title
stringlengths 1
200
⌀ | text
stringlengths 10
100k
| url
stringlengths 32
885
| authors
stringlengths 2
392
| timestamp
stringlengths 19
32
⌀ | tags
stringlengths 6
263
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ironic love affair part 5 | Ironic love affair part 5
Going on a safari in a small town in the United States is the most excellent time of your life.
Photo by Taylor Hall on Unsplash
Chapter: V Getting ready for the hunt
I know when I was a child, I had heard about migrant type workers. They would work the fields in the summer and go into the factories during the winter months as the cold air just wasn’t for everyone. So at the end of my second season, I used this facility that I had been a client for years. This place helped people with mental disabilities get along in life, as I got to tell you they have done wonders for me other times I didn’t need them. Yes, it is a very long story about what happened to me at another time.
I want to write yet another book about that you all hope to enjoy reading its content. I was sure I was looking for something to keep me busy. I did put a lot of bills on my credit score, making me unable to get things on credit, as so many people in the world do.
Plus, not to mention, I was paying on an old nearly classic firebird convertible with a corvette motor. It was a dark hunter green like the color that shined all so well. It was in pretty much mint condition for what I wanted to use for my next search for the jewel of the Nile.
Now I was making decent enough money to give me a sizable income tax check to fix the roof of this vehicle. Even though the canvas like drop-top was of a tan and hunter green like the color, I decided to convert the drop-top roof into a jet black leathery like the top, and the combination looks suburban with one another.
So I put this sweet little sports car up for the winter and went to the mental health clinic called CSS on Wolf ledges hoping they could help me get some gainful employment. That they did, right back to a spot where my mother started in on my mental abilities making unfair comments acting like certain people that would say, “they were gonna but not now” like comments.
Now there had been other industries I wanted to work for as I did put some time into going to college. Even though I went to college, the dream of working in an office is now closed. Besides, I always wanted to work for Little Tikes to feel like an elf or Santa Clause, for instance. I figured that even though CSS and I did not see eye to eye all the time if they were going to an employment specialist for work, I might try it out.
It was through still yet another temp agency. However, it was right on time for my liking. First, they gave us a tour of the facility. Then they gave us an orientation to help break us in and make us feel comfortable. And from there, they gave us a start date and a magnetic clock in the card so we could keep track of our time.
Now my first night on the job was just like starting a new class in school. Once I left home, the drive was like any other drive where I had to be there at a particular time. Not one care other than how good it felt to be doing something positive with my life. I know one thing I like to drive to sound, so I placed one of my favorite radio stations on an adorable, comfortable listening level. I don’t recall what was playing on the tunes. However, I know I was mesmerized by the trip and the other vehicles as we drove up the highway to my first night on this job assignment.
I got closer memories of coming out here to drop my brother and sister in law off flooded my head and their kids I partook in helping watch over them for years. Up ahead is the driveway into the parking lot of this unique toy factory. I took a deep breath only to find myself driving past to see what vehicle types were in the lot.
Everything seemed reasonable, so I went down the road. I found a drive divine enough to pull in and turn around. Now I can smile as I feel a rush blow over my body from the inside and out. From the main road driving back to the parking lot was a curvy road filled with trees to my left. The parking lot with the building gave me such delight to park on a mythical night. I was walking to the door with thoughts of what I will see inside tonight.
I was there an hour early. The first door opened softly, then pulled itself shut once I crossed the threshold. The second door, I had to use the key card and down the long hall. I went to the break area with many tables and chairs lined up in the roles of two meals per two rolls.
The break room looked like a typical dining hall spread throughout the whole room. With several refrigerators for storage, I smile on my face with thoughts of bringing in a plated meal. Later, a laugh came about once I gazed upon all the different vending machines we had to choose.
Then that’s when it happened. This beautiful female comes walking gracefully with a certain amount of wit and charm in her sweet tight sky blue eyes, hair sandy like Blondie like fro, with a nice trenchant like coat covering that slim like the body of hers. I knew right then I had to walk upon her and ask her how she was doing? Not to mention letting her know that tonight was my first night here as I was very excited to be here as well.
She replies that she is doing well with a lovely smile, letting me know it was her first night. I was like hey wow, that is awesome to be starting on the same night with a pretty girl who has lovely hair. I can remember that smile she gave as she said tonight is a good night for her hair because her hair is usually nappy and uncontrolled. I told her I could not imagine that happening with a smile as I told her I needed a drink of soda pop and offered her one.
That was when he walked in as well. I liked the way he looked as he looked like a skinny redneck from hell. I found out later that was what he was. He walked upon us, and he spoke about how this was his first night here along with us, and how he had to take the bus in that the trip wore him out. Not to mention his daughter got hired today as well and will be starting to work with us tomorrow.
Now I have to be honest with you all. No matter what I do when I am with a female, there is always another guy around. I guess that is why I ended up in the night-line dating type services out there to enjoy one-on-one encounters with the felines of choice.
The time to enter the floor was coming quickly as me, and the redneck hung out with the beautiful Misses. Our supervisor’s assistant had come out saying all those here for their first night. Please stand before me. We were led to the time clock to slide our cards across the magnetic bar, then each one of us was given our work location.
Well, what do you all know? I was placed first at my location, then low and behold there she was again right next to me, smiling wide as hell. I looked right at her and said I am a business before pleasure type person, and I also have a landscape company to boot. She replied well. In that case, I might as well let me know that she was going through a divorce herself.
I was like, hmm, I am here to keep payments on my fire-bird and see us getting along very well. Our first night went well, as we were very close to hitting the quota on the swing line. As I have to tell you, I forgot how many swings we had to put out nightly. At the end of our shift, we granted each other a magnificent, sweet farewell.
All I can remember on the second night the rednecks’ daughter coming in with an ear to ear smile as her hair was as wavy as a pitch-black fire wavy type look. Right before the shift started, the redneck from hell and myself stood there as he said if anyone messed with his daughter, he would be shooting them on site. I was calm as I bellowed out yahoo and looked around the plant floor only to for the first time notice that there were so many more mighty elegant looking felines all about as well.
The third night is when the hell reached heaven for sure. That is when I have seen her come in then lean against the wall. Then income the redneck with a grunting smile asking if he and his very fine-looking daughter could catch a ride home at the end of the shift. As foul as this situation got, I didn’t care much about the dirty pool this man was playing.
All I could do is hold my head up and remember I had a few other felines I was working on already. Now myself folks around here in the northern region say I have a southern like draw in my speech pattern. I never noticed it, yet the females seem to cringe over it.
Before I get too deep, let’s back up a moment or two. My most extended term sweetheart lasted about six years during my teen years. I kept telling older people I was in love, although she was older, not to mention the response back was puppy love. When or not it being love or just puppy love, I still thought about her, and I have been single most of the time since we split up.
Don’t get me wrong though the years I have had a lot of one night stands along with several short term affairs. I’m guessing now that I have had more than my fair share of sweetie pies. It was to the point I went to the preacher of the Middle-bury Chapel for someone on one counseling session. So I could work on not just humanity, but my sanity.
I decided it would be a good idea to chat with the man of the clothes seeing as I had brought several felines to his stable already. I got to tell you how this adorable little firecracker came out of nowhere to the night services at our church. These services were actually from another forming preacher who was merging into our sanctuary.
She looks at me, then to an elderly bigger mamma type person to answer her question about her name now. She was so beautiful and divine when she spoke her name with a very pretty pink like tone to her precious skin I knew right then I would never forget the name, Brie. Now that name directly there is concise for Brianna, which is very mighty indeed.
Through my talks with the preacher about life in general, I guess I spoke mostly on females. Along with Brie came another well to do looking honey do to someone else who told me to back off. She already had many guys trying to get with her. I got to admit that it was nice seeing her break down over a breakup as I didn’t want to be the comeback get up and go guy for her. Now little Brie by this time has proven to be a mighty beautiful warrior of sorts by letting me know a lot about these other female faults as well.
There is not much I can remember about the other felines’ name. I don’t much, nor did I care at this time. I have too much going on for a feline of that nature. My sweet little heart took me away from the church building only to let out the most delightful smell on earth that only a real woman can create with just a thought.
Just let the truth be known that I had a lot of felines out there doing battle over myself. We were bonding across from the church under the tree. Two other felines come across, letting her know that I have several others in line from my deep past.
For the previous chapter, click here.
For the next chapter, click here.
For the first chapter, click here.
“amazon.com/author/polson-the-great-1970” check it out. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/ironic-love-affair-part-5-3fd2ef63a856 | ['Patrick Olson'] | 2020-08-28 07:14:23.517000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Social Media', 'Religion', 'Family', 'Lifestyle'] |
Top 10 UI/UX Design Instagram Accounts for Top Notch Design Inspiration | Designers from all over the world Tag there designs on @graphicdesignui and get featured on this account. A very good account to look at on a daily basis for UI inspiration.
Witty digital is a Digital Marketing Agency located in Israel. You will find very innovative design solution on their timeline.
Tubik is a design studio based in Ukraine. Check out their account for UI, UX, Logo, branding and there Work process. A very cool studio where any designer would love to work.
In Kem WD account you will find really creative UI work done by him. I really like his dark theme designs.
This is the place for who love paper wireframes. this account is loved by many professionals. | https://medium.com/freebiesmall/top-10-ui-ux-design-instagram-accounts-for-top-notch-design-inspiration-117bb9bd689 | [] | 2017-05-02 19:58:25.909000+00:00 | ['UI', 'Design', 'Behance', 'UX', 'Instagram'] |
Portrait, with Data | In the new gilded age of the twenty-first century artists are once again returning to rendering hyper-detailed, highly technical visions of the movers and shakers of our times. Image is everything. This time though, the stakes are a little different. Our digital lives have become the historical record that defines us, often without our explicit consent. As we toil away at being born, going to school, getting jobs, buying things and creating ever more data, the gods and goddesses of the digital world are curating their full-blooded portraits in a way that would make Sargent nod with glowing appreciation.
In her book, The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press, 2014) Judith Donath defines data portraits as “depictions of people made by visualizing data by and about them.” Unlike portraits of the past, data portraits don’t require direct human interaction between the artist who is creating the work, and the subject. It has become quite easy to craft an image of an individual by accessing their personal data, with, or without their permission.
DNA ‘portraits’ from Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions project (2012)
Take, for example Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions project. Finding and documenting found objects in the street, such as, hair, cigarette butts and chewing gum, Dewey-Hagborg extracted samples of DNA from those objects and sequenced it to sort for information about eye and hair color, ancestry and gender. Using specialized software, a digital facial approximation was produced from the genetic information, then fed to a 3D printer to make a portrait based solely on the DNA samples’ probable ratios. How accurately those portraits represent the people whose DNA was taken is not known. Through her work, Dewey-Hagborg asks us to become more aware of the use of biological surveillance and its growing impact on the increasingly fuzzy legal definitions of data ownership and indirectly, the potentially inaccurate representations that our personal data may offer about us.
Which one is the real Justin Beiber?
A different case is that of Justin Beiber’s Calvin Klein underwear ads. After images were initially released from an early 2015 photo shoot, a second image of The Beibs was released, purportedly an original, un-retouched image. The truth actually lay somewhere in the middle, in that the “un-retouched” version was an equally manipulated image made to show Bieber as less muscular and well-endowed than can be clearly seen in his own personal Instagram. Since photoshopping even Instagram images is fairly common, especially amongst celebrities, it seems clear the only way to determine Beiber’s genuine physique is to see him in the flesh, perhaps optimally in his Calvins.
Unfortunately, it is not only representations of our images which are being appropriated and used without our consent, and it isn’t just artists who wish to describe us to the world at large. Almost everyone has a credit score, which is a portrait in many ways, one, which in most cases, we haven’t any real control over. What do you look like to your bank, your mortgage lender or your potential employer? All of them have access to your data, and can create a story about your life, behaviors and practices based on their predictive models, which may, or may not be accurate to you.
What Crystal has to say about “Susan.” Would you agree?
Crystal, is a new app which “analyzes public data to tell you how you can expect any given person to behave, how he or she wants to be spoken to, and perhaps more importantly, what you can expect your relationship to be like.” Crystal uses algorithms to discern personality traits from a person’s communication style in their LinkedIn profile, emails or other public messages. Is it accurate? Who knows, but there are probably plenty of people who will defer to its algorithmic logic in preference over actual human interaction. Will we now have to become more responsive to algorithms, trying to guess which of our traits we most need to modify to present a more pleasing (or engineered) countenance? | https://medium.com/phase-change/portrait-with-data-b120e6e8f04a | ['Mrs Smith'] | 2020-05-09 10:17:20.896000+00:00 | ['Ideas', 'Identity', 'Data Visualization', 'Future'] |
The Lightning Network Rookie Guide | This article is part 1 of the new “Catching the BlockChain train” series: “The Lightning Network Rookie Guide”.
Oh my, a new series! Tell me more!
After five episodes about IPFS, it’s time for another exciting technology in blockchain world: Lightning Networks. From here on just Lightning Network (singular, I'll explain why later) or LN for short.
A quick test to see if you paid attention: LN . Did you expand this in your mind to Lightning Network ? Well done, you passed!
BTW if you missed the episodes on IPFS, start here or on hackernoon.
I like the idea to mix hands-on (playing with SW tools) with reading about and understanding the technology. This is reflected in the outline of this Rookie Guide*:
Play with the LN as an end user: this episode. Understanding the basics of the LN. Preparation: set up a Bitcoin full-node and a local block explorer. LN hands-on: installing LN nodes, more wallets, apps, buying a t-shirt on mainnet, etc. Understanding the LN better: diving into the white paper and the spec.
*) If the term rookie offends you: I’m talking about myself of course. I’m figuring this all out while I write these posts turning myself from a rookie into a beginner.
Satoshi’s Vision!
Before we start, here’s a glimpse of the genius of Satoshi Nakamoto: Satoshi’s Vision! (Payment Channels / LN). That was in 2010!
We have a long way to go before we understand his specific statement:
nTimeLock does the reverse. It’s an open transaction that can be replaced with new versions until the deadline. It can’t be recorded until it locks. The highest version when the deadline hits gets recorded. It could be used, for example, to write an escrow transaction that will automatically permanently lock and go through unless it is revoked before the deadline. The feature isn’t enabled or used yet, but the support is there so it could be implemented later.
but we’ll get there, one step at the time.
Apparently, he was at it again in 2013: This email, composed in April of 2013 by Mike Hearn, quotes Satoshi talking about what is now known as the #LightningNetwork.
What’s up with all the hype about the Lightning Network?
If you have been following Bitcoin tech, you are most likely aware of the Lightning Network. If not: it is a proposed solution to increase the scalability of the Bitcoin network by allowing “off-chain” transactions in a trustless way.
There has been a lot of talk about the LN lately, probably because there are a couple of implementations and it seems to work.
People are already using it on top of the main Bitcoin network. And three days ago the first LN node for mainnet was announced.
Here is a cool visualization of the current mainnet LN. When we are halfway this rookie guide I hope you and I to have our own node in there!
Now, why is the Lightning Network so exciting? I’m a fanboy for quite a while now, but this podcast with Elizabeth Stark and Andreas Antonopoulos got me really hooked: Let’s Talk Bitcoin! #357 Real Lightning with Elizabeth Stark.
I encourage you to listen to the whole podcast, but if you don’t, no worries, here are the points that stand out (IMHO at least):
Scalability improvements for Bitcoin: speedy and low-fee transactions as Bitcoin was intended/advertised are now possible. Micropayments: for the first time in history there will be technology that makes small, cross-border, almost fee-free, payments possible. Interoperability: one LN for all blockchains. Just as the internet is a network of networks, we can see the LN as the blockchain of blockchains. Standardization is underway so that the different blockchains can work against a common interface. These specs are named BOLTs (like BIPs for Bitcoin). Cross chain swaps: this interoperability facilitates atomic swaps from, e.g., Bitcoin to Ethereum or any blockchain that interfaces with this overlaying LN. Genuinely decentralized exchanges will then be possible. Application layer: on top of the LN (layer two above Bitcoin e.a. which represent layer one) there is layer three which will be the application layer. Here is where the zapps or lapps live. Developer platform: the LN opens up a whole world of possibilities for developers. The LND implementation offers a gRPC interface that makes writing (z|l)apps easier. We will dive into that later for sure! Developer community: there are 100s of developers active in this space, so let’s hurry up and become one of them. They hang out in the Lightning Labs slack and get their documentation here.
Now if that doesn’t get you excited… (it probably means you have a fun and meaningful life).
OK then, let’s see how it looks like from the end-user perspective…
Lightning Network wallets
Before diving into the workings of the LN protocol and before setting up our own LN node let’s try out some wallets that are available right now:
Lighting Wallet HTLC.me Eclair Wallet Zap Desktop Wallet Lightning Desktop App
First get some testnet bitcoin
We use the wallets on the bitcoin testnet, so to play along you’ll need some testnet bitcoin (tBTC). As in the old days for mainnet bitcoin, you can get them at a faucet.
This faucet and this one also worked for me. If you have trouble getting testnet coins, please tweet to me, and I’ll send you some.
Note that testnet addresses have m , n , or 2 as a prefix.
Testnet bitcoins haven’t (and never will have) any value, but it still feels exciting to see a free 200.000.000 satoshis coming in :)
Lightning Wallet
This Lightning Wallet is for Android only; you can download it here: Bitcoin + Lightning Wallet.
I love this wallet as it is a one-guy project in the person of Anton Kumaigorodskiy and it has some innovative features.
This wallet has an excellent online user manual, let’s walk through it:
Setting up a Bitcoin wallet: this app is very convenient as it is an SPV Bitcoin node with a Lightning node built on top of it. Follow the instructions in the manual and send some testnet coins to your wallet. Note that you need a wait for the transaction to be confirmed a couple of times to proceed.
Next: Using the Lightning wallet.
Select the Lightning tab and click Open new channel . Now select a channel or search for one of the recommended channels by Anton. I picked oh hi mark as it made me feel very welcome. Then fund the channel (hey, you can fund the channel with a sub-satoshi resolution!) and wait for two confirmations.
These confirmations can take a while as it is an actual bitcoin transaction. The amount you funded determines the maximum of the sum of the payments done through this channel. We’ll dive into all this in the next episode of this guide.
As soon as we have an active payment channel, we can buy something.
My first purchase was an article at yalls.org for 100 test-satoshi, then left a comment for 21 test-satoshi. Micropayments are a reality!
I also bought a Blockaccino at starblocks. A few more places where you can spend tBTC here.
What happens here is that the payment is routed over a series of payment channels through a number of nodes. And all in a trustless way, with super low fees and very very fast. Pretty amazing no?
Watch the whole process in this Mobile Lightning wallet demo.
Anton also created another useful video: When Lightning goes wrong. It describes the various scenarios when channels are closed or when payments get stuck. These are the scenarios he describes:
A mutual (cooperative) closing transaction: both peers of the channel agree to close the channel, and the remaining balance is settled on the blockchain without any delays. Both peers need to be online for this to work. Forced channel closing if a peer does not respond or becomes uncooperative. The peer that forces the channel to close is “punished” by a very long waiting time for their bitcoin to become spendable. Your peer wants to steal from you by sending a previous commitment transaction to the blockchain. We see that the peer is punished for that and gets less than he would have had he played by the rules.
We’ll find out in the next episode how all this is accomplished.
A last cool feature of this wallet consists of two parts: the app on your phone and a server that offloads some of the work from the mobile app. It’s named Olympus, and there’s a video about it here.
To receive a Lightning Network payment, we need another peer so let’s move on to the next LN wallet…
HTLC.me
HTLC.me is the easiest way to get started, as you don’t need to install anything and it gives you a bit tBTC to play with.
From the user’s perspective this is not a wallet, but a centralized front-end to a Lightning Network node. It keeps track of your balance, and you can access it by applying the recovery secret they provide the first time you activate your “wallet”.
Anyway, now that I created a wallet on HTLC.me and funded it with some tBTC, I can use it to test the receiving function on Anton’s Lightning Wallet:
From Anton’s Lightning Wallet user guide:
Receiving Lightning funds In order to receive Lightning payments, some conditions must be met: Nothing can be received immediately after creating a new payment channel, as ‘room’ for incoming funds has to be made by spending some funds first. A payment channel can be thought of as a full bottle of water: in order to pour something in one first has to pour something out. Each channel implicitly contains a reserve which is unspendable and typically takes about 1% of the channel’s capacity. You must spend that reserve before receiving is allowed. Unspendable channel reserve is the reason you see a negative receive limit when a new channel is full. It indicates how much you need to spend before anything can be received through the channel. Every payment request is disposable, they can’t be fulfilled multiple times. So you will need to issue a new individual payment request for every incoming payment you wish to receive. Your Lightning wallet needs to be online in order to receive funds.
Next to that, there is also a risk receiving payments on a mobile app that is not always online. The peer can attempt to steal from you by sending a previous commitment transaction. Your LN client can only correct this if it is online at least once per day.
After making some space in the channel from my mobile app, I gave it a shot. Although the steps are very smooth, the actual payment failed as HTLC.me couldn’t establish a connection to my mobile wallet.
Let’s try again with another wallet!
Eclair Wallet
The Eclair wallet is also for Android only. It was announced in this blog post.
It works more or less the same as Anton’s Lightning Wallet. One difference is that it doesn’t allow receiving tBTC as explained in the announcement above.
The Eclair Wallet exposes some of the technical details like the Node id (Lightning Network’s public identifier) of the wallet and the connected peers. Node addresses have the form of some-public-key@ip-address:port , e.g., 03dc39d7f43720c2c0f86778dfd2a77049fa4a44b4f0a8afb62f3921567de41375@213.133.99.89:9735 .
Speaking of peers, the Eclair wallet allows connecting to multiple peers (aka more than one payment channel). If you know the Node id you can look it up in this brilliant explorer: https://explorer.acinq.co/#/n/03dc39d7f43720c2c0f86778dfd2a77049fa4a44b4f0a8afb62f3921567de41375.
From the wallet, you can scan that Node id and add it as another peer.
Let me sit down a bit to let this sink in… It is a cliche, but we are living in the future. Visa et al. should be scared.
Now, let’s try again if we can receive with Anton’s Lightning Wallet. I have both wallets connected to the same node to make it a bit easier (is it?). Unfortunately, we have no influence which channel the Eclair wallet uses.
A little while later I wake up in the now: one forever pending payment and another one failed. Visa can breath normal again.
Let’s try with another wallet, maybe we have more luck there.
Zap Desktop Wallet
The Zap wallet is a different beast; it uses a full lnd node.
This wallet was first announced in this article: Announcing Zap: A Lightning Network Wallet. It has an embedded video with a walk-through that gives a good idea how it all works. But the better option is to download the wallet and play along! (BTW be warned this app is not ready for real use, it uses all CPU now and then, so only proceed if you like the sound of your computer’s fans).
Download the latest release for your platform here: releases.
When running it the first time it takes a long time before you can use it. While it syncs, you can watch a couple of video’s: Zap Lightning Network Wallet Tutorial.
I find this wallet not as intuitive as the other ones I played with, but it compensates this with the fact it is powered by a full lightning node. That hopefully means we can finally see how receiving tBTC works.
Another try to pay from Zap to Anton’s app failed again, and payments to the Zap wallet from either mobile app also resulted in a RouteNotFound . Not sure what is going on here, but receiving money is harder than spending it, just like in real life.
Let’s move on to our last wallet…
Lightning Desktop App
The latest release of this wallet (still massively in development) can be downloaded here.
It was announced here: Announcing Our Lightning Desktop App, Now Available for Testing.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work on my Mac. I created an issue, so when things get fixed (or they point me out what is wrong on my side) I’ll update this article.
First Conclusions
Making payments is unreal, fast and cheap!
Adding a peer node by reading a QR-code on the Lightning Network Explorer is like magic!
Receiving payments works very smooth if it worked… All my attempts failed, but OTOH, wallets that are not always online shouldn’t receive payments in the first place. We have full nodes running on a server for that. Soon to be seen on this blog!
Of all the wallets both mobile wallets are my favorite, as it is more natural to pay with a QR scan from your phone than copy-pasting payment requests.
The next episode will be a bit less hands-on. I will dive deeper into the LN protocol, and hopefully, I can share that with you in an easy to understand way. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-lightning-network-rookie-guide-9fd04468316f | ['Mark Pors'] | 2018-03-19 11:28:46.032000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Lightning', 'Lightning Network', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin'] |
Mathematical Set Operations in Python | Let's Look at the Mathematical Operations Supported by the Set Object
union()
update()
intersection()
intersection_update()
difference()
difference_update()
symmetric_difference()
symmetric_difference_update()
isdisjoint()
issubset()
issuperset()
Set operations can be done in two ways. By using the method or by using an operator.
‘union()’
Return a new set with elements from the set and the other . It’s performed by union() or by using the | operator
Syntax
union(*others)
set | other | ...
‘union()’
Example 1: Find the union of two sets — A and B
It’ll return a new set containing elements from set A and set B . But it won’t repeat elements. All elements in the set are unique.
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={2,4,6,8}
print (A.union(B))#Output:{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8}
print (A|B)#Output:{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8}
Example 2: Find the union of more than two sets
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={2,4,6,8,10}
C={1,3,5,7,9}
print (A|B|C)#Output:{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}
print (A.union(B,C))#Output:{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}
Difference between the union() method and the | operator:
union() : It’ll accept any iterable as an argument
: It’ll accept any iterable as an argument | operator: It’ll accept only a set as an argument. Otherwise, it’ll raise a TypeError .
Example 3: Giving iterable as an argument in the union() method
A={1,2,3,4,5}
#iterable is given as list
print (A.union([2,4,6]))#Output:{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}
#iterable is given as tuple
print (A.union((2,4,6)))#Output:{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}
#iterable is given as range object
print (A.union(range(5,10)))#Output:{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}
#iterable is given as a dictionary
print (A.union({'a':6,'b':7}))#Output:{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 'b', 'a'}
Example 4: Giving iterable as an argument for the | operator
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B=[1,2,3]
print (A|B)
#Output:TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for |: 'set' and 'list'
‘update()’
It updates the set, adding elements from the other . But it won’t repeat elements. All elements in the set are unique. It’s performed by using update() or by using the |= operator. The return type is None . It’ll modify the original set itself.
Syntax
update(*others)
set |= other | ...
Example 1: Calling update() between two sets — A and B
It’ll update set A by adding elements found in both sets.
