Not everyone has the luxury of taking 168 hours off life for a retreat in a remote part of India. Or not everyone has the willpower to do so. Before you make that massive decision that could be minted by your friends and family as the brave new age of irrationality, we bring to you a weekend retreat with all the wellness benefits — without having to leave town.
Kick the day off with HIIT at LEVEL gym, a high intensity workout that will make you wonder why you even possessed an inertia in the first place. Stretch out your muscles with a mind-balancing yoga + sound session as you immerse yourself in a studio designed for optimum reverberation — the perfect sanctuary for sound healing. Then, slowly emerge into reality as you take a silent walk from Robinson Road to Nanson Road. The day of solitude will culminate in a breathing meditation session that is believed to unlock unlimited reserves of energy, creativity, and ideas through frequent practice.
source: Splacer
In the undercover of the night as the sun goes down, indulge in a family-style dinner prepared by Executive Chef Colin Buchan. The menu is a burst of colours and flavours that will make meal time a pleasure for everyone.
To start, we will be serving our famed watermelon salad — a crowd-pleaser from Day One that has made a roaring comeback, alongside grilled baby artichokes and prawn toast. To regain your energy levels, relish in the low-calorie whole red snapper that is rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Don’t pass over the wok fried rice with shiitake mushrooms and shiso leaves, your body will thank you for replenishing your fuel. While nutrition rules have gained notoriety for being fickle, one thing’s for certain: sweet finishes are the way to go. As you reach out for impossibly delectable madeleines swaddled in white linen like baby birds in a nest, treat your tastebuds to refreshingly delicious ice creams and sorbets. Raise your glasses of wine — full of antioxidants — for a toast, to a promising Saturday.
We take your well-being very seriously.
DETOX\RETOX Wellness Retreat
Saturday, October 20th
2pm — 8pm
$138 (early bird, register by October 10th)
$188
More details for RSVP here. | https://medium.com/1880singapore/detox-retox-wellness-retreat-63174e9eb6e4 | [] | 2018-10-15 08:05:29.064000+00:00 | ['Detox', 'Mindfulness', 'Retreats', 'Party', 'Wellness'] |
Gamma Function — Intuition, Derivation, and Examples | 1. Why do we need the Gamma function?
Because we want to generalize the factorial!
The factorial function is defined only for discrete points (for positive integers — black dots in the graph above), but we wanted to connect the black dots. We want to extend the factorial function to all complex numbers. The simple formula for the factorial, x! = 1 * 2 * … * x, cannot be used directly for fractional values because it is only valid when x is a whole number.
So mathematicians had been searching for…
“What kind of functions will connect these dots smoothly and give us factorials of all real values?”
However, they couldn’t find *finite* combinations of sums, products, powers, exponential, or logarithms that could express x! for real numbers until… | https://towardsdatascience.com/gamma-function-intuition-derivation-and-examples-5e5f72517dee | ['Aerin Kim'] | 2019-12-22 17:15:07.364000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Generative Model', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
6 Lessons from Healthtech Design and Product Leaders That Will Inspire You To Join The Industry | Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels
Healthcare is not known for well-designed technology. The industry is extraordinarily complicated, highly regulated, and dominated by entrenched legacy companies. Despite (or perhaps because of) these challenges, startups and major tech companies like Apple and Google are getting into healthcare.
I interviewed four design and product leaders in healthtech startups to better understand the industry
I am deeply grateful to all of them for taking the time to share their insights. They all showed passion and enthusiasm for making healthcare better through great products.
Philip Johnson — Co-Founder + Chief Product Officer @ Enzyme Health
Andy Keil — Head of Product @ DocStation
Eric Boggs — UX Director @ EverlyWell
Diana Gonzalez — Senior UX Designer @ Wellsmith
The interviews have been edited for length and clarity with the permission of the interviewees.
Lesson 1 — Focus on design and rapid iteration for a competitive advantage in a traditional industry like healthcare
When I asked Andy Keil of DocStation if he faces skepticism about the value of a robust product process, he said, “absolutely not.” He emphasized that great product and rapid iteration has been their competitive advantage against traditional healthcare companies. Healthtech startups are raising the bar for design and product while creating new business models in the process.
“We are able to move at lightning speed”
—Andy Keil, DocStation
Philip Johnson, Co-Founder of Enzyme Health, said that great design is “expected” in healthtech startups, unlike in legacy healthcare companies. Adding, “Advocating for a robust product and design process is a huge challenge anywhere. In healthcare it’s even more important because it can literally mean the difference between life and death.”
Lesson 2— Look at regulation as an opportunity
I initially assumed that startups would see healthcare regulation as a frustrating hurdle to overcome, but they see it as an opportunity. Andy Keil said, “Regulation is actually an advantage because there is a bit of a barrier to entry [for potential competitors] once you are able to enter a market.”
Navigating the regulations is often front-loaded. “The hardest part is to find a business model that works for the company and with the regulation,” said Diana Gonzalez of Wellsmith. After the business model is defined, the regulation in the industry provides unique opportunities.
“We provide a lot of value to our customers by helping them navigate the complex and evolving regulations that govern our industry.” — Philip Johnson, Enzyme Health
Of course, there are still challenges that require creative solutions. “Your instinct as a designer is to provide users with what they are looking for. They are looking for a clear indicator of what to do next,” said Eric Boggs. EverlyWell provides on-demand lab testing, but only doctors are empowered to make diagnoses. This means that they can’t direct users to specific treatments based on the lab test results, so they built a network of doctors they can refer to as needed.
Lesson 3— Don’t pass on the complexity of healthcare to your users
“Part of the reason health technology is often so poorly designed is that [the designers] are passing on the complexity [of healthcare] to their users,” said Philip Johnson. Adding, “I view complexity as layers. You should build your software in a way to let you abstract that complexity away when needed.” While simplifying a complex process for users is a core skill for anyone in product, it’s especially important in healthtech.
“Business model complexity is ‘how do you integrate your service with other companies and medical providers?’ The second level is user complexity. ‘How do you make a product patients can integrate into their daily life?’” — Diana Gonzalez, Wellsmith
Andy Keil described the early days of DocStation, “Sometimes you just want to pound your head against the wall, but once you get past it things get exciting.” Like with regulation, the complexity of healthcare can be a competitive advantage for those willing to take it on. Companies can provide a lot of value by making a workflow that is normally difficult simple and intuitive.
Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels
Lesson 4— Protect patient privacy in every part of your process
“It’s important to bake in privacy to the very beginning of the discovery process. Knowing what the parameters are before you begin can save you a lot of wasted effort. HIPAA has implications on aspects that aren’t intuitive — even the physical space you work in,” said Philip Johnson. He explained, “For example, if there are any computer screens that might show sensitive content, you have to be aware of who can see them, particularly visitors.”
“Privacy concerns have a lot of impact . . . It’s one of the things that keep us up at night.” — Andy Keil, DocStation
Eric Boggs explained how they adapted their approach to ensure privacy saying, “We looked at sending patients content about their conditions, but we have to be very careful about how their health information is shared [since the type of content reveals their condition].” Instead, EverlyWell asks users to log in to the platform to view the content. “It adds friction but our priority is to protect the users’ privacy.”
While removing friction is often one of the hallmarks of good UX, it should never be accomplished at the cost of protecting user’s privacy, especially with sensitive health information.
Lesson 5 — Healthtech has a huge positive impact on both patients and medical professionals
Diana Gonzalez said of her experiences at Wellsmith, “Patients talk about how our product has changed their life through better habits. They will live longer with their family to see their grandkids due to better management of their health condition.” The tech industry is, unfortunately, often known more for social media-induced anxiety than helping people live better, longer lives, so this perspective was refreshing.
“The pharmacists we work with are used to having to manually enter data, so our system blows their minds.” — Andy Keil, DocStation
Philip Johnson told me “We are really lucky to see the impact we have on people every single day. Just the other day we got an email from a nurse practitioner who can now spend more time at home with her kids instead of on hours of admin work.”
Lesson 6 — If you want to solve big problems and see the impact of your contributions, work in healthtech
“Don’t let the regulation [in healthcare] scare you. It can be intimidating,” said Philip Johnson. Start by “observing your own journey as a consumer of healthcare. What problems would make sense to solve?” Healthcare impacts everyone in a deeply personal way. While you could live your entire life and never use UberEats or Spotify (not that you would want to), it’s virtually guaranteed you will have to use healthcare.
“Of all the UX jobs, healthtech is a unique opportunity to impact people’s lives in a positive way.” — Diana Gonzalez, Wellsmith
“There has never been a better time to get into the field. There is so much low hanging fruit in healthtech,” said Johnson. Emphasizing, “We can’t wait around for all of the bureaucracy in government to change. People are taking their healthcare into their own hands.” Trendy startups like social media, food delivery, ridesharing, etc. tend to get the most attention from designers, but that also means new, major innovations are that much harder to find. Working in a relatively untapped space like healthtech offers the opportunity for meaningful, large-scale contributions. | https://medium.com/tradecraft-traction/6-lessons-from-healthtech-design-and-product-leaders-that-will-inspire-you-to-join-the-industry-23c86babc20f | ['Taylor Gilbert'] | 2019-06-20 18:05:26.714000+00:00 | ['Healthcare', 'UX', 'Healthtech', 'Startup', 'Product Design'] |
How Presenters Hook Crowds With Cialdini’s 6 Principles | How Presenters Hook Crowds With Cialdini’s 6 Principles
Are you being sold the 10x dream? Find out by learning about the psychology of convincing large groups of people
Photo by Kaleb Nimz on Unsplash
I sat in the auditorium aghast at what I was hearing. Beside me, my friend was pumped. Not just pumped, he was super-charged.
We had arrived together at the Big Event™ and were eager to see some of the bigger names in entrepreneurship in action. I had won two free tickets and was curious to see what went on at this type of conference.
We were five speakers deep when I sensed trouble. The first few didn’t manage to excite the crowds, but this new speaker was different. He was enigmatic. He had the patter to convince you to sell your own mother for a quick profit.
Being broke, I didn’t have the cash to invest and wasn’t buying into the promise. My friend, however, was being drawn in.
I turned and gasped as I watched my mate’s eyes glaze over with dollar signs. He was fully invested. The adrenaline had begun to pump through him and beads of sweat were congealing on his shirt. He was becoming red as his neck muscles grew taut and the vein on his forehead throbbed in time with the over-enthusiastic clapping.
“ARE YOU READY?!” shouted the host. “WHO WANTS TO BECOME A MULTIMILLIONAIRE?!” he enthused.
The crowd screamed back at him. My friend resembled one of those 60’s teens weeping at the sight of the Beatles as they tore their panties off in the vain hope that Johnny would catch them.
We looked at each other. His grin was manic.
“I’M IN! OH. MY. GOD. I’M SO FUCKING IN!” He was intense. Wired.
Behind me, a random suited man stood up and screamed, “ME!” and raced to the back of the hall. Everybody was shouting in caps lock. Every spoken sentence was an exclamation to the glory of money and how many dollars they would all make.
More and more people jumped up and raced to the back. Literally fighting each other to be there first.
“Sign up now!” Mr. Evangelical continued. “Save thousands! This course is the biggest investment you’ll make in your life!”
My mate began to rise. I reached out and grabbed him.
“What’cha doing?” I hissed. There was no need to whisper. The room was charged, as the mob swayed in time to the loud, repetitive beats of cash tills played at high volume.
“I want to invest! I’m going to be rich!” he said, fueled by the rush of a promise.
“Just calm down. We haven’t even got to the main speaker.” I appealed to his logical side. “There may well be a better offer.” He stared back, then looked over his shoulder at the stampede. Pens glinting in the harsh light. Arms were raised and waving as the crowd jostled to be the next super-entrepreneur.
He sat down agreeing with my logic, desperately fighting the urge not to miss the unmissable opportunity of a lifetime. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/how-presenters-hook-crowds-with-cialdinis-6-principles-93cbdc81d312 | ['Reuben Salsa'] | 2020-03-10 16:32:04.781000+00:00 | ['Persuasion', 'Sales', 'Marketing', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Ideas'] |
Case Study: Main e-commerce challenges for beauty brands in 2019 and how KIKO Milano overcame them | The cosmetics market is estimated to double in the next 10 years, according to the EY consulting firm. It should be ideal to join the bandwagon and start your own cosmetics brand… Or not? What are the main obstacles that beauty brands will have to face in 2019?
Pandora’s box of competition
With the boom of new cosmetics brands in the last 10 years and the expansion of e-commerce, cosmetics brands do not compete only with local companies. They compete with everyone who ships to the same country. As the customers have access to sites like Amazon, eBay, Allegro, Souq, Alibaba, and others, the options are exponentially growing.
Prices of cosmetics are dropping and it is getting increasingly harder to offer something unique to your customers.
2. Omni-channel retail strategy needed
Currently, cosmetics are not sold solely in a drugstore. They are sold everywhere! Starting from drugstores, own-brand cosmetics stores, multiple stores, newspaper shops to online drugstores, pure players, own e-commerce of the manufacturer, Instagram shop-now posts, Facebook shop, and selling directly via live chat…
Do you have to be available everywhere? Certainly not, but the more channels you use to sell and/or to advertise your products, the more you can sell. The rule of thumb is — be where your audience is!
3. Price competition (and not only…)
As mentioned before, it is not only that the prices of cosmetics are dropping down: beauty companies are offering many special promotions, discount coupons, in-cart discounts, and loyalty programs. It makes it even harder to stand out with your offer.
Did you know that more than 80% of consumers use coupon codes when shopping online?
What does it mean? Your customers not only want and use coupons, but they are also actively looking for coupons during their entire buying process. If you do not offer them, you are certainly behind the competition, especially as there are more and more websites and blogs that conveniently collect the coupons for the customers, like for example:
Moreover, almost 60% of the customers would use more coupons if those were available online. Being listed in your retailer’s offline leaflet is not enough anymore.
4. Customer loyalty… or rather the lack of it
67% of consumers buy beauty products from at least 4 websites, and loyalty rates for cosmetics are only 42%
The customers are not loyal anymore. Especially Generation X, in particular with beauty brands. The choice of cosmetics is abundant nowadays; the choice of channels to buy them as well. The customers are constantly trying something new and the customer retention is even harder than making them to buy in the first place!
Beauty brands try to fight it by offering loyalty programs, with the biggest ones owned by Ulta, Sephora, and Dr. Brandt, but also chain retailers like DM or Rossmann.
It is recommended then to find the best customer loyalty strategy for your brand and stick to it.
Do you want to learn more about customer loyalty? Read our recent article to learn how to measure loyalty and keep your buyers coming back >>>
5. Low average shopping basket
For the same reasons as above and because of low shipping costs, customers tend to buy less from one brand than they used to…
6. Low customer lifetime value
As points 4) and 5) say, the lack of loyalty and low average spending mean low customer lifetime value.
7. High customer acquisition cost
The omni-channel strategy, price wars, abundance of competition that bids for the same keywords, expensive marketplaces — everything adds up to high acquisition costs.
Customers now search online, buy offline (ROPO — Research Online, Purchase Offline) or online (Research Online, Purchase Online). The most important thing is — most of the product research starts online. Almost everyone has access to all ratings and reviews available out there. They trust their peers more than your brand and if you do not have reviews or your reviews are questionable, they will not buy your products. You need to make sure your products have ratings and reviews.
You also need to have control over the content that is out there. Not only your content. All the content. Welcome social media listening, Brandwatch, and all the other tools where you can track mentions and average ratings: they will be your new friend from this year on.
After 2017–2018 full of fruitful influencer collaborations, now beauty brands are facing an issue. The customers already know the influencers are being paid to advertise your product. They prefer to hear the advice of “ordinary people”. Hence, the boost for micro-influencers and user-generated content. Authenticity is the new buzzword.
8. Demand for personalization
It is no longer a trend. It is a clear demand from the market.
As the study from Marketo showed, 79% of consumers say they are only likely to use a brand’s promotion if the promotion is tailored to previous interactions. Personalized discounts, coupon codes, in-cart discounts will have their glory days in 2019.
Case Study: How does KIKO Milano approach those challenges?
A few words on KIKO Milano’s success story:
Founded in 1997, in Bergamo, Italy, KIKO has now over 930 stores in 20 countries (with a broader online presence reaching 32 countries). They have more than 1200 products in their portfolio, including make-up, beauty accessories and skincare products.
Their mid-priced products (the mission of KIKO is to supply women with professional, innovative and luxurious cosmetics, for every budget) are best sellers in Europe, thanks to the good quality of the products, curated content, and great social media and sales strategies.
Until 2016, the brand was known mostly in Europe. They have expanded very quickly in the last 2 years, opening shops all around the world (Florida, New York, Brazil, China, Middle East, India, Europe). Currently they are expanding in India and will open a shop in Israel in 2019.
In 2017, KIKO reported the turnover of 610 € million income.
Ranked in 2018 as the 5th best cosmetics brand in France; according to Kantar Worldpanel, French 15–24-year-olds now buy as much from KIKO (volume) as they do from Sephora (chain drugstore).
KIKO is definitely having a great success worldwide but the beauty brands challenges also impact them. They closed 27 shops last year in the USA (as they were not profitable).
How do they approach their marketing strategy and try to grow despite the market saturation, high competition, and low brand awareness in the countries they expand to?
Their main marketing strategy is a copy of ZARA’s. They open stores in centric locations (KIKO has opened their shops in the Champs-Élysées, Times Square, and other main locations around the world), they have a strong online presence and online-exclusive deals, they are changing their portfolio constantly, they work a lot on their limited editions. They also run a huge outlet online shop with old limited edition products (-70%).
10 marketing strategy pillars of KIKO
(and how do they face the challenges in the beauty industry that are coming in 2019?)
1. Loyalty program
KIKO Rewards(it was ongoing from 2017 until 20/07/2018, currently they are revamping the loyalty program and they are launching a new one — KIKO KISSES — already available in the UK. We will update the post once there is more information available about the new loyalty program & whether they open it in all their countries.).
You can register to the KIKO Rewards program either offline (in the shop) or online (on the website or by downloading their app).
The program has 2 main benefits:
Special discounts sent to all registered users by email/app, sometimes free gifts, sometimes free shipping, sometimes a dedicated in-cart discount (usually they last 1–3 days maximum). Those special offers ARE NOT the same as sent to the users who subscribe to the newsletter. I would say the KIKO Rewards program has more frequent/better discounts than just a newsletter subscription.
sent to all registered users by email/app, sometimes free gifts, sometimes free shipping, sometimes a dedicated in-cart discount (usually they last 1–3 days maximum). Those special offers ARE NOT the same as sent to the users who subscribe to the newsletter. I would say the KIKO Rewards program has more frequent/better discounts than just a newsletter subscription. Points collection: they can be later redeemed as vouchers (and combined with other promotions)
You can use your points collected on a real KIKO Card (which can be used in the offline shops) or an online KIKO profile (which can be used for the online shop or as a card in the phone app, which you can show instead of the physical card in the offline shop).
joining KIKO Rewards (500 points)
(500 points) points collected from the orders (for example for Poland 5 PLN = 10 points)
(for example for Poland 5 PLN = 10 points) points collected from different actions on the website (for example, filling in your “beauty profile”; the company can then provide you with personalized offers — 200 points)
(for example, filling in your “beauty profile”; the company can then provide you with personalized offers — 200 points) social media following (Instagram, Twitter, Google +, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest; 10 points per each)
(Instagram, Twitter, Google +, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest; 10 points per each) social media engagement (retweets, pins, likes; 5 points each, max. once per month per platform)
(retweets, pins, likes; 5 points each, max. once per month per platform) incentivized reviewing and rating their products (10 points each review, once per month)
(10 points each review, once per month) downloading KIKO app (100 points)
KIKO sends special offers to the loyal customers clusters , like this one:
2x points were given, both online and in the shops, only to the existing users of the KIKO Rewards program, during a limited time frame (18th to 21st of January 2018).
Points could be redeemed as vouchers:
Voucher KIKO 25 PLN (approx. 6 EUR) — Points: 800
Voucher KIKO 50 PLN (approx. 12 EUR) — Points: 1500
Voucher KIKO 100 PLN (approx. 24 EUR) — Points: 3000
You could use the points in your cart, to reduce the costs. No minimal order sum was required to use the points. Points could be used also for discounted products shopping.
KIKO has approached the problem with customer retention and lifetime value by offering a very competitive rewards program, with gamification elements, that brings the customer over and over to their shop. Having been their customer for the last 2 years, I have to admit that each shopping seems less and less expensive due to the rewards in points, special sales, personalized discounts I have received, etc. They have converted me to a loyal customer (and an avid reader of their newsletter) from the day 1.
The new loyalty program preview (UK version) seems to have an amazing design and gamification of the whole program included:
Would you like to build your own, personalized loyalty program but you do not know where to start? Book a free demo of our easy-to-use (and to integrate with your e-shop) program here or contact us directly here.
2. Newsletter sign-up incentive (discount)
Usually around 5 € off the next purchase, advertised by a fancy pop-up message every time you enter the website not logged in.
3. Influencer collaboration
They have collaborated greatly with influencers, which has given them the opportunity to establish themselves in social media, especially on Instagram and Pinterest (where their focus is). Nowadays, they have moved from this strategy to:
4. User-generated content
They have their own hashtag — #kikotrendsetters (in some countries — #kikoyes), if you use it in your picture, it means you agree that Kiko will use your picture on their website/social media (and they do use it, very often):
5. Limited edition products (currently 10 different ones are available as of 23/10/2018)
What is special about the limited editions? They are always season-specific (summer makeup for summer, winter for winter), they use different models (thinner, bigger, with a different skin color, with a different personality). The amount of the limited edition and of the cosmetics shades ensures that you will find something for yourself and you can identify with the company.
6. Personalized products (make-up palettes, engraved lipsticks) as well as promotions (discount coupons) and personalized tips sent via email and/or available on your profile:
7. Discount coupons and in-cart discounts available for a short period of time:
Currently — fall promotion gives -20% if you spend over 30 EUR, -30% if over 50 EUR (in Germany).
Some promotions are valid in the online channel or only in the offline channels, depending on the promotion.
How KIKO distributes discount codes:
newsletter
social media profiles (in their posts)
influencer marketing (in the sponsored posts)
Google ads, display ads
paid partnerships with local websites (for example: El País in Spain)
banners on other websites (magazines)
websites that collect coupons (RetailMeNot, coupons.com, Groupon, CouponFollow, Goodshop, Vales y Cupones etc.)
their own app (Kiko Rewards previously, soon Kiko Kisses — working only on Android and in chosen countries as of October 2018) — the codes are delivered in messages and as push notifications (if the user enables them).
They use fixed codes for discounts.
Sometimes they launch a personalized discount (for instance, for a birthday). On the example below, they use a fixed code (SPECIALDAY) but the code works only during the day of the birthday of that specific user (they have a set of rules for that). The date of birthday is set up on your KIKO Rewards profile. Here is the email I got for my birthday:
8. Non-monetary in-cart promotions
KIKO often does in-cart promotions based on the amount spent — here’s a current example (23/10/2018): orders with a product total equal to or greater than EUR 49 receive a EUR 4.90 discount on shipping costs.
They also often offer free shipping to all KIKO Rewards registered users. The promotion is announced by email, on the profile of the user, and as a push notification from the mobile app.
They also often add a free gift — a cheaper makeup product or accessory with the orders.
Here you can see an email I got (they offered me a free gift that depends on the value I spend in their shop on that specific day and is a surprise):
9. Gift cards
Kiko offers online gift cards, offline gift cards (physical ones) that can be used also online (with the barcode and security code entered at the checkout), and seasonal (Christmas) gift cards.
The gift cards can be charged with anything from 20 to 999 €, must be used within 2 years from the date of purchase, and can be used only in the country of purchase.
They are not rechargeable. We cannot use the gift cards to purchase other gift cards (and therefore to prolong the value)
10. How does KIKO…
…localize the promotions?
They offer different discounts in different countries.
Some offers are country-specific (holiday-specific). Like Columbus Day in the USA:
Some offers are running longer in some countries (currently -30% on makeup brushes, which used to be a central promotion, has mostly expired but is still available in selected countries, like Belgium):
There are some promotions that are very rare, this one I’ve found only in Russia:
Another one that I’ve found currently only in Italy — buy 2, get a third one free:
Another one that is available only in selected countries:
Buy 2 lip products, a third one free of charge.
Some offers are similar, but have different promotional mechanisms:
In the UK, if you buy 3 eyeshadows, an empty palette is for free.
In Poland, if you buy 3 eyeshadows, the palette is for 1 gr (it is 0.25 cent). Tricky, it?
Some offers are “better” in some countries.
For example in the USA:
2+2 BOGO (Buy One, Get One) sale (BOGO is super popular in USA)
Same promotions have a different discount %% in different countries:
Newsletter discount code: 30 PLN for 150 PLN minimum spent in Poland (20% discount), 5$ for every 20$ spent in the USA (25%). Free shipping minimal amount spent to qualify varies by country. In Poland it is approx. 40 €, while in the USA it is 15$… clearly, the US clients get better deals.
How does KIKO fight coupon fraud?
They offer coupons only for a limited time.
In some cases, the time is extremely limited. For example, on the French website, where I was yesterday, there was no discount. Today I went there, and there was a pop-up discount (the right red corner — it says “only for this visit — 10% of discount — use it now”). I refreshed the page and it disappeared. Awesome.
In the case of an occasion-specific coupon (like the birthday of a user), they have special rules set up that let you use your coupon only on that day (which is the date of your birthday set up in the CRM).
They activate different coupons in different countries. Even if the same coupon is valid in different countries, it can have a different duration or varying availability dates. For example, the HALLOWEEN coupon is valid currently in various countries, but not all of them.
You cannot validate the coupon available in another country. When you place an order, you need to be on your country’s website. You can change the website on the top bar of the website. If you want to order to Hungary from Poland, you cannot.
If you click on the “I” sign, you will be informed that if you want to order to another country, you have to open that country’s website. Then the discount code will not work any more.
Gift cards have specific bar codes and can be used only in the country where they have been purchased. The bar codes are specific and set up by country.
How do they control their promotions budget?