#update()
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={4,5,6,7,8}
print (A.update(B)) #Output: None
print (A) #Output: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8} A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={4,5,6,7,8}
A|=B
print (A) #Output: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}
Example 2: Calling update() between more than two sets
#update()
A={1,2,3}
B={3,4,5}
C={5,6,7}
print (A.update(B,C)) #Output: None
print (A) #Output: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}
A={1,2,3}
B={3,4,5}
C={5,6,7}
A|=B|C
print (A) #Output: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}
Difference between the update() method and the |= operator:
update() : It’ll accept any iterable as an argument
: It’ll accept any iterable as an argument |= operator: It’ll accept only a set as an argument. Otherwise, it’ll raise a TypeError .
Example 3: Giving iterable as an argument in the update() method
A={1,2,3}
#iterable is given as list
print (A.update([2,3,4]))#Output:None
print (A)#Output:{1,2,3,4}
#iterable is given as tuple
A={1,2,3}
A.update((2,3,4))
print (A)#Output:{1,2,3,4}
#iterable is given as range object
A={1,2,3}
A.update(range(2,5))
print (A)#Output:{1,2,3,4}
#iterable is given as a dictionary
A={1,2,3}
A.update({2:'a',3:'b'})
print (A) #Output:{1, 2, 3}
Example 4: Giving iterable as an argument for the |= operator
#iterable is given as tuple
A={1,2,3}
B=(3,4)
A|=B
#Output:TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for |=: 'set' and 'tuple'
‘intersection()’
Return a new set with elements common to the set and the other . It’s performed by intersection() or by using the & operator.
Syntax
intersection(*others)
set & other & ...
‘intersection()’
Example 1: Find the intersection of two sets — A and B
It’ll return a new set containing common elements from the set A and set B .
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={2,4,6,8}
#intersection is performed by intersection() method or & operator
print (A.intersection(B))#Output:{2,4}
print (A&B)#Output:{2,4}
Example 2: Find the intersection of more than two sets
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={2,4,6,8,10}
C={2,4}
print (A&B&C)#Output:{2,4}
print (A.intersection(B,C))#Output:{2,4}
Difference between the intersection() method and the & operator:
intersection() : It’ll accept any iterable as an argument
: It’ll accept any iterable as an argument & operator: It’ll accept only a set as an argument. Otherwise, it’ll raise a TypeError .
Example 3: Giving iterable as an argument in the intersection() method
A={1,2,3,4,5}
#iterable is given as list
print (A.intersection([1,4,6]))#Output:{1,4}
#iterable is given as tuple
print (A.intersection((2,4,6)))#Output:{2,4}
#iterable is given as range object
print (A.intersection(range(5,10)))#Output:{5}
#iterable is given as a dictionary
print (A.intersection({1:'a','b':7}))#Output:{1}
Example 4: Giving iterable as an argument for the & operator
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B=[1,2,3]
print (A&B)
#Output:TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for &: 'set' and 'list'
’intersection_update()’
It updates the set, keeping only elements found in it and the other . It’s performed by using intersection_update() or by using the &= operator. The return type is None . It’ll modify the original set itself.
Syntax
intersection_update(*others)
set &= other & …
Example 1: Find the intersection_update() between two sets — A and B
It’ll update set A by keeping only the elements found in both of the sets.
#intersection_update()
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={4,5,6,7,8}
print (A.intersection_update(B)) #Output: None
print (A) #Output: {4,5} A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={4,5,6,7,8}
A&=B
print (A) #Output: {4,5}
‘difference()’
Returns a new set with elements in the set that aren’t in the other . It’s performed by difference() or by using the - operator.
Syntax
difference(*others)
set - other - ...
‘difference()’
Example 1: Find the difference between two sets — A and B
It’ll return a new set containing elements from set A not in set B.
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={2,4,6,8}
print (A.difference(B))#Output:{1,3,5}
print (A-B)#Output:{1,3,5}
Example 2: Find the difference between more than two sets
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={2,4,6,8,10}
C={2,3}
print (A-B-C)#Output:{1,5}
print (A.difference(B,C))#Output:{1,5}
Difference between the difference() method and the - operator:
difference() : It’ll accept any iterable as an argument
: It’ll accept any iterable as an argument - operator: It’ll accept only a set as an argument. Otherwise, it’ll raise a TypeError .
Example 3: Giving iterable as an argument in the difference() method
A={1,2,3,4,5}
#iterable is given as list
print (A.difference([1,2,3]))#Output:{4,5}
#iterable is given as tuple
print (A.difference((1,2,3)))#Output:{4,5}
#iterable is given as range object
print (A.difference(range(1,4)))#Output:{4,5}
#iterable is given as a dictionary
print (A.difference({1:'a',2:'b',3:'c'}))#Output:{4,5}
Example 4: Giving iterable as an argument for the - operator
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B=[1,2,3]
print (A-B)
#Output:TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'set' and 'list'
‘difference_update()’
Removes the element from the set that’s also present in the other set. It’s performed by using the -= operator or by using the difference_update() method. The return type is None . It’ll modify the original set itself.
Syntax
difference_update(*others)
set -= other | ...
‘difference_update()’
Example 1: Find the difference_update() between two sets — A and B
It’ll update set A by removing elements that are also present in set B .
A={1,2,3,4,5}
B={2,4,6}
#Return type is None.
print (A.difference_update(B))#Output:None
#It will update the original set
print (A) #Output: {1,3,5}
# difference_update by using -= operator
A-=(B)
print (A) #Output: {1,3,5}
Example 2: Find the difference_update between more than two sets
#difference_update() will modify the original set.
A={1,2,3}
B={1}
C={2}
#Return type is None.
print (A.difference_update(B,C))#Output:None
#It will update the original set
print (A) #Output: {3}
# difference_update by using -= operator
A={1,2,3}
B={1}
C={2}
A-=B|C
print (A) #Output: {3}
Difference between the difference_update() method and the
-= operator:
difference_update() : It’ll accept any iterable as an argument
: It’ll accept any iterable as an argument -= operator : It’ll accept only a set as an argument. Otherwise, it’ll raise a TypeError .
Example 3: Giving iterable as an argument in the difference_update() method
#iterable is given as list
A={1,2,3}
B=[1]
print (A.difference_update(B))#Output:None
print (A)#Output:{2,3}
Example 4: Giving iterable as an argument for -= operator
A={1,2,3}
B=[1]
A-=B
print (A)
#Output: TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -=: 'set' and 'list'
‘symmetric_difference()’
Return a new set with elements in either the set or other but not both. It’s performed by symmetric_difference() or by using the ^ operator.
Syntax
symmetric_difference(other)
set ^ other
symmetric_difference()
Example 1: Find the symmetric_difference between two sets — A and B
It’ll return a new set containing elements from either set A and set B but not elements found in both sets.
A={1,2}
B={2,3}
print (A.symmetric_difference(B))#Output:{1,3}
print (A^B)#Output:{1,3}
Example 2: symmetric_difference is only performed between two sets
The symmetric_difference() method isn’t supported by multiple sets. If more than two sets are given, it’ll raise a TypeError .
A={1,2}
B={2,3,5}
C={3,4}
print (A.symmetric_difference(B,C))#Output:TypeError: symmetric_difference() takes exactly one argument (2 given)
But we can find the symmetric_difference of multiple sets using ^ .
A={1,2}
B={2,3,5}
C={3,4}
print (A^B^C)#Output:{1,4,5}
The difference between the symmetric_difference method and the & operator:
symmetric_difference() : It’ll accept any iterable as an argument. This method doesn’t allow for multiple sets.
: It’ll accept any iterable as an argument. This method doesn’t allow for multiple sets. ^ operator: It’ll accept only a set as an argument. Otherwise, it’ll raise a TypeError . By using the ^ operator, you can find the symmetric_difference between multiple sets.
Example 3: Giving iterable as an argument in the symmetric_difference method
#iterable is given as list
A={1,2,3}
B=[1]
print (A.symmetric_difference(B))#Output:{2,3}
#iterable is given as tuple
A={1,2,3}
B=(1,)
print (A.symmetric_difference(B))#Output:{2,3}
#iterable is given as range object
A={1,2,3}
B=range(2)
print (A.symmetric_difference(B))#Output:{2,3}
Example 4: Giving iterable as an argument for the ^ operator
A={1,2,3}
B=[1]
A^B
print (A) #Output: TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for ^: 'set' and 'list'
‘symmetric_difference_update()’
Updates the set, keeping only elements found in either set but not in both. It’s performed by using symmetric_difference_update() or by using the ^= operator. The return type is None . It’ll modify the original set itself.
Syntax
symmetric_difference_update(other)
set ^= other
Example 1: Find the symmetric_difference_update() between two sets — A and B
It will update set A by keeping only elements found in either set but not in both. | https://medium.com/better-programming/mathematical-set-operations-in-python-e065aac07413 | ['Indhumathy Chelliah'] | 2020-08-27 12:07:25.096000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Python', 'DevOps', 'Programming', 'Python3'] |
3 Reasons Why ‘Play’ Is Not a Luxury | 1. Play Strengthens Survival Skills
The first reason why we play is that it strengthens our ability to survive. Karl Groos was a leading pioneer in applying evolutionary theory to the study of play and contended that “higher beings”, or mammals, needed to practice behaviors and excercise their bodies in order to become competent adults. For example, his theory could explain why Alaskan bear cubs that play more are also more likely to survive the winter, as was found in a study by Fegan and Fegan (2009). This research suggested that the cubs were able to develop the physical and emotional skills critical to survival.
Groos’s theory also explains why species that rely more on learning than instinct play more than instinct-dependent species. He also wrote that humans practice skills specific to our species; for example, many of our children’s games exercise our mental and language capacities. Personally, as a kid, I remember constantly wanting to play a memory card game, which involved flipping cards laid out in a grid and remembering their matches faster than my competitor (usually my grandma). This was from the time I was five or six. In fact, many of my favorite “active” childhood games involved some sort of mental strategy (e.g., Capture the Flag, Hide and Go Seek, Marco Polo, etc.). Humans, according to Groos, use play to practice the skills we need later in life, and that includes having a robust mental capacity.
After reading about Karl Groos’s theory, I now wonder if reading fiction also fits within it. For both children and adults, reading fiction might be a kind of play that exercises empathy and emotional capacity, which are critical to thriving as humans. For example, a squirrel doesn’t need to understand how another squirrel might react based on his complex emotional state, but humans sure do. Like Groos said, we rely on learning and processing more than instinct, and that learning is done through our real as well as imaginative experiences. | https://medium.com/curious/3-reasons-why-play-is-not-a-luxury-f2400e95a53f | ['Katie Martin'] | 2020-11-03 13:26:18.624000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Humanity', 'Innovation', 'Wellness', 'Excercise'] |
Star Wars: Squadrons has me Feeling like a Kid Again | We are a squad of five mismatched starfighters: a zippy A-Wing; a ponderous but powerful Y-Wing; and three X-Wings, the most ubiquitous ship in the Rebel fleet. We are the very definition of ragtag. We form up as we move to engage the Imperial TIEs even now screaming towards us.
I’m in an X-Wing (naturally). I double-check that my wings are locked into attack position, and glance at the astromech through the rear glass. I’m ready for battle.
The only thing missing is the call to report in. You know the one.
Red leader: All wings report in. Red 10 standing by. Red 7 standing by.
I so desperately want this exchange at this moment that I call for it myself, speaking to myself, and supply all the call signs. I could brave the wilds of Xbox Live voice chat, I suppose, but some dangers are better left alone.
If the game had a canned bit of dialogue in which all pilots checked in, it would be nearly perfect. That, and perhaps some dew-behind-the-ears remark about the size of an Imperial installation (lookit the size of that thing!).
For everything I love about A New Hope, one of my absolute favorite parts is the dogfight that kicks off the climax. It is frenetic and exciting and just plain cool.
It’s therefore no coincidence that my favorite part of the Battlefront games was the space combat. Star Wars: Squadrons takes that formula and turns it up to 11. For one, Squadrons eliminates external views and puts players right in the cockpit. It further ups the immersion by introducing a number of systems to make gameplay fiddly enough to evoke the real thing. You can swap power between shields, engines, and lasers on a moment by moment basis. You can angle deflector shields to the front or back. And, naturally, you can punch the throttle for a temporary speed boost. Ships can be upgraded with new engines, different hulls, or several varieties of weaponry, each with its own pros and cons.
The included campaign is fine but mostly a long tutorial for the main event: turning other players into space dust. As a lifelong Star Wars fan, few things are as thrilling as weaving through space debris while chasing enemy starfighters — and trying to evade pursuit of my own.
The move to limit each side to only 5 ships makes dogfighting a more intense dance than what Battlefront offered. You are much less likely to be blasted out of the sky within moments of spawning. And with the ability to boost shields and temporarily zip out of danger, each life tends to last longer. The result: games are more drawn out and deliberate, with the decision to prioritize one subsystem over another having real consequences. While not a true simulation, it’s no longer pure arcade either.
Squadrons also launches with support for VR.
I always knew Star Wars would be the avenue through which VR would finally enter my life. Getting a PlayStation VR has suddenly become a major priority. Just in time for Christmas! | https://medium.com/fan-fare/all-wings-report-in-31e036ddc8d9 | ['Eric Pierce'] | 2020-10-14 11:09:00.018000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Film', 'Movies', 'Star Wars', 'Writing'] |
Low tech, high risk: what’s behind the biggest misinformation threats | “If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the ******* window and find out which is true,” Jonathan Foster, a lecturer at Sheffield University, once said.
But that is not enough anymore, according to Jenni Sargent, managing director of First Draft. At our latest News Impact Summit on “Covering Politics in a Misinformation Age”, she explained that in today’s media environment, journalists need to investigate if the rain could be fake, learn how to verify fake rain, find out who created it, if it’s part of a coordinated effort of fake rainmakers, investigate what their motives may be, and so on…
In other words, news organisations need to fight misinformation to (re-)gain trust from readers. To find out more, we turned to leading experts in the field for a full day of knowledge-sharing.
Here’s what we learned:
Misinformation is a global, growing phenomenon
Journalists worldwide are targeted by people who deliberately make up false stories. Many newsrooms are not equipped to counter their manipulation tactics — especially at critical moments, like elections, social unrest, extreme weather events, and terrorist attacks.
Example: Are these really images of the Hong Kong demonstrations?
Misinformation is a powerful weapon. It can lead to apathy, disengagement, and distrust, according to Scott Hale, director of research at Meedan. “It can interfere in democracy by suppressing people to vote or influencing public opinion, cause economic harm, and even risk of death.”
Example: The fake cancer cure that circulated in private Facebook groups.
False context is the main threat
Visual content is particularly prone to be used to mislead, as it can spread easily on social media as it tends to elicit an emotional response. That’s why politicians have been using images for a long time and will continue to do so.
Example: Nigel Farage’s provocative use of an anti-immigrant poster.
New technology has driven the proliferation of dangerously deceptive deepfakes — videos that make it look as if a person said something they didn’t actually say. While this new phenomenon is seen as a huge political threat, it’s not the main problem.
Example: You won’t believe what Obama says in this video!
“A much bigger concern is the use of low tech unaltered images wrapped in a misleading context,” said Farida Vis, director of the Visual Social Media Lab, “especially in countries where media literacy is low and where these images circulate in closed messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram.”
Example: This man wearing an ISIS (Daesh) flag in Paris is not what it seems.
De-contextualised images and videos are very easy to produce and quick to spread, according to Guillaume Daudin, who is leading AFP Fact Check. “It keeps doing a lot of damage, far more than the alleged deepfake threat, which is not having any consequence for the moment,” Guillaume said.
Example: Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau did not convert to Islam
Craig Silverman, Media Editor at BuzzFeed News at the News Impact Summit in Lyon.
Disinformation is a money-making business
“It’s not just politicians we should be worried about,” said Craig Silverman, the media editor at BuzzFeed News, explaining how the worlds of for-profit and political disinformation are intertwined. Here are some striking examples:
Spammers often spread political disinformation as it’s a very effective way to turn their spam operations into a profitable business. “If running political stories gets them clicks, they’ll do it,” said Craig.
Professional scammers and spammers offer their sophisticated media manipulation services to politicians, some even have a detailed brochure. “We’ve seen a large growth in the amount of for-hire, for-profit disinformation operations,” said Craig.
The US is seeing a surge of local news sites, run by political activists masquerading as journalists. They publish legitimate stories, but their goal is to build an audience ahead of the 2020 elections to later push political messages.
A recent NYT-article revealed Russia’s new strategy to rent people’s Facebook accounts for media manipulation. This innovative tactic is the political version of a successful money-making scam that runs fake celebrity adds on people’s facebook accounts to make money.
Jenni Sargent, Managing Director of First Draft at the News Impact Summit in Lyon.
What can platforms do?
“Platforms need to create fair and clear policies and then actually enforce them in a consistent and transparent way,” said Craig.
Platforms can warn users of content that is known to be false, limit the algorithms, take down content, ban offenders or — as Twitter recently announced — ban political ads altogether.
“These measures are useful, but we need to be aware that the platforms are incredibly connected,” said Scott, “taking the content of one platform doesn’t remove it from the conversation, it simply drives it to other places online.”
It’s more difficult to research and deal with suspicious content when it circulates on encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram, where even the platforms don’t know what is being discussed.
What can journalists do?
There are numerous tools available to make the verification process more efficient. Journalists can also go beyond fact-checking to investigate context, encourage offline debate and/or collaborate to promote accurate reporting:
Verify, verify, verify tools — AFP Factual’s InVID verification plug-in allows journalists to analyse comments, cut video into snippets, zoom in on images, do advanced Twitter searches, check for modified metadata, and see if images have been photoshopped. Additionally, you can use tools like Google’s reverse image search, TinEye, and Yandex, which is an excellent tool for facial recognition and identifying landscapes.
AFP Factual’s InVID verification plug-in allows journalists to analyse comments, cut video into snippets, zoom in on images, do advanced Twitter searches, check for modified metadata, and see if images have been photoshopped. Additionally, you can use tools like Google’s reverse image search, TinEye, and Yandex, which is an excellent tool for facial recognition and identifying landscapes. Context, please! — First Draft’s visual verification guide helps journalists run five quick checks on an image that will save time and “potentially embarrassment”: Do you have the original image, when was it taken, where, when, and why? The Visual Social Media Lab expanded this guide with a 20 questions framework that goes beyond mere verification to interrogate the context of a social media image.
First Draft’s visual verification guide helps journalists run five quick checks on an image that will save time and “potentially embarrassment”: Do you have the original image, when was it taken, where, when, and why? The Visual Social Media Lab expanded this guide with a 20 questions framework that goes beyond mere verification to interrogate the context of a social media image. Weaken polarisation off-line — My Country Talks is a Tinder for politics that brings people with opposing views together in real life to discuss societal issues. A study has shown that this experience reduces prejudice, increases empathy, trust in others, and the belief in social cohesion. ”A two-hour conversation between people with completely different political views is enough to weaken polarisation,” said one of the researchers.
— My Country Talks is a Tinder for politics that brings people with opposing views together in real life to discuss societal issues. A study has shown that this experience reduces prejudice, increases empathy, trust in others, and the belief in social cohesion. ”A two-hour conversation between people with completely different political views is enough to weaken polarisation,” said one of the researchers. Explore the dark side — DROG’s Bad News game puts you in the shoes of a fake-news creator to understand their powerful tactics. Build your army of trolls to spread conspiracies to influence the public debate. A great experience for journalists and readers to strengthen media literacy that increases “psychological resistance” to fake news, according to a study published by the University of Cambridge.
Participants of the News Impact Summit in Lyon.
There are also many opportunities for journalists to work together if and when appropriate to fight misinformation, for example: | https://medium.com/we-are-the-european-journalism-centre/low-tech-high-risk-whats-behind-the-biggest-misinformation-threats-16966ad095c3 | ['Ingrid Cobben'] | 2019-11-22 10:59:50.069000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Misinformation', 'Insights', 'Fake News', 'Media'] |
Write Better JavaScript by Separating Side Effects From Logic | Write Better JavaScript by Separating Side Effects From Logic
When the logic is pure, it’s easier to understand and test
Image credit: Author
The code in the software systems we write every day creates side effects.
Some of the side effects it creates are permanent, such as creating records in the databases and modifying file systems. Others are temporary, such as updating the user interface, printing to console, or caching information in the memory. Lighting up a smart lamp or launching a rocket into space are also side effects.
A software system with no side effects would probably have no value. Even if it calculates the meaning of life, it can’t communicate without creating a side effect. Such a system would be a black box where no one knows what’s happening inside.
But side effects also make the code harder to reason about. Functional programming (FP) aims to minimize side effects as much as possible.
How are we going to create side effects in our JavaScript code?
This article will show you the transformation of a simple validation function with side effects to a more pure, functional version. I will delay the side effects as late as possible to achieve that. Through this example, I aim to show you the pattern to use in your everyday code.
Let’s start. | https://medium.com/better-programming/write-better-javascript-by-separating-side-effects-from-logic-b6f3f1d3ef4d | ['Ekrem Aktaş'] | 2020-10-13 15:53:42.449000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Functional Programming', 'Programming'] |
How to save UX for mobile.. These days everyone uses smartphones… | These days everyone uses smartphones, which have become rather large computer screens. They come with a wide range of new and innovative apps. We have to try and find solutions that match these apps to large smartphone screens.
That sounds obvious. But. One thing seems stuck in an Older Age. The basic mobile UX principles. We, designers keep designing these fascinating new day-to-day solutions in ‘pocket’ sizes.
And doing so, we keep holding on to what we know and what (we think) our users know.
No new advances are made in mobile UX. Not on a large significant scale at least.
Sidenote: Skeuomorphism, Neumorphism, Glassmorphism are dribbble based UI trends that are not UX and even make UX worse on most occasions. And thus can not be seen as an “advancement” in UX.
Yes, we do create new technologies, but no new advances in personality and what is actually improving the users’ experience on a basic UX level.
The biggest and easiest example of this is the continued use of the basic hamburger menu for important features. Furthermore, we also use the mobile header for other features. Instagram for example uses it now to make a post, share a post, and direct messaging.
This is deadly wrong and bad for user engagement.
Why do we do this? Why do mobile UX designers, including myself, keep using these old basic principles? Because it is easy and it is “What the users know” because “Everyone else does it”.
The hamburger was a quick and easy solution when we needed to put away large quantities of information with limited screen space. And I do believe it still has its rightful place within websites and desktop apps.
(Read more about the origin of the hamburger here)
Back to the observation mentioned above: people have larger and larger and larger phones. Now, it is incredibly difficult to reach those header positions on such large phones while using one hand.
We all know the thumb range in mobile UX, but no one actually seems to take this into account. Apps keep putting important features in the ‘reach’ area of this thumb range. | https://uxplanet.org/how-to-save-ux-on-mobile-b805ba5ba850 | ['Evert Martin'] | 2020-12-26 12:12:31.293000+00:00 | ['Mobile', 'UX Design', 'Design', 'UX', 'UX Research'] |
Before Getting Back Together With Your Ex | “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them." -Andy Bernard, The Office
Through the Red Tape
The thing is, when we’re caught up in the moment, things are seen as subjective and skewed in our favor and towards a favorable outcome. Hindsight has a way of putting things into perspective and where objectivity is gained.
For example, we may want to believe we shared a rare, Consummate Love with an ex and may want to blow up their phone or email with messages reaching out to them. And, because hindsight may be 20/20; it may be less forgiving — where we’re not overlooking past pain or betrayal out of missing 'the good old days’.
With newfound self-aawareness and objectivity comes an appreciation for what an ex taught us, or the personal growth gained in the process.
But, do these insights point towards giving an old relationship a new chance?
The Verdict
I won’t give you a straight answer.
Because, I can’t.
There’s so many variables in play with everyone’s situations. But, here’s to arriving at your own conclusion based on your own honest assessment.
We know there’s no such thing as a ‘perfect’ relationship, with a ‘perfect’ partner, where everything is….’perfect’. It’s these types of false expectations and idealizations that prevent the love many of us want. So, it becomes a matter of how much imperfection we’re willing — or able — to accept.
By imperfections: Have they evolved and grown, or did they just “move on”? Have you? Are you both at a place of accepting your part in the fallout the first time around, and if so what’s going to be different this time around?
There’s a difference between imperfections and character. No one is perfect. What separates human imperfection from character is empathy. We can have amazing memories with an ex, where imperfections were met with an honest self-assessment; where partners turned to each other for support and direction. And where you both hacked through growth, and probably a few tears in the process.
When empathy is lacking, so is an authentic relationship. It doesn’t matter how many ways a lack of empathy may try to get flipped into humor, excuses, shoulder shrugs or rationalizations; if a person doesn’t want to feel, you can’t make them.
How the relationship started, is a good predictor of how it ended, or how it may end again if nothing has significantly changed. The hottest of beginnings always have the coldest of goodbyes.
When relationships are based on living in the moment, there’s no attention or investment given to long-term. When the focus is on now, so is commitment.
These relationships can start out as a full-throttle adrenaline hit, then fizzle to indifference and a calloused goodbye.
On the flipside, authentic relationships build over time and are based on the same attention and investment that those living for the moment aren’t as concerned about. Authentic relationships are about living in the present and planning for the future.
Mutual respect and boundaries are important in any relationship, but get kicked up to an even higher notch when an intimate relationship is on the line. These are the backbone of a relationship that set the tone for how it will unfold.
Boundaries and respect are equally important to our face as well as behind our back. Partners need to feel secure, and to be able to trust each other. We need to know that what’s being said and done to our face, is aligned with what’s happening when we aren’t looking.
When things like agendas, opportunities or Self-interests are pushed to the front of the line, respect and boundaries move to the back.
Because human imperfections are on a continuum, your level of what you can and should accept become more important as we move along the continuum. One act of infidelity over a “semi” breakup may be aligned with what you’re willing, or able, to accept. For someone else, it’s a deal breaker.
Other things to consider should be one-sided love, imbalances of power and amount of personal growth.
According to Sternberg, one-sided love is Non-Love. Love needs to be reciprocated and it needs to be authentic. When one partner believed it was the real deal because that’s the picture the other partner was painting — it doesn’t make it any more real.
There’s a distinction to be made here. If one partner loved more deeply than the other did, there’s two possible reasons: either they’re unsure how to love where time and emotional investment can help to foster emotional maturity…or, they may not care. If a person doesn’t care, no amount of love will do it for them.
An imbalance if power is seen in how problems are faced, accepted and addressed. Both partners should be allowed a voice and their voice respected. How problems were faced before is a good indication of how they may be solved now, along with areas of growth for both partners. Without a healthy ability to resolve problems, they have a way of growing.
Piggybacking on an imbalance of power, is an imbalance in growth. Growth is many things — physical, psychosocial, philosophical and emotional. It’s common that one person may have been further along in growth the first time around and may be further along now.
While there’s no reason to feel ashamed or embarrassed if one or both partbrts are along the growth learning curve, these imbalances will reflect in a relationship. Partners should feel comfortable and trusting enough to let one partner lead when necessary, and to take a backseat when needed. The only way for this to happen us through communication and having those tough talks. | https://medium.com/hello-love/before-getting-back-together-with-your-ex-78444cc60992 | ['Annie Tanasugarn'] | 2020-12-17 18:26:07.460000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'Psychology', 'Life'] |
Covid-19 Bullshit Exposed in 5 Simple Graphics | Covid-19 Bullshit Exposed in 5 Simple Graphics
COMMENTARY: Words don’t seem to be eradicating these fallacies. Maybe images will help.
Image: Pixabay
Must choose my words carefully here in describing several, um, untenable untruths circulating from the top down in my beloved country amid a stomach-turning pandemic that’s taken more than 225,000 lives before the viral high season even kicks in to an expected overdrive. Turning to Merriam-Webster for some help:
trope: a common or overused theme or device
tripe: something poor, worthless, or offensive
bullshit: foolish insolent talk
Eh, I can’t decide. So… you’ve likely heard the five bits of viral tripe-trope bullshit below. Words don’t seem to be eradicating them fully, so I offer data and imagery. Before you call me a “fear-mongering, know-nothing socialist,” which I’ve heard a lot lately and respectfully disagree with, please see the included links that offer additional data and science references on each item.
1. Covid-19 is like the flu
As coronavirus infections exploded across the country in recent days, portending an eventual doubling of the pandemic death toll even by conservative projections, a grim milestone slipped by largely unnoticed: Covid-19, known to be five times as deadly as the flu for those who end up in the hospital with it, has now killed more Americans than any flu season since 1918–19 even on a per capita basis. Though a few months ago it seemed unfathomable, it’s fair to say now that if something doesn’t change, we’ll likely challenge the raw total of the flu pandemic of 1918–19, back when we knew a whole lot less about virus protection than we do today.
2. Cases are rising because testing is increasing
President Donald Trump told rally-goers on October 26 that the pandemic “is ending,” and he’s recently said we’re “rounding the corner,” and he’s repeatedly claimed for months that U.S. Covid cases are up just because testing is up. Statistics beg to differ. Were any of those claims true, the rates of Covid hospitalizations would not be soaring, as they are now. Across the United States, Covid-19 hospitalizations are up 45% in the past month. As I’ve written before: People don’t go to the hospital for the fun of it. Meanwhile, Covid deaths are rising, too, and that data makes for an ugly chart that has a frightening amount of upside potential given that a) deaths follow case counts by a few weeks and b) the national plan is to wait for a vaccine, which experts say won’t be available on a widespread basis until at least early spring.
3. Hospitals are inflating the Covid-19 case counts and the death toll
This is an infuriating claim for scientists and healthcare professionals, only partly because it’s not true, but especially if you’re a doctor or nurse watching more than 1,000 of your U.S. colleagues die from the disease while you work your ass off trying to save people — some of whom believe in Covid-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories like this and refuse to wear masks or otherwise take the disease seriously. Anyway, here’s the debunking data, revealed in not just one recent study but two: Through Oct. 3 this year, there were nearly 300,000 excess deaths compared to the relatively stable YTD average from 2015 to 2019. Only about 200,000 of those excess deaths were officially chalked up to Covid-19. The rest? A mix of Covid deaths that weren’t counted as such and deaths from other causes owing, in large part, to people not seeking or receiving proper medical care and succumbing to heart attacks, cancers and other ills that could have been prevented in non-pandemic times.
4. We can protect the most vulnerable
More than 40% of the U.S. population is in the “vulnerable” category for Covid-19, more susceptible to severe outcomes or death because they’re older or have one of several underlying, complicating health conditions, including heart disease or diabetes, according to the CDC. Tell them they’ll be protected. Anyway, if we could protect the vulnerable, nursing home cases would not be on the rise again.
5. We can’t control the pandemic
A coordinated national plan could have brought the pandemic under control, countless infectious-disease experts have said for months and continue to say. Instead, the White House underplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus from the get-go. Now the administration has raised the white flag and is counting on treatments and a vaccine to control the pandemic.
Any scientist who has seriously studied the transmission of infectious diseases, is honest with the American people, and has a heart and a soul will tell you that defeating a virus this crafty and deadly requires a layered approach to mitigation, from a national mask mandate and serious respect for social distancing to better ventilation and air filtration and well…
This last graphic, created by Ian M. Mackay, PhD, a professor of virology at the University of Queensland in Australia and republished here with his permission, has been vetted and praised by several of the leading infectious-disease and virus-transmission experts. I could explain it in a thousand words, as I’ve done many times over in the links above, but let’s end it here: | https://coronavirus.medium.com/covid-19-bullshit-exposed-in-5-simple-graphics-c34308f2b60 | ['Robert Roy Britt'] | 2020-11-02 02:36:50.582000+00:00 | ['Conspiracy Theories', 'Pandemic', 'Misinformation', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19'] |
We Now Watch TV the Way We Used to Play Music | Flashback sequence to 20 years ago:
She was a model with long flowing hair and piercing eyes, so I agreed to whatever she suggested. We rented a movie and went to her place.
We picked a film that looked great to me and very date-worthy (a Pierce Brosnan non-James Bond movie called The Tailor of Panama). As soon as the credits rolled, she started a two-hour conversation:
We “watched” the entire two-hour film as she chatted away. But we both missed every detail of the story. I never figured out what the film was about, and never saw it again because technically, we did “see” it.
I don’t remember much about the conversation either. Months passed before we tried a second date. The TV and chat definitely drowned each other out. What didn’t work then is normal 20 years later.
Today, people talk all they want: TV’s turned into “background noise’’
We now watch TV the way we used to listen to records. We play one channel with its “music,’’ theme or white noise just there in the background to break up the silence. TV is now more like elevator music used to be.
Eighty-eight percent of Americans look at “second screens’’ like a phone or tablet while watching TV, new Nielsen research shows. Modern shows are getting more simplistic to accommodate the lack of attention.
Less of a story leaves more room for commercials, after all.
After more than five years of having news channels on while writing or doing online searches, I found my “two-screen habit’’ didn’t work when I changed channels to watch 50-year-old “Adam-12” reruns or old Westerns.
Sure, I could type and watch TV simultaneously, but I’d miss most of the story, unlike the hours of cable news chatter where the same stories and issues are repeated again and again with few new details.
Cable news is kind of like a hockey game: the two sides slide around each other, but we only really start to pay attention when a big fight or comparable emotional explosions erupt on screen.
We can either focus closely on listening or half-tune-out, turning the TV into a source of “ambient noise” and “background music.’’
Not so long ago, we were transfixed by watching television
Decades ago, bars would have one TV so customers could watch “the game’’ or “the fight.” Today restaurants and bars have dozens of TVs running all sorts of shows simultaneously with the sound turned way down.
Few pay much attention. It’s just there in the background.
In 1990-96, the HBO series “Dream On,’’ told the story of Martin Tupper, a writer/editor “weaned’’ during the golden age of television when Americans stared obsessively at TV sets.
The ongoing “gag” of “Dream On’’ was that the TV had all of Martin’s attention growing up, and he would constantly “tune out’’ of his, picturing flashback scenes from TV shows he’d seen decades earlier.
In the old days, people would turn off the lights (like you do when watching a movie at the theater), and the light of the black and white set would seem to hypnotize the viewers who stared in rapt attention.
My nephew in the 1990s couldn’t sleep unless the television was kept on all night. My generation may have been the first to get “portable TV sets’’ in our bedrooms (the sets were like babysitters there to comfort and entertain us).
When there were three main networks (and a handful of local UHF stations), the competition was fierce, with each channel competing with the other. The early days of cable seemed like we’d have even more quality choices.
Somehow we went from watching three to five channels when that’s all there was to mainly decide to watch one or two channels when we had hundreds of channels to choose from. Because searching too long is too stressful?
What happens to TV post-pandemic?
Recent research by London Business School professors concludes TV viewing fills psychological needs, relaxing people and helping them escape.
Nielsen argues TV viewing had been fairly constant over the past 25 years. But interest in online options (and lockdowns) actually helped our viewership grow about 15 percent.
TV ratings went up overall during the 2020 lockdowns (mainly from people watching more news). Still, after restrictions eased, TV ratings mostly went back to normal, with higher numbers for streaming services.
And it turns out a third of Americans tell researchers the nation is now in an existential crisis because of the anxiety-driving 24/7 news cycle. So Americans fled the news channels after the election, turning to more comforting programming like binging on TV Westerns.
So TV is now like old-fashioned record players and stereos
Our old TVs had simple knobs allowing us to flip quickly between two or three choices. Modern TVs are like our old record album collections: hundreds of choices, but we instead settle on pulling one channel (or collection of content) out to “binge-watch.’’
So we watched hours (or years) of news the way we played Beatle songs back-to-back. Then we decide to binge on something totally different until we’ve heard so much of it that it can just play in the background, freeing us up to maybe even talk to each other? | https://medium.com/narrative/we-now-watch-tv-the-way-we-used-to-play-music-6e46cd43e948 | ['Joseph Serwach'] | 2020-12-23 04:40:49.210000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Television', 'Art', 'Life Lessons', 'Music'] |
An Illustrated Look at the Booker Prize | Sign up for The 'Gale
By Nightingale
Keep up with the latest from Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society Take a look | https://medium.com/nightingale/an-illustrated-look-at-the-booker-prize-f64560d73553 | ['Surasti Puri'] | 2019-12-19 12:01:03.430000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Books', 'Reading', 'Data Visualization', 'Authors'] |
The Big Disruption | To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] From: Gary Truman ([email protected]) +freespeech@ +libertarians@ +anarchists@ tico — your email is the kind of sentiment that is dragging this company to an early grave and sending our engineers to galt. you’re ready to shoot anyone for expressing anything that might possibly be construed as offensive. is that how the internet (or anahata) was built? NO!! the internet was entirely built on offensive content, porn, conspiracy theories, spam, and gambling. don’t kill what made our company great. don’t kill free speech. don’t kill pete or safaris.
The thread continued for hundreds of messages, cutting across racism, poverty, travel tips, sales IQs, and various engineering grosseries, but frequently returning to the issue of bare feet — the battle line falling clearly between sales and engineering. Sales currently seemed to have the upper hand, if only because they woke up earlier. The engineers’ ranks wouldn’t fill out until noon. This gave sales the chance to pile on the anti-engineer vitriol, with little more than a whimper in response.
Arsyen heard Jonas stirring to his right and turned to discover his co-worker sniffling as he read the same email thread on his computer. Jonas lowered himself in his chair and stretched his legs toward the wall, where his shoes sat unoccupied. Using his toes, he dragged the shoes toward his chair.
“I wasn’t made to wear shoes,” Jonas whimpered. The boil on his nose sizzled under his tears.
Arsyen felt a sudden flash of pity for Jonas. Even a boy genius needed to know what it was to run in the fields, to wear shoes — or not wear them — to do as he wished. Instead, Jonas had been forced to work in America at age fourteen, doomed to live as a preteen among a bunch of adults who could drink, date, and surf the internet without parental controls.
Arsyen turned his fingers to the keyboard and began to release the poetry that filled his head: a story of injustice, of choices, of freedom, and Pyrrhian military history. But after five minutes, he hit the table with his fist. His English simply could not capture the words that came so naturally in his native tongue. He deleted his message and started again, settling on something much simpler.
To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] , [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] From: Arsyen Aimo ([email protected]) Subject: Re: On the subject of engineers’ shoelessness Sales team suck. - Arsyen
“Hooray Arsyen!” Jonas cheered, throwing his shoes across the room.
A few minutes later, Arsyen received an email from Roni.
“Awesome response. You’re a real Anahati now! And congrats — the team’s just spoken. You’ve made it past the first week!”
A few minutes later, someone from the HR team appeared next to Arsyen’s desk to hand him his permanent badge.
Arsyen floated through the rest of the day. He walked taller down the corridors and lingered crossing the lawn, flicking his new white badge as he walked, no longer afraid of any passing engineer. He even tried his hand at firing a red badge–carrying newbie, which was even more delightful than he had anticipated.
At home that night, Arsyen cradled the badge in his hand and spoke to it of handmaidens and orphans and all the wonderful things he would one day do for his country. And also which video games he would buy.
Above the profile photo, Arsyen drew a pointy crown on his head in thick black marker.
It was just like being a real prince again.
Gregor Guntlag moved across his office in efficient strides, enjoying the precise cadence of his combat boots thumping against the floor. From crew cut to coccyx, his spine descended in a long, straight line that leaned forward, diagonal to the floor, as though in constant battle with gravity.
At the moment, however, Gregor’s problem was less physics than numbers. Ugly, unsettling numbers. While few people on the Anahata campus knew of its existence, Gregor’s top-secret Project Y was the only endeavor that now mattered at the company. Everything else was an afterthought; a blip in the company’s glorious ten-year history. Were the project to fail, it would mean the end of Anahata. A victory, on the other hand, would ensure the success of Anahata, the web, and all things good for decades to come. It would be Gregor’s finest achievement, the greatest project to which he had ever put his name. He could not allow it to fail.
Yet by the numbers, it was failing, and not for any of the predictable reasons that often plagued brilliant Anahata ideas — an inability to find willing commercial partners, or criticism that Anahata was violating some silly law. Such problems, governed as they were by ignorance and reactionaries, were far outside Gregor’s control. In fact, his current inability to limit these kinds of interference was one of the main reasons Gregor found Project Y so exhilarating. If it succeeded, he would be able to protect his engineers from the ignorant masses, letting them build and create their dreams unencumbered. There would be no more defections to Galt, no more debates in the media about Anahata’s relevance. Project Y would definitively establish Anahata as the most innovative company in the world, ever.
Gregor often found himself wondering what would have become of him had Anahata or Project Y existed in his early days as an engineer, when he first landed on the shores of Baltimore, fresh from the University of Liechtenstein, his head filled with ideas for space elevators and floating castles.
His first major undertaking tackled the many lies and inaccuracies on the internet by using software that automatically corrected inaccurate opinions, comments, and blog posts. But the service never found any mainstream appeal — as one venture capitalist told him, “The internet wasn’t built for facts.”
Next, he embarked on a project to replace the planet’s slavery cages (or zoos, as they were also known) with robotic animal sanctuaries. After four years of working out of his one-room apartment in San Diego, surviving on little more than instant noodles and bananas, Gregor was forced to admit defeat.
But it was there in San Diego, standing next to a dumpster, ready to trash his metal monkey parts, that he met Bobby Bonilo. The future Anahata founder tossed him a quarter, thinking Gregor was homeless. But then Bobby saw the wires sprouting from the monkey’s tail in Gregor’s hand, took in the faded computing slogan on his T-shirt, and in a split second seemed to understand all of Gregor’s dreams — and their crushing defeat at the cruel hand of pragmatism.
Bobby had been the first to recognize Gregor’s genius. “Humans cling to the past. They will work tirelessly to destroy the most important advances of society,” he had said. “As a visionary, you must know that your ideas are ahead of their time. They must only come to light when the world is ready for them — or when you have too much power to be stopped.”
Project Y was just that — beyond its time, beyond any earthly concept of innovation. By that measure alone it would have failed in a normal environment. But Anahata now had what Gregor then lacked: boundless capital, a deep pool of engineering talent, and the power of a large country. Moreover, there was no public opinion standing in the way of Y. Its secrecy had been closely guarded, and Gregor was determined to keep its existence quiet until it was too late to be stopped.
Instead, the hurdle Gregor now found before him was a far more potent nemesis: the devil himself, Niels Smeardon, breathing fire and online advertising in the path of Gregor’s engineering team.
Niels was the reason two Project Y product managers had come to Gregor’s office that afternoon.
“For the past week, we’ve literally been twiddling our thumbs,” one said. “Every step we take is blocked by sales. We go left, there they are. We go right, there they are.”
“And why can’t you dart around them?” said Gregor, annoyed by the metaphor and his part in it.
“For example, we’re ready to run a simulation of Y at Shanley Field. But sales has the field all booked up for the next six weeks with various internal conferences — ”
“Motivational Go! Fight! Sell! conferences. Conferences…with Powerpoint,” spat the other product manager.
“Also, we need to be able to turn off advertising in one part of the world to free up some servers for Y testing. It would just be a low-volume region that we’d turn off, like Eastern Africa, but sales refuses. I was told it was escalated to Niels and he stopped the whole thing, saying the entire world deserves to benefit from Anahata advertising and that under no condition should Eastern Africa not receive our glorious ads for even a single day.”
Gregor snorted. He looked out onto the field below his office, where a group of sales employees were playing rugby. These were the men who sold Anahata’s internet ads — pithy phrases and punchy slogans advertising cruise ships and cancer treatments. They believed in dress shirts and strip clubs and golf and triathlons. He was sure he could see Niels among them, dressed in one of his shiny custom jerseys, kicking up mud clods simply to remind the earth of his dominance.
“I will fix the Niels problem,” said Gregor, steadying his voice and watching Niels’ spiky blond hair attack the sky as he ran down the field. The two product managers would never have guessed that Gregor’s body was raging inside, his blood cells taking up arms, their spears pricking the subcutaneous layer of his skin, ready to fight.
“Anything else?” he asked, turning to the two men.
“Things are still very quiet in the rest of the engineering community. The distractions have worked really well.”
Gregor nodded. When planning Project Y, he and Bobby had devised a list of “distractions” — projects like Social Car and Genie — that if leaked would capture internal, public, and media attention and let the Y engineers continue to work in secrecy on the company’s big bet.
“Go back to work, and don’t worry about this anymore.”
The duo left smiling.
Gregor remained by the window, watching the field. To any other observer, Niels might have seemed the ultimate captain, rallying his team to the win, throwing slaps and high-fives. But it was all an act. Niels was a man willing to knock down anyone who got in his way. Gregor had kept Project Y a secret from him for this very reason. Niels would destroy it for the very fact that it was Gregor’s baby. And if Niels succeeded in sabotaging Y, it would be the end of everything.
The problem was that Gregor had no power over Niels. They were equals, if not in brain power, then at least according to Anahata’s organizational chart. Only Bobby could tell Niels what to do. And while Gregor and Bobby dreamed up the idea for Project Y together, the founder had since taken a step back, tasking Gregor with making it a reality. This would have been fine were it not for the fact that Bobby seemed to have a weird affection for Niels, never suggesting that he really liked the guy, but also taking care to protect him from Gregor. He had even heard that Bobby and Niels occasionally did yoga together.
Gregor paced his office, Niels’ gravelly voice and sales aphorisms trailing behind him: “With courage comes determination.” “Leadership is knowing when to lead.” “Those who win are those who win.” He caught sight again of Niels on the field, this time tripping an oncoming opponent, the stunned player falling to the ground. Niels was halfway down the field before the man could even lift his face from the dirt.
Gregor needed Bobby’s help to get past Niels for good. It wasn’t simply a matter of getting a server or access to the field. Gregor needed Niels out of the picture, completely won over to the idea of Y, or contained so that he couldn’t thwart it.
He opened his messenger service. Bobby had said he would be busy much of the day at a colonics retreat but in fact seemed to be online.
Gregor: We need to talk about Y. It’s behind schedule. There are roadblocks. Bobby: You should come to colonics retreat. Good for removing roadblocks. Gregor: These are sales roadblocks. Bobby: Flush out roadblocks. Gregor: Do I have your permission to do whatever it takes? Bobby: Small things cloud the big ideas, threaten rain. At retreat now. Can’t talk.
Bobby’s online indicator switched off.
Gregor sighed and leaned back in his chair. He stared out the window for a long time without moving, the sky above him clouding with dark thoughts.
The four leaders of Gregor’s “distractions” projects were all longtime Anahatis. Any one of them could be trusted to help recruit the army of engineers Bobby had requested.
Which is how Gregor ended up in one of the company parking lots, the key to a driverless car in his hand. Nose upturned, he held the car key several inches away from his body. He believed keys were an outdated method of accessing one’s property, which was why he had an engineering team working on a simple identification solution that would require just a small incision in an individual’s pinky.
Gregor unlocked the door and settled into the front seat.
An unfamiliar beep boop beep came from the dashboard, and five red lights flashed in the center console as the Social Car software booted up. Soon, the dashboard glowed Hal-like in the early light of evening.
“Welcome to Social Car,” a female voice said. The dashboard flashed again, and Gregor was presented with a series of options on a large screen in the center console:
I want to meet… - man [specify age] - woman [specify age] - programmer [specify which languages] - designer - venture capitalist - engineers - other
Why would he want to meet someone?
“Other,” Gregor muttered.
Two faces, numbered “1” and “2,” popped up on the screen. Gregor didn’t recognize them but assumed they were the pictures of Social Car team members.
“Number 1,” he said.
“Sven Svensson is a quarter-mile away,” the voice said. “Shall I read you his profile?”
Gregor had no interest in getting to know his employees. The better he knew them, the harder it was to eventually fire them.
“Just drive me to Technology Way.”
“Driving to Technology Way,” the woman’s voice confirmed.
After yielding to two other cars, Anahata’s driverless car made its way out of the parking lot.
“There are three people near you now,” the voice said as the car turned on to Processor Street.
Gregor’s eyes flicked to the dashboard. Now a third, more familiar face stared back at him. He recognized Roni Herman, the team lead. Roni was a bit past his prime, already in his early thirties, but still a well-liked figure on campus. In reviewing the distraction projects and their leaders that morning, Gregor had thought Roni could be an interesting candidate to join the Project Y team.
“Take me to Roni Herman.”
The software beeped its assent, and a few minutes later, Gregor’s car pulled alongside Roni’s.
“Speak to Roni,” Gregor said. The dashboard beeped and a moment later confirmed that Roni had accepted the communication.
“Hello, Gregor, hello!” Roni’s eager, nasal voice filled Gregor’s car. “How do you like Pad Thai?”
“What?” Gregor never ate Thai food. He didn’t like the feeling of spice running through his body, raising his body temperature.
“You know, Pad…Thai,” Roni repeated. Gregor glanced over at Roni’s car, which was keeping perfect pace with his own. Roni climbed into the back of his car, searching for something. A moment later, he put a piece of paper against the window. On it was written in big black letters: “PAD THAI=SOCIAL CAR CODE NAME.”
“What would happen if I were to pull you off Social Car?” Gregor asked.
Roni didn’t answer immediately. Although Gregor refused to make eye contact, he imagined Roni was panicking, afraid he was about to be kicked off his project. Although Gregor volunteered at a community garden, gave millions each year to humanitarian crisis organizations, and voted only for socialists, he did like to cause a bit of microsuffering now and then. He felt it kept the engineers on their toes.
“Oh, well, you know, I don’t know how things would go if I came off it,” said Roni, the panic painted across his face in bold pinkish strokes. “I’ve really led the team from the start and — ”
Gregor frowned. In a company where sales strutted with their chins to the clouds, Gregor preferred the men who slouched. Roni could at least display a bit of faux humility.
“Slow down,” Gregor told his car. He’d ditch Roni and go talk to the Genie team lead instead.
But Roni’s car slowed to keep pace with Gregor’s.
“Pretty great, right?” Roni said. “That’s the speed-detection system we built this week. You can try to slow down, but my car will slow with yours so we can keep chatting. We’ve still got some bugs to work out, but I’m confident we’ll launch before the end of the quarter.”
What?!
The end of the quarter was far too soon for a Social Car launch. Gregor needed all of his distractions running up until Project Y was ready. He couldn’t kill this project — it was too well known and popular on campus — but he certainly couldn’t let it launch anytime soon. He needed to slow it down — like by removing Roni from Social Car and making him his Y evangelist. Gregor inhaled deeply.
“Have you heard of Project Y?” he asked.
Roni gasped. “I’ve heard…things, you know, but not all the details.”
“It’s our best shot at building the world’s greatest company. And the most important thing right now is for us to have strong leaders. People who can motivate others. People who can help articulate a vision.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Gregor saw Roni bouncing in his seat. “At many times during my career I’ve shown leadership and created visions and — ”
“Your vision isn’t required,” Gregor said. “What you’ll need to do is spread the word, win people over, recruit new team members — and eventually spread the project to all of Anahata’s engineers.”
“I organize the quarterly hackathon,” Roni said. “We now have 2,000 Anahata engineers around the world who code the entire weekend over a livestream feed in exchange for beer.”
“That’s what we’re looking for,” Gregor said. “It’s a big job. It’s historic. I need you to move over to Building 1 ASAP.”
“Building 1? Oh, yes! I won’t let you down!”
Gregor gave a small nod from his car.
“Oh, oh, one thing,” Roni said. “What do you want me to do about Pad Thai? Will you find a new leader for it?”
“I’ll find someone new. Don’t tell anyone where you are going or what you are working on.”
“I’ll get going right away!” Roni waved as his car turned and sped back toward campus. Soon he disappeared from Gregor’s dashboard altogether.
“Take me to Innovation Drive,” Gregor told his car.
As the car reversed course, Gregor contemplated how best to hinder Social Car. Putting a new technical lead on the project would undoubtedly slow it down. But he needed to throw a real wrench in the works, not simply lose a few weeks’ time as someone new got up to speed.
Gregor continued to wrestle with the problem as his car made its way down El Camino Real, a street that stretched the length of Silicon Valley in an endless loop of Mexican restaurants (Casa Fiesta, Casa Grande, Casa Lupe), energy-efficient cars, and boxy computer stores. Gregor found the relentless monotony and disinterested aesthetics pleasing.
The car passed under a billboard for Mr. Fixit, a local computer-repair service. Gregor glanced up at the tongue-in-cheek, 1950s-style image of a desperate housewife ripping her hair out as a confident Mr. Fixit repaired her computer and saved the day.
Gregor rolled down the window and craned his neck to see the ad. He ordered his car to do a U-turn. The car drove past the sign again, and then once more.
By the time he passed the sign for the third time, Gregor had the answer to his problem.
“Take me back to Anahata,” he said, “and drop me off at the lobby.”
The next morning, Gregor found himself in a place he rarely visited: the campus security control room, in Building 28. Row after row of TV screens circled the room; below them, men in matching purple polo shirts manned a dashboard of flashing red lights.
It appeared high-tech, but the reality was more panopticon of the banal. On one screen, a sales employee pulled his Porsche into the Anahata parking lot, straightening his tie in the reflection of the car window. Above him, two women did yoga on the lawn. On another screen, an aerial shot captured cubicle after cubicle of workers staring at their computers.
The cameras recorded this routine and hundreds like it each day. It was a wonder that they could even keep their lenses open on alert given how mind-numbingly boring Anahata’s security scene was, particularly during the night shift. In the wee hours of morning, nothing went into Anahata and nothing came out — minus the occasional nocturnal engineer. Otherwise the place was locked down with the tightest security in the Valley. There hadn’t been an attempted theft in more than five years.