They regularly A/B test promotions, in the same country and in other countries. That is why they have established different promotions in different countries as well as different promotion durations.
Some countries have more discount codes, some have more free gifts, some have more free shipping. All is continuously tested and optimized, also based on the ROI of the campaigns.
Some countries get discounts up to 70% of the product price, some only up to 50%.
Everything is tracked and optimized to bring profits. That is why for example in the USA, they offer bigger shipping discounts (shipping is cheaper) than in Poland (where they have to ship the products from the warehouse in Italy, because they do not have one in Poland). In Poland, most common promotions are discounts based on the amount spent (which makes sense, as the shipping is costly and they need to promote high average baskets to save on the shipping and bulk the orders).
Summary
In short, KIKO has designed an omni-channel strategy focused on low-cost customer acquisition (placing shops in popular places, a wide online presence, a newsletter optimized for conversion, working with influencers, and user-generated content to bring brand awareness — which are, indeed, cost-effective methods). They are constantly optimizing and updating their portfolio and bringing in a mid-priced innovation. What really helps them to survive in those competitive times is a great pricing strategy (discount coupons, personalized promotions, in-cart discounts) and a gamified rewards (loyalty) program (which helps them to retain the customers and convert them in free brand ambassadors). I would easily call this case study a customer loyalty building best practice.
This strategy would be impossible to implement without a technically advanced system and a good collaboration between the tech and marketing teams. The development of such a program is a long and costly process, unless you go for a ready-to-implement solution like Voucherify, for example.
Ready to build your promotion system like KIKO? Our dedicated team is ready to assist you! Sign up, it’s free
Originally published at www.voucherify.io. | https://medium.com/voucherify/case-study-main-e-commerce-challenges-for-beauty-brands-in-2019-and-how-kiko-milano-overcame-them-14fbc3774e88 | ['Jagoda Dworniczak'] | 2019-12-30 00:00:00 | ['Sales', 'Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Case Study', 'Ecommerce'] |
Getting Your Hands Dirty | At this time of year, there’s always a bit of garden dirt underneath my nails (and likely in my hair, on my jeans, maybe even on my face). That’s usually because I’m spending a lot of time doing this:
Not bad for an early May haul from the garden!
And doing that leaves me looking like this:
Me and my dirty fingernails
But you know me, this article, just like my last post, Late Season Blooms, isn’t really about gardening. It’s about writing. Or, more specifically, about revising. About digging in and getting your hands dirty in your creative life the same way you might in the spring garden.
Almost every writer I’ve ever met can write a beautiful sentence. They can create a metaphor (like getting your hands dirty), craft an image of a radiant sunset behind majestic cedars or the smell of fresh-turned earth on a warm spring day. A smaller number of those writers can not only write a whole manuscript, but revise it to make it something that works not just at the sentence level, but as a whole.
To do that, you’ve go to revise. Shannon Hale describes her writing process this way, “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” The building of the castles? That happens in revision.
I don’t want to mix too many of these metaphors, so I’ll adapt Shannon’s idea to the garden. Writing may be putting the shovel, and even the seeds, into the soil, but the watering, fertilizing, weeding, and pruning are all a part of revision.
I’ve been in the revision cave for what feels like forever (in truth, it has been almost ten months) trying to craft some fairly intricate flower beds and the Siren song of a new story idea calls to me each time I lose focus. Because when the flower bed contains more weeds than flowers, it feels a whole lot easier to work somewhere else in the yard than it does to go through the pain and boredom of pulling out those weeds.
But weed you must. And prune. And fertilize. And drag the hose. Because that is what it takes to make a beautiful garden as surely as it takes revision to make a beautiful book.
So tomorrow, I will sit back down at my desk, open my story, and work through this revision. Even though the sun is shining and there’s a flower bed out there just begging for me to come out to play. I’ve got a different kind of digging in to do. And it’s going to make something just as beautiful as my flower beds.
My tulips were stunning this year, which made up for all the work I did last fall digging holes for bulbs, fertilizing, and, yes, weeding.
Additional Resources
Ready to dig in? Check out these resources for revision inspiration: | https://medium.com/no-blank-pages/getting-your-hands-dirty-6d3ac4129bc9 | ['Julie Artz'] | 2019-05-07 13:18:18.723000+00:00 | ['Writing Tips', 'Editing', 'Gardening', 'Writing'] |
Black Friday: How much will a customer spend? | 1. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
We’ve made our first assumptions on the data and now we are ready to perform some basic data exploration and come up with some inference. Hence, the goal for this section is to take a glimpse on the data as well as any irregularities so that we can correct on the next section, Data Pre-Processing.
1.1. Univariate Analysis
To get an idea of the distribution of numerical variables, histograms are an excellent starting point. Let’s begin by generating one for Purchase , our target variable.
1.1.1. Distribution of the target variable: Purchase
plt.style.use(‘fivethirtyeight’)
plt.figure(figsize=(12,7))
sns.distplot(train.Purchase, bins = 25)
plt.xlabel(“Amount spent in Purchase”)
plt.ylabel(“Number of Buyers”)
plt.title(“Purchase amount Distribution”)
It seems like our target variable has an almost Gaussian distribution.
print (“Skew is:”, train.Purchase.skew())
print(“Kurtosis: %f” % train.Purchase.kurt())
1.1.2. Numerical Predictors
Now that we’ve analysed our target variable, let’s consider our predictors. Let’s start by seeing which of our features are numeric.
numeric_features = train.select_dtypes(include=[np.number])
numeric_features.dtypes
1.1.2.1. Distribution of the variable Occupation
As seen in the beginning, Occupation has at least 20 different values. Since we do not known to each occupation each number corresponds, is difficult to make any analysis. Furthermore, it seems we have no alternative but to use since there is no way to reduce this number as we did on Project Bigmart with Item_Type.
sns.countplot(train.Occupation)
1.1.2.2. Distribution of the variable Marital_Status
As expected there are more single people buying products on Black Friday than married people, but do they spend more?
1.1.2.3. Distribution of the variable Product_Category_1
From the distribution for products from category one, it is clear that three products stand out, number 1, 5 and 8. Unfortunately, we do not know which product each number represents.
1.1.2.4. Distribution of the variable Product_Category_2
1.1.2.5. Distribution of the variable Product_Category_3
1.1.2.6. Correlation between Numerical Predictors and Target variable
corr = numeric_features.corr() print (corr[‘Purchase’].sort_values(ascending=False)[:10], ‘
’)
print (corr[‘Purchase’].sort_values(ascending=False)[-10:])
There does not seem to be any predictor that would have a high impact on Purchase , since the highest correlation is give by Occupation with 0.0208. On the other hand, Product_Category_1 has a negative correlation with our target with the value -0.3437 which is somehow odd.
#correlation matrix
f, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(20, 9))
sns.heatmap(corr, vmax=.8,annot_kws={'size': 20}, annot=True);
There seems to be no multicollinearity with our predictors which is a good thing, although there is some correlation among the product categories. Are category 2 and 3 necessary? Can we dispose them?
1.1.3. Categorical Predictors
For categorical variables, bar charts and frequency counts are the natural counterparts to histograms. Now is time to look at the variables that contain some insight on the assumptions previously made.
1.1.3.1. Distribution of the variable Gender
Most of the buyers are males, but who spends more on each purchase: man or woman?
sns.countplot(train.Gender)
1.3.2. Distribution of the variable Age
sns.countplot(train.Age)
As expected, most purchases are made by people between 18 to 45 years old.
1.1.3.3. Distribution of the variable City_Category
Supposing ‘A’ represents the biggest city whereas ‘C’ the smallest, it curious to see that the medium size cities ‘B’ had higher sales than the others. But do they also spent more?
sns.countplot(train.City_Category)
1.1.3.3. Distribution of the variable Stay_In_Current_City_Years
The tendency looks like the longest someone is living in that city the less prone they are to buy new things. Hence, if someone is new in town and needs a great number of new things for their house that they’ll take advantage of the low prices in Black Friday to purchase all the things needed.
sns.countplot(train.Stay_In_Current_City_Years)
1.2. Bivariate Analysis
Firstly we individually analysed some of the existent features, now it is time to understand the relationship between our target variable and predictors as well as the relationship among predictors.
1.2.1. Numerical Variables
1.2.1.1. Occupation and Purchase analysis
Although there are some occupations which have higher representations, it seems that the amount each user spends on average is more or less the same for all occupations. Of course, in the end, occupations with the highest representations will have the highest amounts of purchases.
Occupation_pivot = \
train.pivot_table(index='Occupation', values="Purchase", aggfunc=np.mean) Occupation_pivot.plot(kind='bar', color='blue',figsize=(12,7))
plt.xlabel("Occupation")
plt.ylabel("Purchase")
plt.title("Occupation and Purchase Analysis")
plt.xticks(rotation=0)
plt.show()
1.2.1.2. Marital_Status and Purchase analysis
Now, this is a interesting aspect. We had more single customers than married. However, on average an individual customer tends to spend the same amount independently if his/her is married or not. Again, if you had all the purchases the single group, since has a higher representation, will have the highest purchase values.
1.2.1.3. Product_category_1 and Purchase analysis
If you see the value spent on average for Product_Category_1 you see that although there were more products bought for categories 1,5,8 the average amount spent for those three is not the highest. It is interesting to see other categories appearing with high purchase values despite having low impact on sales number.
For examples, if instead of the average spent we look at the amount spent on purchase, as illustrated in the chart below, that distribution that we saw for this predictor previously appears here. For example, those three products have the highest sum of sales since their were three most sold products.
We can se the same behaviour for the other two categories.
1.2.2. Categorical Variables
1.2.2.1. Gender and Purchase analysis
On average the male gender spends more money on purchase contrary to female, and it is possible to also observe this trend by adding the total value of purchase. This last conclusion is more reasonable since the percentage of male buyers is higher than female buyers.
1.2.2.2. Age and Purchase analysis
Total amount spent in purchase is in accordance with the number of purchases made, distributed by age.
Nevertheless, regarding the average spend by group age we can see the amount spent is almost the same for everyone. Curiously, on average customer with more than 50 years old are the ones who spent the most.
1.2.2.3. City_Category and Purchase analysis
We saw previously that city type ‘B’ had the highest number of purchases registered. However, the city whose buyers spend the most is city type ‘C’.
1.2.2.4. Stay_In_Current_City_Years and Purchase analysis
Again, we see the same pattern seen before which show that on average people tend to spend the same amount on purchases regardeless of their group. People who are new in city are responsible for the higher number of purchase, however looking at it individually they tend to spend the same amount independently of how many years the have lived in their current city.
2. Data Pre-Processing
During our EDA we were able to take some conclusions regarding our first assumptions and the available data:
Age : should be treated as numerical. It presents age groups.
City_Category : We can convert this to numerical as well, with dummy variables. Should take a look at the frequency of the values.
Occupation : It seems like it has at least 16 different values, should see frequency and try to decrease this value.
Gender : There are possibly two gender, we can make this binary.
Product_ID : Should see if the string “P” means something and if there are other values.
Stay_In_Current_City_Years : We should deal with the ‘+’ symbol.
Product_Category_2 and Product_Category_3 : Have NaN values.
Usually, datasets for every challenge such as those presented in Analytics Vidhya or Kaggle come seperated as a train.csv and a test.csv . It is generally a good idea to combine both sets into one, in order to perform data cleaning and feature engineering and later divide them again. With this step we do not have to go through the trouble of repeting twice the same code, for both datasets. Let’ s combine them into a dataframe data with a source column specifying where each observation belongs.
# Join Train and Test Dataset
train[‘source’]=’train’
test[‘source’]=’test’ data = pd.concat([train,test], ignore_index = True, sort = False) print(train.shape, test.shape, data.shape)
2. 1. Looking for missing values
#Check the percentage of null values per variable
data.isnull().sum()/data.shape[0]*100
The only predictors having missing value are Product_Category_1 and Product_Category_2 . We can either try to impute the missing values or drop these predictors. We can text both approaches to see which returns the best results.
2.1.1. Numerical Values
2.1.1.1. Imputing the value Zero
data["Product_Category_2"]= \
data["Product_Category_2"].fillna(-2.0).astype("float") data.Product_Category_2.value_counts().sort_index()
data[“Product_Category_3”]= \
data[“Product_Category_3”].fillna(-2.0).astype(“float”)
data.Product_Category_3.value_counts().sort_index()
2.1.1.2. Removing Product_Category_1 group 19 and 20 from Train
#Get index of all columns with product_category_1 equal 19 or 20 from train
condition = data.index[(data.Product_Category_1.isin([19,20])) & (data.source == “train”)]
data = data.drop(condition)
2.1.2. Categorical Values
#Apply function len(unique()) to every data variable
data.apply(lambda x: len(x.unique()))
2.2.2.1. Frequency Analysis | https://medium.com/diogo-menezes-borges/project-3-analytics-vidhya-hackaton-black-friday-f6c6bf3da86f | ['Super Albert'] | 2018-10-17 17:52:29.832000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Education', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Programming', 'Projects'] |
The Greatest Thing Money Can Buy | The Greatest Thing Money Can Buy
Money can buy a lot of things. But one thing clearly stands above the rest…
Photo by Vitaly Taranov on Unsplash
Money can buy lots of things, but the greatest thing it can buy is freedom.
Most people today spend their lives in what can only be called financial slavery:
The bank owns their house.
The dealership owns their car.
The credit card companies and student loan providers own a sizable chunk of their future income.
Their boss owns every hour between 9 am and 5 pm five days a week.
Perhaps the most clever and insightful observation of the futility of the rat race comes from Ellen Goodman:
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.
Is this all life has to offer?
Running out the clock five days a week as you try to stay ahead of your mounting financial obligations and try to scrape together a couple of vacations a year?
Slaving away to be able to afford things that you mostly don’t use?
There has to be something better out there.
Financial Freedom
What if you owned all your possessions free and clear? What if you had enough money coming in from outside your job to not need your job? What if you had enough coming in to not need to work at all?
In the online world, this is sometimes called FI (Financial Independence) or FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early).
In my book I preferred the term Financial Freedom which I think is a better fit.
This may sound like a pipe dream, but it is something that you can achieve if you set your mind to it.
The short version is that if you can get rid of your debt and save up 25x your yearly spending, you can walk away from your job.
How can a reasonable person hope to pull this off? The way I see it, there are four key pillars:
Avoid debt Control your expenses Increase your income Invest your extra time and money
1. Avoid Debt
When you get right down to it, debt is an agreement to pay more for something than it’s worth.
Is it slightly more complicated than that? Sure, but that’s essentially what you are doing.
It’s like going into a negotiation hoping you lose.
It makes no sense.
Are the ever reasons to borrow? Sure, the general rule of borrowing is that you should only borrow to build. This means that you should only take on debt if your expected long-term payoff outweighs the cost to you in interest.
Usually student loans, mortgages, and loans to start a business are seen as acceptable debt. I would caution that all debt is dangerous and if you aren’t careful, all three of those forms of borrowing can blow up in your face.
The only debt I’ve ever had is a mortgage which I have been systematically paying extra on every month since my very first payment. In fact, I’ve increased my extra payment three times already this year.
2. Control Your Expenses
This all starts with the big ticket items: your house (or apartment) and car.
Whether you buy or rent your home is not nearly as important as how much you pay. Especially since more expensive living situations usually come with plenty of hidden expenses (e.g. a larger house costs more to furnish and will likely incur higher utility bills)
Do yourself a favor and find a place that is way cheaper than what people tell you that you need. If your living arrangement is in the same ballpark as all the people who are shackled to their desk until their mid-60’s, there’s a problem.
When it comes to you car, buying 5–10 year old used vehicles with cash is the way to go. There are many costs of car ownership, but the biggest is depreciation, the difference between what you buy the car for and what you sell it for. The way to avoid paying for depreciation is to buy older vehicles.
I drive a 2003 Toyota Corolla with over 160k miles on it. Are there ever repairs that you wouldn’t have on a new car? Sure. Every five years or so something needs replacing and it generally runs about $100-$300.
Trust me, $100-$300 every five years or so is substantially less than buying a new car every five years.
You also need to keep your other recurring expenses low and always be on the lookout for ways to trim them.
Six years ago, My wife and I switched from paying $150 for two lines on AT&T to paying $90 for both of us on Straight Talk Wireless, a prepaid plan. Next we moved to paying $70 between the two of us at Cricket Wireless. We just switched to Red Pocket, another prepaid service that includes talk, text, and 5GB of high speed data for $37 a month for the two of us.
By the way, the $33 we are saving per month by switching to Red Pocket is going directly to paying off our mortgage faster.
The recurring expenses are the best place to trim the fat since you get ongoing savings without ongoing willpower, but it’s important to keep the rest of your spending under control as well.
For many people, eating out is an enormous expense.
When you eat out at a cheap fast food joint, you can probably get $4 for a meal. Move up to Subway or Panera and you’re probably looking at $5-$10 for a meal. Go somewhere relatively cheap where you are served and you are looking at $12+ (emphasis on the “+” — you can easily land in the $20-$50 a meal per person range by going out).
When you cook for yourself, $3 a meal represents the high end of what you can expect. Get a little bit efficient with meal planning, and you can get to $2.50 per person per meal. Utilize leftovers effectively and be smart about deals and you can get $2 per person per meal. If you really want, you can go for the frugal black belt of $1 per person per meal.
If you eat three meals a day, you’re looking at over a thousand meals a year. Those per meal costs really add up over the course of a thousand meals.
I’m not saying that you should never go out to eat, I’m just pointing out that the easiest way to save money on food is to cook. The best baby step available to you is to identify one meal a week where you always eat out, and come up with a plan to not eat out for that meal. Maybe it means cooking one extra meal this week. Maybe it means cooking extra the day before and having leftovers. Maybe it means eating the leftovers that are already in your fridge. Maybe instead of going to Subway two days in a row and getting the footlong each time you go once and split the sub over two days. Maybe *gasp* you have one day a week where you eat less than three meals. I’m not a doctor, but I promise this won’t kill you. You get plenty to eat.
3. Increase Your Income
I’m a big fan of frugality, but it has one notable drawback: you can only save as much as you currently spend.
If you spend $30,000 a year, the most free cash you can generate by cutting your costs is $30,000, and the odds are pretty low that you can actually slash your spending to zero.
On the other hand, you can increase your income by $30,000, $60,000, even $100,000+. It might not be easy, but it’s probably easier than being so frugal that you spend nothing.
Here are some options for increasing your income:
Negotiate a raise Get a promotion Find a better paying job Start a side hustle
The approach for the first two is going to be similar. Figure out what your boss and other people in power want, and work hard to help them get it. Remember, they have their own agenda which they care about far more than they care about you.
Make sure you are always learning new skills and taking on new responsibilities. Keep a record of all your accomplishments and progress so that you have something to talk about.
In terms of getting a better paying job somewhere else, make sure you are always on the look. You can let friends and professional acquaintances know that you are looking and browse job listings for your area online.
Probably my favorite way of increasing your income is to start a side hustle. There are tons of options here, but there is one approach that I really like that we will cover in the next section.
4. Invest Your Extra Time and Money
The goal of financial freedom is to stash up enough money to allow you to take control of your time. Ironically, the two resources at your disposal to make money to free up time are money and time.
Time
Time is an unusual resource in that it can’t be saved. Your life is passing by every second regardless of what you are doing.
This means that there are three things that you can do with time:
Waste it: activities that provide no current or future benefits (e.g. mindlessly scrolling Facebook for hours) Spend it: activities that provide a current benefit, but no ongoing benefits (e.g. working an hourly or salaried position — where you are literally trading time for money). Invest it: activities that may or may not provide immediate benefits, but can set up ongoing future benefits (e.g. writing a book that can keep selling for years)
Most people alternate between the first two uses of time.
The only way to make money is to sell something, and most people choose to sell their time for money.
A better approach is investing your time into creating something that you can sell besides time.
This was a core premise of my book on personal finance. Ironically, the book itself is a good example of this approach. The time spent writing it was an investment creating something I can now sell instead of time.
Money
If you want to build wealth, you don’t want to work for money, you want to have money work for you.
There are three major investments that have proven effective at building wealth:
Starting a business Real estate The stock market
The first two are amazing options, but also quite a bit of work. They are investments in the sense that they are places that you can put your money and potentially receive a handsome return (better than the stock market even), but they also involve an enormous investment of time and energy. They both represent at least part-time to full-time jobs.
My recommendation is to start investing in the stock market.
Here — as simple as you’ll ever find it laid out — is a winning strategy (note that it is America-centric because that is where I live, but the principles apply anywhere):
Start with your 401(k) or 403(b) plan at work. Many companies offer a match on your investment. For example, my company matches my investment dollar for dollar up until 6% of my salary.
This instant 100% rate of return is pretty much the best rate of return you’ll ever find.
But wait, your plan has so many options, what should you invest in?
The answer is the stock market itself, the whole market, by buying low-cost, broad-based index funds.
By “low cost” I mean a low expense ratio and the absence of any extra fees. In investing, you get what you don’t pay for. The higher your fees, the less money that stays invested working on your behalf.
By “broad-based” I mean as close to the whole stock market as you can get. This will likely be a total stock market index fund, but if that isn’t available, and S&P 500 will do just fine (the S&P 500 is 500 of the largest American corporations and represents something like 70 or 80% of the total market).
Here are some exact ticker symbols to look for which all come from my favorite low-cost brokerages, Vanguard, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity:
VTSAX — Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund
SWTSX — Charles Schwab Total Stock Market Index Fund
FSTVX — Fidelity Total Stock Market Index Fund
VFIAX — Vangaurd S&P 500 Index Fund
SWPPX — Charles Schwab S&P 500 Index Fund
FUSVX — Fidelity S&P 500 Index Fund
My 401(k) plan doesn’t have my preferred VTSAX, but it has VFIAX so that is what I am invested in.
If you can’t find any of the funds above, be on the lookout for terms like “Index,” “Total Market,” and “S&P 500” and find a fund with a low expense ratio.
If all else fails, most employers have a “target retirement date” fund. Pick one with a date close to your theoretical retirement date and move on.
Once you’ve hit your employer match and are able to free up more cash to invest, you can either increase your contributions until you’ve hit your limit ($18,500 in 2018), or open an IRA (Individual Retirement Arrangement: $5,500 contribution limit in 2018).
If you max out both of those (or if your income is too high to contribute to an IRA), you’ll need to open a regular taxable brokerage account.
For both IRA’s and taxable accounts, I recommend opening an account with Vanguard and investing in VTSAX — if you can. The downside is there is a $10,000 minimum.
If you don’t have $10,000, no problem. Just head over to Schwab and invest in SWTSX (note: you have to first transfer money into your Schwab account and then go back in and use it to buy SWTSX. Make sure that you are aware that this is two steps).
When investing, you should invest as much as possible, as early as possible and not panic and sell when the stock market takes a dip. No matter what, stay the course for the long haul.
Since we’re keeping this post simple, we won’t go any deeper, except for answering a couple of burning questions:
Q: Isn’t investing in 100% stocks risky? Shouldn’t there be more diversification?
A: An index fund provides plenty of diversification. You are essentially buying every publicly traded company in America.
Sure, there is still some volatility in the stock market, but this is smoothed over a little by the fact that you are actively making contributions.
You could smooth the ride a little more by allocating your assets across a few different classes, but your best bet for growth during the time you are building your wealth is to invest in stocks.
Plus, you may be diversified beyond stocks already. If you own your home, that is another form of investment that you are holding.
Will you ever want to move away from 100% stocks? Sure, once you are no longer contributing and need to live on what you saved, you probably want to add some bonds in, which are more stable.
I won’t get into too much more detail, but you can see this post from the great Jim Collins if you are interested:
Q. You mentioned retiring early but then said to invest in retirement accounts. Aren’t there penalties for taking this money out early?
A. Yes, but there are (legal) ways around everything. They are beyond the scope of this post, but if you want an in-depth treatment, check out these posts from the Mad FIentist:
These posts are dense and are only for those who crave more info.
For everyone else, the path forward is simple, at least for now:
Invest as much as you can as early as you can in low-cost, broad-based index funds, prioritizing tax-advantaged retirement accounts and your employer match.
Conclusion
If you made it to the end of this lengthy article, congratulations. You have the first thing necessary to actually achieve financial freedom: the ability to learn and grow.
I tried my best to give you the basics, but there’s still a lot to be learned, and much of it will need to be learned the hard way: going out and trying things for yourself.
Like anything else worth doing, there will be some doubt and uncertainty. You can never be sure when you set off on your bid for financial freedom that you’ll actually be successful.
But you can do it.
Plenty of people have gone before you and there are plenty on the way.
Taking back your time is one of the most satisfying projects you can work on.
This is the tenth in a series based on my article 30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30. Shoutout to Dr. Christine Bradstreet 🌴 for the idea to turn the post into an in-depth series. | https://thematthewkent.medium.com/the-greatest-thing-money-can-buy-5f6fd8dae1bf | ['Matthew Kent'] | 2020-03-30 18:17:58.593000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Investing', 'Personal Finance', 'Life', 'Self Improvement'] |
How to Manage Your Full Nodes — Part 2: Managing Containers with Kubernetes | This article is the part 2 of 3 series on How to manage your full nodes.
Today, we will be talking about — Part 2: Managing Containers with Kubernetes .
Kubernetes Setup Diagram
Learning Objectives
Create a single master kubernetes cluster. Basic understanding of Kubernetes Services and Deployments. Deploy our Bitcoin and Ethereum containers into the kubernetes cluster.
What is Kubernetes ?
Kubernetes is an open source container and cluster management system developed by Google. Kubernetes ships with powerful features such as self-healing, service discovery, horizontal scaling and more.
Learn more about Kubernetes on their official website below:
A quick beginner’s guide to Kubernetes can be found here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-kubernetes
Prerequisites
Docker image for Bitcoin and Ethereum
In this tutorial, we will be using the two images built in the previous post, however you can also substitute it with other Docker images.
Installed Kubelet, Kubectl, Kubeadm
Recommended Hardware requirements: 4 CPU Cores, 6.5 GB of RAM
Kubernetes uses 2 CPU Cores and roughly 2GB of RAM. We will provision up to 2GB and 2.5GB of RAM for the Bitcoin and Ethereum Container respectively.