But that morning, there had been a break-in at Building 1 — the highest-security spot on Anahata’s campus — prompting Gregor to dash out of the management meeting and make a beeline for the security office.
Footage from three a.m. showed a man dressed entirely in black sneaking across the Building 1 parking lot, hovering on tiptoe like a thuggish ballerina. He jumped behind a tree, rolled through the grass, and ended up at the building’s side entrance, where he pulled out an Anahata badge that had likely been swiped from a negligent engineer.
The man again raised the stolen badge to the access control reader, and for a second, the camera caught a shot of his face. He was Caucasian but looked more like a zebra, with black zigzags painted across his face.
Inside, he went past the molecular lab, the welding shop, the hard-hat zone, and the physical and intangible infrastructure teams, and then stopped in front of another office.
The man darted his flashlight around the room, splashing the walls with light. It was difficult to make out what he was doing, but from the shadows it seemed he had stopped in front of a desk and was pulling something out of his bag. The flashlight swung again. Suddenly, the scene was illuminated: The man was plugging a computer into a wall outlet.
“Galt!” Gregor gasped. This was nothing less than corporate espionage. The thief was going to plant something — maybe surveillance equipment or tampered data — then use it to gain access to all of Anahata’s network.
Then the thief sat down and put his feet up on the desk.
“Wait…what is he doing?” asked Gregor, crouching to put himself at eye level with the screen.
“Sir, after watching this many times, I’ve come to the conclusion that he is picking his nose,” said one of the guards, freezing the tape for a moment to show the faint outline of a finger moving toward the man’s face.
“What?” Gregor drew even closer, his face now just inches from the screen. He signaled to the guard to continue the footage.
The thief jumped up from the chair and turned off his flashlight. Within thirty seconds, he had crept out the back exit, barrel-rolled across the parking lot, unlocked a car, and driven off. One of the guards rewound the footage and froze it on the last full shot of the man’s face, little more than a black-and-white blur.
Although the security team had already watched the tape thirty times that morning, their collective adrenaline rose as they watched Gregor’s face for a reaction. They hadn’t seen this much excitement since an engineer’s pet boa had gotten loose on campus the previous month.
“Whose badge did he use to break in?” Gregor said finally.
The security head double-checked a pad of paper on the desk. “Someone named Roni Herman, who works in Building 7. As of yesterday, Roni Herman’s badge was cleared for access to Building 1. The perpetrator was probably tracking Roni the whole time, somehow got hold of his badge, and then got access to both buildings. This was probably the result of months of tracking and shadowing his movements. Should we call the police?”
Gregor stared at the face frozen on the screen, a black zigzag casting a lightning bolt from the man’s forehead to his neck. “Idiot,” he muttered, staring at Roni’s face on the screen.
Gregor stood.
“Idiots,” he said loudly, looking at the security team. “There is no need to call anyone.”
He turned on his heel and clomped out the door.
The security team looked at each other and shrugged.
“Man, I will never understand engineers,” said one, shaking his head before switching his attention to the cameras trained on the well-endowed girls in the customer support department.
Niels began each day with a run. The Northern California air was just crisp enough to feel clean and pure, and the occasional headwind produced a surmountable challenge — the kind of easy and achievable goal-setting that Niels liked for warming up to his workday. He followed his workout with a long shower, the rainforest setting gently splattering purified water on his head while a speaker piped in a soothing recording of a woman’s voice appraising each inch of his body.
Your muscles are so big.
Your abs are very flat.
Your Adam’s apple is prominent but tasteful.
But that morning, Niels could focus only on Gregor Guntlag. The overly German German had hated him since day one and seemed intent on turning Bobby against him.
Bobby and Gregor were both nutjobs as far as Niels was concerned, but he was used to working with crazies. Fifteen years of working in the Valley and he had never worked for a CEO or founder who wasn’t a sociopath or narcissist. They thought the world’s problems existed in part to keep them intellectually stimulated, and that all those problems — malaria, corruption, congressional deadlock, death, you name it — could be solved by technologists. Their lack of focus was confused for genius. One moment they would be asking the entire company to dramatically change course, and the next moment they’d be giving equal attention to the color of the lampshades in the lobby. And despite their staunch atheism, they all believed their success was somehow mythically predestined.
It was an absurd worldview, but one that Niels admired for its selfishness. Managing and manipulating these egomaniacs was an art he felt he had perfected.
With persistence and patience, Niels had worked on Bobby for six years, helping him understand that Anahata needed money to be successful and that Niels was the best lever he had to produce it in large quantities. As a result, Bobby generally left him alone. Gregor, on the other hand, had been less susceptible to Niels’ charm. He did everything he could to sabotage Niels, always playing the contrarian in any management meeting and sending out his engineering lackeys to turn off a sales production task here and there. It was nothing sufficiently significant to warrant an outcry to Bobby, but just enough to annoy Niels and make clear that Gregor and his foot soldiers were behind the job.
So Niels was surprised by the peace offering that had appeared the previous night in the form of a blue chat bubble on his phone — a chat message asking Gregor to come over to “work things out and bury the hatchet.”
It was a shocking olive branch from Anahata’s head engineer, and in retrospect, Niels realized he should have taken a screenshot of their exchange. Unfortunately, since Anahata chats were not stored (the result of Gregor and Bobby’s joint paranoia about government surveillance), this historic exchange of civilities would have no record.
After an evening spent trying to discern Gregor’s motives, Niels had finally replied that, yes, of course he’d be happy to talk. But the whole thing smelled fishy. Perhaps Gregor wanted something that belonged to sales. If that was the case, it meant that Niels had already achieved Master Negotiator Rule #1: Always have the upper hand. (Viewing even the most casual encounters as an opportunity for personal gain was key to Niel’s life philosophy. An ex-girlfriend had once accused him of dealing with their relationship like a business negotiation. Niels said he didn’t understand how she could possibly think that anything in life was not a negotiation. He came away triumphant, although the woman did break up with him shortly thereafter.)
Niels was confident he could work the meeting to his advantage. In fact, this could be the opening he needed to get Gregor to agree to put ads on Moodify bracelets.
In any other company, the management team would have salivated over the Moodify bracelets, with one billion dollars in projected profit in the first year alone. But not Gregor Guntlag, whose perennial argument against anything Niels wanted was that it wouldn’t be good for Anahata users. Niels believed that not giving people advertisements was bad. If they didn’t know something existed, how could they know they needed it? Only advertising could tell people what they needed to need.
Typically, Bobby hadn’t even listened to the discussion. He caught just the tail end of Gregor’s rebuttal and seemed to defer the decision indefinitely with a wave of his hands. If you asked Niels, Bobby gave his head engineer far too much rope. Gregor was holding the company back from billions of additional revenue. And what did he do to make up for it? As far as Niels could tell, Gregor was simply there to execute Bobby’s big ideas. All of Gregor’s own projects had been massive failures. He was good at implementation but had no vision of his own.
Niels stepped out of the shower and surveyed himself in the bathroom mirror. He was forty-two but didn’t show a single gray hair or wrinkle. By almost any measure, he was the picture of excellence in aging. He gave a quick, indulgent flex of his muscle and a flash of bleached teeth. He remembered that the Anahata employee he banged a few weeks back had commented on his nice smile. He racked his brain for a split second, trying to remember her name. She was that sexy hippie receptionist who kept asking him for career advice as he tried to take her clothes off. Janine. Jane. Jennie. It didn’t matter. It was probably a bit stupid to hit on someone who worked at Anahata, but he wasn’t going to worry about it. He always could have her fired if things got uncomfortable. So far, he hadn’t even run into her on campus.
Niels threw on his favorite Prada slacks — the ones he wore to close a deal — and finished getting dressed for work. He took a final look in the mirror and flashed his teeth. Never underestimate the power of a killer grin.
Master Negotiator Rule #36: Arriving a few minutes late to a meeting communicates dominance. You will wait for me. Punctuality is for the meek.
And so, despite having changed his outfit three times — should he go business casual? slouchy engineer? weekend triathlete? — then having spent two hours circling Gregor’s neighborhood, Niels made sure not to appear at Gregor’s doorstep even a minute early.
Three minutes after the appointed time, Niels arrived at the address and did a double take. He checked the house number again: 414 Tuscany Drive. This was it.
Before him was an immense silver gate — the kind of gate that only the truly rich, and truly paranoid, possessed.
Niels pushed a button on the intercom. Someone picked up, but instead of a “hello” there was simply a buzzing sound, followed by the slow opening of the gate, revealing a long driveway abutted by row after row of towering pines.
On some level, it made sense to Niels that Gregor would live in the wealthiest neighborhood in Atherton, itself the wealthiest city in the Valley. He was, after all, one of the earliest employees at Anahata and had made billions of dollars when the company went public. But Gregor was also the man who wore faded decades-old shirts every day, ate the same bland lentils at every lunch, and drove a beat-up Jeep to work. Niels had assumed he’d eschew a fancy house and live in austerity in a small condo in crime-ridden East Palo Alto, or perhaps an inconspicuous cottage in the slightly smelly, middle-class part of Mountain View. Anything but the estate that was emerging before Niels’ eyes — a sprawling mansion the style of which Niels could only describe as nouveau-chateau, and whose inhabitants Niels would ordinarily assume to be a transplanted Texas blonde and her bejeweled poodle.
The house was ostentation at its American best, its climbing spires and ornate Mediterranean palacio flourishes the odd manifestation of new money’s dream of old Europe. At the end of the driveway was a large marble fountain — six white swans spouting water onto a central lily pad. Rising up behind the fountain was a large marble staircase that led to the front door. Two long, peach-colored wings branched out from the entrance, each ending in a tall, Rapunzel-like tower.
Gregor was waiting for him at the top of the marble steps, dressed in his typical uniform of white T-shirt, khaki pants, and combat boots. In his hand he held two beers, one of which was immediately thrust at Niels, as if Gregor was following a textbook instruction on how to relate to American men. The beer was warm, likely pulled from the pantry just minutes before. Even if this was all just a plot to get something out of him, at least the guy was making an effort. And in any case, it was kind of fun to witness Gregor’s visible discomfort in his role as host.
If the garish exterior of Gregor’s palace had thrown Niels’ preconceptions, the interior only reaffirmed them. Once inside, Niels could see nothing in the house beyond white walls and a single overhead light in each room. The few windows in existence were so high up from the floor that they reminded Niels of a cathedral…or a prison. There was no artwork, no photographs, no sign of a woman, pet, plant, or any possible sign of life.
“You’re not one for decorating, are you?” said Niels, turning to Gregor with a smile designed to communicate friendliness.
“I like simplicity,” Gregor said. “I don’t really like…things.” The word lingered in the air between them.
“Except for an enormous house,” Niels smirked.
“I only bought a large house so as to have a strong fortress in the event of an anthropogenic risk,” Gregor replied.
“An anthropo-what?”
“Hostile artificial intelligence, nuclear holocaust, fossil energy exhaustion, the collapse of everything.”
“Ha ha…oh…”
Niels stifled his laugh; Gregor wasn’t kidding. The engineer’s face was as smooth as his walls, giving up nothing. He seemed to be staring at an imaginary spot just past Niels’ shoulder, avoiding eye contact.
“You like wine,” Gregor said.
“I do.”
“Fischer said you took him on a wine tasting in Napa a few years ago.”
“I didn’t know you liked wine,” Niels said. “I would’ve invited you along.”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Gregor said. “And if you had, I would have said no. We aren’t friends.”
Niels coughed. Being a salesman, he wasn’t used to such direct displays of honesty.
Gregor’s eyes briefly flicked away from the wall, settling on Niels’ shoulders. “Do you want to see my wine cellar?”
Gregor led him down a white hall and through a massive, empty kitchen, at the far end of which was a wide, floor-to-ceiling steel door. Gregor pushed a button, and the door slowly slid into the wall, revealing a flight of stairs leading into darkness. In the seconds before their descent, Niels recalled an article he once read in a tech magazine, in which a successful Valley engineer kept a dungeon underneath his home, holding secret orgies while his nuclear family, clothed in matching pastel cottons, lived happily and unknowingly in the rooms upstairs.
But when Gregor turned on the lights, the illuminated space below revealed nothing more than a simple wine cellar, with row after row of bottle racks, and in the center, two chairs and a wooden table. Atop the table was a decanter filled with wine, and next to it, an empty bottle.
Instead of a toast, Gregor spent thirty minutes detailing each wine purchase in length: how much it had cost, what was said about the vintage, and when he was planning to open a particular bottle. He had built an elaborate wine management system that scanned the bottle’s label, then input each detail — including age, composition, and position in the wine cellar — into an algorithm that determined the ideal “drink date.” When the date approached, Gregor was sent a notification at two-week, one-week, day-of, and then hourly intervals, alerting him of the impending deadline.
“One time I received a notification while on a course of antibiotics,” said Gregor, leaning in just slightly and lowering his voice. “I had this bottle I needed to drink and was worried it was going to go bad. I had to save it until I was well again. It was very upsetting.”
“You don’t have to drink the bottle right that very same day. It’s not like milk.”
“But then I would get no benefit from such a complex system,” Gregor said.
He grabbed the bottle of wine from the wooden table and passed it to Niels, who let out a low whistle of appreciation. It was a Chateau Margaux — the holy grail of red wine. Niels couldn’t help but grin. He was going to crush his enemy at the negotiating table while trying one of the world’s most highly regarded wines.
Niels believed that learning to appreciate wine was an apprenticeship akin to golf — at first difficult to acquire, but then indispensable for business and generally agreeable as a pastime. And he had, in fact, come to love the taste of it. Chateau Margaux was a real bragging right, and he had never held its deep ruby on his tongue.
Niels sat down on an uncomfortable wooden chair. One of the spindles was split in the middle, and the raw edge pushed into his spine. He suspected Gregor had never been inside a home furnishings store in his life, that he didn’t see the inconsistency in offering up one of the world’s most expensive wines in such a dank and uncomfortable setting. For all his engineering brilliance, Gregor would never even have made it past the sales team’s entry-level “Hospitality & Negotiation” training course.
Gregor poured the wine from the decanter and handed a glass to Niels. The men studied the wine and took in the aroma, each eying the other over his glass.
But the deep tones of the Chateau Margaux transformed them. Niels loosened his tie, Gregor slouched just slightly in his chair. It was an exceptional wine. And after they took their first sip, Niels had the sudden realization that this was the first nondisagreeable experience the two had shared since Niels joined Anahata six years earlier. Gregor even tried to offer a slight smile, pushing it onto his face as though it were a heavy wooden beam. But at least he was trying.
Niels did not say a word — Master Negotiator Rule #33: Approach silence like a battlefield. He who speaks first shows his hand.
Niels sipped his wine slowly but decisively. He imagined his Adam’s apple bulging then receding, like a heaving warrior ready to break through enemy lines. A warrior with rippling abs and a weathered loincloth that barely covered his forceful manhood. He could crush this wine glass with just a slight clenching of his fingers. It would shatter at his feet, taking with it all of Gregor’s dreams and —
“Do you read any philosophy?” Gregor asked.
“Not really,” Niels said. “I mean, college, but that was a long time ago.”
“I thought so,” said Gregor.
Niels wanted to tell Gregor that he had graduated summa cum laude in economics from Yale, that he had been a Rhodes scholar, that he had won a Cambridge debate on the virtues of Adam Smith — but he held back. It was best to let the conversation advance smoothly toward the negotiation point.
“For centuries,” Gregor began, “people have tried to create the perfect society. To achieve what we see flickering on Plato’s cave. To transpose the ideal on our reality.”
Niels imagined Gregor sitting on his white couch, within his white walls, reading Greek philosophers after a hard day’s work.
“Many people have tried to create a community of like-minded individuals, with the aim of a peaceful and collaborative rule — a utopia, if you will. You may recall the Rappites…?”
Niels didn’t.
“Or the Oneida community.”
Again, Niels drew a blank.
“In any case,” Gregor said, “all of these attempts ultimately failed.”
“We weren’t made to live on communes,” Niels shrugged. “People are fundamentally selfish.”
“Or…perhaps it’s just a few bad seeds.”
“A few bad seeds are enough to ruin the crop.”
“Yes, Niels!” exclaimed Gregor, his chair rocking underneath him, a flush of pink invading his face. “That’s why we get rid of the bad seeds!”
Gregor took a deep breath, and the color was sucked back into his body. He coughed, then continued.
“We know how to do it. We know how to build the perfect society.”
“On campus?”
Gregor leaned forward in his chair, putting his hand awkwardly on Niels’ shoulder. In a sharp whisper, his eyes blazing, “Niels, we’re going to the moon!”
It took Niels a few seconds to realize what he had just heard. He moved to speak, but Gregor’s hand stopped him, his words spilling over his palm and rushing at Niels.
“We’ve figured out how to build the perfect society — and from all angles, from actual technical infrastructure to the societal structure. We’ve figured it all out!”
The Master Negotiator faltered and a laugh escaped from him, rudely punctuating Gregor’s plan. Niels couldn’t help himself — with just one simple, absurd phrase, six years of intimidation had evaporated. Gregor wasn’t anyone to be afraid of. He was simply insane. And that was surely to Niels’ advantage, though he knew one had to proceed carefully with crazy people. They could be unpredictable.
“Slow down,” Niels said. “Are you joking with me?”
“We have been working on the project for a year,” Gregor said. “Fifty engineers working in secret in Building 1. We’re building a colony on the moon.”
“You mean you have a spaceship and everything? How are you dealing with gravity? Wait, never mind, don’t answer that. What I mean is, since when did Anahata get into the business of humankind?”
“Anahata has always only ever been about humankind. Everything we do is done for — “
“Yeah, yeah, I know, everything we do is to improve humankind. But I mean, a society, Gregor. There are no synergies with our current business. How do you know how to construct a society?”
“Actually, a society is a lot like software. You build it on solid principles, then you iterate. Then you solutionize, and you iterate again.”
“What makes you think you can solve what centuries of wise men have failed to do?”
“Because we have something they don’t have,” Gregor said. He pushed his chair closer, and Niels couldn’t help but lean forward. The broken wooden spindle leaned with him, pushing into his back. But he did not move to swat it away; his eyes were locked on Gregor, their faces almost touching.
“Algorithms,” Gregor whispered.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Niels snorted. “These are humans we’re talking about, not robots. You can’t predict and control human behavior with algorithms.”
“That is an emotional reaction to what is a very logical project. And, yes, an algorithm could have predicted that you would respond that way. Even irrational behavior is rational when seen as a larger grouping of patterns. And as you can imagine, this project is built on patterns of success. Project Y, we call it. It will save Anahata — and, as a result, humankind.”
Niels shook his head. He had come to ask Gregor to slap some silly ads on a dumb bracelet; Gregor was telling him they were going to build a moon colony. If Gregor wasn’t crazy, then Niels was stupid for asking for so little in return.
“Let me get this straight. We’re wasting tons of company money for a totally altruistic endeavor? There’s not a single business purpose in all of this?”
“Obviously there’s a business purpose,” Gregor said. “That’s where it all started.”
Niels smirked — now they were speaking his language. The company always talked about saving the world, and sometimes really did believe in it, but Bobby always made sure there was a monetization element involved — and that Niels was in charge of ensuring the project’s economic success.
“Tell me more,” said Niels, leaning back in his uncomfortable chair.
“Project Y is fundamentally about protecting our employees and our company from outside threats,” Gregor said.
“So this is about beating Galt.”
“And any future Galt. We have the world’s best engineers, and if we lose them, we lose everything. But if we build them a utopia, they will never have any reason to leave.”
“Don’t you think the company’s already done a pretty good job of building a worker’s paradise?” Niels said. “If anything, we’ve made all these engineers into self-entitled, smoothie-guzzling cult members who will never have any reason to leave. Where else could they have job titles like ‘Evangelist,’ ‘Security Warrior,’ ‘Protector of All Things Internet,’ and ‘Debuggenator’?”
Gregor shook his head. “It isn’t enough anymore. Free food, massages, and light-saber aerobics were revolutionary when we first started the company. But nowadays, every startup has them. The smaller companies can offer faster career mobility, wider remit, and most important, by dint of being small and under the radar, they can innovate wildly through illegality. Just think — when was the last time we were able to get away with selling a user’s private data or violate someone’s copyright? Those golden days are gone. We simply can’t compete. And Galt knows it. Everyone knows it.”
Niels couldn’t disagree. Galt was a real threat, particularly in the Valley, where the average shelf life of even the most successful tech companies was just a decade or two. Anahata was already ten years old. Practically ancient.
“So, if you build a colony on the moon…”
“The better way to state it is, if we build an isolated utopia — which just happens to be on the moon — then we will secure the future of this company. No more Galt headhunters. No more Galt stealing our great ideas.”
“And you’ll just lock the employees up there on the moon? Give them a one-way ticket?”
“Imagine — a planet full of geniuses!”
Niels shook his head. “Surely there are easier ways to do this. What about raising employees’ salaries or giving them longer vacations? Going to the moon seems extreme. I see no value add to the company.”
“Value add?” Gregor sneered. “Your statement is not made true by its redundancy. There is indeed value. It’s only by tackling what seems impossible that you can ensure no one else will do it. Galt can compete with bigger salaries and fancy perks, but they won’t be able to compete with a moon colony. Plus, we’re building a utopia that no engineer will ever want to leave. We’ll be unstoppable! All other utopian societies have failed — it’s a big problem that no one’s solved. It’s a huge opportunity for us.”
“Or the sign that we will fail like all the others,” Niels sighed. A moon colony was crazy even by Anahata standards.
“Our utopia will be different. We’ve spent several months analyzing the best combinations of political thought, philosophy, and technological advances necessary to achieve a better society. We’ve also looked at societal failures through the centuries — Rome, Byzantium, and so forth. What was consistent throughout was a lack of individual purpose. As a society progresses, it becomes more specialized, and while its citizens become ever more dependent on each other, they have no relationship with the tasks they perform. They are cogs in a wheel they never wanted to build.”
Niels remembered late-night pot-filled conversations in college that sounded a lot like this. He fiddled again with the wooden spindle digging into his back. When the first ad appeared on Moodify, he’d send Gregor a new chair as a snide gift. Nothing was more insulting to a rich man than to send him a better version of what he already owned.
“We will take the best sampling of society and give people roles that fit their skills,” Gregor continued. “The man born to be a mechanical engineer will be a mechanical engineer. He who cooks well will be a cook. There will be no anomie — I guess you don’t know the philosopher Émile Durkheim? But in any case, every man will have his place. Every man will work together, for himself and for the greater good of the group.”
Niels put one hand behind his back and began to twist at the base of the wooden spindle, trying to wrench it free from the chair. It wouldn’t budge no matter how hard he tried. He could feel the sweat forming amateurish circles under his expensive shirt.
“This goddamn chair — “
He looked up and saw Gregor studying him, expressionless.
“I mean,” Niels said, “how are you going to transport all of mankind to the moon?”
“Oh no,” Gregor said. “That would just be bringing along the bad seeds and all their earthly problems. There is a full selection process. The bulk of the group will be engineers, of course, as they perform very well across every factor we’ve determined necessary for success. You see, we have calculated a target percentage for every category of person and skill type that we need in order to have a high societal success rate.”
“Argh!” growled Niels, the spindle behaving even more egregiously than before, pushing on his spine, scratching at his well-buffed skin. Such a crappy chair had no place in his existence. He worked way too hard and earned too much money to have to sit in chairs like this.
He scooted to the edge of his chair, but the spindle followed him, digging into him, pushing him forward and downward as though he were Gregor’s supplicant. Unacceptable!
Niels leaped to his feet.
“Sit. Please,” said Gregor, leaning across and pulling the the spindle out of Niels’ chair in one single, swift movement.
“As you may have guessed,” said Gregor, laying the spindle next to the bottle of wine, “sales employees won’t be as likely to be admitted to the moon colony given the high bar, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a shot. If you help us, I can even imagine we’d raise the percentage of acceptance for the sales employees. Provided, of course, that they pass the necessary tests.”
Niels snatched the spindle from the table and pointed it at Gregor. He thought the move looked intimidating, menacing even. But then he glanced down and realized he looked more like an orchestra conductor. He threw the spindle to the ground.
“You always get so upset when I speak in a factual manner about the sales team’s IQ,” Gregor continued. “But you should listen objectively to this plan, because there’s a part that you’re going to love.”
Gregor paused, then drew out his words. “I…will…let…you…monetize.”
Niels eyebrows shot upward in genuine surprise.
“Monetize the moon? You’ll let me do that?”
“Yes.”
“But…you never let me monetize,” said Niels, sitting down. “What’s the catch?”
“I’ll let you export the moon minerals,” Gregor said. “You and your team will go down there and pull them out and — ”
“Minerals!” roared Niels, rocketing out of his chair. “My team sells internet advertising, Gregor, not minerals! Internet advertising!”
“Well, before they can sell the minerals, they need to get them out of the ground, so the selling part is sort of a moot point at this stage.”
“You want my sales team to become miners?”
Gregor looked puzzled. “Oh, I hadn’t really thought they would be the miners. But now that you suggest it, it’s not a bad idea. The skill sets do overlap, I suppose. The ‘core competencies,’ as you call them, are the same — dirt digging, rubbing elbows with worms, hunting for gold — ”
“Gregor!”
“One thing,” said Gregor, holding up his hand. “I don’t want you to get too excited. We can’t export minerals right away. It really doesn’t become economical until we build the space elevator, and that’s not on the roadmap until late next year.”
“Space elevator?!? You are going to sink this company!”
Niels knew it was time. He jumped onto his chair and stomped his feet. He waved his arms in the air again, willing his face redder and redder, sputtering a few expletives to express his outrage at Gregor’s ridiculous plan. While not all business meetings required such theatrics, almost one hundred percent of Niels’ negotiations involved either throwing a pen or stomping away from the table. He found it was often the best way to force a rapprochement from his opponent.
“Sit down,” said Gregor, pouring them both more wine. “You have nothing to be concerned about. Project Y is highly economical. By retaining our best engineers and protecting our most secret projects, we save hundreds of millions of dollars each year. And that’s before even calculating the potential upside from building the world’s first functioning utopia. Ultimately, we think this could generate tens of billions of dollars of new revenue.”
Niels slowly lowered his arms, but he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Feigned outrage was a tried-and-true technique — why hadn’t it worked this time? Just the previous week, Niels had used the same approach on the CEO of the world’s largest advertising firm, and in a matter of minutes the guy agreed to make his own car a surface for real-time Anahata ads.
He decided to continue standing on the chair. Niels threw his hands on his hips and puffed out his chest, then clenched his fists to make his biceps pop.