Creating Single Master Cluster
Bootstrap the cluster with kubeadm with
$ sudo kubeadm init
Kubeadm will now help us to bootstrap a brand new cluster.
I0810 08:40:20.627773 8504 feature_gate.go:230] feature gates: &{map[]}
[init] using Kubernetes version: v1.11.2
[preflight] running pre-flight checks
I0810 08:40:20.639260 8504 kernel_validator.go:81] Validating kernel version
I0810 08:40:20.639326 8504 kernel_validator.go:96] Validating kernel config
[preflight/images] Pulling images required for setting up a Kubernetes cluster
[preflight/images] This might take a minute or two, depending on the speed of your internet connection
[preflight/images] You can also perform this action in beforehand using 'kubeadm config images pull'
[kubelet] Writing kubelet environment file with flags to file "/var/lib/kubelet/kubeadm-flags.env"
[kubelet] Writing kubelet configuration to file "/var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml"
[preflight] Activating the kubelet service
[certificates] Generated ca certificate and key.
[certificates] Generated apiserver certificate and key.
[certificates] apiserver serving cert is signed for DNS names [ip-10-0-0-103 kubernetes kubernetes.default kubernetes.default.svc kubernetes.default.svc.cluster.local] and IPs [10.96.0.1 10.0.0.103]
[certificates] Generated apiserver-kubelet-client certificate and key.
[certificates] Generated sa key and public key.
[certificates] Generated front-proxy-ca certificate and key.
[certificates] Generated front-proxy-client certificate and key.
[certificates] Generated etcd/ca certificate and key.
[certificates] Generated etcd/server certificate and key.
[certificates] etcd/server serving cert is signed for DNS names [ip-10-0-0-103 localhost] and IPs [127.0.0.1 ::1]
[certificates] Generated etcd/peer certificate and key.
[certificates] etcd/peer serving cert is signed for DNS names [ip-10-0-0-103 localhost] and IPs [10.0.0.103 127.0.0.1 ::1]
[certificates] Generated etcd/healthcheck-client certificate and key.
[certificates] Generated apiserver-etcd-client certificate and key.
[certificates] valid certificates and keys now exist in "/etc/kubernetes/pki"
[kubeconfig] Wrote KubeConfig file to disk: "/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf"
[kubeconfig] Wrote KubeConfig file to disk: "/etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf"
[kubeconfig] Wrote KubeConfig file to disk: "/etc/kubernetes/controller-manager.conf"
[kubeconfig] Wrote KubeConfig file to disk: "/etc/kubernetes/scheduler.conf"
[controlplane] wrote Static Pod manifest for component kube-apiserver to "/etc/kubernetes/manifests/kube-apiserver.yaml"
[controlplane] wrote Static Pod manifest for component kube-controller-manager to "/etc/kubernetes/manifests/kube-controller-manager.yaml"
[controlplane] wrote Static Pod manifest for component kube-scheduler to "/etc/kubernetes/manifests/kube-scheduler.yaml"
[etcd] Wrote Static Pod manifest for a local etcd instance to "/etc/kubernetes/manifests/etcd.yaml"
[init] waiting for the kubelet to boot up the control plane as Static Pods from directory "/etc/kubernetes/manifests"
[init] this might take a minute or longer if the control plane images have to be pulled
[apiclient] All control plane components are healthy after 40.557841 seconds
[uploadconfig] storing the configuration used in ConfigMap "kubeadm-config" in the "kube-system" Namespace
[kubelet] Creating a ConfigMap "kubelet-config-1.11" in namespace kube-system with the configuration for the kubelets in the cluster
[markmaster] Marking the node ip-10-0-0-103 as master by adding the label "node-role.kubernetes.io/master=''"
[markmaster] Marking the node ip-10-0-0-103 as master by adding the taints [node-role.kubernetes.io/master:NoSchedule]
[patchnode] Uploading the CRI Socket information "/var/run/dockershim.sock" to the Node API object "ip-10-0-0-103" as an annotation
[bootstraptoken] using token: uxdg68.gt830ifp7w9ra2bp
[bootstraptoken] configured RBAC rules to allow Node Bootstrap tokens to post CSRs in order for nodes to get long term certificate credentials
[bootstraptoken] configured RBAC rules to allow the csrapprover controller automatically approve CSRs from a Node Bootstrap Token
[bootstraptoken] configured RBAC rules to allow certificate rotation for all node client certificates in the cluster
[bootstraptoken] creating the "cluster-info" ConfigMap in the "kube-public" namespace
[addons] Applied essential addon: CoreDNS
[addons] Applied essential addon: kube-proxy Your Kubernetes master has initialized successfully! To start using your cluster, you need to run the following as a regular user: mkdir -p $HOME/.kube
sudo cp -i /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf $HOME/.kube/config
sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME/.kube/config
Run "kubectl apply -f [podnetwork].yaml" with one of the options listed at:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/addons/ You should now deploy a pod network to the cluster.Run "kubectl apply -f [podnetwork].yaml" with one of the options listed at: You can now join any number of machines by running the following on each node
as root: kubeadm join 10.0.0.103:6443 --token uxdg68.gt830ifp7w9ra2bp --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash sha256:78d4f0387768a6c747f54b0b5241731397a9617882e9ccc5a4e5a6847a85a043
Save the last line into your favorite text editor: you will need this command later if you plan to join this master node from other machines.
Next, we need to run the following commands to use Kubernetes from our regular user.
$ mkdir -p $HOME/.kube
$ sudo cp -i /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf $HOME/.kube/config
$ sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME/.kube/config
2. Check the status of our cluster with
$ kubectl get pods -n kube-system
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
coredns-78fcdf6894-g2pfp 0/1 Pending 0 11m
coredns-78fcdf6894-tnwwc 0/1 Pending 0 11m
etcd-ip-10-0-0-103 1/1 Running 0 10m
kube-apiserver-ip-10-0-0-103 1/1 Running 0 10m
kube-controller-manager-ip-10-0-0-103 1/1 Running 0 10m
kube-proxy-s2k7h 1/1 Running 0 11m
kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-0-103 1/1 Running 0 10m
3. Add a pod network by installing the Weavenet CNI Plugin.
$ kubectl apply -f " https://cloud.weave.works/k8s/net?k8s-version=$(kubectl version | base64 | tr -d '
')"
Wait for the weave-net and core-dns pods to be in the running state before continuing.
$ kubectl get pods -n kube-system
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
coredns-78fcdf6894-g2pfp 1/1 Running 0 13m
coredns-78fcdf6894-tnwwc 1/1 Running 0 13m
etcd-ip-10-0-0-103 1/1 Running 0 12m
kube-apiserver-ip-10-0-0-103 1/1 Running 0 12m
kube-controller-manager-ip-10-0-0-103 1/1 Running 0 12m
kube-proxy-s2k7h 1/1 Running 0 13m
kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-0-103 1/1 Running 0 12m
weave-net-bfpkm 2/2 Running 0 26s
A full tutorial to all the cluster creation options and configuration can be found here:
4. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will un-taint the Kubernetes master so that we can deploy pods on the master machine.
$ kubectl taint nodes --all node-role.kubernetes.io/master-
Managing Containers with Kubernetes
Kubernetes manages containers through the use of Kubernetes objects. These are persistent entities that possess a state and a specification; spec for short. The specification is provided by you and gives Kubernetes the desired state you want for your setup. Command line tools such as kubectl take your specifications as input and apply the changes required in Kubernetes to achieve your desired state.
Single Master, Single Node, Sample Blockchain Client Setup
Image Credits:
Bitcoin Logo: https://pngimg.com/imgs/logos/bitcoin/ See License (https://pngimg.com/license)
Ethereum Logo: https://www.ethereum.org/assets
Kubernetes Pod
The pod is the smallest unit in Kubernetes.It represents a single running process / application and wraps the container with a unique network IP, storage resources and other policies / run-time configuration the container accepts. We will adopt the simplest one container per pod model, and use Deployments to control higher level functions such as number of replicas needed, restart and image pull policies.
Kubernetes Services
Next, we will introduce Kubernetes services. Services allow us to target a group of pods / deployments by using selectors and / or targeting a list of ports. Services provide us the following nifty features:
Service discovery : Pods running in the same cluster can access services via their DNS name : my-svc:<some_port>. When pods are destroyed , their unique IP changes however they can still be accessed at the same DNS provided by the service. Port forwarding: Services can map different ports from the cluster to the target ports on the group of pods selected by the service. Load balancing: Services will split the incoming traffic among pods that have the same labels selected and / or same target ports. Canary releases: Launch new pods with upgraded software and evaluate their performance by exposing the same target ports and labels for selection as older releases.
btc-live-svc.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: btc-live-svc
spec:
selector:
app: btc-live
ports:
- protocol: TCP
port: 8333
targetPort: 8333
name: btc-live-net
- protocol: TCP
port: 30001
targetPort: 8332
name: btc-live-jsonrpc
First, we define the service with apiVersion: v1 , kind: Service and metadata: name : btc-live-svc . Next, in the spec we define that we are selecting any Kubernetes Deployments / Replicasets / Pods that fulfill the label app:btc-live . Then, under ports , we list the ports that we are exposing in the service and the targetPorts that we will find and forward to in the objects found by the selector. We expose the port 8333:8333 ( Live Bitcoin port to listen and forward ) and 300001: 8332 ( Bitcoin JSON RPC server ).
We can deploy the above Bitcoin Live Service with:
kubectl create -f btc-live-svc.yaml
And receive, the following output:
service/btc-live-svc created
Verify that the service has been created with:
kubectl get services
Kubernetes will list the active services:
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
btc-live-svc ClusterIP 10.96.245.220 <none> 8333/TCP,30001/TCP 1d
kubernetes ClusterIP 10.96.0.1 <none> 443/TCP 1d
Similarly, below is the service file for Ethereum.
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: eth-live-svc
spec:
selector:
app: eth-live
ports:
- protocol: TCP
port: 30303
targetPort: 30303
name: eth-live-net
- protocol: TCP
port: 30005
targetPort: 8545
name: eth-live-jsonrpc
Kubernetes Deployments
Next, we look at another Kubernetes object, deployments. In our previous tutorial, we can run our Bitcoin container after building the Docker image with the following command:
docker run --name testing-btc-live -v /data/btc-live:/app/data -p 18332:8332 -p 8333:8333 -td test-btc-img
We can specify the above configuration in the Kubernetes deployment file below.
btc-live-deploy.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: btc-live
spec:
selector:
matchLabels:
app: btc-live
replicas: 1
strategy:
type: Recreate
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: btc-live
spec:
containers:
- name: btc-live
image: test-btc-img
imagePullPolicy: Never
ports:
- containerPort: 8333
hostPort: 8333
protocol: TCP
name: btc-live
- containerPort: 8332
name: btc-json-rpc
volumeMounts:
- name: btc-live-data
mountPath: /app/data
resources:
requests:
memory: "1024M"
cpu: "750m"
limits:
memory: "2048M"
cpu: "1000m"
volumes:
- name: btc-live-data
hostPath:
path: /data/btc-live
type: Directory
In the first section, we describe our deployment to Kubernetes:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: btc-live
Next, we specify the criteria for selecting pods in the selector app: btc-live , , the number of replicas we need replicas: 1 and the deployment strategy for pod type:recreate , which does not allow new and old versions of the pod to run together.
spec:
selector:
matchLabels:
app: btc-live
replicas: 1
strategy:
type: Recreate
The template section, describes our pod template which is used to create our full node pods.
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: btc-live
spec:
containers:
- name: btc-live
image: test-btc-img
imagePullPolicy: Never
ports:
- containerPort: 8333
name: btc-live
- containerPort: 8332
name: btc-json-rpc
volumeMounts:
- name: btc-live-data
mountPath: /app/data
resources:
requests:
memory: "1024M"
cpu: "750m"
limits:
memory: "2048M"
cpu: "1000m"
volumes:
- name: btc-live-data
hostPath:
path: /data/btc-live
type: Directory
The metadata section describes what metadata will be attached to the pod. This allows the pods created to be selected and managed by the deployment and discovered by the service.
metadata:
labels:
app: btc-live
The spec section describes our pod.
name: btc-live
image: test-btc-img
imagePullPolicy: Never
ports:
- containerPort: 8333
name: btc-live
- containerPort: 8332
name: btc-json-rpc
volumeMounts:
- name: btc-live-data
mountPath: /app/data
resources:
requests:
memory: "1024M"
cpu: "750m"
limits:
memory: "2048M"
cpu: "1000m"
We define the Docker image that we will use for the pod test-btc-img and set the imagePullPolicy:never so that it does not try to pull an image if it is not present on the machine ( since we are using our own image ). Next, we specify the ports to expose on the container 8333 (btc port), 8332 (json rpc server) . Then, we mount our data volume as /app/data and put limits on the pod with the resources section. The pod will request a maximum of 2048MB of RAM memory: "2048M" and use a maximum of 1 CPU core cpu: "1000m" and start with 1024MB of RAM memory: "1024M" and 0.75% of a CPU core cpu: "750m" .
Lastly, we need to define the volume that is being mounted with:
volumes:
- name: btc-live-data
hostPath:
path: /data/btc-live
type: Directory
Running the Bitcoin deployment
$ kubectl create -f btc-live-deploy.yaml
deployment.apps/btc-live created
Check the deployment is running correctly:
$ kubectl get deployments
NAME DESIRED CURRENT UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE
btc-live 1 1 1 1 51s
Check that the pods are deployed:
$ kubectl get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
btc-live-6b999dcfb5-jdb7t 1/1 Running 0 1m
We can get more details of the pod from the kubectl command describe
$ kubectl describe pod btc-live-6b999dcfb5-jdb7t Name: btc-live-6b999dcfb5-jdb7t
Namespace: default
Priority: 0
PriorityClassName: <none>
Node: ip-10-0-0-103/10.0.0.103
Start Time: Sun, 12 Aug 2018 08:33:35 +0000
Labels: app=btc-live
pod-template-hash=2655587961
Annotations: <none>
Status: Running
IP: 10.32.0.4
Controlled By: ReplicaSet/btc-live-6b999dcfb5
Containers:
btc-live:
Container ID: docker://1017245fad91385967b864230f21bf129636a2b23ffe8c4d0d9adca2fcbbdf0a
Image: test-btc-img
Image ID: docker://sha256:3132efdefd1ce9bcd6d9e0a1a3b01ec17ffac7b5d8b23e0b958c63c50b16e16d
Ports: 8333/TCP, 8332/TCP
Host Ports: 8333/TCP, 0/TCP
State: Running
Started: Sun, 12 Aug 2018 08:33:36 +0000
Ready: True
Restart Count: 0
Limits:
cpu: 1
memory: 2048M
Requests:
cpu: 750m
memory: 1024M
Environment: <none>
Mounts:
/app/data from btc-live-data (rw)
/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount from default-token-th8pj (ro)
Conditions:
Type Status
Initialized True
Ready True
ContainersReady True
PodScheduled True
Volumes:
btc-live-data:
Type: HostPath (bare host directory volume)
Path: /data/btc-live
HostPathType: Directory
default-token-th8pj:
Type: Secret (a volume populated by a Secret)
SecretName: default-token-th8pj
Optional: false
QoS Class: Burstable
Node-Selectors: <none>
Tolerations: node.kubernetes.io/not-ready:NoExecute for 300s
node.kubernetes.io/unreachable:NoExecute for 300s
Events:
Type Reason Age From Message
---- ------ ---- ---- -------
Normal Scheduled 1m default-scheduler Successfully assigned default/btc-live-6b999dcfb5-jdb7t to ip-10-0-0-103
Normal Pulled 1m kubelet, ip-10-0-0-103 Container image "test-btc-img" already present on machine
Normal Created 1m kubelet, ip-10-0-0-103 Created container
Normal Started 1m kubelet, ip-10-0-0-103 Started container
So far, everything looks good. Let us try to access the JSON RPC server we set up and query the Bitcoin full node status.
$ sudo cat /data/btc-live/.cookie
__cookie__:3213d9a206e39d69ec2e1556f744c9ebd8fbee6f5885fe5e1f8a24e6e9eb3de4
Next, we need to base64encode the cookie file to get our Basic Authorization token.
// Grab the Authorization Token from the cookie file
sudo cat /data/btc-live/.cookie | base64 -w 0
Make a CURL request to our Bitcoin Full Node Service:
curl http://10.96.245.220:30001
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
-H "Authorization: Basic X19jb29raWVfXzozMjEzZDlhMjA2ZTM5ZDY5ZWMyZTE1NTZmNzQ0YzllYmQ4ZmJlZTZmNTg4NWZlNWUxZjhhMjRlNmU5ZWIzZGU0" --data '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "getblockchaininfo", "id": 1}'
Substitute 10.96.245.220 with your ClusterIP that was created when you deployed the Service in the earlier section.
You should get the following response:
{"result":{"chain":"main","blocks":0,"headers":122000,"bestblockhash":"000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f","difficulty":1,"mediantime":1231006505,"verificationprogress":2.813522581816168e-09,"initialblockdownload":true,"chainwork":"0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000100010001","size_on_disk":293,"pruned":false,"softforks":[{"id":"bip34","version":2,"reject":{"status":false}},{"id":"bip66","version":3,"reject":{"status":false}},{"id":"bip65","version":4,"reject":{"status":false}}],"bip9_softforks":{"csv":{"status":"defined","startTime":1462060800,"timeout":1493596800,"since":0},"segwit":{"status":"defined","startTime":1479168000,"timeout":1510704000,"since":0}},"warnings":""},"error":null,"id":1}
Congratulations, you have deployed your Bitcoin full node on Kubernetes !
The steps for deploying Ethereum full node would be the same as the one for the Bitcoin full node.
We can get the synchronization status of the Ethereum full node with the following command:
Response:
{
"jsonrpc":"2.0",
"id":1,"result":{
"currentBlock":"0x5bef8e",
"highestBlock":"0x5d95ef",
"knownStates":"0xb9893c9",
"pulledStates":"0xb9893c9",
"startingBlock":"0x5bef8c"
}
}
eth-live-deploy.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: eth-live
spec:
selector:
matchLabels:
app: eth-live
replicas: 1
strategy:
type: Recreate
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: eth-live
spec:
containers:
- name: eth-live
image: test-eth-img
imagePullPolicy: Never
ports:
- containerPort: 30303
name: eth-live
- containerPort: 8545
name: eth-json-rpc
volumeMounts:
- name: eth-live-data
mountPath: /app/data
resources:
requests:
memory: "2048M"
cpu: "750m"
limits:
memory: "2560M"
cpu: "1000m"
volumes:
- name: eth-live-data
hostPath:
path: /data/eth-live
type: Directory
Additional Resources:
We have created a public Github repository with sample files for Docker and Kubernetes that you can use to learn more, as well as few scripts for convenience.
Try out the interactive mini-kube tutorials at Kubernetes official website to learn the basics in your web browser.
Summary
We have successfully managed to deploy our Dockerized Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes in a single master Kubernetes cluster. We can now access the full nodes within the cluster with their service names or within the same network using the external IP as host. This concludes part 2 of our 3 part series of running containerized full nodes.
Want to learn more?
Follow us on our Twitter and Medium for more updates. If you are a developer who is keen to contribute towards building a developer community alongside MW Partners, kindly reach out to [email protected]. | https://medium.com/mwpartners/how-to-manage-your-full-nodes-part-2-managing-containers-with-kubernetes-41338e4b4821 | ['Oliver Wee'] | 2018-08-31 07:53:15.065000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Bitcoin', 'Kubernetes'] |
Instagram Is Hiding Likes to Protect Themselves, Not Their Users | What Other Reasons Does Instagram Have to Hide Likes From Its Users?
If Instagram wouldn’t be hiding likes to protect their users, what would they be hiding likes for? In my opinion, these are the two most likely culprits.
1. Instagram is hiding likes to protect their reputation and business
Data shows that since early 2019, average Instagram engagement has declined from 1.54% to 0.9%, but if you’ve been paying attention to your Instagram account you know this decline has been happening for a while now. How do we know? Because many of us measure like numbers to gauge content performance, and we’ve seen our numbers continue to decline over time.
If you’re used to using Instagram often, it’s not easy to stop using it, even after the perceived value of your time on the platform decreases.
Yes, by hiding likes Instagram, makes it less likely that we’ll compare our like numbers to others, but when it comes to feeling unhappy because of likes, comparing our numbers is not the only culprit. The decline in engagement also is. When you spend a lot of time creating content and interacting on Instagram, your like numbers are the best indicator of the perceived return in value you are getting for your time. If your like numbers decline, so does the perceived value of your time on the platform, and if you use Instagram often, this is likely to affect your mental health.
Instagram isn’t protecting its users, it’s protecting itself. By hiding likes, Instagram will help alleviate the negative backlash that comes from declining organic engagement on a platform over time as well as protect their reputation as Facebook’s more engaging social media platform (which is essential to their business now that FB is in clear decline). Not only that, but hiding likes also makes it more likely to get more users to pay for sponsored posts as we try to make up for the continuing decline in organic reach. That is great for business, not necessarily for our mental health.
In a recent study of 154K Instagram users, the influencer marketing platform HypeAuditor saw a decline in likes from at least 30% of their following coming from users in the regions in which Instagram’s hidden like counts test is currently running. If this trend continues when Instagram rolls out like hiding in the USA, we can expect more people to be less happy with their Instagram accounts as well as pay more for sponsored posts to make up for the decline in engagement.
2. Instagram is hiding likes to further monopolize our data
Likes being visible make Instagram less valuable as a business. Why? There are a lot of companies out there making money from analyzing, surfacing, and visualizing your Instagram likes data. By hiding likes, Instagram is making sure those companies can no longer capture that value and now sets itself up as the only owner and purveyor of our likes data. This makes them the only entity capable of charging people to access it. Monopolized access to our data is great for business, not necessarily for our mental health.
I’m not saying that I know the intentions of the people who make these choices at Instagram; I don’t. I’m also not saying that hiding likes will not reduce the platform’s negative impact on our mental health. It might, although I am doubtful about that (if it clearly positively impacted users, wouldn’t Instagram be touting studies about it? They’ve obviously tested it, a lot).
All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t so easily give Instagram a big ol’ pat on the back because they say they care about their users’ well-being and health. If they really did, there would be many other product features that would make a bigger impact on improving our mental health, other than hiding likes.
For example, in an effort to protect my mental health, I’ve muted all of the people I follow on my personal account. Unfortunately, Instagram still surfaces their stories at the top of my feed in an effort to try and get me to engage with them again.
If they truly cared about our mental health, that feature wouldn’t be aimed at getting you to engage again. If they truly cared about our well-being, they would want us to choose what content we saw, not what their algorithm knows will keep us on the app for longer, they would give us control over how they use our data and content, or they would give their users an equitable value exchange for the free content they use to monetize, among many other things.
Caring about your user's well-being isn’t just something you say, it’s something you practice. So far, Instagram and Facebook have a long history of not practicing it, and it’s important we remember that. Facebook is one of the most powerful organizations in the world, after all.
By the way, if you want to learn more about how Instagram works, read these articles on how to create a visually appealing Instagram grid, everything you need to know about Instagram hashtags, how the Instagram algorithm works, how to make money on Instagram, why your Instagram account isn’t growing, how to create effective Instagram story ads, how to create a visually appealing Instagram grid, how to increase your Instagram engagement, how to create effective Instagram sponsored posts, how to check if you’re shadowbanned, how to create an Instagram repost account that makes money, how to monetize your Medium article, the best Instagram bots, how to automate an Instagram bot that isn’t spammy, the state of Instagram bots in 2020, how to increase your Instagram engagement rate, how to find the best times to post, as well as how to find the most valuable Instagram influencers, how to measure what an influencer is worth, how to measure your influencer marketing ROI, and how to reach out to influencers.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read my article! If you enjoyed it, you can support me by signing up to my Instagram Small Business class, sharing this article and giving it a bunch of claps. You can also follow me on Instagram to get updates whenever I publish a new piece ❤ | https://medium.com/better-marketing/instagram-is-hiding-likes-to-protect-themselves-not-their-users-7669001ebc82 | ['Eduardo Morales'] | 2020-10-16 20:52:57.943000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Mental Health', 'Instagram', 'Instagram Marketing', 'Social Media Marketing'] |
Exploring the Fat Protocol Thesis | The exploration is adapted from the original USV thesis, which you can read here.
You know protocols.
SMTP for email transfer, HTTP for hyperlinks, TCP/IP for data transfer. Every application you use is built on top of those protocols. Facebook, Google, Amazon, would not be able to exist without these protocols. Since the advent of the internet, the majority of value has accrued to the applications on top of pre-existing protocols, and the protocols themselves have not generated much wealth for the people who invested in them.
The underlying argument of the fat protocol thesis is that blockchain technology can fundamentally flip that dynamic and change it such that the protocol layer accrues more value than the application layer. The theory posits two main reasons why this happens:
Shared data layer Speculative token attachment
First: the shared data allows for user data to be held in a central place (namely the protocol/blockchain) and to be shared equally among the applications built on top. Historically data was siloed and barriers to entry were large. With a shared data center, it’s easier for companies to build on top and for them to work together. For example, it takes quite a bit of effort to transfer your assets from Robinhood to E-trade (built on different bases), but it’s seamless to do so between Coinbase and Binance.
Second: the speculative token attachment encourages building and speculation on early stage protocols, as any application built on top of the protocol will increase it’s value and create a loop of value creation. As applications are built, the protocol accrues more value. As the protocol accrues value, people are incentivized to build applications. Since the tokens are needed to access & use the protocol, they go up in value the more a protocol is used. It’s a virtuous cycle.
Due to the protocol gaining value linearly with application usage, the theory posits that that applications cannot accrue value larger than that of the underlying protocol.
Issues with the thesis:
One: Applications often end up building their own application specific protocols. It’s unclear whether the underlying protocol would be able to adapt to swallow those needs. The protocols being developed are more focused when they are developed from a application centered perspective, as you would know exactly what features should be develop and how they should be developed.
Two: My own bloated protocol thesis. If every protocol had a native token it would be cumbersome to interact with each other and seamlessly transact. I don’t want to live in a world where I have to own 100 different coins for 100 different protocols. I would like protocols that handle basic functionality, and applications that take care of complexity. If the underlying protocol cannot adopt all types of complexity needed to run a full scale application (which is likely) then new protocols must be developed, and with it would likely come with additional tokens.
Three: Off chain applications that accrue value could theoretically enjoy more value than the underlying protocol. Take for example Enigma, which operates as an off chain addition to the Ethereum protocol. Simplifying a bit, you need the Enigma token to process private transactions, and the results of those transactions are posted the blockchain.
The Enigma token is correlated with the intensity of the computations performed on the Enigma layer. If the computations are incredibly intensive, it will consume more Enigma tokens (and therefore drive the price of Enigma up). Regardless of the intensity, the same amount of Ethereum will be used…because the only thing ethereum is being used for is posting the result to the blockchain.
You can see here that Enigma could theoretically surpass Ethereum in value if they had the same number as transactions but the Enigma token was consumed faster because the computational intensity on the Enigma layer was more.
Four: The shared data view also holds some issues. The shared data thesis only holds true for very specific types of data. It would be unwise to have a shared pool of private data, and would definitely be unwise to have a shared pool of all the data that Facebook collects (syncing costs would be insane!) | https://medium.com/ledgercapital/the-fat-protocol-thesis-debated-65ad56285fd5 | ['Avi Felman'] | 2018-09-24 19:07:30.216000+00:00 | ['Guide', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Development', 'Bitcoin'] |
5 Traits That Screams You’re Insecure | Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.
The best way to finally stop feeling insecure is to identify the habits that are maintaining that insecurity. And accepting the fact that you’re insecure.
It’s not a bad thing to be insecure but it hinders your growth and makes your daily activities, harder to deal with.
Here are 6 signs/habits that screams you’re insecure.
1. You get offended easily.
You get easily offended and defensive when somebody points out something about you. Now, the reason why you get so offended or defensive is that you’re insecure about that particular thing or trait about yourself.
You wouldn’t care if you weren’t so insecure about that particular thing. You try to cover up or make up for the things, you’re lacking in, by getting defensive to kind of protect yourself.
Think about it, why would you make up or cover up something, you’re completely proud of (or okay with) or you accept that thing about yourself. You wouldn’t.
Eg., Let’s just take a trait, that you’re okay with and you accept it. Let’s just say it’s your body shape. If someone says something about your body shape, and you’re completely fine with it, you wouldn’t even try to explain or cover up for it.
2. You bring people down.
You put hate on people or bring them down to feel good or secure about yourself or a trait that deep down, you think you’re lacking.
You put them down because they have the things or traits, that you’re insecure about. You point out flaws in them, just to make up for your own flaws.
Or sometimes, they’re just a big giant mirror which reflects your biggest failures and fears. You put hate on them, to hide or to cover your own inability to go ahead and achieve your biggest goals in life.
3. Bragging or Showing off.
You try to seek validation or approval of others by bragging and showing off. Now it can be anything. It can be you trying to seek validation by seeking as much attention as you can get through posting pictures on social media (of yourself or the materials you have). Not that it’s a bad thing. But when you do it excessively, you’re actually insecure. And you don’t feel whole or complete in yourself.
It can also be you trying to brag about the things that you have, verbally. You might have all the expensive things but bragging about them shows that you’re trying to be accepted or validated by people.
4. Overly Competitive.
You think, if you do better than others, people are gonna accept you. And then, you feel validated and better about yourself.
When someone outshines you, you feel insecure about your abilities, it hits your ego. Ego is a false sense of image based on the past. You try to protect that image.
When you feel whole and complete in yourself, you don’t need to compete.
5. Thinking you’re superior to others.
Here, the claims you make about yourself or your own worth comes at the expense of acknowledging the self-worth of other people.
It’s fine to know that you’re luckier and happier than everyone else, but when you bring down their self-worth in your mind and compare it with yours, it clearly states that you’re insecure.
You do it subconsciously, to enhance your self-esteem. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/5-traits-that-screams-youre-insecure-8239209aaeed | ['Simran Kaushik'] | 2020-12-13 00:02:41.990000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Self Help', 'Love', 'Self Love'] |
How To Limit Artificial Stupidity? | How To Limit Artificial Stupidity
A quick overview of Human-Learn Library
What Is Artificial Stupidity?
Artificial stupidity is a new term that is used as the antonym of artificial intelligence. However, it has two opposite meanings:
Machine learning algorithms make stupid mistakes while learning from the data. Artificial intelligence is dumbed down to make mistakes and look more human.
It can be appealing and clap-rewarding to write about the second meaning, but I want to introduce you to the first meaning of artificial stupidity and the fascinating Human-learn library by Vincent D. Warmerdam.
An Interesting Example Of Artificial Stupidity:
There are many examples of the first meaning of artificial stupidity in recent years. One of the most amusing ones was discovered by Ciaran Maguire and introduced on Twitter. An insurance company’s algorithm was calculating different costs for people according to the day they were born. As you can see on the tweet below, when the date of birth was changed by one-day, price changes a lot. How did the algorithm come to this calculation? What about the programmers testing the accuracy of the algorithm? How did they miss such a bizarre outcome?
My assumption was that there were severe outliers in the data set which affected the weights of the model drastically. Still, there could be other causes for this error. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-limit-artificial-stupidity-a4635a7967bc | ['Seyma Tas'] | 2020-10-16 13:01:03.319000+00:00 | ['Siri', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning Ai', 'NLP', 'Data Science'] |
3 Most Asked Python Interview Questions for Data Scientists | 3 Most Asked Python Interview Questions for Data Scientists
Top python interview questions for data scientists
Photo by fabio on Unsplash
Many blogs and websites have several questions and advice with regards to data science interviews. However, most data science interviews want to test candidates software engineering skills as well. Here we present the top 3 most frequently asked questions in a data science interview that are about Python Programming.
What is the difference between a list and a tuple?
This question is really about understanding data structures in Python. When would you use a list and when a tuple? This is closely related to a question that didn’t make the top 3 about what is an immutable and mutable object. We will get straight into it.
A tuple is an immutable object contrary to a list that is not. In plain English, a mutable object can be changed, while an immutable one cannot. So, a list has a variable size, i.e., can be extended and we can replace items to it while a tuple is immutable and thus we cannot.
This explanation is most of the times sufficient to pass the interview question but in this post, we are going to give you a few more details about it, to understand it a bit better.
Tuples and lists are both data structures used to store a collection of items and those items may be of any data type. Both tuples and lists access those items using an index. And this is where similarities end.
The syntax of tuples is different than lists, where tuples are created with ‘()’ and lists ‘[]’ . As mentioned tuples are immutable meaning if you have a tuple like this: my_tuple=('A','B','C') and you try overwriting the element at index ‘0’, e.g. my_tuple[0]='D' , this would throw a type error: TypeError: ‘tuple’ object does not support item assignment . The same won’t happen if you are modifying a list.
In terms of memory efficiency, since tuples are immutable, bigger chunks of memory can be allocated to them, while smaller chunks are required for lists to accommodate the variability. Not to be confused here. Bigger chunks in memory actually mean lower memory footprint as the overhead is low. So, tuples are more memory efficient but not a good idea to use if they are expected to be changing.
What is a list comprehension?
Anyone programmed with python is likely to have come across this notation, where you can do for loops inline like this [letters for letters in ‘Example’] . The will results in [‘E’, ‘x’, ‘a’, ‘m’, ‘p’, ‘l’, ‘e’].
List comprehension is an elegant way to create and define lists without writing too much code. Also, you can add conditions to list comprehensions like this: [ x for x in range(20) if x % 2 == 0] which returns only numbers that are divisible by 2 (including 0).
A key point here is that every list comprehension can be re-written using a normal for-loop. However, not every for-loop can be re-written in a list comprehension format. However, typically, list comprehensions are more efficient. For more analysis on this visit this link.
Sometimes a list comprehension is compared with a lambda function (not be confused with AWS Lambda) which is another question the frequently comes up in interviews. Lambda function is really about doing a function operation as you would normally do but rather do it in one line.
For instance,
def my_func(x):
print(x+1)
can be turned to this lambda function my_func=lambda x: print(x+1) , where this can be called like a normal function e.g. my_func(2)
What is a decorator?
A decorator in Python is any callable Python object that is used to modify a function or a class without changing its underlying structure. Using a decorator is easy, writing one can be complicated to an inexperienced programmer.
Let’s see how we can create one.
Say we want to create a decorator to convert a string to lower case.
def lowercase_decorator(function): def wrapper():
func = function()
make_lowercase = func.lower()
return make_lowercase return wrapper
We defined a function that takes another function as an argument and performs the operation of lower case to the function passed.
def say_hello():
return ‘HELLO WORLD’ decorate = lowercase_decorator(say_hello)
decorate()
The output would be “hello world”.
In practice, however, we use the ‘@’ symbol as a syntactic sugar of what we did above, to reduce the code required to alter the behaviour of a function.
What we could have instead, after defining our decorator, is the following:
@lowercase_decorator
def say_hello():
return ‘HELLO WORLD’ say_hello()
We expect the output to be the same i.e., “hello world”. | https://towardsdatascience.com/3-most-asked-python-interview-questions-for-data-scientists-1a2ad63ebe56 | ['Alexandros Zenonos'] | 2020-08-17 22:08:28.290000+00:00 | ['Interview', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'FAQ'] |
Our Hidden Education | Some people and organizations are already doing this.
They’re after school and summer programs. Programs in leadership, performing arts, technology, social justice, mentorship, and sports are instrumental in creating fulfilled and engaged young people.
Out-of-school programs allow young people to explore their interests, build skills, and expand their networks outside of the classroom. Important for several reasons:
It is essential that young people, and particularly those getting ready for adulthood, explore their interests. As Annie Murphy Paul (@anniemurphypaul) has found, “interest has the power to transform struggling performers, and to lift high achievers to a new plane”. Interest is in fact a “more powerful predictor of future choices than prior achievements or demographic variables.” Out-of-school programs tend to inspire what Alex Hernandez (@thinkschools) and Jeff Wetzler (@jeffwetzler) call “signature experiences”. These are those transformative learning moments of lasting impact. While funding for arts in the formal system is continuously decreasing, out-of-school programs are picking up the slack. At the same time, while everyone agrees on the importance of STEM and technology education in the classroom, fewer than 10% of NYC public schools offer computer science education. Again, out-of-school programs are stepping in. Connection with different kinds of out-of-school programs expands a young person’s adult and peer network exponentially. And this matters, because as Julia Freeland (@juliaffreeland) points out, “low-income students have measurably smaller networks than their more affluent peers…”. This has implications for both college access and employment opportunities.
And if you’re not convinced yet, we can always fall back on the trusty graduation rates out-of-school programs are helping to achieve. For example, participants of the community-based organization Brotherhood SisterSol (@BroSis512) in Harlem graduate high school at rates of 94% when the neighborhood average is just 42%.
The leadership and social justice organization Global Kids (@globalkids) is not only creating more informed young citizens, but is also helping 97% of their participants graduate from high school, and 91% to attend college.
Yet another example, Scripted (@ScriptEdOrg), a coding program for teens, has reported that 100% of their participants plan to attend college upon graduation from high school.
The evidence is clear: after school and summer programs are no longer in the ‘enrichment’ category. They are instrumental to the success of young people.
Afterschool and summer programs like the ones mentioned above and the thousands more like them across the nation, are making concrete, impressive gains with our young people. I for one am relieved to learn this because it means we do not have to rely on just one institution anymore.
We can elevate the status of afterschool and summer programs to the level they deserve. Educating young people right alongside the formal education system. It’s time we champion them as partners in our young people’s education and give them the attention they deserve.
Please join me in doing so.
If you are a teen attending a program or are a parent of a teen attending a program, write them a note to thank them for their work. Even better, if you’ve got the means, donate to their program so they can expand.
I know it’s cliché, but it really does take a village to raise a child. We already have that village in place, we just need to harness it better. | https://medium.com/synapse/our-hidden-education-40a648839ddd | ['Cecilia Foxworthy'] | 2016-05-31 20:09:58.225000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Startup', 'Edtech'] |
How Your Heart Can Hurt AND Be Happy When Thanksgiving Is Canceled | How Your Heart Can Hurt AND Be Happy When Thanksgiving Is Canceled
This year is different
Photo by Zera Li on Unsplash
A Story Four Centuries Old
You heard the Thanksgiving story from the time you were five-years-old sitting around the Kindergarten table coloring your construction paper headdresses and Pilgrim hats.
You listened to the tale as you glued the feathers onto the turkey you made by tracing your handprint. “What a feast the Pilgrims created to celebrate their survival after landing at Plymouth Rock!” you thought.
The story goes that the Pilgrims organized a big party with lots of food and shared it with the Wampanoag tribe of Native Americans.
We love that story because it’s about people gathering together to eat good food, play games, connect with each other, and take a day off from the daily struggles of survival. It’s a story of two cultures who met and lived peacefully together for fifty years.
(It’s a different story altogether once greed and power made us start stealing land and killing the very people who had helped us most, but for now, let’s concentrate on the good chapter of the story.)
The First Thanksgiving and The Current Thanksgiving
The gathering of the Plymouth colonists in November of 1621 must have been a fascinating affair. The colonists were malnourished, uncertain, and sad. Of the 102 passengers, only half had survived. They were far from home, uncertain, sad, and struggling, yet still, they celebrated with The Wampanoag Indian tribe — strangers who had become friends.
We don’t concentrate as much as we should on the contribution of the Wampanoag Tribe of Native Americans to the survival of those early colonists. In reality, Thanksgiving should be a celebration of Squanto, the Indian who spoke English. Heroic, beleaguered Squanto, a Patuxet Indian who spoke English because he’d been kidnapped, not once, but twice by English sea captains. As an old man, Squanto went to live with the Wampanoags because when he finally returned to America after his kidnappings, his whole Patuxet tribe had died from smallpox.
Squanto must have had a generous, compassionate spirit to befriend this rag-tag group of colonists and teach them to get sap out of maple trees and plant crops. He showed them how to fish and what plants to avoid eating or touching.
The Wampanoag Indians helped the English settlers because Squanto had acted as a liaison between William Bradford, the governor of the newly formed colony, and Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe,
On that first Thanksgiving, the two peoples gathered together. Massasoit and ninety of his tribe brought five deer to add to the feast the colonists had prepared from fish and fowl.
Despite language barriers and different backgrounds, people overcame their difficulties for a few days to gather together and have fun.
How Our Hearts Hurt
In this COVID-era when so many are struggling to eat, when hard-workers have lost their jobs, their businesses, or a loved one, we feel again the epic story of surviving despite difficulties. We need the support of others and look forward to gathering together to commiserate, commune, and indulge. But this year, it can’t happen, and our hearts hurt.
For twenty years, my family has gathered at my sister and brother-in-law’s house. Since the death of my brother-in-law’s parents, his entire family — brothers, spouses, children, and grandchildren have been part of the celebration. My two sisters and me, with all our extended clan, meet up there, too.
Last year, 54 people ate together in my sister’s home. Rented chairs and tables formed a long t-shaped configuration with a separate kids’ table are crammed to the side. The age range has varied from eighty-seven years to one-month. An annual touch football game, “The Turkey Bowl,” pits one family against the other in a friendly but fierce competition.
The Best Day of the Year
Noisy, nutty, and wonderful. Without a doubt, Thanksgiving is one of the best days of the year for my family.
I don’t know how many families have more than fifty members from four states at their annual Thanksgiving feast, but it’s a beautiful tradition that has allowed us to form strong bonds with my brother-in-law’s whole family. Weddings, births, graduations, retirements, deaths. We’ve been through them all together. This year, we would remember the life of my brother-in-law’s sister-in-law who died earlier this year after an eight-year battle with cancer.
In 2020, we can’t “gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing.” Our family canceled Thanksgiving, and I’m sad.
Alternatives to Cancelling a Celebration?
You may think we’re being over-cautious. We may be able to celebrate and still be safe during a pandemic. Many people are offering alternative solutions to big gatherings.
We could eat outside, but protecting more than 50 people from the elements of what could be a blustery Midwestern day in November isn’t a viable option.
We could opt to take everybody’s temperature before they arrive, but let’s face it. If you’ve piled all your kids in a car and driven several hours, how would you feel if you got turned away at the door because someone’s temp is elevated? What family member would want the job of saying, “No, you have to turn around and go home.”
We could delegate the serving of the meal to just one or two people, but again, it’s not a feasible solution when you’re feeding such a large group. Besides, part of the camaraderie is from the communal prepping, serving, and cleaning required with a big group meal.
Could we require a COVID test for everyone before they arrive? Maybe, but as all the experts warn, while tests are a great thing, they are NOT guaranteed. You could test negative today and three days from now, test positive. You could be exposed after you took the test.
According to one poll, 40% of the population will celebrate Thanksgiving virtually this year. Our family among them. It won’t be the same. It will be different.
Can you be sad and happy at the same time?
Yes, you’ve heard it a billion times. “This year is different.” I’m sad that we won’t have a joint-family Thanksgiving gathering in a house in Indiana bursting with cousins, in-laws, kids and kin from far and near, but I’m also happy that our family cares about each other so much.
We may be risk-takers in lots of ways, but not with our lives.
No risk is worth spreading an invisible infection to the people we love the most.
We’re a resilient, resourceful family who believes that Thanksgiving will come again next year. We’re sad now, but we’ll celebrate double in 2021, happy that our family members are still occupying their seats at the table. We’ll be ecstatic that — like the remaining Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock — we survived to celebrate again. | https://melissagouty.medium.com/how-your-heart-can-hurt-and-be-happy-when-thanksgiving-is-canceled-2b251c204343 | ['Melissa Gouty'] | 2020-11-23 14:37:55.273000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Mental Health', 'Thanksgiving', 'Covid 19', 'Family'] |
Hadoop statistics collection and applications | Xinding Sun | Pinterest engineer, Discovery
The massive volume of discovery data that powers Pinterest and enables people to save Pins, create boards and follow other users, is generated through daily Hadoop jobs. Managed by Pinball, these jobs are organized into indexing workflows that outputs dozens of terabytes of data daily.
Previously, the only statistics collected were each job’s native Hadoop counters, which presented a few problems. For one, they’re expensive, because each counter change has to synchronize with the Hadoop job tracker. Additionally, counter history isn’t preserved, so it’s impossible to trace statistics trends and strange changes, which are often strong indicators of data corruption or code bugs.
To address these issues, we designed a new statistics collection engine to power the indexing workflows, which has allowed us to develop real-time alerts to protect our data, and can be used to collect useful statistics for ongoing data analysis.
Architecting the statistics collection engine
The statistics collection engine stores statistics for each job at run time, and then are merged with native Hadoop counters and stored to S3 immediately after job completion. We then do alerts on job completion, copy the data to our database, and alerts and data analysis are further developed on database. The statistics data are structural and small compared to that of a Hadoop job output. The MySQL DB serves our applications very well in practice.
Designing the engine
We kept the following design values in mind when building the statistics collection engine.
Lightweight: To avoid expensive communication between the Hadoop job tracker and the tasks, we implemented the statistics collection engine at per shard layer. In our initial effort, the engine was implemented inside Hadoop reducer. Since each reducer has its own shard, the collection of statistics is local to the reducer task. Note the reducer doesn’t have to communicate with the job tracker.
Our job output is stored on AWS S3, where each reducer takes one partition. On completion, a reducer uses its partition number to store its own statistics. Once all the reducers finish, we aggregate the total statistics by scanning through the per shard statistics. At the end, we merge the statistics with the Hadoop native counters to get the final result. We store both intermediate and final statistics in thrift format.
Simple: We implemented the statistics collection engine as a singleton class. As the reducer runs within one process, it simply grabs the singleton at preparation phase. During the merging phase, the reducer calls the exposed APIs to update the statistics.
We support multiple types of statistics including counters, sums, top/bottom items, histograms, each of which were chosen because the final results can be derived by merging their per-shard intermediate results. The APIs corresponding to the statistics are listed in the following. Note that the “name” is unique within a reducer process, and used to identify a specific statistics metric. For example, we use “PageRank” in a pagerank reducer to identify all the pagerank related information.
1. void incrCount(String name) and void incrCount(String name, long count) are used to increase a metric count, where the first one is a special case of the second, with count = 1L.
2. void addSum(String name, double value) is used to add up the values of a specific metric.
3. void addToHistogram(String name, double value) uses a histogram buckerizer and adds the value to the histogram counts of the metric.
4. void addItem(String name, Object object, double value) adds an item into two priority queues for the metric. The queues keep fixed numbers of top and bottom items ranked by their values. The object’s name string is used to identify the item in the queue.
To make it simple to use, we also set the defaults for the statistics APIs so one can use the above APIs without customizing any parameters. By default, a log bucketizer is used for histograms (the size of top/bottom items are set to 100). However, a programmer can implement a new bucketizer and expose it for research purpose, and also set the size of top/bottom queue with a few extra lines.
Alert and data analysis applications
We mainly use the collected statistics information for two types of applications — alert and data analysis.
Alerts: We’ve implemented two types of alerts based on absolute value and on temporal estimation.
1) Alert based on absolute value: Any number that’s below a preset threshold will trigger an alert. One example is USER_WITH_INTERESTS metric in UserJoins calculation. In the figure, we can clearly see the dip due to a bug on 12/23.
2) Alert based on temporal estimation: In this case, we use recent data to predict current value. Any number that’s out of track will trigger an alert. One example is the the S3 output size check of a job. In the figure, the output size of the job changed significantly around 07/22, which was due to corrupted data input.
We also have two degrees of alert: warning and fatal. In the former case, we only send warning email to the job owner. In the latter, we stop the job immediately and alert the owner to do the investigation. Since the alert is useful in detecting sudden changes, programmers tend to tolerate false positives in practice. This is purely based on the fact that post debugging on corrupted data and bugs are way more expensive.
Data analysis: Almost all the statistics information we collect are useful for data analysis. For example, after the UserJoins calculation job is done, we can collect the user related board and pin counters. In another example on top/bottom items, the pagerank job collects top ranked users, boards from the joins and makes them available for post analysis at each iteration. As a third example, we collect the histograms of social ranks in the PinJoins calculation job for research and experiment. At each iteration, we tune the social rank parameters and get the result on the fly.
Looking ahead
The success of the statistics collection framework enables us to manage the indexing workflow in a total new way. There are still many things we want to explore in the future.
We may use an extra Hadoop job to do the final aggregation to improve performance if the per shard statistics data become too big.
We may create more sophisticated statistical model for better alert and analysis.
To reduce false positives, we may allow the programmer to initialize the workflow with some parameters on data or code changes.
We may also use the statistics to tune the scheduling of the jobs in the workflows to achieve optimum cluster usage.
If you’re interested in tackling these possibilities with us, join our team!
Xinding Sun is a software engineer at Pinterest.
Acknowledgements: The framework presented here is a collaboration with Tao Tao. We want to thank the whole Discovery team for actively applying it to their Hadoop jobs/workflows and giving invaluable feedbacks. Thanks to Hui Xu for the suggestions and technical insights. | https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/hadoop-statistics-collection-and-applications-24a14005bb01 | ['Pinterest Engineering'] | 2017-02-17 22:23:02.582000+00:00 | ['Pinball', 'Pinterest', 'Engineering', 'Hadoop', 'Data'] |
Distributed LOF: Density-Sensitive Anomaly Detection With MapReduce | Overview
Outlier detections is one fundamental step in data quality, data management and data analysis tasks. Many applications are related to it, such as Fraud detection and network intrusion, and data cleaning. Frequently, outliers are removed to improve accuracy of the estimators.
One popular technique in outlier detection, the Local Outlier Factor(LOF), addresses challenges caused when data is skewed and outliers may have very different characteristics across data regions. As datasets increase radically in size, highly scalable LOF algorithms leveraging modern distributed infrastructures are required.
Inspired by the work done by Yizhou Yan et al, this project is focusing on designing LOF algorithm in distributed computing paradigm to satisfy the stringent response time requirements of modern applications. Here, Distributed LOF with related MapReduce jobs and optimized Data-Driven LOF (DDLOF) framework are delivered to achieve this Goal.
All the works are based on Map-Reduce, written in Java. Code is available in the Github.
Distribute LOF (DLOF)
According to the work done by Yizhou Yan et al, DLOF is implemented from assigning all the points to the same machine first, and follow the 3-step pipeline:
Step 1: calculate K-distance of each point and materialize them as intermediate values.
Step 2: calculate LRD, which is the inverse of the average reachability distance based on the number of nearest neighbors of p.
Step 3: calculate LOF for each point from the intermediate values saved in previous steps.
Noticing that although each step requires different types of intermediate values, these intermediate values are only related to the direct kNN of p. Given a point p, as long as the intermediate values associated with the kNN of p are correctly updated and passed to the machine that p is assigned to in the next step, the LOF score of p can be correctly computed without having to be aware of its indirect kNN.
Related MapReduce jobs are as follows:
Fig 1. MapReduce jobs for DLOF
Data-Driven LOF (DDLOF) framework
To optimize D-LOF, DD-LOF is implemented to bound the support points. It decomposes the KNN search into multiple rounds to minimize the number of points that introduce data duplication. The following figures shows the general schema of the framework.
Fig 2.
Fig 3. DDLOF: Supporting Area
In the preprocess step, the whole dataset is divided into grids, and points are assigned to each grid. Different flags was set to each point based on three kinds of observations. Flag 1 means that it is able to find all neighbors in its belonging grid, while Flag 2 means that its k distance is shorter than the distance of point p to the grid line, which indicates that the k distance needs to update. After this step, each point will return the list, contains its flag, grid, neighbor list.
Fig 4. Different conditions for supporting areas
Next step is updating the k distance. First, by computing how many other grids the circle with radius r (as the below figure indicates) touches, there are 8 conditions. The most complex case is the radius happens to be grid diagonal.
After k-distance is updated, the neighbor information also needs to be updated. When both k-distance and neighbor list has the latest version, it’s ready to compute LRD, and finally LOF.
DDLOF’s six MapReduce jobs are summarized as follows:
Experiments and Results
For the data generation, firstly, generate random points within a defined region. Then, simulate clusters using make_blobs function in Scikit-learn by defining the parameters of clusters. Lastly, to mark outliers, some points are randomly distributed across the whole region.