“So you’re going to put a whole bunch of male engineers alone on a planet, huh? Sounds to me like this will last up until you have your first system downtime and your engineers are no longer able to stream porn from Earth.”
Gregor said nothing for a few seconds, as if it took him a moment to understand.
“Oh,” he finally said. “No, we’ve thought of that already. There will be women.”
“I mean real women, not robots and avatar women. Or holograms,” said Niels, referring to the recent Anahata prom, for which Bobby had commissioned Japanese nurse holograms to accompany dateless engineers.
Gregor waved him away, but Niels wasn’t sure whether he was ignoring him or missing Niels’ swipe entirely.
“Our engineers have found ways to solve all of the many dangers that could befall a young society — famine, natural disaster, war. You think they can’t solve the simple problem of women? History has shown that if you give an engineer a problem, he usually can solve it. Again, that’s why our society will primarily be made up of engineers.”
“Most of your engineers can barely dress themselves,” sniffed Niels, staring down at Gregor from atop the chair. “Besides, I heard what happened last year at your winter retreat — hardly the outcome one would expect from superior beings.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Gregor, but the hint of a grimace suggested otherwise.
As part of a team-building exercise, Anahata had put its engineers into teams for a virtual trek through the Amazon. Along the way, the engineers were met with various obstacles — wild animals, tree loggers, and angry environmentalists.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Niels said. “Your engineering teams abandoned sick and injured teammates just so that they could make it out of the Amazon first. A bunch of the employees got fed to anacondas.”
“We didn’t use real snakes,” Gregor protested.
“They left their teammates to die.”
“Only in a virtual world!” Gregor’s face burst in splotches of red.
“Your moon colony is a virtual world!”
A few seconds passed, then Gregor spoke.
“I agree it would have been good of our engineers to save their colleagues. But at least their motivation was pure — to escape the jungle on behalf of Anahata. This is why they are the ultimate citizens of our new society. They will always work for its greater benefit and not be led astray by the petty distractions that affect so many other people. Distractions like…”
Gregor’s eyes flashed.
“Distractions like pots of gold.”
It was clearly a dig. But last year’s sales incentive — in which Niels had promised a pot of authentic gold doubloons to any sales team member who doubled their returns in a quarter — had proved to be a brilliant motivational technique. Anahata had tripled its profits that year thanks to a bit of luck o’ the Irish. Niels wasn’t crazy; he was shrewd. And that, he believed, was the difference between him and the man seated below him. There was no reasoning with insanity.
“What do you want from me,” Niels asked, throwing his hands up. He was no longer certain of his next move. Should he come down from the chair? Or maybe it was best to speak to Bobby directly, though that also carried risks.
“Stop blocking my teams from testing on Shanley Field,” Gregor said. “Free up the servers in Eastern Africa. Basically, get out of our way. In exchange, I will give you full transparency into our plans and eventual access to the moon minerals.”
“No, I don’t like this,” Niels said. “It’s not right for Anahata. And what will the rest of the world think when they find out? Our shareholders will freak out and the stock price will tank.”
“It doesn’t matter. By the time they find out, we’ll be gone. On the moon. And once we’re there and things are up and running, it will be easy to prove that the model works.”
Niels sighed and shook his head. He was used to arguing over dollars in well-lit restaurants, not debating with a psychopath in his wine dungeon. It was time to play the Bobby card.
“I think we need to talk about this — seriously talk about this at a very, very long management meeting.”
Gregor’s face tightened. “There is nothing to talk about. Bobby agreed to this a long time ago.”
“Then Bobby’s going to need to come talk to me if he wants those servers in Africa. I’m not going to let you thwart the part of the company that makes all the money and funds your crazy ideas.”
Niels got down from the chair and took a step toward the stairs.
“Wait! We’re not done!” Gregor yelped.
Niels suppressed a grin. Clearly, all was not lost. He counted to five in his head, and slowly, slowly turned toward his prey.
“Maybe there is a way…”
“I’m sure we can find a compromise,” said Gregor, the slight tremble in his voice confirming Niels’ hunch.
Gregor was afraid Niels would turn Bobby against him. It never ceased to amaze him the things grown men feared. Niels feared no one.
“I want ads on Moodify,” Niels said.
Gregor’s face scrunched into a sour ball, then unfolded into a scowl before disappearing underneath his skin. A second later, it was as if his face had never hosted any expression at all.
“Listen,” said Niels, “you let me put ads on Moodify and I’ll support you one hundred percent in the moon colony project. Shanley Field, servers in Africa — I’ll even give you a few sales guys who can wash your engineers’ laundry on the moon.”
Niels held out his hand, but Gregor made no move toward him. For a minute, the two men stared at each other without moving.
“Putting ads on Moodify bracelets is bad for our users,” Gregor said.
Niels shrugged. “Okay, I’ll just discuss this with Bobby tomorrow and — ”
“Wait,” said Gregor, jumping out of his seat and moving quickly toward Niels. “There is something I have to show you.”
Gregor took a few slow steps backwards toward the stairs, as if his gaze could freeze Niels in place. He then turned and bounded up the steps, letting the door slide gently behind him.
Down below, Niels crossed his arms and yawned loudly.
But once Gregor was gone, Niels began to rub his temples. Why hadn’t he just gone into banking instead? Greedy capitalists were so much easier to negotiate with than engineers.
Five miles away, Arsyen Aimo was also thinking about money — namely, that thanks to his huge new salary, he was once again on the winning side of capitalism and ready to upgrade his entire life.
Part of that upgrade definitely involved getting a new girlfriend — preferably an American one with excellent teeth.
Of course, he already had a girlfriend, Natia, though that had happened somewhat by accident.
A year earlier, he had signed up to an online dating site as “Rick,” a blond surfer from Santa Cruz. Rick resembled an underwear model, with a chiseled body, defined jawline, and a strong nose echoing Arsyen’s own good looks.
The first woman he met was Natia — herself masking as a Romanian grad student at Berkeley. Between her confusion of Los Angeles as a Northern Californian city and Arsyen’s own English mistakes, they quickly called each other’s bluff and soon were speaking to each other in Pyrrhian.
They struck up a fast virtual friendship — not more than that initially, as they were both too practical to imagine dating someone thousands of miles away. Arsyen took pains to conceal his true identity. From his experience, once a Pyrrhian woman knew she was in the presence of an Aimo, all hopes of reasonable conversation dissolved in a puddle of sighs. Instead, he told her about living in America, about drive-through pharmacies and the endless array of flavored sparkling water, and the importance of sanitation engineers like Arsyen, who fixed the various clogs, stains, and crumbs that could slow the infrastructure of a fast-moving startup.
She in turn wrote to him about her life in Poodlekek, Pyrrhia’s capital. Natia worked as a switchboard operator for the national telecommunications firm, a graying dinosaur that was slowly moving Pyrrhia into the 1980s. She belonged to a political philosophy group, which met weekly to discuss why Marxism failed and whether man could subvert machine in a post-capitalist society. Arsyen found her little intellectual forays rather cute. There would be no need for political philosophy once royal reign was restored, but why discourage Natia from stretching her feminine brain in the meantime?
She was particularly passionate in her dislike of General (now President) Korpeko — the source of the Aimo family’s undoing. He was a “despot,” she wrote, “hell-bent on pushing sports and false achievements instead of encouraging the true prosperity of the nation.”
Among her many gripes was Korpeko’s obsession with the little-known sport of curling. He believed it was Pyrrhia’s ticket to international fame — sufficiently obscure as to ensure little competition from wealthier countries. Korpeko had replaced all the bike lanes and gutters along main roads with curling courts, and no vacations or trips outside the country were allowed during the first week of February, now known as Pyrrhian Curling Week. Arsyen’s stomach tightened each time he imagined Korpeko’s curling lanes snaking across Pyrrhia’s unmarred hills.
“It sounds nothing like the rich cultural life that once flourished under the royal family,” Arsyen wrote to Natia, thinking of the literary salons and long afternoon croquet matches his family hosted at their summer palace for the Pyrrhian elite. The king had generously ensured that vivid accounts of the affairs were published in all of the country’s newspapers so literate citizens could vicariously enjoy the experience.
“Do you remember the photos of them playing croquet atop their verdant courts?” Arsyen asked. “It was far more dignified.”
“Yes, I suppose if you consider hitting a ball a more civilized activity than rolling a puck,” Natia replied.
Natia’s lack of appreciation for croquet was one of the many shortcomings Arsyen had been forced to tolerate as a lowly janitor. Another was the mole on her cheek — it was just a little too big for his liking; he often found himself covering it up with his thumb whenever they did video chat.
Luckily, product managers didn’t have to put up with such defects. When product managers discovered problems, they fixed them. And that’s exactly what Arsyen planned to do.
With a fat new paycheck now coming his way, Arsyen was better equipped to find himself a beautiful American girl — someone like that hippie receptionist, Jennie. Then, when the time was right, he would return to Pyrrhia bronzed and wealthy, with his beautiful queen and her good orthodontics on display. Natia and the other women of Pyrrhia would weep at what they had lost, only able to take comfort in the possibility of becoming one of Arsyen’s bathing maidens.
So it was decided: Natia was out. The only question was whether to write her a breakup email now or first play his video game.
Arsyen opted for the video game. And there he was, a half-hour later, stuck on his couch, glued to his screen, when the phone rang.
It was the chief strategist with the Throne Reclamation Committee (the TRC).
“Have you heard the news? A train went off Golden Bridge and fell into the lake.”
“Mmmhmm,” said Arsyen, drawing his sword and piercing the heart of a castle guard. “It was probably a drunk conductor. Our trains are flawless.”
The national rail service had been one of the great Aimo accomplishments — christened by his father as “locomotives of progress and prosperity.” The king even had a toy train replica built to travel over their palace moat and directly into Arsyen’s bedroom. He wondered if that train was still there — particularly the first-class carriage, outfitted with miniature foodstuffs. As a teenager, Arsyen often threw the train’s gold-plated bison fries at his manservant Sklartar when the old man wasn’t moving fast enough.
“They say you could hear the screams of the children as the train flew through the air,” the strategist said, “that the flames moved across the sky like a rocket.”
“Huh,” said Arsyen, his thumb pumping up and down on the console button as he sliced through the head of one of the king’s henchmen. Tragedies often befell poor nations. There wasn’t much point in getting worked up over a handful of dead bodies.
The felled henchman rose, holding his head in his hands. He was coming back for more. As Arsyen pumped the console with his thumbs, the phone fell from his ear. No matter, if the news was that important, he was sure to hear from the TRC again. Nothing was going to interrupt his game. He had made it through his grueling first week at Anahata and deserved some downtime.
Arsyen glanced at his email on his way to the bathroom a few minutes later and saw that Natia had written. She too was obsessed with the train accident. She claimed the government had stopped any media from reporting the event, fearful that the news could put a damper on its bid to host the International Curling Championships the following year. Government workers had already begun repairing the bridge, and no effort was being made to dredge up the train. Meanwhile, the police were arresting anyone they believed was spreading rumors. All internet services were blocked in the capital, and Natia had been forced to travel outside the province to get to any café with open access. “If they find out I am here, they will arrest me, or worse!” She wrote. “Help us get the word out about what happened. Hundreds are dead!”
Arsyen had assumed the TRC had been talking about ten people. Hundreds of people elevated the train wreck to a national disaster — the kind of thing worthy of a future king’s attention.
“What would a king do…?” Arsyen wondered aloud, imagining himself laying his healing hands upon thousands of maimed Pyrrhians, their bodies draped in rags — rags he would eventually replace with velvet robes! — as they lay prostrate before him. They shielded their eyes from his divine light, and chanted his name to the ground below them. King Arsyen. King Arsyen.
He shook himself back to reality. His dream was still far off. Whatever happened in Pyrrhia now would certainly be repeated in a year’s time, with a new set of mothers rolled out to despair over the loss of their children at the hands of Korpeko’s corrupt and negligent government. He needed to be patient and let these minor catastrophes accumulate. At the point of ten train wrecks, the time might finally be right for a royal coup.
But in the meantime, Arsyen could at least give a nudge toward revolution and have some quick fun with Korpeko. If working in technology had taught him anything, it’s that the internet loves a troll.
While working at Galt, Arsyen had learned about GaltPages — a popular tool that aggregated everything people had to say on all the different Galt apps. He even half-started his own GaltPage a few months earlier to promote his Aimo Air Freshener — a custom pink mixture he invented out of cleaning supplies so he could cover up the persistent stench of body odor that permeated the Galt meeting rooms. Its cotton candy scent would one day make Arsyen millions — provided he could figure out how to keep it from combusting.
He hadn’t gotten very far with his page back then, but Galt seemed to have made its product easier to use since he last tried. He could easily repurpose his early work to suit Natia’s social justice needs — the fluffy pink plume of cotton candy in the page’s background no longer suggesting a sweet scent but rather an artsy take on a nuclear holocaust. And, Arsyen told himself, there was a potential bonus to be had in all of this: If enough people were interested in what he posted about Poodlekek, he could collect their contact info and sell them his air freshener once all the furor died down.
Arsyen had worked in the Valley long enough to know that the key to social media was virality, not sincerity. So he renamed the page “Justice for Poodlekek” and posted Natia’s text about the accident, calling for action. He then posted the link to Justice for Poodlekek in the comment section of every Pyrrhian blog and newspaper article he could find and wrote a review of Korpeko’s government on the restaurant review site Help! Then he added pictures of Golden Bridge to his Photomatic account, using the retro and futuristic filters, as well as a bleaker one with a sprinkling of decapitated bodies.
Arsyen leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. It was an awfully nice thing he had just done for Natia, and it would hopefully assuage her disappointment when he broke up with her in favor of dating Jennie.
He returned to his video game and quickly forgot about the page. But a while later, passing by his computer on the way to the kitchen, he saw that the previously blank comment section of Justice for Poodlekek now hosted a long list of responses. The view count was already in the thousands and climbing with each minute. Arsyen did a double take: People seemed to really be upset by this train thing. And not just the train, but about Korpeko and his government as well.
The street light has been out for two weeks. Why is there no bison milk on Mondays?
Arsyen squealed with delight. His people seemed so unhappy! He hit the refresh button again and again, each new complaint augmenting his euphoria.
Korpeko will drag our country into further poverty! I hate curling!
Arsyen couldn’t resist posting a comment under a fake name.
This never would have happened when the Aimos were in power!
Someone replied immediately.
That’s true. King Aimo would’ve made us play croquet until our fingers fell off.
Arsyen laughed. That had indeed happened to a few unlucky peasants who had trespassed on the royal croquet court.
As the minutes passed, complaints about bison milk were replaced by complaints about potholes, potholes by accusations of corruption, corruption by torture.
Arsyen did a small jig before his computer, then paused — first to check out his flexed biceps reflected on his computer screen, and then to update his page with a new message.
My people, we must take action!!
Of course, Arsyen knew President Korpeko would put it all down. That’s how it happened in Pyrrhia and the rest of the poor world. People protested and waved hand-painted signs, and then, if they weren’t disappeared by the government, they trudged back to work on Monday.
But Arsyen’s well-meaning but rather stupid Pyrrhian subjects couldn’t see that far ahead. Instead, the misery of Pyrrhia wrote itself across the Justice for Poodlekek page. The decay of the streets, the decay of the nation, the decay of everything, really, but the country’s gleaming curling lanes. The page’s followers swelled into the thousands within minutes. Soon they were asking about the creator of Justice for Poodlekek, calling on him to lead them forward.
It was terrible timing. He still had six levels to go in his video game.
“Men of action take action,” Arsyen said to himself, repeating a poster he had seen outside one of Anahata’s sales buildings.
He composed a short note to Natia:
My dear Natia, I have made a GaltPage to help you spread the word. Also, I am sorry but I think we will have to break up because I am not going to be able to come to Pyrrhia anytime soon.
Arsyen paused. What if Natia showed up one day in California without that unfortunate mole and wanted to sleep with him?
He began to type again.
Let me know if you ever come to California. Keep in touch!
Then he left the house to go grab a burrito. He needed some fuel to keep him going if he was going to conquer the six-headed henchman later that night.
Whatever Gregor Guntlag was trying to prove, Niels was determined to ignore it. He would meet Gregor’s final, desperate plea for cooperation with the same dismissal with which Gregor had treated Niels’ chair-jumping antics.
Niels pictured Gregor lugging the mysterious proof of his superior world order down the stairs, his combat boots thudding against the wooden steps, then stomping to the table. What did he want to show Niels? A philosophy book? A line of code? A diorama? Regardless, Niels’ expression would remain placid, unmoved, mouth silent in Guntlagian style until Gregor’s desperation grew to the point where Niels would only need to repeat three words: “Ads on Moodify.” Maybe he would even agree to let Niels put ads on employee T-shirts and the meeting-room chairs.
When had Gregor left exactly? Half an hour earlier? An hour? It was starting to seem like an awfully long time to leave someone waiting in a basement.
It was obvious what Gregor was trying to do. He had locked Niels in the cellar in order to assert his dominance and put Niels on edge. But these kinds of mind tricks and one-upmanship were old hat for a Master Negotiator. After all, Niels was the man who had challenged a quadriplegic music executive to a game of rugby; the man who hid E. coli in an opponent’s entree so he could pitch him on a business proposition as the other lay prostrate before the toilet for six hours. This wine cellar act was amateurish.
That said, why would a grown man lock a work colleague in his basement? Was that something Germans found funny? Or maybe Gregor was in fact Austrian. The Austrians were famous for their appreciation of basements. For a split second, Niels’ body tensed as he imagined Gregor descending the stairs in a pair of leather pants.
Niels closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them again. He couldn’t help but respect his opponent for planting these seeds of doubt. Five minutes passed, then ten. Niels felt splinters from the chair making inroads into the back of his arms. Shapes emerged from the shadows, then receded. Another twenty minutes passed.
Niels knew he shouldn’t panic, but the shadows, the quiet, the unpredictability of his opponent all began to cloud his confidence. The longer he sat and paced and sat and paced, the more Niels became convinced that the taciturn Teuton was planning to leave him there all night, returning only once confident that he had broken the Master Negotiator.
Niels needed to plot his escape. From his shirt pocket, he pulled out the pen and pad of paper that he always carried with him. In a world of internet intangibles, Niels found reassurance in last-century items.
His high-level plan of attack was fairly easy to map. First, Niels needed to get himself out of the basement, and second, he needed to stop Gregor’s moon colony plan. (Third, he needed to destroy Gregor, though that was a longer-term goal that would require a separate strategy and PowerPoint deck.)
The question, of course, was how to go about these things. Niels considered the obvious — he could call another member of the management team. But as soon as Fischer, HR Paul, or Old Al showed up, Gregor would have some story ready and they would all have a good chuckle over Niels’ paranoia. Word would get out around Anahata, and even his own team would eventually find out about his panicked call for help. Exhilarated by the scent of weakness, the salesmen would circle him like the killer sharks he had trained them to be. It would be the end of him.
Instead, Niels sketched a mountain. At the base, he wrote, “Me.” At the summit, he wrote “FREEDOM.” Then he paused, realizing that he had failed to capture the full complexity of the situation. So he drew a second mountain next to the first. Now he had a mountain range. At the base of that second mountain, Niels wrote, “Gregor announces Moon Colony Plan.” At the top, he wrote, “I DESTROY the Moon Colony Plan!!!”
After a few minutes, and a few trees and shrubs added to his drawing for good measure, Niels had the entire route mapped, from base camp to summit. He was ready to go. He leaped out of his chair and did fifty jumping jacks, followed by one hundred situps, enjoying the rush of blood through his body. Niels would save Anahata from the worst decision it could ever make, and possibly even get Gregor fired in the process.
The first step was simple. He would ring Bobby and suggest that he pick Niels up at Gregor’s house for a midnight yoga class. Bobby was a sucker for yoga invites and had stated on numerous occasions that he wished the management team would chant together. Niels, for his part, thought yoga was the lazy man’s excuse for exercise, but like golf and wine, he saw value in its acquisition. Yoga had not only helped him meet several lonely housewives, but had also distinguished him as the only member of Bobby’s team who could execute Chaturanga Dandasana — providing a reasonable excuse for him to seed business ideas over sun salutations.
Niels pulled out his phone, selected Bobby’s number, and was soon hit by his mountain’s first boulder. There was no reception in Gregor’s basement.
He was not used to being knocked down so early in the game, but like a true sales champion, Niels rose quickly. “Only losers lose,” he whispered to himself, quoting one of the motivational posters in his office. He did five pushups with one hand, then jumped to his feet.
Niels tapped his phone’s email application and began to type:
Bobby, have just heard of a killer nighttime yoga studio in Mill Valley. Fantastic kombucha bar. I can get us in. Can you meet tonight? I’m at Gregor’s — stuck in his basement actually, funny story. Come grab me and we can head straight to the studio.
He paused. Would Bobby sense desperation? He needed to make his message appear as normal and Niels-like as possible.
Also, Gregor told me all about Project Y. Fascinating idea. I have some ideas about how we can monetize.
Niels smiled. He could feel his bed and a good night’s sleep within reach.
He pushed “send” and immediately began composing a second email, this time to HR Paul. Gregor’s insanity needed to be recorded somewhere — even if in the short-term Niels had no intention of compromising Anahata’s public reputation and Niels’ own financial stake in the company — by outing its head engineer as a psychopath.
Niels decided to attach a photo of himself in the basement. He raised his phone camera to get an angle that captured both the rows of wine bottles and the staircase leading up to a locked door. Then he hit “send” and took a swig of the Chateau Margaux — it would make for great bragging rights at next month’s HBS Successful Man Golf Tournament.
Niels opened the email application again, and his face fell. His email to Bobby hadn’t gone through. In its place was a time-out message — the data connection just wasn’t strong enough. Niels tried to send again, and then again and again, from different parts of the basement. But each time he was met with the same result.
The Master Negotiator was hit with a strong dose of reality — there was no phone connection, only a very weak data connection, and he was trapped in an Austrian psychopath’s basement.
Niels scanned the room. Aside from the bottles of wine, it was absolutely empty. The staircase led to the locked door on the first floor, but otherwise there were no windows and no way out. He couldn’t go to work. He couldn’t make money.
He couldn’t make money!
“No!!!” he screamed, kicking over one of the chairs. He bounded up the stairs and began pounding on the door. “Let me out! You can’t do this!”
Niels pounded for several minutes, but there was no answer from the other side.
Niels crumbled on the top step and was at first shocked, then horrified, then just miserable to discover that the wet feeling on his face were tears, actual man tears. His body shook, and he began to feel cold. He wanted his mother, or the ex-girlfriend he had cheated on, or even just that hippie receptionist he had slept with.
Or even God. Niels clasped his hands in prayer, unsure whether the gesture was necessary for the Almighty to hear him. Did God have to listen to him? Didn’t God love rich people?
Just in case, Niels apologized extra hard for ignoring Him the previous four decades and promised that he would be good from now on. He wouldn’t sleep with receptionists, he’d mentor inner-city entrepreneurs, and he’d teach the homeless how to code. He’d get rid of moon colonies and pop-up internet ads, and he’d fix piracy on the web once and for all. Above all, he’d be a good citizen and son and follower of whatever religion God turned out to belong to.
He looked down at the useless mobile phone in his hand. Tears had formed pathetic puddles across its surface, distorting his Flitter application, which now seemed to sprout wings from the “f” of its logo. Niels stared at it for a few seconds, watching the “f” heave under his tears, like a bird dreaming of flight.
And then it hit him. Flitter — Galt’s popular thought-sharing tool — was famous for working in the lowest-bandwidth parts of the world. They were always bragging in the press about how someone had used their tool to escape an oppressive regime. It drove Bobby crazy — he thought Anahata should have a monopoly on freedom and hope.
Niels didn’t care about any of that. In fact, he had zero interest in Galt or Flitter or in reading anyone’s thoughts other than his own. But a year earlier, he had tried to convince Galt to run Anahata’s ads on their apps and opened a Flitter account, Niels_1973, to show them he really cared about their product. But eventually the deal fell through, and other than a few half-hearted fleets about some Anahata sports matches, Niels’ account lay dormant for months. He had practically forgotten he even had it installed on his phone.
The likelihood Flitter would work in the cellar was low, but Niels had nothing to lose. He fired up Niels_1973 and, hands shaking, expressed his panic in fewer than one hundred thirty-five characters (the limit set on any Flitter message):
Help me! Trapped in basement at 13 Willow St, Atherton.
Niels hit “send,” and in a split second, the post was successfully transmitted. Niels jumped up from the step, pumping his fist in the air. “Yes!” he cheered. He sat back and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Twenty minutes passed, and there was no response — no “we’re coming,” or “hold tight, buddy!” For a moment, Niels wondered whether his message had indeed been delivered — or fleeted, as the Flitterati would say. But he could see there were millions of other live fleets coming in from the rest of the world — fleets about politicians, fleets about celebrities, fleets from companies hawking their products, and fleets from celebrities hawking those same products. Clearly someone was getting through to someone.
The problem, Niels quickly realized, was that no one was listening to him. He had only two people following his fleets: agefshgr_74 and tina_xxx. Niels didn’t even know who they were or how they had found him in the first place.
“Failure is not an option,” Niels whispered to himself, repeating the Smeardon family motto. He took a gulp of Chateau Margaux and reminded himself that the important thing was that Flitter worked. The next step was simply to make it work better for him. He needed something more eye-catching — something that would get people so excited that they would want to refleet his message to all of their friends and followers.
He quickly settled on Tech Geek, the Valley’s hottest tech gossip site. Including the @techgeek Flitter handle was his best bet to be seen by someone following their account. So Niels tried again, decades of Chateau Margaux life force moving him into a new world of confidence:
@techgeek Love your hard-hitting tech analysis. Also: Help me! I’m a prisoner of #Anahata.
Up in San Francisco, Tech Geek’s social media manager stared at the fleet from Niels_1973 and groaned. Of all the Galt apps, Flitter definitely had the most crazies. There was something about giving people just one hundred thirty-five characters to express themselves that made them even more desperate — fueled by the hope that a bite-sized thought would be small enough to penetrate the world’s scattered attention.
It wasn’t just weirdos like Niels who drove him crazy. It was the number of people who didn’t properly understand Flittiquette. They exhibited a poor use of hashtags, a tendency to refleet every compliment or inane statement made by a follower, and an inability to craft something eye-popping in one hundred thirty-five characters.
Social media was a twenty-first-century art, and a true amateur (“in the French sense,” he explained to anyone who would listen, “meaning a lover of social media”) had to spend time honing his craft. He often reflected that his title should have been Master Craftsman of Social Media. Or simply God.