Two datasets are generated for test. One is only having 110 points with 10 outliers, another one contains 1,0,50 points with 50 outliers.
Small dataset
The dataset is visualized in a scatter plot below.
Fig 5. DLOF implementation in small dataset
By filtering LOF value whose is greater than 1.5, the points with large LOF value 13.86 and 7.3 fit into the outliers. However, this algorithm fails to capture the rightmost points. The reason maybe is that when k is little (2 is chosen in this case), these points share similar sparse density with its neighbors, which leads to the LOF is near 1.
Fig 6. DDLOF implementation in small dataset
Comparing to DLOF, DDLOF can capture the few rightmost points, but it still fails to the farthest points. It may due to the same reason as DLOF. This indicates that choosing k-value is critical to outlier detection. The small k-value may classify the farthest points into non-outlier, while the larger k-value may make the points belonging to one cluster have the relatively large LOF.
The following figure marks the points whose LOF value is greater than 1.5. DLOF successfully captures few outliers, but fails to detect all of them. To be noticed, there are some points belonging to the clusters also has relatively high LOF. This may due to located on the edge of one high density cluster, the average of the ratio of the local reachability density of this point and those of o’s k-nearest neighbors may still large, even though they are close to its neighbors.
Fig 7. DLOF implementation in large dataset
Conclusion
In our project, DLOF and DDLOF are applied to detect outliers. The points which lay in the center of cluster mostly have LOF close to 1, while the points get higher LOF when they are far from the center of the cluster. Both the methods are able to detect outliers, while there still exists misclassification. More work needs to be done regarding choosing the value of k, and processing the points in the edge of the cluster.
References:
[1] Y. Yan, L. Cao, C. Kuhlman, and E. A. Rundensteiner, “Distributed local outlier detection in big data,” in SIGKDD, 2017, pp. 1225–1234.
[2] https://towardsdatascience.com/density-based-algorithm-for-outlier-detection-8f27 8d2f7983 | https://medium.com/swlh/distributed-lof-density-sensitive-anomaly-detection-with-mapreduce-6a34c176b90 | [] | 2020-06-24 21:29:41.365000+00:00 | ['Mapreduce', 'Hadoop', 'Java', 'Anomaly Detection'] |
How to Set Up a Deployment Pipeline on AWS | How to Set Up a Deployment Pipeline on AWS
Continuous delivery with GitHub Actions
Photo by Samuel Sianipar on Unsplash.
CloudFormation is a service on Amazon Web Services. It allows you to describe Infrastructure as code. You can define necessary services and dependencies between them in template files in .yml or .json format.
If we choose to store template files on GitHub, we would like to have an automatic deployment to AWS with every new commit in our repository. It is possible to achieve this with GitHub Actions.
To build a pipeline, we can use an official GitHub Action from AWS available on GitHub Marketplace. Even though it has a good description, there are still some challenges you might face while integrating it. Let’s go through each step in detail. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-set-up-a-deployment-pipeline-on-aws-c9ae10a3cd21 | ['Dmytro Khmelenko'] | 2020-11-19 15:46:09.359000+00:00 | ['Continous Deployment', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'DevOps', 'AWS'] |
Data Journalism Crash Course #4: Open Source Communities | Image by the author
Co-creation, collaboration, sharing, community. What do these words have in common? The essence. Each of these terms is rooted in cooperation, in mutual aid, in joining efforts for a common goal.
And depending on where these principles are applied, the result can be efficient and highly profitable — if not financially, at the very least, with better use of time and human resources.
For those working with digital development, the most encouraged form of collaboration is Open Source Software, also known as FOSS, an acronym for Free and Open Source Software.
Open projects are great for anyone who wants to receive collaboration from others, learn from analyzing real projects or getting their “hands dirty” with true intellectual craftsmanship.
Open source is a term that means exactly what it says. This concerns the source code of the software, which can be adapted for different purposes. The term was created by OSI (Open Source Initiative) which uses it from an essentially technical point of view.
Because it does not have a license cost, open-source software offers the opportunity for greater investment in services and training, ensuring a greater and better return on IT investments. In the vast majority of cases, these tools are shared online by the developers, and anyone can access them without any restrictions.
The term open-source, as well as it is ideal, was developed by Eric Raymond and other OSI founders to present free software to companies in a more commercial way, avoiding an ethical and rights debate.
The terminology “Open Source” appeared during a meeting that took place in February 1998, in a debate that involved personalities who would later become a reference on the subject. Examples include Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson, Larry Augustin, Jon “Maddog”, Sam Ockman, and Eric Raymond.
The acronym FLOSS, which means Free / Libre and Open Source Software, is an aggregating way of using the concepts of Free Software and Open Source in favor of the same software, since both differ only in argumentation, as mentioned before.
The developers and supporters of the Open Source concept say that this is not an anti-capitalist movement, but an alternative for the software industry market. This collaborative model present in open source led the author’s right to be looked at in another light.
The creation of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) is an example of the great efforts made by several companies such as IBM, Dell, Intel, and HP to work with the creation of open source technologies.
OSI imposes 10 important points for a software to be considered Open Source:
Free distribution
The program license must not in any way restrict free access through sales or even exchanges. Source code
Of fundamental importance, the software must contain a source code that must also allow distribution in compiled form. If the program is not distributed with its source code, the developer must provide a means to obtain the same. The source code must be readable and intelligible to any developer. Derived works
The software license must provide permission for modifications to be made, as well as derivative works. You must also allow them to be distributed, even after modification, under the same terms as the original license. Integrity of the source code author
The license must, clearly and explicitly, allow the distribution of the program built through the modified source code. However, the license may require that derived programs have a name or version number that is distinct from the original program. This will depend on the preference of the code developer. Non-discrimination against persons or groups
The license must be available to any group of people and any individual. Non-discrimination against areas of activity
The license must allow anyone from any specific branch to use the program. It should not prevent, for example, a company from using its code. Distribution of License
The rights associated with the software must apply to all those whose program is redistributed, without the need to execute a new license or additional license for these parts. Non-product specific license
The program is not part of another software, and to use it, the entire program must be distributed. If the program is extracted from that distribution, it is necessary to ensure that all parties are made available and redistributed to every one, since everyone has the same rights as those guaranteed in conjunction with the original program distribution. License should not restrict other programs
The license is not considered open source if it places restrictions on other programs that are distributed together with the licensed program. Technology neutral license
The license must allow the adoption of interfaces, styles, and technologies without restrictions. It means that no clause in the license can establish rules for these mentioned requirements to be applied to the program.
EXAMPLES OF OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITIES
CREATIVE COMMONS
Creative Commons Reel video
Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit entity created to allow greater flexibility in the use of copyrighted works. The idea is to make it possible for an author/creator to allow the wider use of their materials by third parties, without them doing so in violation of intellectual property protection laws.
With a Creative Commons license, a composer can allow other artists to use some of his compositions by creating a mixture of rhythms, for example; a writer can make an article available and allow other authors to use it, either by publishing in other media, or by applying part of the content in a new text, or using the original, but making changes, anyway.
Thanks to the internet, this “collaborative spirit” has become much greater. The problem is that copyright protection laws are strict and often end up hindering the desire of many creators to not only give away their materials but also to use the creations of others who also want to share their work.
With Creative Commons, authors and creators can allow their works to be used in a much more flexible way. They can decide how and under what conditions their materials can be used by third parties. An example: a writer can allow anyone to use and change a text of his own, except in commercial applications. Note that, in this case, the Creative Commons license gives more freedom of use to the work, but does not remove the possibility of generating income from the original author: he may charge for the use of the text in the case of for-profit activities.
WIKIPEDIA
Almost 20 years ago, a discreet and humble way to disseminate and contribute to knowledge appeared on the internet. With the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia was born, and today has more than 54 million articles in 309 languages, written by volunteer collaborators around the world. Virtually all articles can be edited by those who wish to contribute, cite sources and references to enrich the information.
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were the creators of the project, which went public on January 15, 2001. The name Wikipedia came from the fusion of a reference to the Hawaiian word wiki (meaning fast, light) with the British term encyclopedia.
Because it is an open encyclopedia, many users and Internet users question the writing quality of the articles, the rate of virtual vandalism, and the accuracy of the information. Many articles in the Wikipedia database contain unverified or inconsistent information; however, anyone who takes the digital encyclopedia seriously and contributes to it has its merits: the scientific articles that Nature magazine compared in 2005 reached almost the same level of precision as those of the Encyclopædia Brittanica.
Wikipedia is often seen in academia as a source of inadequate information. Scholars point to its troubled environment due to “editing wars”, in which contributors struggle to maintain their text while suppressing that of others, although admitting there are great interest and originality in the work.
However, international literature seems to converge to what they conclude that Wikipedia’s success shows that self-organized communities can build high-quality information products. Wikipedia’s analyzes are increasingly detailed and critical, with no room for simplistic praise or rejection.
Wikipedia is not only an online encyclopedia but also a common good, a commons. Its quality and maintenance depend on the cognitive surplus, that is, in the free time of schooled people. It is recognized among the most successful collaborative initiatives on the Web, based on trust among millions of contributors and readers, supported by standards that promote reliability and objectivity.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE
ABOUT. In: WIKIPEDIA. The free encyclopedia. Florida: Wikimedia Foundation, 19 march. 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
AIBAR, E. et al. Wikipedia at university: what faculty think and do about it. The Electronic Library, v. 33, n. 4, p. 668–683, 2015.
Brasseur, VM (Vicky). Forge Your Future with Open Source: Build Your Skills. Build Your Network. Build the Future of Technology.Pragmatic Bookshelf.2018.
DALIP, D. H. et al. A general multiview framework for assessing the quality of collaboratively created content on web 2.0. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, v. 68, n. 2, p. 286–308, 2017.
Herstatt, Cornelius / Ehls, Daniel. Open Source Innovation: The Phenomenon, Participant’s Behaviour, Business Implications.Routledge. 2018
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/data-journalism-crash-course-4-open-source-communities-857cbf504b36 | ['Deborah M.'] | 2020-10-31 19:08:36.116000+00:00 | ['Data Journalism', 'Technology', 'Open Source', 'Data Science', 'Journalism'] |
Authenticity Is Your Now | Authenticity is not a fixed point on a map. It’s fluid, much like your identity, and shifts over the course of your life.
It’s easier to trick yourself into believing the feel-good advice that your voice comes from a sudden revelation. You just have to wait for that moment. And once you’ve found it, the entire picture comes into focus and remains that way for life.
But authenticity is found through fragments. It evolves over time. It’s a moving target that falls out of focus and can be lost to the chaos of life.
Authenticity is less about identifying a singular purpose and voice that should define your entire life. It’s about finding and trusting your voice today. In other words, embracing the impermanence of your identity, knowing that it can and will change.
How you live your life–your interests, principles, and priorities–will evolve over time. As you grow, you’ll add depth to your voice. If you remain the same for too long, that’s when you know you’ve stopped learning or are clinging to an expired version of yourself.
It’s easy to get caught up in the expectations you hold for yourself or that others project upon you– who you should be, where you have been. If you fuel these doubts, you can opt out of the unknown and find comfort in your plateau. But you won’t grow through the familiar, and you won’t find alignment.
Your sense of authenticity–your now–is something that’s all your own. It’s discovered, developed, and deepened, by the obstacles you face, the uncertainties you navigate, and the inspiration you find along the way.
If you want to create something that matters–to both yourself and others–you have to create from where you currently are in your life. That’s how you build momentum and depth. Trust yourself.
It’s the difference between artists and entrepreneurs who get lucky once and those who sustain success over decades. If you cling to what got you there in the first place, you’ll fail to evolve and render yourself irrelevant.
Artists who reinvent themselves fight for projects that allow them to grow, stretch their abilities, and discover new things. In doing so, they create from a place that resonates with them at a single point in time.
Over the course of years, a series of single brush strokes reveals an evolving sense of authenticity.
Bob Dylan, one of history’s great songwriters, has reinvented himself time and time again throughout his career. He’s altered his voice and bridged various genres, beginning in folk, shifting towards rock, and experimenting with country and Christian albums along the way.
Five decades later we can step back and admire his trajectory–how he’s pushed himself to grow, defy expectations, and channel that into his art. Time makes this seem inevitable, as if all he had to do was fall in line with destiny. But that fails to take into account the years of criticism, outrage, and uncertainty Dylan faced.
Authenticity–creating from who you are today, despite expectations tearing you in different directions–is not for the faint of heart.
Dylan threw the folk community into a fit of rage when he “went electric.” He could have stuck with what was working and fallen in line with their expectations, but validation was never his primary motivation. He sought meaning over influence at each step of his career. As a result, he achieved exactly that–lifelong influence.
Dylan resonates with people because his songwriting tracks his own development as a human being. His songs reflect who he was–his observations, experiences, and imagination–and who he refused to be at each point in time. Dylan’s career is a master class in embracing the impermanence of identity and authenticity. The fragments of himself that he brought to life shows he understands this in a deep way.
“There were a lot of better singers and better musicians around these places but there wasn’t anybody close in nature to what I was doing. Folk songs were the way I explored the universe…” Bob Dylan
There’s no single template for finding your voice as it exists today. It’s different for each person. Legendary director, Steven Spielberg, was quite different from Dylan. Dylan had unusual depth which he developed at an early age. Spielberg developed his own sense of depth over decades.
Spielberg’s progression from Jaws (1975) to Schindler’s List (1993) demonstrates this. In those eighteen years, he grew by finding projects that spoke to him at a specific point in time. What felt authentic to him in 1965 was entirely different than 1993. That doesn’t negate his early work, he was just creating from a different place.
Spielberg’s voice evolved through his films, just as Dylan’s did through his albums. That’s why they’ve remained relevant for so many years. They’ve changed, adapted, and grown. But most importantly, both have had the courage to speak from where they were in each present moment.
Both faced criticism along the way for unpopular decisions, but that’s the irony of the whole thing. People are enraged by change, but if you stay the same you guarantee failure. You lose touch with yourself, a sense of fulfillment in your work, and a deeper connection to your audience.
Before you release your work into the wild, fight like hell to make sure it first resonates with you.
No one gets it right each time. There will be times you lose your sense of authenticity. Not even Dylan and Spielberg are immune to the chaos of life. But when the intention and awareness are there, it’s easier to rebuild and rediscover a sense of momentum.
Life is motion. Authenticity is about finding harmony in that motion.
It’s not always easy, but it’s meaningful. Allow yourself to evolve through uncertainty. When you find the courage to speak from this place, you add unusual depth and clarity to your voice. That’s what draws people in.
Start by reflecting on what resonates with you at this point in your life–experiences, interests, observations, values. Authenticity is your now. No matter where you are, trust yourself to create from who you are today.
Sharpen your strategic mind, take thoughtful action, and live on your own terms. Unlock your FREE copy of my latest ebook, 7 Strategies to Navigate the Noise 📕👆 | https://medium.com/the-mission/authenticity-is-your-now-58d035a5b8f3 | ['Alex J. Hughes'] | 2019-10-05 18:21:56.385000+00:00 | ['Identity', 'Creativity', 'Authenticity', 'Life Lessons', 'Art'] |
Feature Engineering in Machine Learning | Feature Engineering in Machine Learning
Making data model-ready
To work on a machine learning problem, we can’t just grab data provided and apply the algorithm on it i.e, .fit(). We need to first build a dataset first.
The task for converting raw data into a dataset is called Feature Engineering.
For example, let the business problem be predicting if a customer sticks to the subscription for a particular product. This would be further useful to enhance the product or the user experience, which will help for business growth.
The raw data will contain details of each customer such as location, age, interests, average time spent on the product, the number of times the customer has renewed the subscription. These details are features of the dataset. The task of creating a dataset is to understand the useful features from the raw data and also, create new features from the existing features that have an impact on the results or, manipulating the features such that they are model ready or can enhance the results. This entire process is simply called Feature Engineering.
There are various methods to achieve this. Based on the data and applications, each of these is used.
In this article, we will understand why to use feature engineering and various methods to perform feature engineering. | https://towardsdatascience.com/feature-engineering-in-machine-learning-23b338ea48f4 | ['Ramya Vidiyala'] | 2020-07-27 18:55:42.638000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Education', 'Data Science'] |
How to Write a Great Follow-Up Email After a Meeting | Why Most People Fail to Consistently Send Follow-up Emails
This probably isn’t the first time you’ve thought about sending follow-up emails. In fact, it probably isn’t even the first time you’ve tried to make this practice into a habit.
And the first couple days of your initial attempt probably went really well. But then something happened; a crisis arose. You invest all of your time and energy into resolving the crisis and, as a result, forget about sending follow-up emails.
The crisis ends, but the emails don’t begin again. Sound familiar? It’s the classic story of well-intentioned habits being crushed before they’re fully-formed.
If you’re ready to commit to this habit again, here’s a quick tip to streamline the process and make it easier to remember to send those emails, no matter what happens: Create a follow-up email draft before the meeting.
Obviously this draft can’t be too specific or detailed since it’s being written before the meeting is taking place, but that’s okay. You can always flesh it out after the meeting. Here’s an example of what this email draft might look like:
Obviously this draft can’t be too specific or detailed since it’s being written before the meeting is taking place, but that’s okay. You can always flesh it out after the meeting. Here’s an example of what this email draft might look like:
“Hi Sachin, Thanks for meeting with me today. I enjoyed our meeting very much and look forward to meeting you again. Cheers, Patrick”
Once you’ve got this email sitting in your drafts folder, it’s hard to forget to send it. All you’ve got to do is personalize it once the meeting wraps up. Speaking of which, let’s talk about … | https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-write-a-great-follow-up-email-after-a-meeting-3270335c52cc | ['Patrick Ewers'] | 2018-09-12 01:53:27.608000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Communication', 'Productivity', 'Meetings', 'Email'] |
The Summer of Covid | Every cloud has a silver lining. For me, it was grabbing as much outside time, adventure and fun as one can during a pandemic. Please enjoy my collage timeline of ‘Getting Outside for Your Mental Health’. | https://medium.com/mind-your-madness/the-summer-of-covid-3e9c282da525 | ['Jennifer Hammersmark'] | 2020-11-18 08:18:54.551000+00:00 | ['Horseback Riding', 'Mental Health', 'Outdoors', 'Camping', 'Hiking'] |
20 Little Things I’m Grateful For That Made 2020 Better For Me Than 2019 | I don’t need to say again that 2020 was a shit year for the vast majority of people. It was a year that not only exacerbated the brokenness of the system but also exposed what has been previously wrong with it for decades.
But still, I hope you are encouraged to make a list of things that went right for you just to keep yourself going in the midst of oppressive opposition and draining negativity from all forces around you. It may sound silly or superficial for you, but I find it more conducive to my personal growth when I am not 100% negative or putting myself down all the time — ya know?
I am aware that fall into the privileged but not privileged category. I am fortunate to be living with family during this time while others don’t have the privilege and are being evicted from their apartments. I am still employed and able to work from home. I don’t face blatant racial discrimination. I live in a relatively safe area. I don’t have to work on the front lines during this pandemic.
However, even though I benefit from middle-class privilege, the future statistically is bleak for me. I don’t earn enough to live on my own. I have pondered whether or not I am chronically ill due to my persistent fatigue that makes me work half as much as a normal healthy, able-bodied person and leaves me bedridden for 2/5 of the day (excluding nighttime sleeping hours). I haven’t seen the doctor for four years. I am not in a position of power or influence and I’m pretty sure elites controlling certain industries would hate my guts if they knew my personal views on certain things that I am unwilling to compromise on.
In the grand scheme of things, I am pretty much powerless (what offends me the most is not Asian jokes but when people assume I’m like a “rich white girl blogger” and I’m not even white or rich and an influencer’s outfit on Instagram is worth more than what I earn a month — but that’s beside the point). But I am also aware that I am fortunate that I am able to have things that many others don’t, including safety, food, shelter, and some time to think of my dreams (even if it is not as much as I’d like).
It’s easy to stew in negativity. It’s easy to think about ways you are falling behind in life due to things beyond your control. My limited level of privilege may give me a slight advantage, but I still feel like I am falling behind other people who are richer, more successful, more productive, more charismatic, more well-connected, and more powerful than me. There will always be many people in society who are above me — financially, socially, and mentally — and there is nothing I can do to catch up to them, even if I double down my effort to be like them (but over time, I realize that the only person that is worth being is a better version of myself, nothing unrealistic).
My mental health has been down the toilet for the vast majority of the year and I’ve been in far too many creative ruts to count and admittedly couldn’t control how much I felt frustrated about it.
However, as much as I skew heavily to believing in the most pessimistic things and hate toxic positivity along with forcing myself to feel happy when I’m clearly not, showing gratitude from time to time is a genuine way to help me get out of an overly negative rut that drains me and keeps me in a self-destructive cycle of hopelessness, paralyzing self-doubt that prevents me from reaching the point where I’d like to be — flourishing creatively and authentically, and analysis-paralysis that stifles me and makes keeping the creative momentum harder to maintain.
There is a time for releasing repressed emotions and a time for acknowledging what went right to give yourself hope because in times like these, hope may be all you have to hold onto and to remind yourself that you are not a disaster-in-the-making, a lost cause, or worthless compared to people who seem to have it all together.
If anything, I’ve learned that it is far more productive to remind myself of how far I’ve come, compared to when I first started to make real changes in my life, instead of beating myself down to the ground so hard that I feel like I can’t ever get back up.
Without further ado, here are 20 little things that went right for me this year: | https://medium.com/song-of-the-lark/20-little-things-that-went-right-for-me-in-2020-82c6317d3cb | ['Lark Morrigan'] | 2020-12-22 19:41:02.741000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Self', 'Mental Health', '2020'] |
How I created an Analytical tool for LinkedIn using Google Sheets | How I created an Analytical tool for LinkedIn using Google Sheets Chaitanya Arora Follow May 11 · 4 min read
My Motivation!
So I started using LinkedIn a few days back and ever since I was fascinated by the knowledge-rich content people regularly post on this platform. Inspired by others, I started sharing my insights and knowledge through some posts that I thought others might benefit from. Being from an analytical background, I looked at the numbers, i.e. the amount of reach and engagement my posts got and soon I felt the need for an analytical tool. I searched a lot online but could not find any good solutions, most of them were paid and only for LinkedIn Pages. Thus I came to the task of building a basic tool to track views, likes, and comments on my posts!
So what came to my mind?
Being already accustomed to the world of scraping and web development, my first go to was to build a python script to scrape the required data and then deliver it to a web application to analyze it and show me the insights. But all this required a decent amount of time and knowledge to make a proper working application. As this was meant to be for personal use I chose to simplify my work and do something so that I can visualize the data easily and create insights without much coding.
The best tool that came up to my mind was something we all have been using from school that is Microsoft Excel or nowadays Google Sheets. My idea was simple, get the number of views, likes, and comments from my posts on a regular interval of time and then insert it into a new row. Once I have enough data, I can plot graphs between various columns and deduce inferences from it thus helping me to get a better understanding of my audience.
So what did I do?
To get the data into my Spreadsheet I considered exploiting the power of Google Apps Script’s integration with Sheets to interact with the outside world and append data onto new rows. Using a script, I got the numbers from LinkedIn and appended them to come up with the above sheet. Now applying my knowledge, I could use these numbers to make inferences and plot graphs to get a better understanding of my audience, based upon the data I plotted a timeline of views, likes, and comments on my post vs time.
Here, in this next graph, I can see that more than 50% of my views came in the first 5 hours between 10 am and 3 pm where my post acquired the initial boost to spread through the network. Also, I can see that the effect of the comments lasted for about an hour and brought in some more views.
But the most important inference I could get from the chart is that most of my viewers are active during the day around 1:00 PM and continue to use LinkedIn. This trend is unusual from what the internet suggests but as we all know the Global Pandemic we are facing right now could lead to this kind of behavior as most of my connections are young people who are still in college and tend to be free around this time.
So whats next?
I plan to use my script and gather more data until I can fully understand my audience as making inferences from just 1 post is kind of wrong as data is insufficient. Therefore, I believe if I keep analyzing my posts, one day I will be able to understand what my audience wants and can create the right content for them, thus making the best use of this platform for all of us.
So if you have any queries or suggestions, send me a connection request, mention in the comments, or drop a message. If you are interested in knowing how I fetched my data or about the script I used, do let me know!
Connect with me on LinkedIn for more awesome posts and updates.
Thanks. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/how-i-created-an-analytical-tool-for-linkedin-using-google-sheets-56aa2a5bcbf8 | ['Chaitanya Arora'] | 2020-05-25 16:07:58.490000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'LinkedIn', 'Growth Hacking', 'Analytics', 'Google Sheets'] |
The Magic Data-Driven Journalism Formula | Designed by Infogram
There are many ways to think about data-driven journalism. Some view it as a set of tools that enable journalists to collect, arrange, analyze, and design data.
Others view data-driven journalism as an equation: DDJ= C+C+D. Data-driven journalism equals content, plus context, plus design.
Let’s break down each component individually.
1) Content
They say content is king. In this case, the content is your data. Data is the raw material journalists use to weave their stories together. If you have data, you have options for multiple stories, but the process isn’t as easy as it looks. Turning data into insightful stories takes effort, and data isn’t always readily available.
There are three cases of data availability:
Some countries don’t make data public, so it’s not available to journalists. In this case, the government may legally punish anyone who publishes data they aren’t supposed to have access to.
Sometimes data is available, but it isn’t machine readable and therefore can’t be transferred easily. If data is saved as a PDF, for example, journalists have to take the time to convert the numbers and input them manually. This is almost impossible with big data sets.
When data is available, clean, and machine readable (which is rare in Egypt), the next crucial step is data verification. Journalists need to determine the validity of the data they have found.
2) Context
Content may be king — but without context, content doesn’t have any value. That being said, context without content means nothing. It’s a two ways street. The value of data is only highlighted when it is arranged within a certain context — helping to tell the story and explain what the data means. Context is the frame in which journalists can tell their story.