Because as far as he could tell, there was no job with more prestige. Sure, he told his friends, he could take a high-paying social media job at a big corporation, but that wasn’t his style. He didn’t want to be the guy fleeting “Not feeling fresh? Try the new #Summer_douche in fresh lavender.” He had done his college senior thesis on Che Guevara’s influence on scatological pop art. He could hardly sell out to the agro-chemico-industrial complex to be their social media plaything. He was part of an #online #revolution #disrupting #everything.
That’s why he was at Tech Geek, by all accounts the heart of the universe — or, at least, his universe, and the universe of anyone who mattered to him. Tech Geek was where all things tech and Valley were beating, throbbing, iterating, de-duping, compiling, normalizing, and randomizing. As far as he saw it, if you did social media for the Valley, you were, in many ways, the Valley. In fact, he liked to think of himself as a modern-day William Randolph Hearst. The decisions he made — whether to refleet someone’s comment, post a piece of news or gossip about another company, or (shock!) ignore it altogether — these were the things that made and broke powerful men and their companies.
So it annoyed him when fools like Niels_1973 would fleet things that were clearly false, just in the hope of grabbing his attention. It was irresponsible and a waste of his time. Niels_1973 was probably the same guy who had tried to send a “tip” to Tech Geek a few months earlier that Anahata had discovered Atlantis and was refurbishing it so that Bobby Bonilo could have an underwater pleasure kingdom. Or the guy who had fleeted that Anahata was suggesting its lowest-performing employees take performance-enhancing drugs. Granted, the latter proved to be true, but the source had missed a crucial detail. Anahata was randomizing who would get the drugs so they could analyze the effectiveness of the trial — a piece of research that would be helpful for the entire scientific community. #Detailsmatter
Niels_1973: @techgeek Love your hard-hitting tech analysis. Also: Help me! I’m a prisoner of #Anahata.
He reread the fleet and shook his head. He spent several minutes contemplating the various punishments he could mete out, finally deciding to block Niels_1973 from his list altogether. It was an extreme punishment, but he couldn’t condone such outrageous, attention-seeking behavior.
Then, feeling like he had done yet another great service for the world, Tech Geek’s social media manager called it a night and made his way to bed.
It took total isolation from the outside world for Niels to discover what millions of Galt fans around the world already knew: There was no longer any point in real conversation when you could just communicate in short phrases and poop emojis.
As night gave way to morning, Niels found himself deeply focused on a handful of celebrities and their preferred hair products and was closely following the reports of a burgeoning relationship between two contestants on a popular reality TV show. His concern for smooth hair and the couple’s happiness grew stronger as he finished off the bottle of Chateau Margaux, then opened a 1787 bottle of Chateau Lafite.
Niels’ innumerable fleets about captivity, despair, and Anahata had gone unanswered despite variations in text, creative spelling, and attempts at haiku. Despite hours of nonstop fleeting, there were still no refleets by his two followers, and still no acknowledgment from Tech Geek. Nor had he gained any new followers who could potentially spread the word on his behalf.
Ever the mountaineer, Niels devised a new plan, with a new mountain range that showcased the complexity (but also the conquerability!) of his current situation. This was one of his favorite mountain-range models to use at work. It had switchbacks and a very large boulder. The point, he often told his team, was to not get distracted by the boulder and to stay focused on the switchbacks.
Flitter users were switchbacks.
No, they were boulders.
Well, whatever they were, they weren’t the point. The point was, he had been foolish to think that people on Flitter would care about him, Niels Smeardon. What they cared about was the content he himself had been sucked into — the celebrities, the gossip, the lifestyle guru tips. The trick was to make these idiots care about him through his connection to the people they worshipped. They were like lichen growing on top of the boulder. Or maybe the sign at the bottom of the mountain marking the trail. Or…
“I don’t need mountains,” Niels growled. “Mountains need ME.”
He crumpled the paper and tossed it to the ground, then immediately started fleeting again.
His first pass was a flop, despite referencing the biggest pop star on the planet — the sexy blonde singer named La Lala who was known for hitting high notes while writhing on the floor with pythons.
#OMG LaLala making new video with #Liberace! A duet with a legend!
The only reaction came from Tina_xxx, who removed herself from his list of two followers. No one else responded to his fleet.
Niels sipped some wine and took a few minutes to study the most popular tweets about La Lala. Then he tried again.
#LaLala sings at #Nashville high school, discourages #bullies. Wears pythons in school uniform. Such an #inspiration!
Niels doubted La Lala had ever been to Nashville. But no matter, within minutes, he had been refleeted. There was even a string of responses, most of them from Lala fans in Nashville asking where she had sung. Niels responded:
My friend said #EmersonHigh. She wore band aids instead of clothes!!
Within a few seconds, he had two new people following his account. He stretched his fingers and typed his next set of messages.
#LaLala wears no makeup to remind us that talent is more important than beauty. #LaLala pythons remind us that in every snake is a beating heart. #LaLala spotted at #LAX, straddling a plane. Anyone have pictures?
The popularity of Niels_1973 began to climb. The more inane his posts, the more misspellings and melodrama (driven more by inebriation than calculation), the more followers he gained. Niels felt his blood begin to pump again. He gave one of his help me! posts a go, just to see if someone would respond. But despite having amassed four thousand followers in thirty minutes, all hanging on every word he had to say about La Lala, there didn’t seem to be anyone interested in helping the man behind the fleets.
Niels scratched his head, then returned to his notepad. He drew a SWOT analysis listing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of his pop star. When he hit the “weaknesses” box, he realized his error: La Lala skewed toward a much younger audience. Was it really plausible that a pimply fourteen-year-old fan would come to his rescue?
Niels groaned. His demographic targeting had been all wrong. La Lala fans were too young. He needed serious people. People who had driver’s licenses. People who thought a bit more about the consequences of social media. People like…thirty-year-olds.
Niels flipped back to the Flitter homepage to study the most popular age-appropriate topics. What were people fleeting about on a random Monday morning? Scrolling through the list, Niels saw that most of the topics were things he knew nothing about. In addition to the perennial pop music favorites, the list included things like #bitchslap, #whatimknitting, and #blessedmoments. Niels kept scanning, moving farther and farther down the list. And then he saw it: #Poodlekek.
“Yes!”
Niels knew all about Poodlekek. It was his friend’s heavy metal band in college. He was surprised they were still together after two decades, let alone had become so popular. He remembered going to their shows at the campus coffee house, cigarette lighter waving in the air as he and his then-girlfriend sang to guitar-heavy ballads about twisted love, rocky family relationships, and starving children in Ethiopia. Their fans would likely be Niels’ age, the kind of people who would take seriously his cries for help. And Niels had plenty of interesting things he could fleet about them to get people’s attention — like the lead singer’s bad case of the Herp. Women would totally refleet that.
But first things first. He needed to build a new fan base. Niels kicked off his first Poodlekek fleet with a bit of nostalgia.
Raise your lighters for #Poodlekek
Arsyen rose from his bed, ready to conquer an American woman.
It would not be his first attempt. He had made several passes at courtship since arriving in the United States, but most women were too intimidated by his overwhelming virility.
But Jennie, the Anahata receptionist, struck Arsyen as the confident type. She shook his hand without averting her gaze and even scolded him during their campus tour when he complimented Galt. He liked a sassy lady with good teeth.
He had the day all planned out. After lunchtime, he’d surprise Jennie in the reception area and give her his Aimo Air Freshener. Then, after a bit of chitchat, he’d suggest they head to his apartment for some video games and sex. It would be the perfect first date.
The only potential hiccup was keeping his words straight. He wondered whether Sven would practice his English with him that morning.
But Arsyen had no such chance. Sven greeted him as he entered their cubicle, waving a hand bloodied by jelly doughnut. Jennie — his Jennie — was standing next to Sven.
She spotted him and smiled. “Oh, hi! How are you liking Anahata?”
Arsyen shook his head vigorously. He did not have an answer prepared for this.
But Jennie seemed to have no difficulty continuing the conversation by herself, telling Arsyen something about her feminist book club. Little of what she said registered with him. He was watching her lips move, fascinated by the way they came together and then parted as she spoke just to him. They were so different from Natia’s lips, which moved together in fits and jerks, all depending on the bandwidth of her internet connection.
Sven cleared his throat.
“Jane here was just about to tell us what she’s doing here.”
“It’s Jennie,” she said, turning to Sven. “And I’m here because I’m the new nontechnical technical lead.”
“Huh?”
“I’m your new manager,” Jennie said.
It was as if Vesuvius had exploded across the well-manicured lawns of Palo Alto. Sven’s nose twisted until the rest of his face followed in a spiral of despair. Jonas’ mouth froze in a perfect, horrified O.
Arsyen understood their reaction immediately: They were as upset as he was about having a female boss.
“This sounds like the kind of subterfuge the sales team would instigate, sending a nonengineer in here to sabotage our project,” Jonas said.
Sven jotted some lines on a piece of paper and threw it in front of Jennie. “What do you see here?”
Jennie took the paper in her hands, and Arsyen noticed that her wrists bore the remnants of a henna tattoo. She took a few seconds to study the crude drawing, which showed a graph with a diagonal line descending from the top left-hand side to the bottom right.
“Um, a descending line?” she said.
“And what’s the first thing you think of, in the context of Anahata?” Sven asked.
“I don’t know…falling profits?”
“I knew it — imposter!” he yelled, leaping to his feet.
“But I’m not from the sales team. And that was just a line — ”
“You could’ve said it was a Pareto curve, or a drop in latency, or a decrease in the number of users,” Sven said. “There were endless acceptable possibilities.”
“The possibilities were indeed infinite, in a figurative if not exact sense,” Jonas nodded.
“You had so many options, and yet what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Money. You are from sales. Out with you!” Sven’s finger pointed toward the hall, its edict winding across the floor and out the exit door, sending Jennie back to the reception area from whence she came.
Jennie glanced at Arsyen. Help! her eyes seemed to plead. It was clear she didn’t belong there — maybe she had also been trying for a janitorial position, like Arsyen, and had been mistakenly rerouted to Social Car.
“Did you come to clean?” whispered Arsyen, stepping closer. He reached into his pocket to grab the air freshener.
Jennie shot him a dirty look. “You think because I’m a woman I’m supposed to clean your cubicle?”
Jennie opened her leather fringe vest and shoved her chest at Arsyen. Feminism Happens Here, the T-shirt read.
Arsyen froze. He was not used to such forwardness in American women.
Jennie turned back to Sven and Jonas.
“Gregor Guntlag himself asked me to do this. He said I didn’t need to know how to code — just to lead. I’m a tour guide. I know how to lead people.”
Sven | https://medium.com/s/the-big-disruption/the-big-disruption-36fbed0268cf | ['Jessica Powell'] | 2019-06-19 14:03:52.831000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Marketing', 'Fiction', 'Feminism', 'Equality'] |
Color Widgets vs Widget World — Which widget app is the best? | Introducing the new World of Widgets
Apple’s new iOS 14 update has given us many improvements: inline replies in Messages, headphone customization, mirrored selfies, and of course the App Library. But there’s one iOS 14 update you’re probably seeing all over your social, and that’s the newly available widgets. Everyone’s using them to make their screen more aesthetic and stylish; they come in three sizes and are customizable by color, font, and content. There’s a lot of stressors in the world right now, and giving my phone a makeover seemed like a great distraction, as well as something that might actually prove useful. With this in mind, I set out to make my phone both prettier and more efficient. I did some research, and ended up downloading two of the hottest apps for comparison: Color Widgets, and Widget World.
What IS a widget?!
I barely knew anything about widgets when I started on my ~journey~, but you don’t have to be a technical expert to improve your iPhone experience and its aesthetics.
Simply put, an application is a big program, and a widget is a mini program which draws often-used functions from the app that can be used outside the app. For example, you might be able to play, pause, and skip tracks on a widget outside your music app, without going into the app itself.
Apple also has a new feature called Smart Stack, which uses Apple’s existing widgets. iPhone will automatically rank your widgets on the Stack based off of your existing app use during the day — for example, if you check the news in the morning and tomorrow’s weather at night, then those apps will show up at the times you normally use them. However, the Smart Stack can also be customized with apparently infinite widgets in the order that you want them.
With the new update, you can also download customizable widgets which can be used for every function you use a lot on your phone — weather, music, reminders, notes, calendars, whatever! Instead of just showing you the information at a glance you need, they can also be decorated with different background and font colors, different typefaces, and even different sizes: small widgets are the size of a 2x2 block of app icons, medium widgets are the size of a 2x4 block (the entire width of your home screen!) and large widgets are the size of a 4x4 icon block. The best part? You can move the widgets to any point on the home screen — no more blocking of the best half of your favorite background wallpaper! No more grids of icons if you don’t want them! Finally the look of the device you use the most — your phone — can be fully customized to your personality and needs.
What categories of widgets are there?
Widget World vs Color Widgets
Both Color Widgets and Widget World have clocks, weather, reminders, steps, calendars, quotes, and countdowns, with various backgrounds and fonts available (neon, minimal, pastel, etc.). In Color Widgets, some are customizable with your own photo background. Some categories and more options for customization can only be unlocked with a premium membership. I found the user experience in the Color Widgets app to be a bit clunky: the categories and options are arbitrarily organized and a bit repetitive, without a clear distinction between the free and premium options. The customization options are also more limited than I would like; they are lacking the option to change the color or font of individual content types (date or day of the week), and you can’t change the names of those categories too, which is annoying if you want to alter a base-level widget. However, there is a “your text here” widget which allows for personalized content, so if you really wanted to build your own line-up of information it is probably possible.
Widget World vs Color Widgets
Widget World vs Color Widget
I liked the organization of widget options in the Widget World app a lot better: the widget types are divided into clear categories on separate pages: quotes, clocks, weather, reminders, calendars, they’re all easy to explore. Using the Widget World app also is also a much friendlier user experience, and the app is a lot better looking. There are many more designs, and each category has its own concept design. The customization options are also a lot more detailed: each part of the content — for example the month, time, or battery — can be altered with different colors and fonts, allowing maximum customization which Color Widgets doesn’t allow. You can even choose which content you want to be visible or invisible, which is a great idea — I love being able to control the flow of information around my home screen. Honestly, the designs are also just cooler, and you can experience the full range of designs in your collection through customization. The Color Widget app doesn’t allow this; only one customized widget is saved at a time, whereas in the Widget World app you can draw from your own saved library of individual customized widgets.
What about the cost?
Both apps have a premium option: a Color Widgets subscription costs $1.99 a month, which unlocks all widgets and broadens the design library. The free library of widgets, as I mentioned above, is a bit limited and doesn’t include the weather, so this is an okay option if you want a better widget experience, but I think the Widget World options are actually better value for money.
Widget World Pro is $7.99; that includes all widgets and features such as visible / invisible content, colors, and fonts; all customizations unlocked, and the vast design library and subsequent updates available. To unlock any single individual widget is $1.99, but you can customize that base widget as many times as you want, and you get to keep all your customized versions in your collection.
Widgets are amazing
Widget World Widgets
Before this update landed on my phone I’d never thought about widgets at all, but now I am totally sold. I love being able to glance at my screen and get all the information I need immediately without opening up a bunch of different apps. After trying them both, I think Widget World is the best widget app: you just can’t beat the design and customization options. Before, my home screen was disorganized and difficult to navigate, but now, after a bit of work — that was so fun it didn’t feel like work — my home screen is a joyously color-coordinated lineup of everything I need. Check your phone right now, and download iOS 14 if you haven’t already. A new world of widgets awaits you!
You can download both apps and try them out!
Click Here to Download Widget World
Click Here to Download Color Widgets | https://msdoris-woolf.medium.com/color-widgets-vs-widget-world-which-widget-app-is-the-best-f7c3bd14bcdd | ['Doris Woolf'] | 2020-12-07 21:12:36.318000+00:00 | ['Wallpaper', 'iPhone', 'Design', 'Themes', 'Widget'] |
1:37 AM | Photo by Brina Blum on Unsplash
Eyes wide open during closing hours. Something is different tonight.
My eyes find focus in a corner of the living room, fixated on my collection of plants. 16 to be exact.
My plants look so dead. Withering, neglected. And that’s so unlike me. I care deeply about my plant family. Staring at the green and brown congregation, I realize I can’t rest until I fix my fixation. I start with the plant that looks most disconnected from its once joyful existence.
I begin to water it, but quickly bring myself to a halt.
Looking around, I notice something new. I feel it too. I feel the imbalance. I feel the emptiness of small plants in large pots, isolated from the closeness — no familiar leaves brushing up against them throughout the day. Silent. Still.
All plants need space to grow and extend
Some need to grow alone
Some need to be next to their friends
Thriving together in their shared elements
I turn on the music in my mind and I hear Erykah Badu.
This is strange because the last time I heard her mainstream, my eyes couldn’t hear her and my ears couldn’t see the words being spoken directly to me.
The song in my mind is Bag Lady. Is this song about me? Of course, it is. The Bag Lady is all of us to some degree.
Track by track as my mind reacts, I pick up one of the spider plants. Chlorophytum Comosum.
When I first bought this plant, it was already dying
The woman at the store said it wouldn’t live, no use in trying
but I knew in my spirit she was unintentionally lying
I couldn’t accept her advice as truth
Three years later, that same plant speaks with vibrancy and youth.
The underlying issue was multiple plants overcrowding one pot — treated as if they were all the same. Nothing left to gain.
Lacking attention and love
I uprooted those plants, finding hope in each bulb
I knew they would be just fine
One story gently divided into five
And each story thrived
A similar thing happened with the mass cane plants. Dracaenas. The plants I’m now pruning. Overcrowded without enough light, I created new space for them. Now they sit just right.
Epipremnum aureum. Devil’s ivy plants are supposedly some of the easiest plants to grow. Adaptable. Versatile. Living in water without soil, I bear witness to their roots growing longer and stronger through the transparent shallow glass. Vines sprouting forward in beautiful overlays.
The money trees. Pachira aquatica. Watered. Leaves spritzed. They stand strong even when dismissed. Rise up. Resist.
On to the Jade plant. Crassula ovata.
A small stem and one leaf when we met, I thought you would die
I was never certain I could keep you alive
Upon first glance, little to no progress
Until I looked a little closer to the left
New leaves. Evidence emerged
This one moves quickly when love is the verb
This cycle continued until all 16 plants were watered.
And by the next day
They look so much more alive
More green, less grey
With a new realization, I apologize to them all
When I lose my footing, everything close to me feels the fall | https://princellatalley.medium.com/1-37-am-937cfb045f4d | ['Princella Talley'] | 2020-07-13 01:25:13.810000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Creative Writing', 'Poetry', 'Culture', 'Life'] |
A Picture of Boston: Lenny and the Piss Poor Boys | A Picture of Boston: Lenny and the Piss Poor Boys
Lenny Lashley’s underappreciated country album is one of Boston’s most poignant artistic expressions
Lenny Lashley is one of Boston punks most beloved figures, even if a lot of his outings have flown under the radar in comparison to other artists from the area. He first popped up on the scene in the mid 90s as the leader of Darkbuster, Boston’s hard-drinking party band whose lyrics consisted of drinking beer, fighting, making grave mistakes, waking up hungover and doing it all again. The perfect soundtrack to any New Englanders weekend. What drove it all home for the listener was how Lenny’s lyricism always painted this debauchery in a more cynical way, there was always some regret or consequence to the fun being had. Time was being wasted and life was passing us all by as we indulged ourselves in the drink, the drug and the lust.
After Darkbuster disbanded for the first time Lenny continued his tales of hard luck and regret for the next two decades and his storytelling has only ripened with age. He’s carried his musical skills into other bands as well, notably playing rhythm guitar in fellow Boston rockers the Street Dogs which he played in for seven years before departing in early 2020.
Lenny’s solo career however is where he truly cemented his status as a local hero amongst the Boston music scene. His current solo outing is Lenny Lashely’s Gang of One which is where I first came across Lenny’s music in 2014 when I saw him and his band open up for Flogging Molly at the House of Blues. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I truly delved into Lenny’s back catalogue and found Darkbuster and later fell in love with his first solo outing: Lenny and the Piss Poor Boys and their self-titled album.
This album took a giant leap from Lenny’s punk rock roots with Darkbuster as Lenny firmly planted his boots into the country/folk territory which is a rarity in the east coast… maybe not necessarily but it’s mostly music that you hear played in bars and tip the guy playing as you stumble outside to puke your guts out on the sidewalk. Boston’s a rock n’ roll type of crowd, that’s what sells here at least but Lenny chose to stick to a style of music that provided the perfect backing to his hard luck tales of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, which is the title of the first song on the album. In all honesty the album is one of the most aesthetically pleasing to the authentic Bostonian culture which is disappearing due to gentrification and it reflects an understanding of that world better than in the movies.
Lenny begins the albums first song “Wrong Side of the Tracks” with the line “In an old steel town they’re closing factories down/ Mom and Dad split up cuz he’s a bastard” and from there you can instantly picture where the albums content will come from. This isn’t just laughing off the pain and drinking it away for good times anymore, this is downright upsetting and hopeless from the start. What’s worse is this is the reality for a lot of people in the Greater Boston area and its possible that many of the listeners of this album are drawn to it because of the relatability of the lyrical content.
Lenny fits into this record better than his previous punk records, hearing his vocals and instrumental work on this record sounds like a man who has truly worn in the work boots he bought years prior. His voice crackles across the tranquil country-esque music, it has a tinge that releases an odor of Jim Beam and cigarettes and it fits the sound so well as he croons his hard tales of dead friends, hangovers spurred by nights of debauchery and cradled with severe loneliness. It’s a hard voice that gives Tom Waits’ grave voice a run for its money, it scratches your ears as you listen, you can almost feel his unkempt beard at your ears as the smoothness of the slide guitars ease you into the affair. His voice makes him sound older than he is on the record, to never have met the man I would have pictured him to be in his 50s recording the album, but he was really in his early thirties.
The third song on the album pays homage to a long gone Boston landmark the Cambridgeport Saloon on Mass. Ave in Cambridge, a picture of which is featured on the albums black and white cover. The dive bar was a seemingly unsavory place for the yuppies in the city but a haven for the locals as you could find yourself there at an ungodly hour of the night grabbing a few beers at less than $2 bucks a pop. Places like this are a godsend in the city of Boston and they’re all but disappearing in favor of cute hipster hangout spots to make the yuppies feel cozy. Lenny’s song pays homage to the stories people most likely told, or he probably lived through himself, of their weeks leading up to them sitting at the barstool and you can imagine they aren’t enjoyable.
The most depressing part of the song in my opinion is the verse “I fell down and didn’t get up, they took me away/ I’ll be back tomorrow night and start it up again” because we all know this one is absolutely true. No matter how bad of a situation you’d find yourself in, you’ll never learn the lesson that’s slapping you in the face. Perhaps you’ve already learned it but it’s just too late.
The most appealing piece of this album is how much soul it contains, it’s truly the sound of a man bearing himself as any busker found at a pub would in order to set the mood for the patrons. Lenny’s lived a hard life, no doubt about that but he’s come out on the other side to tell the tale but when this album came out in 2005 I’m not sure he had made it out of his own personal hell just yet and that to me brings out such feeling in the record.
The music is tinged with the sounds of outlaw country and maybe some folk music reminiscent of Bob Dylan. The slide guitars ooze with the peaceful rhythms, there are also some rockabilly songs such as the track “Whiskey and Water” which is one of the many standouts. Lenny speaks to and for a community in the Greater Boston Area that is largely being ignored and suppressed these days as gentrification has all but forced them out of the city. Despite the area’s penchant for hard rocking music it’s Lenny’s easy going country soul that can carry us all through our days of hard working and unbearable realities that we all are struggling to get through, often turning to substances to ignore. The album still maintains that punk attitude that Lenny had from his Darkbuster days and that’s what gives this album the crossover appeal to fans of his earlier output, he’s maintained his integrity throughout his career. There are many artists in the Boston area that have tackled this sound but Lenny’s first solo album in particular stands out amongst them all, there’s a certain magic in the sound of this album and I wish he did more as Lenny And The Piss Poor Boys but just hearing from Lenny is good enough.
This album sinks under a lot of people’s radars I find and that’s a shame because I think it would speak to a lot of people. It was on streaming services for awhile which was where I first discovered it but it recently disappeared from Spotify and is nowhere else to be found. This was a devastating loss and I can only hope in writing this that it can somehow be put back up, it’s carried me through a lot of hard times. We all find ourselves in hard times and a lot of music can reach out to us and carry us through them, this is one of those albums for me and I sincerely doubt I’m alone in this. I’ll always keep carrying on hoping to live to see myself live out the line Lenny sang on my favorite track “Beat On The Brat,” “I’m thirty-something and I don’t feel old/ Still listening to punk rock still like my beers cold/ I got the best gal I’ve ever seen and I can’t wait till we hear her favorite song again.” Someday we’ll all make it through. | https://medium.com/clocked-in-magazine/a-picture-of-boston-lenny-and-the-piss-poor-boys-337bfb5f24ec | ["Ryan O'Connor"] | 2020-12-19 19:05:53.778000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Boston', 'Magazine', 'Review', 'Music'] |
This is your brain on FOMO. | A study by some smart guy called Andrew Przybylski found the condition was most common in those who had unsatisfied psychological needs such as wanting to be loved and respected. So, most of us.
In a society where we’re bombarded with advertising imagery to make sure we’re all super-insecure, it’s the perfect storm for a FOMO epidemic. Get your tinfoil helmets ready, kids!
Illustration: Jason Chatfield
I can’t remember the last time I went out with friends and we didn’t all have to compete for each others’ attention. We’re instantly pitted against the un-winnable battle of a universe of other non-present people who are potentially more interesting. Sometimes it literally takes playing the phone stack game to get us to engage like adult humans.
I’m the guiltiest of my friends of this heinous social disease. I’ve done it for a long time.
Ever since Facebook and Twitter became available on a handheld device, I was that guy checking it for updates. Checking out of wherever I was to be somewhere else. A scorching case of FOMO not seen by the likes of any other early adopters.
Such was the severity, my friends just started excluding me from conversations. What was the point? I was just going to stop half way through and check my phone anyway right? I am also a dork. And who wants to talk to a dork? (Except the Lord)
Trying to hold a conversation with me while I was holding my smartphone was like trying to read bedtime stories to a hyena ripping into a squealing zebra. The amount of patience required not to punch me in the face couldn’t be quantified. The lack of restraint on my part was unfathomably rude.
Nomophobia (which is a thing, sadly) is the chronic, crippling fear of being out of mobile phone contact. Add a hefty dose of FOMO into that equation and you’ve got yourself a serious social problem infecting an entire generation.
This all may sound like I’m being harsh on a seemingly harmless social faux pas, but as I’ve written before in 2010, social media exists on the very requirement of you obsessively needing to check back in and obsessively tap that little red circle to see how many people Liked or commented on your genius photo of a duck wearing a hat.
There are two parts to this:
1.) By Design
Social media sites know exactly what they’re doing. Peoples’ addiction to them is no accident. Facebook has been redesigned more times than Tori Spelling’s chin, but there’s one thing on the user interface that has never changed- that’s the little red circle with a number in it, hovering over a small light blue globe. The small indicator of how many notifications are sitting there, waiting for you to check. There’s a reason they haven’t changed it too – the human brain.
The way the human brain forms habits and addictions based on patterns, and more specifically, through triggers. Triggers are really powerful things. You can use them to your advantage if you want to hack your brain, but if you let them run your subconscious it’s a one-way trip to the above mentioned simpering mess of FOMOsexual.
(I don’t know what the sexual part is. Let’s not think about it. But I will gift you my new favourite word: Infornography. You’re welcome.)
2.) The Greatest Hits.
FOMO is mainly associated with Facebook and Instagram, which provide constant opportunity for comparison of one’s status.
Oddly enough, the majority of people on Facebook and Instagram don’t tend to post photos or check in when they’re doing nothing. They tend to image craft; posting photos of themselves doing fun things, out with friends, eating great food or having heaps of fun at a bar. With Facebook, you’re getting everyone’s Best Of album. Their Greatest Hits. Epic FOMO bait.
What’s the solution?
Solar flare? Wipe out the internet? FOMOs Anonymous?
The first step is stopping the trigger. The next, ideally, is a digital diet to reset your triggers.
I tried a little experiment would recommend you try if you have FOMO issues. I wanted to see if I could extricate myself from the lure of the little red dot for as long as I could. I would see how high I could get that little number before I felt the need to click it. The result? I’m four days in and I’m recognising the desire to click it every time it pops up, but guess what. I haven’t been socially excluded/missed out on anything/died. I am, however, still a dork.
The first part of breaking an addiction is recognising the problem. Then identifying the trigger.
(This is super easy if your addiction is guns.) I’ve still been logging on every now and then, checking on the events panel. I’m still responding to friend requests and DMs, but I haven’t clicked the notification button. It’s up to about 104. The idea that this is somehow heroic strikes me as more and more ridiculous as each day goes on.
FIG 1: DERPAMINE GENERATOR
The link between seeing the red dot, and needing to click/extinguish it is diluting and my brain’s circuitry is rerouting my attention to other things.
I use an app called SelfControl.app for Mac to blacklist Facebook.com and other tempting servers from access on my laptop, effectively blocking social media from my ‘work’ computer altogether. The spike in productivity is astounding. (and sad, really.)
Not to over-simplify neuroscience, but basically the habit-forming pattern is trigger > action > pleasurable response. (Rinse, repeat.) The more you do it, the stronger the habit/addiction becomes (the stronger the neural pathways become). The more reliant on the dopamine drip you get from that pleasurable response, the less control you have over that addiction. It gets a lot more complicated, but them’s the basics.
The interesting thing is once you’ve clicked on the red dot, the pleasure disappears. The idea of having the red indicator with numbers in it ready to click is more pleasurable than the seconds after you’ve clicked it. It’s the same principle of the study of why window shopping is so pleasurable; The desire to buy a thing is more pleasurable than having spent your money and bought the thing.
That’s the scientific reason people buy things they don’t need or can’t afford. The reason people feel like they need the new iPhone. The excitement of the experience of owning it is far greater before you purchase it than after you purchase it. There’s a reason you can’t walk into an Apple store without feeling excited about potentially walking out with one of those shiny new gadgets. It’s experiential marketing, and they’re very good at it.(They also use knolling… KNOLLING!)
There’s a bunch more scientific research as to how Facebook makes you jealous and sad in the New York Times seemingly rehashed the same time each year.
Without getting too far off track, the basic principle of overcoming FOMO and information addiction is
..Sorry I just got distracted by an article about Bees.
What was I saying? | https://medium.com/scotchbook/this-is-your-brain-on-fomo-d89d571b8bc6 | ['Jason Chatfield'] | 2020-03-18 17:38:17.343000+00:00 | ['Fomo', 'Addiction', 'Psychology', 'Tech', 'Apps'] |
How to Build Desktop Applications the Right Way Using Electron | How to Build Desktop Applications the Right Way Using Electron
Kick off your next project with Electron
Photo from Electron.
If you are like me, you love JavaScript and its ecosystem and have been building amazing web applications using frameworks like React or performant web servers with Node.js. Now you want to develop a desktop application and you don’t want to learn a new programming language. Or perhaps you want to reuse as much as you can from existing web projects.
Here is when Electron enters the picture to save the day.
Electron allows you to build desktop applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are many arguments on the internet against Electron, some of them being its performance and often low-quality apps, but don’t blame the framework. Electron is powerful and can be performant. Today, many popular applications run on top of Electron, such as VS Code, Slack, Skype, Discord, and more.
But why is it then that many people argue against it? The problem starts with the apps and the way people use Electron. For many, porting a web application to an Electron means taking your existing code as is and embedding it into an Electron container. Is this a terrible thing to do? Maybe not, but you are not taking full advantage of the power of Electron. You are merely changing a browser tab for an independent application.
What can we improve? In this article, we will explore the basics of Electron and build a sample application to show some of the Electron ways. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-build-desktop-applications-the-right-way-using-electron-aee5deedeb8c | ['Juan Cruz Martinez'] | 2020-11-19 16:46:37.982000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'JavaScript', 'Electron', 'Typescript', 'Nodejs'] |
BitGreen Chain Swap Information | We finished testing our new wallet (and completely new blockchain protocol), and have a simple way for everyone to restore their balances on the new chain.
Remember — Never accept wallet advice or help via direct message — use public channels only, and accept help from verified team members who you messaged first and confirmed as a team member.
NOTE: The Chain Swap has started. Click below for the guide:
How will the swap work?
The old and new chains are not directly compatible; however, the addresses where your coins are now are generated and balances restored on the new chain. The result is a semi-automatic coin swap process. The addresses on the new chain will match your old addresses. You will need to generate your address on the new chain using old chain private keys, contained in your wallet.dat file.
You will have to “dump” your wallet to get the private keys, and import all keys into the new wallet to restore your addresses and balance. This process will expose your private keys. There may be impersonators trying to steal your coins. Be extremely careful with support requests. Do not screen share or copy your private keys to any other user or you will lose your coins.
The swap is done with 2 console commands — it is really simple.
Coin Swap Process
This graphic outlines the process of the coin swap which will occur after the snapshot at block 870,000: | https://medium.com/bitgreen/bitgreen-chain-swap-information-e0094ea85287 | [] | 2019-11-25 01:55:44.178000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Bitgreen', 'Sustainability', 'Proof Of Stake'] |
The Rise of Star- Lord — The Conquest of Peter Quill | The Rise of Star- Lord — The Conquest of Peter Quill
From ANNIHILATION to GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
Detail, Cover, Annihilation: Conquest — Star-Lord #1. Art by Nic Klein. Credit: Marvel Comics.
Author’s note: This is another in a series of adapted excerpts from Star-Lord and the Guardians of the Galaxy: An Unofficial Comic Book History (Glow-in-the-Dark Radio, 2018), now available in paperback and as an eBook.
Star-Lord — Peter Quill — rose to prominence and truly arrived in the Marvel Comic Book Universe with Annihilation, a major Marvel comic book event in the middle oughts. You can catch up on that part of his story in Part Five of our history of the character, with insights from former Marvel editor Andy Schmidt.
Up until that point, he’d been featured in books set outside of the “reality” most of the rest of Marvel’s comics took place in, apart from a Thanos miniseries just before Annihilation. Part One of this series gave us creator Steve Englehart’s insights on Star-Lord’s beginnings. In Part Two we saw how Chris Claremont helped turn Star-Lord into a more traditional hero. Part Three covered the adventurous Doug Moench years. And in Part Four, Timothy Zahn and Rafael Marin explained why, for a time in the nineties, Star-Lord was no longer Peter Quill.
After coming back in a big way in Annihilation, Star-Lord got his own miniseries as part of the sequel event Annihilation: Conquest. The structure for Annihilation: Conquest was similar to Annihilation’s. The series began with a Prologue issue, followed by three concurrently released mini-series: Star-Lord, Quasar and Wraith — the place of the fourth mini-series being filled by four tied-in issues of NOVA’s ongoing. These were followed by a monthly main event mini-series in six issues.
Cover — Annihilation: Conquest — Prologue. Art by Aleksi Briclot. Credit: MArvel Comics
Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning were brought in as the main writers — they would script the Prologue, the NOVA cross-over issues, and the main event itself. The Prologue and the first issues of the mini-series arrived in the summer of 2007.
In the aftermath of the attack by the Annihilation Wave, much of the formerly civilized Marvel Cosmos has been blown apart, long-standing governments and societal structures now in ruins. The Skrulls’ worlds have been destroyed or overrun by those who once served Annihilus, and the ancient civilization of the Kree is battered and frayed. Ronan the Accuser, having cleaned out the corrupt leaders responsible for ruining the Kree Empire, now rules.
Other veterans of Annihilation are off doing their part to heal the cosmos after all the destruction. Peter Quill is trying to help Ronan restore the Kree government and keep the peace. In the Prologue, Quill prepares to welcome Spaceknight envoys to Hala. Quill “negotiated terms between Lord Ronan and the Spaceknights personally.”
The Spaceknights bring Galadorian “A-Ware” — bleeding-edge defense programming. Quill helped convince Ronan to buy it to help restore the Kree’s defense networks. The envoys are there to provide Ronan with a demonstration of the A-Ware. This does not go well. The Spaceknights — or something controlling them — grab control of the Kree War-Net as soon as they are given access for the demonstration. They take over all Kree ships and Sentries and begin attacking Quill and the Kree warriors!
Star-Lord faces the Phalanx-infected Kree. Interior Page from Annihilation: Prologue. Art by Mike Perkins, Color by Guru EFX. Credit: Marvel Comics.
The Sentries, the Kree’s giant robot war machines, begin massing together into some kind of tower on the surface of Hala. As it reaches orbital height, the spire sends out a massive pulse of energy that blasts ships apart and ultimately creates a cocoon of energy around all of Kree space, isolating it from the rest of the universe. Quill tries to get to the War-Net’s power source to disable it, but the Kree warriors he’s with turn on him — they too are now possessed by the Spaceknight’s A-Ware programming, somehow. Apparently, the infection is techno-organic.
“We must join together,” they now state in chorus. “We must be one.” As they complete their conquest of the Kree and claim all of Kree space as their own, the Spaceknights reveal themselves at issue’s close as completely taken over by The Phalanx.
The action then shifts to the three mini-series and NOVA issues four through seven. For the first time in ages, Star-Lord had a book with his name on the cover! Providing some creative continuation from the Annihilation event, Keith Giffen remained on board to write the four Star-Lord issues.
“Bill (Rosemann) said, ‘Hey would you like to write a Star-Lord mini-series?’ And Peter Quill was always one of my favorite characters from way back when I started using him in THANOS,” Giffen told Comic Book Resources at the time. “I was to turn Peter Quill back into Star-Lord. Since I was the one who kept hinting that something had happened in the past that made him put down the mantle, if I got a chance I would explain that to the readers and then show a little more about the man as he realizes there’s a place for Star-Lord in the universe.”
In the mini-series Giffen does indeed strip away some of the mystery behind Peter Quill’s past. We get Quill’s narrated recaps of “the whole Master of the Sun thing” and Star-Lord’s sentient ship — “Ship” — from the character’s earliest days. We’re finally filled in on the “something” that’s been hinted at: Ship helped Star-Lord find Galactus’ former herald The Fallen One. They battled, Star-Lord lost.
Star-Lord looks back at his past, via Writer Keith Giffen, in an interior page from Annihilation: Conquest — Star-Lord #1. Art by Timothy Green II, Inks by Victor Olzaba and Color by Nathan Fairbairn. Credit: Marvel Comics.
Then, they battled again — and hundreds of thousands of people were sacrificed by Star-Lord to try to kill The Fallen One. Ship died, and Star-Lord was declared a murderer by the NOVA Corps and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Kyln, and received his implants. As Quill wakes up from the aftermath of the attack in the Prologue, he’s being attended to by Kree surgeons — who have removed those cybernetic implants.
Star-Lord — Peter Quill — wasn’t the lone star of his Annihilation: Conquest mini-series, however. Giffen also told CBR at the time, “It was my chance to do a Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos story… When Bill gave me the names of the characters that Star-Lord would be teamed up with in his strike force — Bug, Deathcry, Captain Universe, Groot, Mantis… and Rocket Raccoon! There’s no way that I’m walking away from that.”
Hearing those characters’ names, you may have guessed by now that the new Guardians of the Galaxy began to assemble in this mini-series. Quill is forced by Ronan and the Kree to lead a no-tech team to help stop the greater invasion of the universe by the techno-organic Phalanx… as Star-Lord.
We meet Rocket Raccoon and the giant tree-being Groot for the first time, as it’s established that Rocket likes the biggest guns, and that he and Groot have bonded — Groot is happy to carry around Rocket and his guns. Here, Groot speaks complete sentences — still proclaiming his reign over Planet X. His trademark phrase, “I am Groot,” developed later.
Star-Lord meets Groot for the first time. Interior Detail, Annihilation: Conquest — Star-Lord #1. Art by Timothy Green II, Inks by Victor Olzaba, Color by Nathan Fairbairn. Credit: Marvel Comics.
“The group dynamic — if there is a group dynamic — is dysfunctional as hell,” Giffen told CBR in 2007 as he was still writing the series. “Even though none of them with the possible exception of Bug would ever admit it to Peter Quill, the main reason each one of these people volunteered for this mission is because of the Star-Lord legacy. That’s another thing that’s driving Peter Quill crazy. Peter looks around and goes, ‘I’ve got a huge tree that thinks its royalty. I’ve got a raccoon, an insect and a woman who thinks she’s the Celestial Madonna. I think she’s brain damaged.’”
As for Star-Lord’s “legacy”? “Peter’s state of mind is, ‘I really don’t want this. I’m more than happy to help you guys out and lead your strike force, but I don’t really want to pick up this whole Star-Lord thing again — it’s a very reluctant decision on his part,” Giffen told CBR.
But by first issue’s end, Quill’s been handed a replica of his old Star-Lord helmet on Ronan’s orders and informed, “the problem with having a past, Mr. Quill, is that sooner or later it WILL catch up with you… You are of more use to us as The Star-Lord than as a misplaced Terran.” Peter Quill becomes Star-Lord again, whether he likes it or not.
The Not-Yet-Guardians? Opening page detail, Annihilation: Conquest — Star-Lord #2. Art by Timothy Green II, Inks by Victor Olzaba, Color by Nathan Fairbairn. Credit: Marvel Comics.
The group is so dysfunctional that Captain Universe manages to kill Deathcry in the second issue, when she turns berserk on him — he affronts her by trying to help her in battle, and is only defending himself from her rage… when he makes her explode. It’s not clear if Groot survives the second issue, either — In a cliffhanger ending, he sacrifices himself to buy time for the rest of the group to escape.
In the third issue, however, Groot returns — a sprig of his former self. Tiny Groot is still regal, however, and will not be patronized.
Watering the plant? Rocket Raccoon and a surprisingly talkative Groot. Interior Detail, Annihilation: Conquest — Star- Lord #3. Pencils by Timothy Green II, Inks by Victor Olzaba, Color by Nathan Fairbairn. Credit: Marvel Comics.
In a neat turn-around, Rocket now carries Groot. But the group is captured as they try to destroy a Phalanx facility creating an airborne nanobot contagion currently turning all Kree on Hala into incubation units for more Phalanx. All but Mantis and a badly damaged Captain Universe are in enemy hands as issue three closes, and all are aware they, too, are infected by the airborne contagion.
The group is kept alive in captivity so the Phalanx can study how their contagion adapts to different species as the final issue opens. Although still free, Captain Universe — Gabe — surrenders his power, the Uni-Force, temporarily to the Phalanx to root out a cure to the contagion. Once he reclaims his power, he rejoins the group, whom Mantis has helped free, they blast their way off Hala, and unite with Kree survivors — now armed with a cure to the Phalanx contagion obtained by the Uni-Force.
The group have all been pardoned for their crimes. Groot has grown back to his full — large — size. The Uni-Force has moved on — Gabe is no longer Captain Universe. But Star-Lord is informed, “You and your team have not been decommissioned.” Much as he might hate it, Peter Quill and his team are needed for the battle ahead.
Cover, Annihilation: Conquest #1. Art by Aleksi Briclot. Credit: Marvel Comics
We catch up with Star-Lord and his crew in the main series Annihilation: Conquest, as they join the larger war against the Phalanx. More great cosmic characters out of Marvel’s past appear as well.
As the series begins, Phyla-Vell, who’s now Quasar, and Moondragon — now in dragon form — come across Adam Warlock — freshly reborn from a cocoon they’d found in the Quasar mini-series. Reborn as a much younger version of himself, he has no memory, no idea who he’s supposed to be. As he begins to remember, he brings the other two with him to meet another classic cosmic character, Warlock’s father-figure, the High Evolutionary.
The Phalanx are now “processing” the Kree population, turning those with special abilities or powers into their “Select” — an elite group with some small manner of their wills intact. They harvest all minds for knowledge, hungry for it, and they search for… something. They disassemble non-Select on a molecular level, killing them to create energy to power the “Babel Spire” — their name for the tower assembled out of Kree Sentries in the Prologue that, in turn, powers the energy cocoon the Phalanx have thrown up around Kree space.
There’s no sign of Star-Lord and company yet in the first issue; however, finally disclosed as the Big Bad, the villain of the piece behind the Phalanx, we do find ULTRON revealed on the final page!
Enter: Star-Lord. Cover, Annihilation: Conquest #2. Art by Aleksi Briclot. Credit: Marvel Comics.
Star-Lord appears, guns blazing, on the cover of issue two, and inside the team shows up, still fighting on Hala. Star-Lord is now the “secret head of the Anti-Phalanx Resistance” on Hala. They’re planning an assault on the Babel Spire. And we hear for the first time from the big tree-man, “I am Groot!” The issue ends with Ultron teleporting to capture Warlock. Ultron apparently kills Moondragon in the process, in a scene reminiscent of when her father — Drax — killed Thanos in the first Annihilation series.
Quasar attempts to save an as yet still-breathing Moondragon and Warlock tries to fight Ultron as we get into the event’s third issue. When Moondragon dies, Quasar rejoins the fight, but the High Evolutionary detonates the star they’re hiding in, in his attempt to kill Ultron.
On Hala, Star-Lord and the team are in the Babel Spire setting charges, when Blastaar, now taken over by the Phalanx as a Select, tracks them down with the Phalanx and kills Gabe. A freshly reconstituted Ultron — “I have just had my molecules scattered by a supernova. I was forced to re-coalesce my consciousness via Phalanx Gestalt and download it in a fresh body.” — shows up to ask a stunned and beaten Star-Lord, “Was there, Human, any point at all where you actually believed you were going to win?”
Ultron is torturing Star-Lord as the fourth issue starts. Mantis protects Peter’s brain from afar as Ultron attempts to use an encephalo ray to read his mind, until she’s discovered. Meanwhile, on Kree-Lar, Ronan used the powers of Wraith and Super-Skrull’s companion Praxagora to make an army of hidden, off-the-grid Kree Sentries found on that world Phalanx-proof. Knowing they cannot win, he plans to send them to Hala to raze the planet, and spare his people the infection of the Phalanx through death. The Sentries later blast the Phalanx around Kree-Lar before heading off to obliterate Hala. Ronan grabs a ship to follow them there.
He’s Star-Lord. Interior Detail, Annihilation: Conquest #2. Pencils by Tom Raney, Inks by Scott Hanna, Colors by Frank D’Armata. Credit: Marvel Comics.
Warlock, Quasar and the High Evolutionary escaped the exploding star and travelled to Hala in a protective globe made by Adam. He’s not yet in full control of his powers, though, and the globe vanishes in the sky over the planet. The three begin to fall from the sky, and Adam must rescue a power-drained Phyla-Vell.
They go on to speak of her father, Mar-Vell — and Phyla’s need to get her act together despite the loss of Moondragon. Adam is beginning to get his memories back. Together, they find the High Evolutionary at their planned-upon destination — a lab for creating “Nu Kree” Warriors designed by the High Evolutionary. The High Evolutionary, however, has already aligned himself with the Phalanx, and blasts Adam — along with an apology.
The High Evolutionary scans through Ultron’s memories as issue five opens, trying to figure out how Ultron and the Phalanx came together, and how Ultron came to control them. Adam is in a cocoon and Ultron is hooked up to the High Evolutionary’s machines beside him as they undergo some sort of “transfer process” — evidently transferring Ultron’s consciousness into Adam Warlock’s body.
The High Evolutionary discovers the union happened when Ultron was expelled from Earth by The Avengers; his consciousness racing across the cosmos detected the calling of one the Phalanx’s Babel Spires, calling out to their masters, the Technarchy. Ultron answered the call instead and was absorbed into the Phalanx as he absorbed them, and through sheer perfection and force of will Ultron instantly dominated the technologically more advanced Phalanx, creating this new symbiosis.
Rocket Raccoon, Mantis and Bug are still trying to save Star-Lord. Rocket shows up with his big guns to save the other two at an opportune moment. When they then manage to grab Star-Lord, Rocket informs him Groot is growing. Mantis is both helping accelerate his growth and make his sap extra-flammable — she’s also a pyrokinetic. Groot is growing himself up and through the structures that make up the Babel Spire and fills up about a tenth of it as they rescue Star-Lord.
They’ve saved a sprig of him to — hopefully — bring him back. As Rocket Raccoon, Mantis, Bug and Star-Lord escape the Babel Spire, Mantis sets Groot ablaze. The Babel Spire explodes into flame.
The High Evolutionary ignores the blast as Ultron’s consciousness finishes transferring into Adam Warlock. The newly-reborn Adam/Ultron believes possessing Adam’s perfection will allow him to pursue his goal of combining technological and organic life. He then commands the High Evolutionary to use the Phalanx Host and his Nu Kree to create an army of Adam Warlocks! We see row after row of Adam’s cocoons in the issue’s final panel.
As issue six opens we see life beyond Kree space for the first time since the Phalanx’s energy shield went up. Many of the races still standing after Annihilation now wait just beyond the energy cocoon, puzzling out what’s going on, and are shocked as NOVA arrives with Drax and Gamora in tow — along with the other Warlock of the Technarchy, from the New Mutants, and his offspring Tyro. With Warlock’s help, NOVA punches through the energy shield, and their team flies through.
NOVA arrives with the Technarchy… and some future Guardians of the Galaxy… interior detail, Annihilation: Conquest #6. Pencils by Tom Raney, Inks by Scott Hanna, Colors by Frank D’Armata. Credit: Marvel Comics.
Saved by Groot’s final act, the team then also loses Mantis, as Adam/Ultron teleports in and whacks her, snapping her neck… just after she tells Peter Quill it will happen. Ultron blasts Rocket and Bug out of the way to face Star-Lord. Before he can kill him, NOVA comes rocketing through, plastering Ultron into a wall. Ultron knocks him away, and Richard Rider and Peter Quill meet up again for the first time in a long time. “Rich! What kept ya?” “You know. Stuff.” | https://medium.com/fan-fare/the-rise-of-star-lord-the-conquest-of-peter-quill-2883f6465046 | ['Mike Luoma'] | 2019-08-08 11:57:10.125000+00:00 | ['Marvel Cinematic Universe', 'Marvel', 'Books', 'Comics', 'Star Lord'] |
Kubernetes Operator for Beginners — What, Why, How | Kubernetes Operator for Beginners — What, Why, How
Explain the basic knowledge and means, build an Operator from scratch using Kubebuilder
In Infrastructure Development, we can never bypass Operators in modern Kubernetes solutions.
I have been writing different operators in the past one or two months, with the purpose to reduce companies’ pressure in managing various Kubernetes and GCP resources on the GCP and to inject more automated management methods.
From the company’s perspective, the higher the automation, the lower the maintenance pressure; the stronger the scalability, and the higher the stability.
From the developers’ point of view, application developers can be more assured to focus less on infrastructure and concentrate more on business innovation. Infrastructure developers reduce toil and spare more time to explore interesting things. With Operators, DevOps sleep better at night!😂
from Unsplash @davidclode
Let me unveil Operators’ mystery.
What is an operator
Operator, first proposed by CoreOS engineers in 2016, was to simplify the framework of complex stateful application management. It is a controller that perceives application status and automatically creates, manages, and configures application instances by extending the Kubernetes API.
Operators are software extensions to Kubernetes that make use of custom resources to manage applications and their components. Operators follow Kubernetes principles, notably the control loop. — from kubernetes.io
The above is the official explanation of Operator from Kubernetes. As long as you understand the two key concepts mentioned, you can understand Operator.
Custom Resource, also known as CRD
Kubernetes is a container orchestration management tool based on Pod, Service, Deployment, Secret, Configmap, and other basic resources. In short, it forms the system architecture we need by integrating the resources in a way as Legos and manages the communication (event), status, expected status (spec) between these resources as well. Thus, only a simple declarative configuration is required for users.
Kubernetes for fun by author
When these basic types fail to meet the demands, customization of the resource type is needed, which is the origin of CRD. By customizing apiVersion, kind, metadata, spec etc., we create our own building blocks, declaratively! As for how to run these ‘building blocks’ in Kubernetes, the Operator is the mechanism behind it.
Control loop
As the core mechanism of the Kubernetes native API, the Controller should be managed by the Controller Manager component inside the system and follow a unified design and development model.
Therefore, CRD, just as the native resources, should be able to be managed by the Kubernetes API and be used by kubectl. That is to put our CRD under the management of the Kubernetes controller. Then what is the Kubernetes controller management pattern?
Operator Pattern
The Operator implementation is based on the controller pattern. It allows application developers to abstract complex distributed application clusters into a customized API object by extending the Kubernetes API object and achieve the basic DevOps by requesting a customized API model. In the Controller, developers can focus on implementing related complex logic encountered in application runtime management.
Why you need an operator
Operator, as a CRD solution, is meaningful. Next, Let’s think about the big picture, enlarging our thoughts.
In principle, Kubernetes is most suitable for a stateless system, because stateless applications support operations such as deployment, migration, and upgrade at any time. Kubernetes’ current ReplicaSets, ReplicationControllers, Services , and other elements are enough to meet stateless applications’ basic requirements for automatic scaling and load balancing between instances.
But with the vigorous development of Kubernetes, it is applied into fields including complex distributed systems, big data, machine learning, etc., facing more and more challenges.