Let’s use rainfall in the Amazon as an example. Average rainfall across the whole Amazon basin is approximately 2300 mm (or ~7.5′) annually. This statistic alone doesn’t tell a story without also explaining rainfall in other parts of the world, previous Amazon rainfall data, and how the Amazon rainforest impacts the world.
3) Design
Data can be displayed in multiple ways. Spreadsheets don’t attract a reader’s attention, which is why data visualization is so important. Dataviz is a great way to for journalists to get their data’s message across. While some people still love reading text, what people really want to see is visuals.
But, flashy visuals shouldn’t be the end goal for journalists. It is more about transforming that excellent content into an engaging image. There are helpful online tools like Infogram that help journalists do just that!
Main image by Infogram | https://medium.com/info-times/the-magic-data-driven-journalism-formula-35848081e274 | ['Amr Eleraqi'] | 2016-12-18 17:12:48.346000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Data Journalism', 'Infotimes Blog'] |
SaaS customer profitability | Bill.com recently went public. Their software automates complex back-office financial operations for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). One of the charts in their prospectus shows the revenue growth and contribution margin of customers acquired in 2017; it’s a very nice illustration of the first three years of a SaaS customer in a healthy SaaS business. The chart is below.
In the first year, you lose money. Generally speaking, the first year of any customer in a SaaS business is an unprofitable one. That’s because the sales & marketing expense to acquire the customer is incurred in year 1. As you can see for Bill.com, for fiscal 2017, the 2017 Cohort represented $6.7 million in revenue billed to these customers, $11.8 million in sales and marketing costs to acquire these customers, and $2.3 million of cost of sales representing a computed contribution margin of -108%.
In the 2nd year, you start becoming profitable. Since you never incur sales & marketing expense again to acquire the customer, the only cost in any SaaS business is just the “cost of sales”. In fiscal 2018 and 2019, the 2017 Cohort represented $14.2 million and $17.3 million, respectively, in revenue billed to these customers and $3.9 million and $4.2 million, respectively, in estimated costs related to retaining and expanding these customers, representing a computed contribution margin of 73% and 76%, respectively.
The revenue grew. Note that revenue in year 1 was only $6.7mm. In years 2 and 3, it was $14mm and $17mm respectively, meaning the cohort grew. Indeed, good SaaS businesses have cohorts that grow over time, as upgrades in the customer base outpace downgrades and churn.
Payback is fast. According to Bill.com, “for customers acquired during fiscal 2018, the average payback period was approximately five quarters.” Good SaaS businesses recover the cost of acquiring the customer within 1.5 years.
Bill.com’s customer cohort is a nice example of what a good SaaS business will experience: i) you lose money on the customer in year 1; ii) in year 2 the customer becomes very profitable and you recover the cost of acquiring the customer; iii) over time, your customers buy more product from you rather than less. Maintain these same attributes in your own SaaS business and you’ll be on your way to joining Bill.com as a public company.
Visit us at blossomstreetventures.com and email us directly with Series A or B opportunities at [email protected]. We invest $1mm to $1.5mm in growth rounds, inside rounds, small rounds, cap table restructurings, note clean outs, and other ‘special situations’ all over the US & Canada. | https://blossomstreetventures.medium.com/saas-customer-profitability-2d7090710ba4 | ['Sammy Abdullah'] | 2020-12-07 14:37:18.568000+00:00 | ['Venture Capital', 'SaaS', 'Startup', 'Software'] |
I’m Tired of Writing | I’m tired of writing about negative LGBTQ headlines. I don’t want to talk about how Dwight Howard tried to have a person killed and somehow transwomen are evil because of some screenshots and recordings. I don’t want to keep writing about how trans people are terrified of going to the bathroom in public. I don’t want to keep writing about how hard it is to transition, especially with the gatekeeping in the medical field.
Someone tried to shove bible verses in my face to prove that these bigots have a right to antagonize LGBTQ people. Someone else tried to tell me that LGBTQ people are already over-represented.
I don’t want to write about how LGBTQ kids are much more likely to be bullied, kicked out, sexually harassed, develop mental illnesses like anxiety and depression, develop self–harming habits, and attempt suicide. I don’t want to feel like I have to write a piece on Trans Day of Rememberance and talk about the intense pain so many of us endure just trying to be ourselves.
I’m tired.
I’m tired of seeing another negative story centered around LGBTQ people every time I load up Twitter. I’m tired of seeing my trans brothers and sisters feel like they’ll never get to live in their truth because of transphobic, disgusting bigots. I’m tired of seeing the hopelessness eat us alive.
Someone says they don’t think kids should be allowed to transition. They should be forced to wait until they’re older. What happens if they don’t make it to 21? What happens if the pain eats at them until they swallow a bottle of pills? Until they slit their wrists and cut too deep? Until they get a hold of a gun and make their brains go everywhere? Until they just give up?
Some believe that gay kids should be sent to conversion camps. They’re still a thing in parts of the US. Why would you send a kid to some camp to be tortured and constantly told something is wrong with them simply because they’re attracted to the same gender? Have you heard the horror stories that come from those camps? Would you send one of your kids to one knowing what they do to those poor children? Or do you only care about getting rid of “the gay”?
Someone says trans surgeries are cosmetic and they aren’t necessary. Tell me what’s the point of living if you can’t be truly happy. Show me where these surgeries haven’t saved lives. Just because you can’t see us bleeding doesn’t mean that we aren’t hurting.
I’m tired of picking an article based on how much it pissed me off. I’m tired of using bitter anger to fuel my words. LGBTQ people are facing death in other countries. LGBTQ people are being targeted and attacked just down the street from you. People and their hyper Twitter fingers hop on every day just to shit on us.
Photo by Mercedes Mehling on Unsplash
I’m tired, but I’m far from done. Every time I receive a response from a homophobic, transphobic bigot, it only makes me want to write that much more. Every time someone tells me that one of my pieces helped them, it only reassures me that I’m doing the right thing.
I might take a break. I might not post for a few days, or even a week, but I will always come back. I’ll come back for my LGBTQ family. I’ll come back to remind them that they’re not alone. You can throw all the Bible verses you want. You can spew all the bitter bigotry you want. I will always come back. I will always fight for my community.
I don’t care if you think we only make up 0.1% of 7 billion+ and that somehow means we don’t matter. I will write for that 0.1% until my hands no longer work. Even then, there are programs that will let me talk and it’ll type for me. I’ll keep writing until I can’t use my brain anymore.
I don’t care if you think we’re a humongous sin stain. Everybody sins. You sin. Matter of fact, you sin every time you judge us for being who we are. Take a moment to count how many times you’ve sinned today.
I’m tired, but I’m not a quitter. I will keep writing and sharing our stories. I will keep fighting for us. | https://medium.com/brian-the-man-behind-the-pen/im-tired-of-writing-eceddc81ee53 | [] | 2018-11-27 01:45:24.950000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Writing', 'LGBTQ', 'Transgender', 'Social Justice'] |
A Step-by-Step Guide to Future Proof Your IT Career! | Amidst the AI hype, there’s also a sinister buzz about how AI will take away our jobs! However, truth remains that the role of manpower in AI-enabled world will become minimal but not destroyed. In fact, AI experts will always stay in demand!
It means that…
You don’t need to fear the AI job loss epidemic that has creating fear among the professionals. And if you still have some doubt then read this…
Gartner survey says that among 89 countries a massive 270% jump in AI took a toll in implementing this technology in the past four years. This growth is not going to cease until the foreseeable future. Markets and Markets predict the AI market that was valued at $21.5 billion in 2018 will rise to $190.6 billion by 2025.
With 91% of enterprises expecting to hit the AI business market by 2023, AI experts and AI professionals will drastically rise. The discussion on the growth of AI is inevitable, it’s time you ask yourself this question — ‘Am I ready for the future of jobs?’
AI Impact On Jobs:
Over 80 million people around the world will lose their jobs to automation by 2030. But these statistics need to juxtapose, as much as we fear to lose our jobs to automation, this trend will also redefine and create newer roles in the AI industry.
In 2019, 40% of the digital initiatives will use AI and its services.
If you wish to become an indispensable candidate/employee, then you should keep up with the evolving trends and technologies in the field of AI. You can make it possible by up-skilling or retraining yourself in the IT field.
Here I am listing down intelligent ways to future-proof your AI career
👉1. Doing what robots can’t do:
Not a day goes by without hearing how AI is going to rule the job market. Sounding alarming? As much as automation and robots are here to ease our jobs, yet, the imminent rise of robots is threatening human employment. Precisely, the machines that we humans have developed are now performing tasks sharing our employment.
Artificial intelligence is here to better our lives. The majority of our jobs will indeed be replaced by AI. Likewise, skills such as tasks such as critical thinking, soft skills, creativity, empathy, and intuition won’t be accomplished by these so-called robots.
At any rate, if humans are threatened due to constant bickering of robots taking away our jobs. It is not going to be salient, at least not for the next two generations to come. At the moment, what we’re supposed to be worried about is about the comeback and the spreading disinformation. Why debate when we don’t even have relevant skills to combat with the ongoing AI skill gap?
👉2. Learn a new programming language:
For professionals in the IT domain, learning a new programming language or having the knack for coding is the smartest decision to take. Staying ahead of others and future-proofing one’s career by learning to code in in-demand languages can end up replacing workers with redundant skills.
For instance, specialist working behind desks have been replaced by chatbots. But have you wondered, who are the people responsible for creating automated chatbots? Well, they’re 🔗AI experts and programmers who’ve been trained to work on technologies such as AI and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) making it possible for customers to gain solutions.
Learning a new programing language will certainly have an add-on advantage in your portfolio. As an individual aspiring to enter the AI world, it is essential that you concentrate on these trending skills.
As a developer in the IT field looking to enter the realm of artificial. Learning statistics for machine learning and Python programming is highly recommended.
👉3. Demonstrate your value in varied ways:
We’re living at the edge of a competitive job market where in-demand skills are proven valued by employers. In no time, the interaction between human and automation will no longer be a problem provided IT professionals are skill ready. However, for individuals working in sectors such as medical, hospitality, legal, and manufacturing will be seen replaced, if one is still following old traditional practices.
Go the extra mile:
3.1 — Take a glance at yourself and assess the skills you’re required to learn. Considering you’re the person responsible for automation improvements, you must also ensure the process runs smoothly adding value to the organization.
3.2 — Be the firewall wizard. Take responsibility for rolling out automation and handling it efficiently. If so, master the art of determining whether automation is handling its job properly.
3.3 — Add another skill-set to your existing skills. Expanding roles from being a developer and growing to become an AI expert is an added advantage for IT professionals today.
3.4 — Learn a new tool to enter the AI world. You will find several online free security and cloud tools for one to learn. This requires an individual to have exceptional skills to conduct manual analysis for the tool to remain effective.
👉4. Adapt to newer skills:
Who else but the IT professionals are aware that technology keeps changing. From x68 server farms to containerized applications, professional who had the urge to transform according to the paradigm shifts are the ones who have sustained. With AI and machine learning being the next thing, AI professionals are preceding today’s job market.
Many industries are adopting artificial intelligence, but progress remains grim as there’s a scarcity of available AI talent. And if you want to make a career in AI then certifications is the next step. 🔗AI certifications will provide you with a much needed edge to beat the competition and stay ahead of your peers.
Artificial intelligence is certainly the disquieting buzzword and if you want to make a career in this field then arm yourself with latest tools and techniques, keep yourself updated with the latest trends in the field.
📫 My other Stories on AI: | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/step-by-step-guide-to-future-proof-your-it-career-cdf937f98634 | ['Albert Christopher'] | 2019-08-09 05:56:44.821000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Information Technology', 'Programming'] |
Remote and Nomadic Lifestyles Our New Post-COVID Normal? | Whitney Durmick may be way ahead of a future lifestyle trend, although she might not realize it. For the past two years, Whitney has been leading a self-styled nomadic life, moving from place to place, setting up shop in different locations across the nation to live, work and explore. Doing so has allowed her to scratch that travel and adventure itch without missing a beat with her career. And I can attest to that, as she is part of our Oracle for Startups team and continues to be a star performer — no matter where she is calling home. In fact, I believe it has made her an even better employee.
“I wasn’t trying to be trendy,” she says, citing skyrocketing rents in her previous home city of Denver, CO as a major motivator. “I crunched the numbers and realized I could either travel or pay rent. So I chose to travel. It was a decision borne from indecision.”
Having the option to work remotely, and from anywhere, has helped Whitney identify her “release valve” that prevents burnout. Whitney dialed in to work from farm cottages, truck stops, even a remote yurt in the mountains of Malibu. She rarely takes vacation, because in her mind, “my whole life feels like a vacation.”
While we aren’t all suited for a nomadic existence — you know, kids and such — COVID-19 has set a new paradigm on how we view work-life balance. We’ve all been on a universal work-from-home experiment, one that has for the most part been a success, thanks to cloud connectivity and video technologies like Zoom. It’s opening up new ways of thinking about work.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says data from his company seems to point to that direction.
“A whole bunch of people are going to live a few months here and a few months there and kind of move around,” Chesky said on a recent Recode Decode podcast with Kara Swisher. “Work from home can pretty soon be work from any home. And why couldn’t it be.”
Regardless of your definition of “remote” work, businesses worldwide are rethinking their workplace and working policies, which can provide benefits for employers and employees.
A recent survey from Upwork, a global freelancing platform, has found the remote-work experience has gone much better than expected, with 56% of hiring managers saying the shift to remote work has been positive, while only one in ten feel it has been worse than expected. 61.9% of hiring managers say their workforce will be more remote going forward, and the expected growth rate of full-time remote work over the next five years has doubled, from 30% to 65%.
Also from the survey, employees cited many benefits of remote-work, tops being: lack of commute, fewer unnecessary meetings, greater productivity, greater autonomy, and reduced distractions, all of which were shared by more than 40% of respondents. Negatives include technology issues and reduced team cohesion due to not being in-person.
Overall, the survey shows that the good far outweighs the bad. The Upwork data is just one of many surveys pointing in this direction.
Another huge benefit of remote work: tech talent acquisition will no longer be limited to the coasts. That enlarges the talent pool and allows individuals to live anywhere, potentially helping driving growth of smaller urban cities. Employees can have better quality of life, talent/hiring pools expand, and the environment can breathe a sigh of relief due to reduced commutes.
“The paradigm of working in an office is altered forever… for many things employees are much more productive working remote, and that the talent base can be opened up, suddenly you can hire from a hundred thousand cities not a couple of cities. I’m on the side of flexibility and the trend towards remote work,” said Chesky.
Of course, not all jobs can be remote. And in-person communications have huge value. The future will most likely be more flexible remote-work policies, like co-working satellite type offices where employees can meet in-person as needed. Less traditional nine-to-five, daily schedules at the big corporate headquarters. Facebook, Twitter, Shopify and many others have publicly stated their future remote-work policies. While other companies are taking a more cautious approach, it seems all are open-minded to the idea of working remotely.
Veteran entrepreneur and author Arianna Huffington believes companies will adopt a “hybrid” model. During a recent WSJ Tech Health virtual conference, the Thrive CEO and founder stated that “every company will decide their own hybrid mixture” but we will move to a hybrid model because “we’ve seen we can be productive with remote-work environments.”
Thanks to Oracle’s forward-thinking mindset, a majority of our Oracle for Startups team has been remote for years, so I relate to the benefits and negatives of the Upwork data. I whole-heartedly believe it makes for a better quality of life and higher productivity. It does, however, require being intentional with “over-communicating” and ensuring your messages are clear, heard, and not misconstrued. If possible, always using video on your calls so you can see non-verbal cues and connect better. As with everything, there are always trade-offs, but we overall operate better remotely and are genuinely happier and more productive.
“Working remotely has been a game-changer in my life,” said Whitney. “At first it was just nice to be able to stay home with my dog and skip the obnoxious commute. But I’ve developed habits that help me reach my biggest priorities: health, productivity, and inspiration.”
Here’s another example of inspiring remote work: Derek Andersen, founder and CEO of Startup Grind, just set out on his summer adventure driving cross-country with his family in an RV. He’ll be working, too. Talk about a unique work-life balance.
Bottom line: The paradigm has shifted and remote-work will be our new reality. And that’s good because it’s promising and beneficial on so many levels. Whether many adopt Whitney’s nomadic lifestyle remains to be seen. But if it happens, she can consider herself a pioneer. Don’t believe me? Check out Whitney’s blog to learn more about her unique remote-work experiment. It’s a fantastic read. | https://medium.com/startup-grind/remote-and-nomadic-lifestyles-our-new-post-covid-normal-1ddc883f64be | ['Amy Sasser Sorrells'] | 2020-06-11 18:47:35.286000+00:00 | ['Work From Home', 'Work Life Balance', 'Startup', 'Life Lessons', 'Corporate Culture'] |
Review of “Confessions” by Lev Tolstoy or, Why Religion Matters | Review of “Confessions” by Lev Tolstoy or, Why Religion Matters
This is the best purchase under $5 that I’ve ever made.
I watched plenty of Jordan Peterson’s videos in the last couple of weeks. I’m a big fan of his, and every time he says something, I listen.
And he talked a lot about Tolstoy.
I don’t remember what exactly he said that made me go out and buy “Confessions.”
Maybe it’s the fact that it is a short book (only 100 pages long) and can read it in one day.
And I can tell you that it was worth it.
I struggled a lot with nihilism, the idea that life essentially has no meaning because one day, all that you have cared for and work for will be gone.
So what’s the point?
I started reading the book, and Tolstoy was saying how at the age of 51, he became severely depressed.
This is after he has written Anna Katerina and War and Peace.
His answer to the question, “What’s the meaning of life?” didn’t really hold up.
Until that point, he taught that progress is the name of the game; the meaning of life is to become better and acquire more for yourself.
However, this answer didn’t satisfy him, so he went on a search to find what’s the meaning of life. After contemplating suicide, he looked at religion.
He was never a religious person, and in his youth, he was mocking people who believed in God. He didn’t like the whole idea of having one being that created all of us.
However, when he was depressed, he started to wonder why so many people are religious.
As a writer, he was part of the intelligent elite, people who taught that they are above the average folks. They had the money, fame, and, most importantly, the intelligence to create something unique.
All they cared about was acquiring more for themselves. After all, they have earned, right?
And then Tolstoy realized his problem. The problem wasn’t that life was hard or depressing. Make no mistake, life can be that. The problem was that Tolstoy’s life was depressing. He had a family and success but didn’t have anyone who can struggle for.
He then taught about the average people. How so many of them were living a hard life but aren’t depressed? How can they go to work day in and day out without ever thinking of suicide?
His realization was profound.
The reason so many people kept working even when life is hard is that they had someone they struggled for. They didn’t do it for themselves. They did it for people they cared about.
But Tolstoy still wondered how they could find meaning in their deaths. After all, when they die, all they have worked for will disappear.
This is when religion comes in.
Tolstoy realized that no matter how flawed religion and religious beliefs are, they have one advantage over atheism — it gives people meaning after their death. It gives them hope, a hope that the future after them will be better.
After that realization, Tolstoy started regularly going to church and doing all the rituals that came with that. However, he was surprised that many of the so-called “religious” people didn’t practice what they preached.
He wondered how the idea of caring for other people didn’t apply when an orthodox met a catholic. They would all disagree on what really happened in the Bible and won’t be able to find common ground.
Tolstoy concluded that there is some truth in religion, it wouldn’t be that popular if it’s full of falsehoods, but he didn’t know which part of it was a truth and which wasn’t.
I highly recommend you check out this book if you have struggled with nihilism like me.
I learned that to have a meaningful life, you have to struggle for someone other than yourself.
Tolstoy goes into great detail, exploring all the possible answers to the question, “What’s the meaning of life?”
If you want to know more, check out “Confessions” by Lev Tolstoy (you can find the Amazon link below the picture).
Thank you for taking the time to read this. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/review-of-confessions-by-lev-tolstoy-or-why-religion-matters-97a087937461 | ['Tanyo Gochev'] | 2020-01-09 13:06:01.153000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'Book Review', 'Books', 'Personal Development', 'Meaning Of Life'] |
This Month In Chirp — October. Welcome to our monthly Chirp bulletin | 🚀 Explorer Board
Last week we announced our Explorer Board, the first IoT prototyping platform that’s tailor-made from the ground up to explore the possibilities of acoustic data transfer.
Built around the powerful Arm Cortex-M4 CPU with inbuilt DSP for optimised audio processing, it allows developers to quickly and easily integrate data-over-sound technology into embedded scenarios.
You can check out more details, and express your interest for the board, which will ship by the end of the year here | https://medium.com/chirp-io/this-month-in-chirp-october-776c1fb9595e | ['Jamie Tringham'] | 2018-10-30 23:22:29.354000+00:00 | ['Python', 'API', 'Kotlin', 'Embedded', 'Data Over Sound'] |
IMDB movie review polarity using Naive Bayes Classifier | IMDB movie review polarity using Naive Bayes Classifier
Develop a naive Bayes algorithm-based machine learning model that predicts sentiment or polarity of an IMDB movie review.
Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash
Introduction:
Naive Bayes is an algorithm that uses Baye’s theorem. Baye’s theorem is a formula that calculates a probability by counting the frequency of given values or combinations of values in a data set [6]. If A represents the prior events, and B represents the dependent event then Bayes’ Theorem can be stated as in equation
Bayes Theorem:
here x if for different words in the review text, Ck is for the class label
p(Ck|x): the probability of class label given text review words x
review text(x) can be represented as {x1,x2,x3, …….. ,xn}
p(Ck|x) ∝ p(Ck|x1,x2,x3, …….. ,xn}
About IMDB movie review dataset:
Data source: https://www.kaggle.com/utathya/imdb-review-dataset
The IMDB Movie Review Dataset consists of text reviews with data frame named as ‘data’
The dataset contains text movie reviews with the given polarity of positive and negative.
Let us take some random examples (not from the dataset) and learn how naive Bayes classifier works.
Taking a few examples:
Let’s take a toy example of movie text and review and it’s sentiment polarity (0->negative, 1->positive).
Text Preprocessing:
Here is a checklist to use to clean your data:
Begin by removing the HTML tags Remove any punctuations or a limited set of special characters like, or . or #, etc. Check if the word is made up of English letters and is not alpha-numeric Check to see if the length of the word is greater than 2 (as it was researched that there is no adjective in 2-letters) Convert the word to lowercase Remove Stopwords example:( the, and, a ….)
After following these steps and checking for additional errors, we can start using the clean, labeled data to train models!
Bag of Words Representation:
The next step is to create a numerical feature vector for each document. BoW counts the number of times that tokens appear in every document of the collection. It returns a matrix with the next characteristics:
The number of columns = number of unique tokens in the whole collection of documents (vocabulary).
The number of rows = number of documents in the whole collection of documents.
Every cell contains the frequency of a particular token (column) in a particular document (row).
we compute the posterior probabilities. This is easily done by looking up the tables we built in the learning phase.
P(class=1|text) = P(class=1)* Π(P(wi|class=1))
Some important points:
Laplace/Additive Smoothing
In statistics, additive smoothing, also called Laplace smoothing. Given an observation x = (x1, …, xd) from a multinomial distribution with N trials and parameter vector θ = (θ1, …, θd), a “smoothed” version of the data gives the estimator:
where the pseudo count α > 0 is the smoothing parameter (α = 0 corresponds to no smoothing). Additive smoothing is a type of shrinkage estimator, as the resulting estimate will be between the empirical estimate xi / N and the uniform probability 1/d. Using Laplace’s rule of succession, some authors have argued that α should be 1 (in which case the term add-one smoothing is also used), though in practice a smaller value is typically chosen.
So how do we apply Laplace smoothing in our case?
We might consider setting the smoothing parameter α =0.1 and d=1 (see the equation above), we add 1 to every probability, therefore the probability, such as P(class| text), will never be zero.
2. Log probability for numerical stability
The use of log probabilities improves numerical stability when the probabilities are very small.
P(class=1 or 0|text) = P(class=1 or 0)* Π(P(wi|class=1 or 0)) log(P(class=1 or 0|text)) = log(P(class=1 or 0))+∑(log(P(wi|class=1 or 0)))
text query1: The plot of the movie was pointless with the worst music ever.
text preprocessed : * plot * movie * pointless * worst music *
P(class=1|text) = P(class=1)*P(plot|1)*P(movie|1)*P(pointless|1)*P(worst|1)*P(music|1) =(4/7)*(0.1/4.2)*(3.1/4.2)*(0.1/4.2)*(0.1/4.2)*(1.1/4.2) =1.49097*10^(-6)
P(class=0|text) = P(class=0)*P(plot|0)*P(movie|0)*P(pointless|0)*P(worst|0)*P(music|0)
=(3/7)*(1.1/3.2)*(3.1/3.2)*(1.1/3.2)*(1.1/3.2)*(2.1/3.2) =1.10670*10^(-2)
#since probablity of P(class=0|text) is greater than probablity of P(class=1|text) for text query1 so we classify the query text as negative review.
text query2 : In love with the action scenes and music was amazing too.
text preprocessed : * love * * action scenes * music * amazing *
P(class=1|text) = P(class=1)*P(love|1)*P(action|1)*P(scenes|1)*P(music|1)*P(amazing|1)=(4/7)*(2.1/4.2)*(2.1/4.2)*(3.1/4.2)*(1.1/4.2)*(2.1/4.2) =1.380790411*10^(-2)
P(class=0|text) = P(class=0)*P(love|0)*P(action|0)*P(scenes|0)*P(music|0)*P(amazing|0)
=(3/7)*(0.1/3.2)*(0.1/3.2)*(0.1/3.2)*(2.1/3.2)*(0.1/3.2) =2.6822*10^(-7)
#since probablity of P(class=1|text) is greater than probablity of P(class=0|text) for text query2 so we classify the query text as positive review.
Implementing Multinomial Naive Bayes Classifier:
Apply Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier for different values of alpha and get a plot of error vs alpha to get optimal value of alpha with minimum error.
plot for error vs hyperparameter alpha
we get optimal value of alpha at a value of 6, so
Now we will perform the following steps:
Apply Multinomial Naive Bayes for alpha=6
2. Predict the output using Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier
3. Find test accuracy and train accuracy
4. Plot a confusion matrix and heatmap
A confusion matrix is a table that allows us to visualize the performance of a classification algorithm
Finding the most frequent words used in both positive and negative reviews.
We have taken a sample of positive and negative words and found out the frequency of most frequent words used.
Here we observe that that words like “bad” are frequently used which depicts negative reviews.
Here we observe that that words like “great” are frequently used which depicts positive reviews.
Improvements
Some words take place in several documents from both classes, so they do not give relevant information. To overcome this problem there is a useful technique called term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-IDF). It contemplates not just frequency but also how unique the word is.
Furthermore, in the BoW model that we created, each token represents a single word. That’s called the unigram model. We can also try adding bigrams, where tokens represent pairs of consecutive words.
Scikit-learn implements TF-IDF with the TfidfVectorizer class.
By this, we can improve our test accuracy to from 82.464% to 85.508% and train accuracy from 87% to 93%
Conclusion:
Naive Bayes is a simple but useful technique for text classification tasks. We can create solid baselines with little effort and depending on business needs explore more complex solutions.
Naive Bayes is a very good algorithm for text classification and considered as baseline. Basically for text classification, Naive Bayes is a benchmark where the accuracy of other algorithms is compared with Naive Bayes.
You can get full code here. | https://satyam-kumar.medium.com/imdb-movie-review-polarity-using-naive-bayes-classifier-9f92c13efa2d | ['Satyam Kumar'] | 2020-06-01 14:48:23.215000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'NLP', 'Movie Review', 'Sentiment Analysis'] |
Similarity Queries and Text Summarization in NLP | Before diving directly into similarity queries it is important to know what a similarity metric is.
Similarity Metric
Similarity metrics are mathematical constructs which is particularly useful in NLP — especially information retrieval. We can understand a metric as a function that defines the distance between each pair of elements of a set or vectors. We can see how this can be useful — we can compare between how similar 2 documents would be based on the distance. If a lower value is returned by a distance function then it is known that 2 documents are similar and vice-versa.
We can technically compare any 2 elements in the set — this also means that we compare 2 sets of topics created by topic model (If you don’t know what a topic model is please do checkout my previous blog Topic modeling-LDA)
Most of them would be aware of one distance metric — Eucledian metric . It a distance metric we come across in high school mathematics, and we would have likely seen it being used to calculate the distance between two points in a 2-dimensional space (XY).
Gensim, scikit-learn and most other ML packages recognize the importance of distance metric and have them implemented in their package.
Similarity queries
Its demostrated in the below implementation that we have the capability to compare between two documents, now its possible for us to set up an algorithm to extract out the most similar documents for an input query.
Index each of the documents, then search for the lowest distance value returned between the corpus and the query, and return the documents with the lowest distance values — these would be most similar. Gensim has in-built structures to do this document similarity task.
The tutorial on the Gensim website performs a similar experiment, but on the Wikipedia corpus — it is a useful demonstration on how to conduct similarity queries on much larger corpuses and is worth checking if you are dealing with a very large corpus.
In the examples, we used LDA models for both distance calculation and to generate the index for the similarities. We can, however, use any vector representation of documents to generate this — it’s up to us to decide which one would be most effective for our use case.
Below attached notebook contains samples for both similarity metrics and queries and has detailed explanation for each and every step, run the cells in the notebook before moving to next topic.
Notebook- Similarity metrics and queries
Text Summarization
Summarization is a process of distiling most important information form source or sources to produce an abridged version for a particular users and tasks.
Text Summarization is a task of condensing piece of text into shortened form while preserving the meaning of the content and overall meaning. Text summarization is important because of the amount of textual data generated is increasing on another level day by day and it becomes difficult to read textual information and often people get bored to read large blocks of text. This is when text summarization came to rescue to make work easier for the readers.
The idea of text summarization is to find the subset of data which contains information of the entire set, but sometimes it results in loss of information.
Main idea —
Text processing
Word frequency distribution — how many times each words appear in document.
Score each sentence depending on the words it contain and the frequency table.
Build summary by joining every sentence above a certain score limit.
2 approaches for text summarization are —
Extractive summarization (selecting a subset of sentences / extracts objects from the entire collection).
Abstractive Summarization (paraphrases/Sentences generated might not be present in the original text).
Summarizing text
In text analysis, it is useful to summarize large bodies of text — either to have brief overlook of the text before deeply analyzing it or identifying keywords from the text.
We will not be working on building our own text summarization pipeline , but rather focus on using the built in summarization API wich gensim offers.
Its also important to know that gensim dosen’t create it own sentences, but rather extracts key sentences from the text which we run the algoirthm on (Extractive summarization). The summarization is based on the text rank algorithm(A graph based ranking model for text processing).
Graph-based ranking algorithms are essentially a way of deciding the importance of a vertex within a graph, based on global information recursively drawn from the entire graph. The basic idea implemented by a graph-based ranking model is that of “voting” or “recommendation”. When one vertex links to another one, it is basically casting a vote for that other vertex. The higher the number of votes that are cast for a vertex, the higher the importance of the vertex. Moreover, the importance of the vertex casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is, and this information is also taken into account by the ranking model. Hence, the score associated with a vertex is determined based on the votes that are cast for it, and the score of the vertices casting these votes(you can find this explanation in research paper).
Implementation
Run the cells in the notebook for clear understanding .
Notebook-Summarization
Above code sample contains extractive summarization of text. There are deep learning approaches and pretained models(which have achieved state-of-art-results) available for abstractive summarization of text, check out their implementation to dig-deep into the concept.
A State-of-the-Art Model for Abstractive Text Summarization by Google AI.
One of the recent research for abstractive text summarization where the model predicts the masked sentence for summarization.
Experiments demonstrate it achieves state-of-the-art performance on 12 downstream datasets measured by ROUGE scores.
A self-supervised example for PEGASUS during pre-training. The model is trained to output all the masked sentences.
Conclusion:
Throught the blog we saw how basic mathematical and information retrieval methods can be used to help identify how similar or dissimilar 2 documents are and how text summarization can come in handy for various tasks(Financial research, Question answering and bots, Medical cases, Books and literature, Email overload, Science and R&D,Patent research, Helping disabled people, Programming languages,Automated content creation). Checkout the applications of automatic summarization in enterprise.
— — — — — — — — — — — Thank you — — — — — — — — — — —
Sometimes later becomes never. So do it now.
Keep Learning…………………… | https://medium.com/swlh/similarity-queries-and-text-summarization-in-nlp-50ef4cf04f7b | ['Aravind Cr'] | 2020-06-21 04:39:16.438000+00:00 | ['Data Analysis', 'Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Data Science'] |
Market trends bulletin — Insights 2.0 Vol 15 | Market trends bulletin — Insights 2.0 Vol 15
Market Analysis:
Bitcoin (BTC) is currently trading at 6451 USDT (as of 12 November 2018, 11.11 IST) with the rise of 0.03 % in last 24 hours. From the sentiment’s analysis point of view, the global crypto community is neutral.
Now let’s take a look at the technical analysis of bitcoin and few other altcoins. The probability expressed for altcoins depends partially on the bitcoin trend.
Bitcoin (BTC):
As per daily timeframe, BTC has formed a symmetrical triangle pattern. A symmetrical triangle chart pattern represents a period of consolidation before the price is forced to breakout or breakdown. A breakdown from the lower trendline marks the start of a new bearish trend, while a breakout from the upper trendline indicates the start of a new bullish trend. From the chart, we can see that BTC tested support level 1 (6371 USDT) and closed successfully above it. The daily candle is closed as “Bullish Takuri Line” candle pattern and bulls dominated last 24 hours session with high volume. There is a high probability of uptrend than downtrend as per the daily timeframe.
Ethereum (ETH):
ETH is currently trading at 212 USDT (as of 12 November 2018, 12.19 IST) with the fall of 0.18 % in last 24 hours. As per the daily timeframe, ETH also has formed a symmetrical triangle pattern. From the chart, we can see that ETH tested support level 1 (209 USDT) and closed multiple candles successfully above it. The daily candle is closed as “Bullish Hammer” candle pattern but bears dominated last 24 hours session with high volume. There is a high probability of uptrend than downtrend as per the daily timeframe.
Bitcoin cash (BCH):
BCH is currently trading at 519 USDT (as of 12 November 2018, 11.17 IST) with the fall of 2.97 % in last 24 hours. The daily closed candle represents bears dominated last 24 hours session. Bulls will come back into the game if it holds support level 1 (521 USDT) with some bullish confirmation candle else we can see a continuation of downtrend till support level 2 (483 USDT).
Ripple (XRP):
XRP is currently trading at 0.51010 USDT (as of 12 November 2018, 12.42 IST) with the fall of 0.02 % in last 24 hours. As per daily timeframe, XRPUSDT also has formed a symmetrical triangle pattern. From the chart, we can see that it has tested support level 1 (0.49818 USDT) and closed multiple candles successfully above it. As per the daily closed candle interpretation, bulls dominated last 24 hours session in spite of heavy selling pressure. There is a high probability of uptrend than downtrend as per daily timeframe. | https://medium.com/koinex-crunch/market-trends-bulletin-insights-2-0-vol-15-6b3f9b7844da | ['Team Koinex'] | 2018-11-12 11:28:02.271000+00:00 | ['Finance', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum', 'Analysis', 'Bitcoin'] |
A short review of Joe Abercrombie’s ‘Best Served Cold’ | A short review of Joe Abercrombie’s ‘Best Served Cold’
A good, if slightly underwhelming, return to the world of ‘The First Law’
Joe Abercrombie is a prolific fantasy author (and a pretty interesting person to follow on Twitter, too). He’s best known for his First Law trilogy, but he has also written a few young-adult books, a follow-up trilogy to First Law, and a set of spinoff books set in the same universe. Best Served Cold is one of those spinoffs. It’s about a mercenary in Styria, a nation geographically close to Adua (where much of The First Law is set.
I chose to read this book because I liked The First Law a great deal and think Abercrombie’s writing style is great. Earlier this year, I also read A Little Hatred, which is the second book in his sequel trilogy. While I waited for book two in that series to come out (it released in September; it’s on hold in my library right now) I decided to give Best Served Cold a try.
Much like The First Law, Best Served Cold follows multiple protagonists, starting with just one perspective and then gradually expanding as the story develops. The two “main” characters are Monza (the mercenary out for revenge) and Shivers (a minor character from The First Law who is also present in the sequel trilogy). There are a few others, but the majority of the chapters come from one of these two people and it’s clear that they form the centerpiece of the story.
The book’s greatest strength is the characters themselves. Every single character has some kind of fatal flaw. A few of them have some good qualities too, but Abercrombie seems most interested in telling a story with no clear “good guy.” The myriad ways that each character interacts with everyone else are the best reasons to pick this book up. Everyone is out for their own interests, and the broader story unfolds through their betrayals, plots, and schemes.
Best Served Cold falls short in its pacing. It’s a lengthy book, and some of the chapters in the second half don’t carry the plot forward as much as their earlier counterparts. The central story of revenge and plotting is solid, but I think Abercrombie could have purged some of the less-central parts of the plot and ended up with a slightly shorter book.
Best Served Cold falls short of the high standards set by The First Law trilogy, but is still a perfectly enjoyable book on its own. Abercrombie is a really good character writer, and the dialog and interactions in this story more than make up for the pacing shortfalls. As we wait for his second trilogy to conclude, fans of his work could do a lot less than checking Best Served Cold out. | https://medium.com/the-coastline-is-quiet/a-short-review-of-joe-abercrombies-best-served-cold-3e1a4ac85ffb | ['Thomas Jenkins'] | 2020-11-15 18:13:05.567000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Reading', 'Fiction', 'Fantasy', 'Book Review'] |
Feature Engineering | Introduction
Fractional differentiation (or Fractional derivative or Fractional calculus) is a great idea once you understood all the equations. But the first time when I was reading Chapter 5 of Advances in Financial Machine Learning by Marcos Prado. All the mathematical symbols and equations just push me away from it.
I was like, what is this?
Believe me, if you feel lost, you are not alone. The reactions of most people just like what Homer Simpson said: “If something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing.” Luckily, I was one of the most people until now.
Let’s face it and it wasn’t as hard as it looks like. We can break it down and figure it out step by step with the first principle.
Ok, let’s break down the whole chapter and talk it through.. together, emmm.…I mean together…
Background
If you have no idea of what derivative is or need to refresh your memory of derivative learned in school. There are a few really great tutorials online.
The paradox of the derivative | Essence of calculus, chapter 2 by 3BLue1brown.
Fractional Calculus ~ (FC01) An Introduction to Fractional Calculus by Let’s Learn, Nemo!
well, I watched those 2 videos, but I am still having no idea…. what???? well, you can always watch the third one, I guess.
Ok, let’s do it slowly.
Why Fractional Differentiation?
In previous articles, we have explored the Feature Engineering & Feature Selection and Data Transformation etc.. Why Fractional Differentiation?
Definition: A fractionally differenced time series (as opposed to integer differencing) retains the memory of the original series (as indicated by the high correlation), but also it is stationary, the mean and variance of those time series should be time-invariant (or not change with time). (e.g. have the same variance, mean, skew, etc).
What is stationary: A stationary time series is one whose properties do not depend on the time at which the series is observed. Thus, time series with trends, or with seasonality, are not stationary — the trend and seasonality will affect the value of the time series at different times.
Why stationary is important?
If the data is not stationary, it would be wrong that all the assumptions we made based on the financial market data are Independent and Identically Distributed (IID). If the data (features) are not “stationary” (in other words, their underlying data generation process changes its characteristics with time) it would be hard to predict expected future date.
Sadly, in financial time series data, the volatility of prices can change rapidly from time to time by events, such as on important information releasing day. Both simple percentages return and log returns as well demonstrated in previous articles in these series, remove most of these relationships (low correlation).
This leads to an enormous challenge — how can one make the time series stationary while keeping its predictive power (or memory or information for prediction).
In the extreme, consider transforming any features into strictly 1’s (using np.sign() ) you’ve successfully attained stationarity, but at the cost of all information in the original series. On the other hand, the original stock price has zero differentiation, it has all the information but not stationary.
Lopez de Prado proposes an alternative method, named fractional differentiation, that aims to find the optimal balance between zero differentiation and fully differentiated. The goal of the fractional differentiation is to find the fraction d, which is the minimum number necessary to achieve stationarity, while keeps the maximum amount of memory in our data.
Intuition
My 1st reaction to Fractional Differentiation really reminds me of Exponential Moving Average (EMA)….
More accurate name of EMA is exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA). Todays’ stock price is the sum of weighted N days stock price before.
In general, a weighted moving average is calculated as
The EMA is a moving average that places a greater weight and significance on the most recent data points by decreasing the weighting factors exponentially.
EMA weights N = 15 from Wikipedia
Calculating the EMA requires one more observation than the simple moving average (SMA). Suppose that you want to use 20 days as the number of observations for the EMA. Then, you must wait until the 20th day to obtain the SMA. On the 21st day, you can then use the SMA from the previous day as the first EMA for yesterday. However, EMA doesn’t remove the trend, it will be non-stationary.
More of Exponential Moving Average (EMA) can be found on Pandas official document.
Note for each paragraph
NOW please go to chapter 5.
Like EWM, a feature at current timestamp can be expressed as the sum of all the past values with an assigned weight for each value. Mathematically, it is the sum of a dot product (see 3blue1brown for dot product).
The current value is the function of all the past value before this time point, this is where the long memory comes from:
The question is how to decide each weight for each corresponding value?
The weight is calculated by fractional derivative, and can be expressed as:
When d is a positive integer number, like 1,2,3… etc. As ∀k > d, (∀ is a math symbol means for all), there must be a point where d equal to k and d-k=0:
and memory beyond that point will be removed because of dot product with 0. For example, if d=1, put d into 𝜔:
then, 𝜔={1, −1, 0, 0, …}, if d=2, 𝜔={1, −2, 1, 0, …} and so on so forth.
On the contrary, if d=0.1, as k is always an integer number, wight 𝜔 will be some value other than 0 and the memory will be preserved.
Next question is how to transfer the weight 𝜔 equation into code? If you have watched the fractional derivative video above, the weight can be expressed as :
Now, iterative is one thing code is good at. The weight can be expressed as a simple for loop.
def getWeights(d,size):
'''
d:fraction
k:the number of samples
w:weight assigned to each samples
'''
# thres>0 drops insignificant weights w=[1.]
for k in range(1,size):
w_ = -w[-1]/k*(d-k+1)
w.append(w_)
w=np.array(w[::-1]).reshape(-1,1) #sort and reshape the w
return w
let’s get some real stock data and try it out. For consistency, in all the 📈Python for finance series, I will try to reuse the same data as much as I can. More details about data preparation can be found here, here and here.
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
plt.style.use('seaborn')
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = [16, 9]
plt.rcParams['figure.dpi'] = 300 import yfinance as yf def get_data(symbols, begin_date=None,end_date=None):
df = yf.download('AAPL', start = '2000-01-01',
auto_adjust=True,#only download adjusted data
end= '2010-12-31')
#my convention:always lowercase
df.columns = ['open','high','low',
'close','volume']
return df
Apple_stock = get_data('AAPL', '2000-01-01', '2010-12-31')
price = Apple_stock['close']
price.head()
We get the weight for each day’s stock price of 10 years Apple stock price.
w = getWeights(0.1, price.shape[0])
w
Next, we can set different fraction d and see how the weight changes.
def weight_by_d(dRange=[0,1], nPlots=11, size=6):
'''
dRange: the range of d
nPlots: the number of d we want to check
size: the data points used as an example
w: collection of w by different d value
'''
w=pd.DataFrame()
for d in np.linspace(dRange[0],dRange[1],nPlots):
w_=getWeights(d,size=size)
w_=pd.DataFrame(w_,index=range(w_.shape[0])\
[::-1],columns=[d])
w=w.join(w_,how='outer')
return w
weight_by_d = weight_by_d()
weight_by_d
Then plot those weights into a graph for comparison.
def plotWeights(w, v=2):
ax=w.plot()
ax.axvline(x=v, c='c', linestyle='-.', lw=2.5, alpha=0.4)
ax.axhline(y=0, c='c', linestyle='-.', lw=2.5, alpha=0.4)
ax.legend(loc='upper right');
ax.set_ylabel('Weight')
ax.set_xlabel('Number of data points') plotWeights(weight_by_d_0_1);
The weight converges to near zero after 2 data point, which means the past 2 days have much more weight on the current day (more memories). For example, for d = 0, all weights are 0 except for 𝜔0 = 1 (the 1st blue line on the top). That is the case where the differentiated series coincides with the original one. For d = 1, all weights are 0 except for 𝜔0 = 1 and 𝜔1 =−1(the last yellow line at the bottom). That is the standard first-order integer differentiation, which is used to derive log price returns.
Anywhere in between these two cases, all weights after 𝜔0 (𝜔0 = 1) are negative and greater than −1. Here, instead of calculating the return as the difference of today’s price and yesterday’s price(log return), we calculate the return as the difference of today’s price and all the days before today’s price.
The fraction d doesn’t have to be in the range of [0,1]. We can try different like range [1, 2].
weight_by_d_1_2 = weight_by_d([1,2])
weight_by_d_1_2
plotWeights(weight_by_d_1_2, v=3);
For d > 1, we observe d ∈ [1, 2], 𝜔1∈ [-1, -2], 𝜔2∈ [0, 1] and 𝜔k> 0, ∀k ≥ 2 (I guess this sentence is quit straight forward, no need to explain).
Let’s move to the next paragraph. This convergence part confused me again.
Let’s try a few more alternated range of d to get some intuition.
First, we go to the negative regime.
weight_by_d_2_0 = weight_by_d([-2, 0])
plotWeights(weight_by_d_2_0);
Obviously, no convergence!
Let’s go back to the positive range side.
weight_by_d_2_3 = weight_by_d([2,3])
plotWeights(weight_by_d_2_3);
and [3, 4]
weight_by_d_3_4 = weight_by_d([3,4], size=8)
plotWeights(weight_by_d_3_4);
How about range [0, 10]?
weight_by_d_0_10 = weight_by_d([0,10], size=12)
plotWeights(weight_by_d_0_10);
From the above result, we can see that for k > d, if
then
and 𝜔k = 0 otherwise.
Consequently, the weights converge asymptotically to zero, as an infinite product of factors within the unit circle.
This part can be understood by this plot when d is fixed at one fractional number:
weight_by_d_06_07 = weight_by_d([0.6, 0.7], nPlots=1)
plotWeights(weight_by_d_06_07, v=1);
It is from the cyan colour dash line where k > d (d=0.6). From that point, the weights converge asymptotically to zero, as an infinite product of factors within the unit circle. The absolute value of weight is getting smaller. That is why
If
then | https://medium.com/swlh/fractionally-differentiated-features-9c1947ed2b55 | ['Ke Gui'] | 2020-10-13 11:19:29.811000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Python', 'Finance', 'Fractional Calculus', 'Marco Prato'] |
Death by a Thousand Cuts | Stop listening to the media and tune out negativity
The famous scholar of the Islamic Golden Age, Ibn Sina once conducted a medical experiment. He put two identical lambs in two separate cages, and he placed a wolf in one of the side cages. The wolf could only be seen by ONE of the lambs and the other was placed out of sight.
Months after, the lamb who could see the wolf died out of sheer stress and fear, even though the wolf did not physically go near or even threaten the lamb. The other lamb that had not seen the wolf lived on healthily and in good spirits.
This experiment showed the power and effects of mental influence on our health and body. Fear, anxiety, stress and negativity does nothing but harm — even if we don’t realise the damage it is doing to us internally.
We don’t need the nonsense. Filter it out. You don’t need to always be plugged in. Take a social media detox. It’s killing you.
Feed your soul and increase your spirituality
Believe it or not, the answer actually insightfully comes from that beacon of wisdom, Mr Khaled again.
“One of my major keys is actually the master key: God. In my life, they’ve hid the keys from me, so I’ve overcome and weathered a lot of storms because of Him.” — DJ Khaled
What is the effect of bad news on our being, on our humanity, on our souls,, constantly bombarding us and beating our brains to a pulp? As it leaves us subdued, disillusioned, depressed and losing hope, I would argue that is also a key reason why religion and spirituality is under attack in today, as it is one of the only things left which gives people hope, which allows people personal freedom, and which sets out a model different from the secular model. More than anything, it heightens your spirituality, and nurtures your soul. When you have this, you have contentment, you have insight, you have clarity, you have energy, you have freedom. You come to life.
In this current system, it is not set up for the soul to be allowed to be nurtured, to thrive. Everything that is championed or encouraged is effectively eroding our own souls. So we must challenge. We must go the other way. Where they zig, we must zag.
What does good nutritious organic food do? It gives us energy, makes us productive, creative, healthy. What does GMO, fructose based processed food do? None of the above.
What does being taught about entrepreneurship, real money, the importance of being debt free and money management do? Keep us independent and free to make our own choices. What does being lumbered with debt, working for someone else do? None of the above.
What does keeping family ties ensure? You have protection around you, keeping you safe and secure. What does breaking them do? None of the above.
What does spirituality, religion and excellent, selfless moral values do? What does selfishness do?
What does chastity and marriage do? What does lust, pornography, following one’s desires etc do? You get the pattern here.
Ultimately, ‘they’s’ are at war with our humanity — but cleverly, letting us inject our own poison. We are attacking our bodies, our minds, our hearts and souls with our choices — with what we eat, what we do, with our relationships.
Spirituality is our way of becoming closer to God, the creator.
The opposite of spirituality is actually materialism — one feeds the soul, the other feeds the self. It is no coincidence that current status quo is that which promotes mass consumerism, mass gluttony, mass lust, has broken down family ties and promotes a ‘YOLO’, do what thou wilt, mentality. It’s because it feeds the self, which in turn starves the soul.
‘Materialism — the true cost’ by Nicky Cullen. Very apt.
We need to bring it back, to not be so self-obsessed, to do charitable acts for our fellow man. Eat wholesome food. Invest in people and your relationships.
Contribute in something bigger and greater than yourself
One of the greatest things that you can do in such times, is to channel your energies into a positive force. What change do you want to see? It may not lead anywhere but it is positive action, taking you forward and it will develop you. Fighting for a single cause greater than yourself can potentially tick all six of the human needs in one fell swoop. Efficient.
If you’re doing something you care HUGELY about, and you believe in its purpose deeply enough, you will tap into an inner resolve you didn’t know you had. And trust me, when all of these pieces come together, not only does your work move towards greatness, but so does your life.
Never stop learning
Now that you know the six human needs… one of the main ones is growth. When you’re dying, you’re not growing. So the opposite is also true. Always keep growing, learn, learn, learn and continue to benefit others with your growth.
Spend time in nature
Nature is therapeutic. It will keep your soul content. Trust me on that.
Don’t believe me? Okay, here’s the science behind it.
“Generally speaking, negative ions increase the flow of oxygen to the brain; resulting in higher alertness, decreased drowsiness, and more mental energy. They also may protect against germs in the air, resulting in decreased irritation due to inhaling various particles that make you sneeze, cough, or have a throat irritation.”
Pierce J. Howard, PhD, author of The Owners Manual for the Brain: Everyday Applications from Mind Brain Research and director of research at the Center for Applied Cognitive Sciences in Charlotte, N.C.
Negative ions are oxygen atoms charged with an extra electron. They are created in nature by the effects of water, air, sunlight and the Earth’s inherent radiation.
Photo by Jeffrey Workman on Unsplash
The more negative ions there are in the blood, the more efficient the cell’s metabolism process. On the contrary, the more positive ions there are in the blood, the slower and less efficient the cell’s metabolism. This causes the body’s cells to become weak and the body will tend to get sick more easily and aged faster.
THAT’S why you feel great when you go to the countryside or a forest or the beach or a waterfall. And why you might not feel so good in the home — positive ions are everywhere in a house — particularly as they are often generated by technology. The more screens in the house, the more positive ions.
So in a nutshell, negative ions are positive. Go get more.
Don’t ever lose hope
Going back to hope — I would argue that hope is one of the foundational, fundamental needs a human being has. Hope is the seed within us, that keeps us alive. It allows us to dream of a brighter tomorrow. It allows prisoners of war to survive their ordeal. Hope is the thing that keeps the battered wife or stockholm syndrome victim going.
But sadly, as they say, it’s the hope that kills you. This is why we’re feeling down.
Because too often we attach this powerful emotion of hope to the wrong thing.
The answer isn’t to lose hope. It’s actually to keep your hope stronger than ever. Just to move it to a different source — that is bigger and greater than anything else.
The truth is, when we are looking to external means to fix our realities, that is symptomatic that a paradigm shift is needed. What we desperately need to do is to first understand that in a system that is not designed for your own salvation, we need to not play their game. And to build a new one for ourselves. To create our own systems, to work within our own communities and work together.
The most important thing we need to realise is that true hope actually lies within. With God. Knowing He will NEVER let you down. It’s the one thing that is certain, that has been promised.
That kind of certainty is powerful. A believer who places full trust in this promise will never let his head drop. He knows that in any state, when times are good he is grateful, when times are difficult he is patient. That’s it. It’s actually quite liberating.
Instead of looking for external saviours, we need to free ourselves from these rigged systems which are mere theatres of distraction. We need to place our hope in the one thing that will allow you to keep the hope no matter how difficult, or how dire things may get. That is God’s mercy.
That will always be a source of strength. That is limitless, it never runs out. And will provide solutions even if it seems impossible.
In times of difficulty, if you tap into this source and retain this hope whilst nurturing your soul— no matter what they do, they will never ever be able to defeat you or to make you this apathetic jellyfish.
You will stop bleeding to death.
You will become aware of what is your ‘salt’ and seek to avoid it at all costs.
You will recover.
You will thrive.
And most importantly, you will be authentic and congruent, and become who you were meant to be, again. | https://medium.com/kn-ow/death-by-a-thousand-cuts-ea8ee7748c3e | ['Faisal Amjad'] | 2020-08-05 16:27:54.841000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'Personal Development', 'Spirituality', 'Mental Health', 'Soul'] |
Android Color Management: What Developers and Designers Need to Know | In the recent Oreo release, Android gained initial support for color management — which helps match color outputs across devices. With the update, Android devices can now display colors outside of the sRGB color gamut. If you’re not familiar with color profiles or what wide color gamuts are, then I highly recommend this video from Google I/O on understanding color:
tl;dw; color management ensures that colors look the same on different displays. For example the color #ff0000 (pure red for those that don’t read hex codes) may appear differently depending upon the screen technology showing it — some screens are capable of showing more saturated or intense colors than others. Saying #ff0000 in sRGB specifies a specific shade of red (in the sRGB color space) so color managed displays can produce the exact desired color.
In this post I’d like to outline what Android app designers and developers need to know about these changes.
Displaying wide color gamut images
Images can embed a color profile, declaring the color space of their color information. Similarly many cameras are capable of capturing wide color gamuts and embedding an appropriate color profile. This lets them display colors beyond the standard sRGB gamut. To display images with wide color profiles in your app you need to opt-in per Activity . To do this, set the colorMode attribute in the activity’s declaration in your application’s manifest:
<activity
android:name=".WideColorActivity"
android:colorMode="wideColorGamut" />
You can also set this programmatically but you need to do so during onCreate before your Window is created. Wide color gamut support is opt-in as it requires more system resources (which might result in a performance decrease in your app):
“When wide color gamut mode is enabled, the activity’s window uses more memory and GPU processing for screen composition. Before enabling wide color gamut mode, you should carefully consider if the activity truly benefits from it. For example, an activity that displays photos in fullscreen is a good candidate for wide color gamut mode, but an activity that shows small thumbnails is not.” — developer documentation
Note that if you are using a single Activity architecture then it may make sense to break out wide color gamut image display into a new Activity .
Here’s an example showing two activities displaying the same wide color gamut test image (a PNG with the Display P3 color profile embedded), the top activity declares a wide color gamut color mode, the bottom does not.
Activities displaying wide color gamut content need to opt in to wide color mode (top)
Color accurate rendering
Many Android devices have had screens capable of displaying wider color gamuts for some time. Prior to Android 8.0’s color management, all content was assumed to be sRGB but wide color displays would reinterpret the color values into their gamut and effectively “stretch” the colors. This makes reds more red, greens more green, etc. leading to a more saturated appearance. This stretching however is imprecise and there is no way to calculate the stretching effect, hence the rendered colors are not accurate.
Many applications have desaturated their assets to compensate for this stretching. As a consequence, colors may appear muted when displayed on devices with calibrated displays. That is on color-accurate devices, such as the Pixel 2, desaturated assets will appear less vivid than on non-accurate displays. Once color-accurate rendering is widespread, app makers can stop altering assets and be confident that their content displays as intended. Until then however, there are some steps that you can take to ensure that your content looks great on both color accurate displays, and on non-color-managed devices.
Android 8.0 adds a new widecg resource qualifier which you can use to alter colors on devices whose screen has a wide color gamut and wide color gamut rendering is supported (also nowidecg for the inverse).
Note that wide color gamut support is distinct from whether the current activity is running in wideColorGamut color mode. That is this qualifier will apply if the device supports color accurate rendering, irrespective of whether the activity is running in wide color mode.
For example an application may declare a base palette of colors in res/values/colors.xml :
<!-— desaturated colors used on non color accurate displays -->
<color name=”palette1">#5bc3cc</color>
<color name=”palette2">#302c54</color>
<color name=”palette3">#c7416b</color>
<color name=”palette4">#e37b5b</color>
<color name=”palette5">#ffd64f</color>
…and an alternate set in res/values-widecg/colors.xml :
<!-— desired colors as rendered on color accurate displays -->
<color name=”palette1">#36c1cd</color>
<color name=”palette2">#251f55</color>
<color name=”palette3">#c8144e</color>
<color name=”palette4">#e4572e</color>
<color name=”palette5">#ffc914</color>
Provide different colors to be used on color accurate (left) and older devices
You can use the same technique with raster assets (e.g. res/drawable-widecg-mdpi/foo.png ) but this will require shipping near-duplicate assets so it may not be worth the trade-off of increasing the size of your app. Consider moving to vector assets which can be colored dynamically.
Wider support coming
While we recently announced plans to add a new ‘saturated’ color mode letting users choose to opt out of color-accurate rendering (i.e. act like a nowidecg devices), I still believe it’s important to update your apps for a color-managed world. By updating your apps to better support color accurate rendering fewer users will feel the need to opt out of this mode. We plan to continue investing in wide-color support; adding more API surface for working with wide color gamuts in future releases (such as updated Paint and Canvas APIs accepting colors with greater bit precision).
The reality of modern displays is that designers and developers now need to have an understanding of color management and how to apply it within their app. As more devices ship with wide gamut displays and color-accurate rendering, it’s important to get ahead of the wave and update your apps to provide the best experience. We consider this the best way to deliver a great experience to your users where the colors they see are those you intended.
Related reading | https://medium.com/google-design/android-color-management-what-developers-and-designers-need-to-know-4fdd8054557e | ['Nick Butcher'] | 2017-11-27 10:11:13.531000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Developer', 'Colors', 'Design', 'Color Management'] |
How to Emotionally Prepare for Election Day, No Matter the Result | How to Emotionally Prepare for Election Day, No Matter the Result
Getting our emotional houses in order will serve us way more than refreshing polling data and doomscrolling social media.
Next week, the world will change. Or will it?
However the election goes won’t change that the three richest Americans — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg — own as a much as the poorest half.
That police violence is a leading cause of death for young Black men. That veterans of the war in Afghanistan are now watching their kids deploy to the same war. That this week an already-scorched California faces its highest fire risk so far in 2020.
That a plague has taken over 225,000 American lives, left millions unemployed, and closed nearly 10,000 small businesses.
Getting Trump out is crucial. But Joe Biden will only mildly reform capitalism, the political and economic system holding us back from true, lasting change.
But those facts don’t change how I feel. A part of me hopes something, anything will shift on Tuesday. The same part that wakes up every morning hoping all of this — Trump, the plague, climate change — was a nightmare. The same part that wants to get back to “normal.”
If I’ve learned anything through meditation practice, it’s that the mind is almost constantly leaving the present moment.
The boredom, the sadness, the anger, the anxiety is too much to handle. So the mind churns. About how things should be. How I should be. How things could’ve been. How things will be if I just do this or that.
No wonder racism is such a powerful political tool. The number one reason British people voted to leave the European Union back in 2016 was a lack of economic mobility. They didn’t think life was going to get any better the way things were headed.
Like Trump, the leaders of the Brexit campaign successfully channeled this discontent into blaming immigrants of color.
What do we do with this part of ourselves that wants a better future? Isn’t it normal and healthy to hope for the best?
It is. It’s how our minds work. It’s human.
The problem comes when we’re banking on some massive shift to change how we feel. Some deus ex machina that’s going to swoop in and fix everything.
Trump crawling back to Trump Tower never to be seen again. A vaccine wiping out coronavirus with the snap of a finger.
These fantasies distance us from the cold, hard, messy truth. They keep us out of the hot, sticky, muddy river that is what the poet Mary Oliver called our “one wild and precious life.”
But like any thought patterns, they’re information. They point out our needs right here, right now — if we just slow down enough to look at them.
“External, measurable outcomes all point to the internal, subjective experiences or feelings that we most want to have in our lives,” writes the professional coach Tripp Lanier.
In other words, our mind fantasizes about the future, but our emotions point to what we need right here, right now.
What would it feel like if Trump loses? What would you do, right now, if a coronavirus disappeared?
Psychotherapists call this exercise “the Miracle Question.” They have clients imagine an ideal future. They ask what the clients would feel if that future happened. Then they connect those feelings to actions that can be taken in the present.
I don’t know about you, but if Trump loses in a landslide, I’d feel a lot. I’d feel free, motivated, fully alive, safer, connected.
So, what can I do today, regardless of the circumstances, to feel that way?
Who can I call or text, right now, to feel connected? What tough conversation am I avoiding? (Because there’s always at least one.) What hike have I been longing to do? How can I engage in local politics beyond Tuesday?
Bottom line: Getting our emotional houses in order before Tuesday will serve us way more than refreshing polling data and doomscrolling social media. | https://medium.com/curious/how-to-emotionally-prepare-for-the-election-no-matter-the-result-b681330cb7f6 | ['Jeremy Mohler'] | 2020-10-29 17:24:03.483000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Mindfulness', 'Life', 'Trump', 'Psychology'] |
SpaceNet 6: Data Fusion and Colorization | Preface: SpaceNet LLC is a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating open source, artificial intelligence applied research for geospatial applications, specifically foundational mapping (i.e., building footprint & road network detection). SpaceNet is run in collaboration by co-founder and managing partner, CosmiQ Works, co-founder and co-chair, Maxar Technologies, and our partners including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Capella Space, Topcoder, IEEE GRSS, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Planet.
Introduction
When we first created the SpaceNet 6 dataset we were quite interested in testing the ability to transform SAR data to look more like optical imagery. We thought that this transformation would be helpful for improving our ability to detect buildings or other objects in SAR data. Interestingly, some research had been done in this field, with a few approaches successfully transforming SAR to look like optical imagery at coarser resolutions (1, 2, 3). We had tried some similar approaches with the SpaceNet 6 data but had found the results underwhelming and the model outputs incoherent. We concluded that translating SAR data to look nearly identical to optical data appeared to be quite challenging at such a high resolution and may not be a viable solution.
A few weeks later, one of our colleagues Jason Brown from Capella Space sent us an interesting image he had created. He had merged the RGB optical imagery and SAR data using a Hue Saturation and Value data fusion approach. The approach was intriguing as it maintained the interesting and valuable structural components of SAR while introducing the color of optical imagery.
The inception of this workflow: Can we teach a neural network to automatically fuse RGB and SAR data? — As shown in the middle image above. Will this help us improve the quality of our segmentation networks for extracting building footprints?
After seeing the image above, it triggered something in my mind — Instead of doing the direct conversion of SAR to optical imagery, what if we could work somewhere in the middle, training a network to convert SAR to look like the fused product shown above? On the surface this task seems far easier than the direct conversion and something that could be beneficial in a workflow. We hypothesized that a segmentation network should find this color valuable to use for building detection. Moreover, we wanted to test this approach in an area where we didn’t have concurrent SAR and optical collects, simulating a real world scenario where this would commonly occur due to inconsistent orbits or cloud cover that would render optical sensors useless.
In this final blog in our post-SpaceNet 6 analysis challenge series (previous posts: [1,2,3]), we dive into a topic that we’ve been greatly interested in for a long while: Can colorizing synthetic aperture radar data with a deep learning network really help to improve you ability to detect buildings?
The Approach and Results
To achieve our analysis goals we constructed the following workflow:
I. SAR and Optical Data Fusion
To begin our workflow we fuse our SAR and RGB optical imagery using a Hue Saturation Value (HSV) image fusion technique. We again use the larger 1200 pixel² images as introduced in the previous blog. The process is as follows:
We first convert our quad-polarized 4-channel SAR data to single channel by calculating the total polarimetric scattering power for each pixel. When working with polarimetric radar, this is known as a calculating the ‘SPAN’ or creating a SPAN image. We then convert our RGB image and transform it to the HSV color space and swap the value channel with our single-channel SAR span image. Finally, we convert the [Hue, Saturation, SAR SPAN] image back to RGB color space.
The final result is an interesting fusion of optical and SAR imagery. We perform this technique for all three data splits. You can download the code to do this here: https://github.com/SpaceNetChallenge/SAR-RGB-DataFusion
II. Training a Colorization Network
We next train the Pix2Pix (Code) Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) using the colorization mode. We modify the base network slightly to work in HSV colorspace rather than LAB colorspace. The network will take a SAR span image as the input, learn corresponding hue and saturation values and then use those value to create a colorized output. We actually train on the ‘test_public’ split of the SpaceNet 6 dataset for this process. This ensures that the model does not overfit to our training subset that we will later use to train a segmentation network or to our third final testing split of the dataset.
Training time is actually quite fast for this approach at ~5 hours using 4 NVIDIA Titan Xp GPU’s with 12GB of memory each. Ultimately, no participants attempted to run a colorization or domain adaptation process using the optical data to pre-process the SAR in any fashion. This minimal training time does show that this was a possibility in the challenge, but may not be worth doing.
III. Creating Colorized Outputs
We next run inference, creating our colorized outputs. In the figure below we can see the fused RGB and SAR (which we label as ground truth) in the leftmost column, our SAR SPAN image (the input into Pix2Pix) in the center column, and our Pix2Pix predicted output in the rightmost column. Simply put — we train Pix2Pix to read in images in the center column and create the output images on in rightmost column. Inference is a bit slow at ~5.4 seconds per image tile. However this implementation only uses 1 CPU for data loading, thus could likely be improved many times over with some parallel processing. | https://medium.com/the-downlinq/spacenet-6-data-fusion-and-colorization-38a77cc4fb74 | ['Jake Shermeyer'] | 2020-07-22 20:58:24.854000+00:00 | ['Geospatial', 'Computer Vision', 'Data', 'Open Source', 'Data Science'] |
Cracking The Story — How A Screenwriter Gets Unstuck by Gary Goldstein | Film Courage: We’ve heard screenwriters use the phrase ‘Cracking The Story,’ so what does this mean exactly?
Gary Goldstein: Cracking The Story is (just to continue from what we were talking about) you have the beginnings of a story but then you beat out the story, you create the whole story, you role out the carpet, basically the whole story, so you don’t really crack the story and it may be more of a TV term than a film term (I’m not sure) but you don’t crack the story until you are able to tell the story from start to finish and any of the holes in it are filled and that’s my interpretation of it. The concept of cracking something is like “Oh! That was what was missing.” We got it and now we cracked the story and the rest of it just falls into place.
Check out new Film Courage videos every day at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Youtube!
So there’s that, but also just the concept of being able to tell the story from start to finish. If I send in a pitch (let’s say) and I write up a pitch to send into a producer or network or something for a movie or TV show pilot or something, I may send a premise line and see if the general premise line is of interest. And they may say “Oh, no. We are already doing something like that.” Or “That’s great, give me more.” I will give them the story from start to finish. It doesn’t have to be very long. It can be a page and a half that I’m writing but at least I’m not just giving them preamble. I’m not just giving them the first act of something. I’m not just giving them like a tease. I’m basically telling them, cracking that story for them, telling them where that story is going to go from start to finish. Not necessarily in great detail. Sometimes in more detail but it’s really about being able to show that this is an entire story. This is where this will move and then we can fill it in and amplify it as we go along. So it’s really being able to tell a story from start to finish, for me anyway. That’s my interpretation of it.
Film Courage: What about those writers who say sometimes they begin something without knowing the ending?
Gary Goldstein: Well, I’ve done that.
Film Courage: Oh, you have?
Gary Goldstein: I’ve done that or where the ending has changed a lot. Again with April, May and June (this play), I didn’t know. I didn’t know what they were going to find. I didn’t know that at the end of the first act they were going to find…that the sisters were going to find something, that it just became obvious, it became the thing that was driving me. I didn’t even realize it. And I didn’t know what that thing was going to be until I thought about it. So that was a case where I really didn’t know…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
Question for the Viewers: Do you outline before writing a screenplay?
CONNECT WITH GARY GOLDSTEIN
IMDB
Twitter
Bio:
Gary Goldstein is an award winning writer for film, TV and the stage. He has written numerous films for Hallmark Channel and its sister network, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, including the comedies “The Wish List,” “Hitched for the Holidays,” “This Magic Moment” and “My Boyfriends’ Dogs,” and the first two films in the “Flower Shop Mystery” series: “Mum’s the Word” and “Snipped in the Bud,” starring Brooke Shields.
Gary’s feature film “Politics of Love,” a romantic comedy set during the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, was released in theaters August 2011. He also wrote the feature romantic comedy, “If You Only Knew,” which starred Johnathon Schaech, Alison Eastwood and James LeGros.
In addition, Gary has sold or optioned a number of original screenplays, has a string of episodic TV credits and has sold half-hour comedy pilots to both NBC and Warner Bros Television.
On the L.A. stage, Gary has been represented with the comedies “Just Men,” “Parental Discretion” and “Three Grooms and a Bride.” His family drama “Curtain Call” premiered in late 2008 at Carmel, CA’s Pacific Repertory Theatre. His newest play, the three-sisters dramedy “April, May & June,” will have its World Premiere in March 2017 at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills, as part of its 2016–17 subscription season.
Gary is also a freelance film reviewer and feature writer for the Los Angeles Times. | https://medium.com/film-courage/cracking-the-story-how-a-screenwriter-gets-unstuck-by-gary-goldstein-77110f162db1 | [] | 2017-11-21 17:01:42.535000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Writing Prompts', 'Screenwriting', 'Writer'] |
How Tony Robbins Promotes a Conservative Worldview | 2. His interventions with trauma survivors and mentally ill people are based on victim-blaming
When I watched one of his $6,000 weekend retreats, I noticed that an alarming amount of the passionate attendees were survivors of trauma and/or people struggling with mental illness. These poor souls had endured inconceivable suffering and abuse and were desperate for relief, love, or a solution to their trauma. So desperate that some had even sold their belongings to scrounge together the $6,000 to attend.
One of them had been born into a cult in which she was sexually abused for the first decade of her life. Another was a refugee from a war-torn country who had grown up as disadvantaged as possible. Many had been traumatized by poverty. Some were immigrants struggling to find a footing in the US. Many others were on the verge of suicide, or burdened by mental illnesses like severe depression, OCD, or bipolar disorder.
His solution for them?
“Get your shit together.” Be stronger. Try harder. Stop being weak and lazy. Pick yourself up.
But in reality, what would actually help these people is not the power of willpower or “uncovering their truth,” but therapy or societal changes that would give them greater social support. What they really need is a social safety net that protects them from poverty and relentless financial insecurity. Immigration reform. Greater protections for women and people of color. Universal healthcare that gives them access to therapy.
In a sense, Tony is preying upon people’s trauma by charging them $6,000 for an event that promises to radically transform their life, without actually tackling the root of their problems, or the systemic societal issues that caused them.
He might think of his approach as much-needed “tough love.” But what he’s really doing is blaming people for their own shitty life circumstances, which are completely outside of their control. This is a very toxic and insidious form of victim-blaming.
As for mental illness in particular, he often gaslights people by blaming them for not overcoming their symptoms — he insists that mental illness is “all in their head,” that they’re only “making excuses” for not getting their life together.
For example, in one of his interventions, he spoke to a woman who was struggling to succeed in life because of her severe OCD. How did he react? Not with empathy or understanding, but by denying the reality of her condition.
He said the following:
OCD is a story you tell yourself. Mental illness is a story. We get to decide every second of our lives what our story will be.
This might sound empowering on the surface. But by dismissing mental illness as a delusion, he further stigmatizes it and exacerbates it. For many people with serious mental illness, their symptoms are far from “imagined.” They’re very real, and way beyond their conscious control.
They can’t magically “snap themselves out” of mental illness. As if it’s that easy. They can’t rewire their own brain in an instant.
He even proposes that you can power yourself out of severe depression by simply “changing your physiology.” How can you do this? By standing taller, talking faster, talking louder, moving faster, holding your head up (literally), etc. One quick method is by assuming a masculine posture of putting your arms behind your head and propping your feet up.
He cites “science” that supposedly shows that these “power poses” can immediately increase your testosterone by 20% and lower your cortisol (stress hormone) levels by 22%.
This also supposedly makes you 33% more likely to “take action.” The posture “produces more certainty,” which makes you take better actions than you otherwise would have. He neglects to mention that these claims about power posing and snapping yourself out of depression have been thoroughly disproven.
On one occasion, he gives this “power pose” advice to a woman lamenting her mom’s diagnosis with stage 3 ovarian cancer. He urges her to use these techniques to overcome her sadness and fear of her mom dying.
What if what would help her feel less worried is affordable healthcare for her mom, not a power pose? | https://stephanieleguichard.medium.com/how-tony-robbins-promotes-a-conservative-worldview-39d6ef039fe2 | ['Stephanie Leguichard'] | 2020-09-11 02:30:35.466000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Self', 'Productivity', 'Women', 'Politics'] |
A CV Isn’t Enough To Land You A Data Science Job | A CV Isn’t Enough To Land You A Data Science Job
How To Be a More Attractive Data Science Candidate Beyond Your Resume
Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash
Introduction
Off the back of my last post, Getting A Data Science Job is Harder Than Ever, I received lots of responses on my LinkedIn regarding how to be more attractive to employers.
I am in no way a specialist when it comes to getting Data Science jobs, but I am very fortunate to have access to many people that have jobs as Data Scientist, people that work in the hiring space as recruiters, and managers that review hundreds of applications every day.
Many may disagree, and I hate to break it. A CV is simply not enough.
Me being extra by tracing the origins of the word Curriculum Vitae (CV), I found it’s a Latin phrase which translates loosely as “the course of my life”. In other words, a CV is great for summarising experience, achievements, and individual skills. The initial summary of your life may result in interest being shown — in the form of an interview (or whatever stages the company takes) — however interest doesn’t necessarily always transcend into attraction.
To make the distinction between the two terms clear, I’ve defined interest as the curiosity to methodologically assess whether one is suitable to make a long-term investment into, and we have defined attraction as the indication of a physical or emotional desire to be close to someone — in a business sense this would mean that whoever is hiring for the job wants you on their team.
In hopes of landing my next gig, I’ve been in conversation with various people to consider methods of enhancing myself to make me a more attractive candidate to employers, hence increasing my chances of landing a more desirable role, and here are 2 common ideas that come up:
Contribute to Open Source
Contributing to open source is a great way to instantly gain more attraction from employers because it tells them exactly what they can expect from you if they were to hire you.
Here is a simple fact about the modern era (maybe it’s exclusive to technology jobs but I am unsure), wherever you apply, given they like your resume, what’s followed is a google search.
You want for the first thing that comes up on Google when your name is searched is to do with Data Science.
The nature of open source naturally pushes us to the edge of our comfort zone. Whether it’s fixing a bug in the scikit-learn framework, Creating a beginners guide for Tensorflow/PyTorch, or deploying your own Machine Learning API, contributing (and contributing consistently) instantly makes us more attractive to employers because it displays 3 major traits that any employer would want:
You are curious
You are a learner
You are determined to improve/a self-starter
Gone are the days when we simply write in the summary section that “I am a curious person and enjoy learning”, these things are practically inferred when we actively contribute to the community, as we are seen as one who wants to advance the community.
Note: A common way of contributing to Open-source is with a well documented project
Network
It’s likely your ideal job would have hundreds of other people applying, and just like you, they believe they are well suited for the role, hence capturing the companies attention is one of the most important hurdles to overcome when searching for jobs.
I love how Jeremie Harris put it:
“So a job application isn’t just a contest of skill: it’s also in large part a contest for bandwidth.”
Building genuine relationships with people is great because if they were to refer your application to their company, it is much more likely to hold more weight over someone who submitted their application through the easy apply on some jobsite.
I personally believe the best way in is often through someone who is already working at the company you are interested in applying for, especially if you can skip the resume screening step altogether — this is how I got my last gig, I am talking from experience.
Before Covid changed the world, meetups were my go to — Even when I had a job I’d go to meetups, not because I was searching but because building your connections and developing relationships is important in any industry. Consequently, I am primarily on LinkedIn which I am now realising isn’t so bad after all. | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-cv-isnt-enough-to-land-you-a-data-science-job-38db16c6f221 | ['Kurtis Pykes'] | 2020-09-30 17:54:33.895000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Towards Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Deep Learning'] |
Masks of Loneliness | Loneliness
sits in the vacant spot,
cuddled close
in an empty church pew
to the weary faced man
who buried his wife last month.
Loneliness bumps shoulders
with the teen-aged girl
in her sparkly dress
as she stands
alone
while the music plays on.
Loneliness slides
through the screen door left ajar
as the old lady shuffles through
with grocery bags
of single serving meals.
Loneliness seeps
into my thoughts like black mold
creeping into crevices around floor tiles
sniffing around
the perimeters of life,
waiting to snare another. | https://medium.com/grab-a-slice/masks-of-loneliness-8dd4881170f7 | ['Thalia Dunn'] | 2020-12-26 21:18:23.214000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Loneliness', 'Relationships', 'Poetry'] |
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