How to keep Kubernetes’s feature while integrating it into stateful systems.
How to ensure the availability of existing instance services when the application system is scaled or upgraded.
How to backup and manage system state and application data.
The answer is CRD, which makes Operator indispensable in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
As an infrastructure developer, I also deal with various Operators every day.
Google Config Sync synchronizes and deploys YAML in Github and maintains final consistency.
Google Config Connector deploys YAML of GCP resources to the cluster.
Prometheus monitors clusters, resources, and uploads metrics to Stackdriver.
Fluentd processes logs to Stackdriver.
There are many other open-source Operators or Operators developed by ourselves. We need them for many reasons.
DRY. Operators define a set of methods for packaging and deploying complex business applications in a Kubernetes cluster and provide a reproducible and standardized solution.
Operators define a set of methods for packaging and deploying complex business applications in a Kubernetes cluster and provide a reproducible and standardized solution. Reliability. Operators also provide a set of monitoring and managing methods at runtime by incorporating business-related operation and maintenance logic into the Operator’s own controller, like a 7*24 operation and maintenance robot. They can monitor the state of the application and theirs watch events in the Kubernetes cluster and process the monitoring events based on the expected final state in a millisecond.
Operators also provide a set of monitoring and managing methods at runtime by incorporating business-related operation and maintenance logic into the Operator’s own controller, like a 7*24 operation and maintenance robot. They can monitor the state of the application and theirs watch events in the Kubernetes cluster and process the monitoring events based on the expected final state in a millisecond. Encapsulation. We need Operators to encapsulate complex business logic and implement a unified external interface (Kubernetes API)
We need Operators to encapsulate complex business logic and implement a unified external interface (Kubernetes API) Declarative. Operators deals with the logic behind the CRD YAML.
In one word
The Operator pattern captures how you can write code to automate a task beyond what Kubernetes itself provides. — from Kubernetes Operator Pattern
After realizing the role of Operator, let’s see what open-source operators are now available. Operator Hub is where the Kubernetes community hosts all Operators. Here, we can publish our Operator, similar to DockerHub.
How to write an Operator
You can implement an Operator in many ways, with many tools.
Kudo
Helm
Dynamic Operator, Operator SDK, and Kubebuilder
These tools reflect different thinking modes and target different scenarios.
For example, Helm and Kudo both achieve their goals by manipulating YAML files, so the operator implemented by them is essentially a YAML file containing various logics. And then their tools parse this YAML and deploy CRD resources.
Whether it is Kudo or Helm, they are operators themselves. Using them to develop operators is a process of combining different functions under their defined specifications, and many operator templates are offered, like Kube Zookeeper and Kafka.
There are more templates under Helmhub. Moreover, it is easier to publish Operators written by Operator SDK to the community and allow users to perform installation and use through helm because Operator SDK is supportive of Helm.
Dynamic Operator is more complicated. You need to define the CRD characteristic through code to implement the Controller’s reconcile logic and add more complex webhooks, monitoring events, and other logics on its basis. Operator SDK and Kubebuilder are two scaffolding tools that cover some templated code and focus on implementing Operator logic.
Kudo
KUDO allows an application developer to create an operator with declarative measures. — from Kudo doc
To use Kudo, we need to install the Kudo controller in the Cluster. It parses the Operator YAML we wrote and deploy it into the cluster. Meanwhile, we need to install Kudo CLI to perform related management operations.
# install kudo cli on Mac
$brew tap kudobuilder/tap
$brew install kudo-cli # init Kudo in kind cluster
$ kind create cluster --name=kudo-test # init Kudo
$ kubectl kudo init
KUDO_HOME has been configured at /Users/pc/.kudo
$ kubectl api-resources --api-group kudo.dev # check kudo controller installed
$ kubectl get pods -n kudo-system
Install zookeeper via Kudo
# install zk
$ kubectl kudo install zookeeper --instance zk
# verify
$ kubectl get pods
Install Kafka
$ kubectl kudo install kafka --instance=kafka -p BROKER_MEM=1024m # check for information
$ kubectl describe instance kafka | grep -A5 Spec
Of course, we can also define Operators via Kudo in a customized way. Generally, a Kudo Operator contains these elements.
operator.yaml which defines the CRD structure and the operations performed (ADD/DELETE/TOGGLE, etc.)
which defines the CRD structure and the operations performed (ADD/DELETE/TOGGLE, etc.) params.yaml which defines the variables used
which defines the variables used templates.yaml which defines the resource template that applied to the cluster
Kudo itself defines concepts such as Task, Plan, Param, and Template to standardize Operator definitions. The customized Operators should fill in the relevant YAML configuration under these specifications. I won’t go into details here. If interested, you can refer to the Kudo official website to learn more about Kudo architecture and implementation.
Helm
Helm is the best way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes. — from helm.sh
Helm emerged for a simple reason. The various native resources of Kubernetes, Pod, Service, Deployment, Secret, etc., are all functionally independent. However, it requires a complex combination of them when we implement a complex component or a specific function.
And the “lazy” developers created a way to standardize operation and simplify usage when they had to repeat the same process under different circumstances. That is the Helm chart.
We can consider Helm, a package manager developed by Deis for Kubernetes, as apt-get/yum under Kubernetes. It is an Operator itself, so you need to install Tiller in the cluster and download the Helm CLI when using it.
Skipping the trivial installation steps and Helm chart usage, let’s directly see how to customize the Helm chart.
$ helm create test-chart
$ ls
Chart.yaml charts templates values.yaml
Chart.yaml , used to describe the chart, including name, description, and version.
, used to describe the chart, including name, description, and version. values.yaml , stores the variables used in the template files in the templates directory
, stores the variables used in the template files in the templates directory Go template file, which is under templates/ . Learn more at Go template info.
Helm CLI supports the release, installation, rollback, and other operations of Helm chart. For more information, please refer to the 👉 Helm.
Dynamic Approach
Dynamic Operator is the freest, most flexible, and most complicated way to implement Operators, which defines the CRD data type by code and implements the Add, Update, Delete operation that serves the Control Pattern resources. The Controller performs resource management by monitoring different Kubernetes events and combining related business logic.
There are two most common methods, both of which implement Operator with Go code.
Operator SDK
Kubebuiler
Both methods use templates to generate code and define data types ( spec, metadata ), and then implement related logic by extending the API with the controller-runtime library . Since it is increasingly harder to distinguish them, the two teams are considering the possibility of merging the two into one. 👉 Discussion
I choose to use Kubebuilder for the following reasons.
Kubebuilder has more mature documentation. kubebuilder.io contains a complete tutorial.
Kubebuilder is maintained by Kubernetes SIG and is more Kubernetes-community-oriented.
Operator SDK is developing towards integrating with Kubebuilder.
Consider that our Operator does not need to be published to the community; otherwise, Operator SDK may be a better choice.
Implement an Operator through Kubebuilder
To implement an Operator, “do one thing and do it well” is a good rule of thumb, my interpretation of which is three one-one-mapping.
Operator build process
There are only four steps to implement an Operator.
Define the CRD. To be more specific, define Spec/Status/Metadata
Generate template code with Kubebuilder tool
Implement the reconcile logic in the generated Controller
Test
Let’s walk through the process step by step.
Suppose we have such a case.
Implement a function to automatically generate the user’s ServiceAccount and ClusterRolebinding containing configuration according to the user’s information.
For instance, we have a user Jenny and she has a GSA account. We want to use an Operator to connect the GSA to a certain ClusterRole. So Jenny has the correct cluster permissions. Below are the resources we want the Operator to create/apply to the cluster automatically
Put it simply, firstly, user information is dynamic and obtained through Http Rest or gRPC interface. Secondly, we need to create resources for new users and delete information for logged-out users.
Initialization
After initializing the Kubebuilder tool, we get the following directory structure.
$ kubebuilder init --domain company.org --license apache2 --owner pc
The directory structure after the init command
Kubebuilder init
config dir contains many boilerplate YAML files, such as RBAC, webhook, cert, etc.
contains many boilerplate YAML files, such as RBAC, webhook, cert, etc. main.go is the entrance of the whole Operator.
is the entrance of the whole Operator. Makefile contains many Go command wrapper.
Now we can create the API and pass flags like group, version, kind. Usually, people consider GKV as the unique identity of the CRD.
$ kubebuilder create api --group identity --version v1 --kind UserIdentity
Choose yes to create both Resource and Controller.
create Output
After running create command, you will find there are two directories (api/ and controller/) created.
API dir
controller dir
These two places are where the magic happens.
Define CRD
useridentity_types.go is the place we define our CRD fields. We can find out it already has many default fields set, like UserIdentitySpec , UserIdentityStatus , and meta type fields.
In our example, the only thing we need the operator to carry is the ClusterRole ref, which the user gets from a gRPC call or HTTP request, or even a PubSub topic subscribe.
So All I need to do is to put the field into the UserIdentitySpec .
type UserIdentitySpec struct {
// INSERT ADDITIONAL SPEC FIELDS - desired state of cluster
// Important: Run "make" to regenerate code after modifying this file
// roleRef is the target ClusterRole reference
roleRef string `json:"roleRef,omitempty"`
}
After setting up the CRD fields, we can also change the YAML sample of the CRD in config/smaples/identity_b1_useridentity.yaml to below:
apiVersion: identity.company.org/v1
kind: UserIdentity
metadata:
name: useridentity-sample
spec:
# Add fields here
roleRef:
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
kind: ClusterRole
name: event-view
Define Controller
The easiest way to implement a controller is the method of implementing reconcile.
To be simple, we will skip the getting user name part, and focus on the interaction between the controller runtime API.
The approximate reconciliation logic in controllers/useridentity_controller.go is as follows.
Test
After completing all the above, we can write suite_test to test our code. Kubebuilder itself integrates the ginkgo framework, uses the BDD pattern to test the cases, and completes the test with the gomega framework.
A simple suite_test case is similar:
When("A ClusterRoleBinding is created", func() {
It("Should find a GroupRoleBinding", func() {
Eventually(func() bool {
fetched := &rbacv1.ClusterRoleBinding{}
_ = k8sClient.Get(context.TODO(), req, fetched)
return fetched != nil
}, 10, 1).Should(Succeed())
})
})
You can run the test by using commands in the Makefile
make test
The next step is to deploy the Operator to the local kind cluster for testing.
make install kubectl apply -f config/samples/useridentity.yaml
Use the sample YAML, and kubectl apply it to the cluster.
Finally, we can verify by kubectl get clusterrolebinding.
At this point, our Operator has been initially implemented.
Is Operator Necessary
In Kubecon NA 2020, many talks were around Operators' implementation and way of thinking. And some community members even mentioned the necessity of Operators as a continuous delivery model for Kubernetes in Keynotes.
However, some people hold a different opinion. Joe Thompson from HashiCorp published a talk on “Stop Writing Operators” and put forward several points that I agree on.
I agree Operator is the ultimate means to solve the problem, not the only one or the primary one.
Do not indulge in automation-If a task only takes 10 minutes a month, and then it is not worth spending a week or more writing an Operator.
Meanwhile, if you already have the current Helm chart or Kudo template, never waste time re-creating the wheels yourself. If not, see if you can implement it through the Helm chart other than using the Operator SDK or Kubebuilder to implement it anymore because Declarative’s YAML is always simpler than Go code.
We encountered many problems during the implementation process, including Kubebuilder itself, issues with SIG upstream tools. The time spent on solving problems far exceeded the estimated.
If possible, maybe I will keep our “ugly” bash script instead of customizing the Operator.
To Sum Up
This article is a preliminary summary of my research on Operators in the past few months, which records the course from understanding Operators to calling various operator implementation tools, from trying the tools to solving the problems with Kubebuilder.
Actually, I encountered more problems in Kubebuilder coding that I will summarize in the follow-up articles. Although implementing Operators is not easy, it is indeed a way to understand the Kubernetes controller-runtime life cycle better.
The code in the article is on Github.
Thanks for reading! | https://medium.com/swlh/kubernetes-operator-for-beginners-what-why-how-21b23f0cb9b1 | ['Stefanie Lai'] | 2020-12-04 12:56:25.122000+00:00 | ['Operators', 'Helm', 'Kudos', 'Kubernetes', 'Kubebuilder'] |
ITIL vs SRE | Photo by Dietmar Becker on Unsplash
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” — Ecclesiastes 1:9
Over the past few years, we have seen the birth of countless startups. The products and services of these small startups have managed to gain the trust and preference of most consumers. Startups innovate and adapt very quickly. In the meantime, huge organizations with thousands of employees and decades of history are extremely complex systems that proportionately require huge management efforts. We can say that startups are comparable to speedboats while large organizations are more like transatlantic ships. While the startups were focusing on being lean, agile, and adapt to the customers, large organizations were still focusing on processes, controls, and strong management.
ITIL describes itself as a set of best practices for managing IT services. SRE as a way to reach customer happiness. While SRE is more popular between startups, ITIL is widely adopted by large organizations. In recent years ITIL has been criticized for being bureaucratic, inflexible, and not getting along well with new ways of working like Agile and DevOps. Wouldn’t the best practices for managing IT services be that good?
ITIL was developed by the UK government in the 1980s to improve the quality of IT services and projects. Its goal is “to provide services that meet the needs of its customers”. ITIL understands that the service value chain depends not only on IT but also on people, partners, and processes. ITIL proposes some best practices for managing IT services throughout their entire life cycle. The world has changed a lot since the 1980s. However, the importance of providing services that meet consumer needs remains the same.
Like SRE, ITIL is based on a set of principles and practices. Principles are the basic idea or rule that controls how something happens or works. The ITIL principles are:
Focus on value Start where you are Progress iteratively with feedback Collaborate and promote visibility Think and work holistically Keep it simple and practice Optimize and Automate
When comparing ITIL principles with SRE principles, we clearly see that they have a lot in common:
In addition, ITIL also describes a set of 34 service management practices. Practices are what translate the ideas behind the principles into action. Given the similarity between the ITIL and SRE principles, it would also be expected that their practices also be similar. Here are some ITIL practices aligned with the SRE principles:
Availability Management
Capacity and Performance Management
Incident Management
IT Asset Management
Problem Management
Release Management
Service Request Management
Service Validation and Testing Management
Deployment Management
ITIL describes practices but does not prescribe how they should be implemented. Likewise, SRE practices can and should be adapted to the company’s reality. SRE intersects and changes some ITIL practices, but it does not want to replace it. Modern solutions are actually a compound of internal and external services in an extensive value chain. ITIL is right in trying to put some order in the chaos. But ITIL should be used more as a framework and not as a recipe. Curiously, when implementing SRE practices, we are unintentionally implementing part of ITIL.
Large organizations have often implemented ITIL the wrong way. The term “management” is generally seen as a hierarchy in the organizational structure and not as an action verb related to the activity of manage something. The bureaucracy, excess of controls, and complexity of processes reflect this. ITIL fails when the implementation of its practices violates its own principles. Although SRE has brought new air in the way of implementing some of the practices described by ITIL, SRE is also at risk of being corrupted in the long run. Hence the importance of stressing principles before practices and always adapting practices to the company’s reality.
In short:
SRE and ITIL have similar principles
ITIL practices are not prescriptive
ITIL scope is ampler than SRE
Some ITIL practices are fully compatible with the SRE principles
SRE should not be seen as a substitute for ITIL
When implementing SRE, we are unconsciously implementing some ITIL practices
In the long run, SRE runs the same risks as ITIL if it doesn’t stick to the principles
To know more about SRE, I recommend my Udemy Course: https://www.udemy.com/course/sre-the-big-picture/?referralCode=FA215C81B6B26C631F5F | https://medium.com/dev-genius/itil-vs-sre-457f88c61cac | ['Anderson Marques'] | 2020-11-10 21:46:37.309000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Coding', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Software'] |
Improve MongoDB Performance Using Projection | Experiment 2: If the Experiment 1 Result is No, Find Other Scenarios on How Projection Improves Query Performance
Since my first hypothesis was wrong, then I tried to do some research and re-visit the performance course offered by MongoDB University. The course is free — check it out if you are interested in learning MongoDB performance.
And I discovered Covered Query. Covered Query is a “query that can be satisfied entirely using an index and does not have to examine any documents”, according to MongoDB’s official documentation.
We can use the cooking metaphor to understand Covered Query. Imagine that you’re cooking a meal with all the ingredients are ready and inside your fridge. Basically, everything is covered, and you just have to cook it.
Before we create any indexes for the database, let’s start by asking: What is the field that we want to return to the application? Let’s give the following scenario:
Admin would like to know all the flight bookings to a specific destination. The information that Admin would like to know is their respective booking_no , origin and destination .
Given the scenario above, let’s start by creating indexes. We can create two indexes.
Destination — Create an index on the destination field only.
Destination, Origin, and Booking No. — We can create a compound index with the sequence destination , origin and booking_no field.
Refer to the command below on how to create the index.
Query without projection
First, let’s start to query the booking where the destination is “Gerlachmouth”. The screenshot below shows the execution time for the query. As you can see, the total execution time reduced to 5ms. It was almost 100 times faster compared to one without indexes.
You might be satisfied with this performance, but this is not the end of the optimization. We can improve the query performance, and make it 250 times faster using Covered Query compared to without indexes. | https://medium.com/better-programming/improve-mongodb-performance-using-projection-c08c38334269 | ['Tek Loon'] | 2020-08-10 21:47:54.683000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Database', 'DevOps', 'Mongodb', 'Software Engineering'] |
I Embraced My Sexuality and Learned to Live Without Fear | So there I was. I entered the hotel and conference center in Houston for the 2016 Gay Christian Network Conference. This was foreign territory for me in that I’d never been to anything like this, and I had no idea how things worked here. At the registration table, I got a red lanyard for my conference ID, which meant that people should ask me before taking my picture for publication purposes.
I chose this lanyard because I had come to this conference somewhat on the sly. I didn’t announce it on Facebook, and didn’t tell many of my acquaintances. And I was also teaching part time at a conservative Christian college that would have fired me on the spot if they knew that I was at such a conference.
I’m an introvert whose natural inclination is to reflect almost continually on everything and that whole weekend I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d gotten there.
So here’s where I flashback to my childhood and tell you that I grew up like most kids in a small town in the Midwest: going to church all the time, doing pretty good in school, having a blue-collar Dad who tended to be verbally abusive. He wanted me to play football like my older brother, but I didn’t even know how the game worked. Though I never did play, I had a pretty normal childhood: chicken pox, church youth group trips, figuring out what you’re really good at in high school (which was English and journalism).
I didn’t really start recognizing who I was until I got to college. I was at conservative Christian college in Chicago when was I first able to admit that I was attracted to guys. One aspect of college life that confirmed this for me was living on a floor with 30 guys who all shared one communal bathroom.
I had developed a fear of getting in trouble and a desire to do everything perfectly during high school, and these approaches to faith were reinforced during my freshman year of college. But this approach changed when I started seriously struggling with depression. This depression came from realizing I was a legalist and from realizing that legalism couldn’t save you. My depression got worse when I started experiencing some cognitive dissonance between what my spiritual life was supposed to be, and how it actually was. I became disillusioned with the evangelical subculture I was part of and distrustful any kind of Christian institution.
A kind of evangelical PTSD continued after I’d graduated, though my cynicism and anger were only perpetuated during my time as a crime reporter in Chicago. What made things worse was a friend’s suicide, which happened only a few months before that friend was to graduate from my alma mater. This was a double dose of the dark night of the soul.
So I became quick to question just about everything. For some reason, though, the one thing I didn’t question was my commitment to fight my same-sex attractions. I’d been to different counselors to help with my depression, but my same-sex attractions, though obviously part of what contributed to this issue, usually took a back seat.
So I fought these attractions faithfully for 15 years. I even became part of a ministry associated with Exodus International for a year while living in Dallas. Though I wasn’t forced into trying reparative therapy, I found some amazing community that really helped me become more comfortable in my fight. I dated 6 women during those 15 years, though each relationship lasted for less and less time.
After the most recent relationship attempt, I became more exasperated with my situation. I kept remembering so many different things I’d heard and read about same-sex attraction that I’d sidelined. And this was the start of a process when my thinking and stances on my attractions began to change. Many factors came together during this process, making it difficult to pinpoint if one led to another or if one idea domino-ed into another and another.
Perhaps the first event in this process came during grad school, when I proposed a presentation to a pretty huge academic conference and got in. The theme for the conference was Rhetoric Across Borders, and the title for my presentation was “Calling it Quits: How Exodus International Closing It’s Doors Opens up Rhetorical Possibilities.”
I had researched the rhetoric surrounding the ex-gay movement and how former president of Exodus International Allan Chambers’ admission of his own same-sex attractions not fully disappearing was such a big deal. At that time, though, I knew I wasn’t quite on the same page as the conclusion to my presentation, where I added some super liberal — or what at the time I’d thought were super liberal — conclusions. I argued that one good which had come from this organization shutting down was the creation of more room for gay Christians to identify themselves and more room to, if needed, define themselves in different ways. Little did I know that these conclusions I had added were almost exactly where I would end up at the end the process of me changing my mind.
Friends who were counselors told me in the past that the longer someone has same-sex attractions the more the wiring in your brain solidifies. This idea — and ideas were quite a big thing for me during grad school where I studied rhetoric — is what led me to more fully accept that I couldn’t change my attractions. I mean, if the president of Exodus International couldn’t do it, I couldn’t either.
So for a while, I’d considered being gay but celibate. I mean, I had already pretty much done that for the last 15 years. So why not stick to that, and just admit that I was gay? But, once I started to consider that, I realized that I would have to start adding so many different qualifiers to the word ‘gay’ and add so many explanations for that I meant when I said ‘gay’. So I realized I would have to start taking time to explain, “I’m gay, but not like what you think.”
Another factor that fed on my evangelical PTSD and angst is the idea that maybe Christians had got it wrong on their stance against all things LGBTQ. There have been a couple times in the past where Christians had it wrong about some idea: the world being flat, slavery, etc. I already was distrustful of the church, pastors, and Evangelicalism as a whole. There were times where I felt like doing exactly what Evangelicalism was saying not to do. You can’t love the LGBTQ community? Well, then maybe I should love them. You can’t be gay and Christian? Well, then maybe that’s just what I’ll be. I mean, more and more respectable evangelicals were coming out in support of LGBTQ people, relationships, and this community’s full inclusion in the church.
Similar to my desire to be contrary was the role of Soren Kierkegaard’s existential faith. I was first introduced to this Danish philosopher back in undergrad, when I started to experience my first bouts of depression and cognitive dissonance with how my faith actually played out. What cemented Kierkegaard a place in my faith was one idea that if you don’t get depressed when thinking through your faith and through the absurdity of life without God, then maybe you’re not thinking hard enough. As dark and depressing as Kierkegaard can be, he was a light and an encouragement to me during my depression. I felt vindicated in feeling like my evangelical expectations weren’t meeting up with what I was actually experiencing.
More and more Kierkegaardian ideas became revelations and integral parts of my new worldview. Ideas like the process of questioning and wrestling and praying with God could be more important than if your conclusions place you outside the majority opinion. This is because the activity of questioning and wrestling and praying is what makes your faith genuine. One of the worst sins for Kierkegaard would be to go along unthinkingly and uncritically with the crowd and become part of the mob. I could talk Kierkegaard for days, as I’m sure people in my church small group could tell you. But one way to paraphrase much of Kierkegaard’s ideas would be to figure faith out for yourself.
Also, one of the largest reasons why I decided that I was wrong for fighting my same-sex attractions was fear. This fear started back when while I was kid and afraid of the wrath of my Dad. Afraid of getting yelled at, I was afraid of doing anything wrong. That is why I so quickly adopted a legalistic mentality: maybe if I did everything right, I’d be okay or more worthy of love. That same fear is what kept me fighting against my same-sex attractions because I was afraid of the inevitable judgment and rejection that would result from coming out.
So each of these influences all sort of dog-piled on top of each other: Kierkegaard’s ideal of being genuine; not trusting whatever evangelicalism said was true; knowing I couldn’t change my orientation. All of this pushed me to think that maybe I should stop being so afraid. Maybe I should be bold and embrace being gay. Maybe I should sin boldly. If this put me on the outside of the crowd, then so be it. I was already used to being an outsider, so why not fully embrace this identity and accept whatever consequences came with this decision? So these rhetorical questions became my basis for changing my mind.
Since then, I have slowly been coming out to more and more people until two summers ago, when I announced on Facebook that I was in a relationship with a man. I have dated this man for 16 months and fallen in love with him. And in this, I know that God has a huge sense of humor because, in spite of my distrust of the church and my wariness to get too involved, my boyfriend is a pastor. Which means that I know that I’ll be involved in a church for the rest of my life.
That year, I approached my church’s leadership about starting a group that talks through LGBTQ+ topics in a way that fits with this church’s values and priorities. The group would describe different perspectives without privileging one over the other and half of the time would be more about different people sharing their stories. I was nervous and expecting more rejection when I proposed this, but the leadership said yes. And this group has been amazing.
So there I was. Seven of us from this discussion group traveled to Pittsburg for 2017’s Gay Christian Network Conference. And that year, I wore a blue lanyard, which meant I had no issues with anyone taking my picture. I didn’t have to worry about a Christian employer finding out that I was at this conference, or that I was gay. I even got interviewed on camera about my experiences at the conference that year. And during that interview, I spoke without any fear. | https://medium.com/reaching-out/i-embraced-my-sexuality-and-learned-to-live-without-fear-3a0f1d7131c3 | ['Eric Beach'] | 2018-01-14 21:48:01.066000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Life', 'Storytelling', 'Faithfullylgbt', 'Gay Christian Network'] |
Replacing My Old Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System with IBM Watson AI Technologies | More and more transactions are done through an IVR | Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
In a previous post, I covered how a lot of customers currently use an IVR to deliver some basic information and process some basic transactions (press “1” for hours of operations, press “2”…, press “0” to speak to an agent).
Over the past few years, some customers started to bring chatbots with AI into their websites, delivering some quick value to their users. Now, they wish to replace their old IVR with their cool new chatbot. Where to start?
First, let’s recap on the components required for a typical IVR solution built with Watson services :
IBM has released in late August 2019 a new offering called “Watson Assistant for Voice Interaction”, packaging all the required Watson components mentioned above for IVR solutions. Check the following Medium article from Tom Banks for more details
Diagram showing the data flows and components involved in Watson Assistant for Voice Interaction offering
I already covered the Watson Speech-to-Text component in my previous series of articles “Watson Speech-To-Text: How to Train Your Own Speech “Dragon””.
This article provides some guidelines on how to bring your existing fully functional Watson Assistant chatbot or add a brand new one into your brand new Watson IVR.
IMPORTANT NOTE: For simplicity purposes, the following diagrams are shown in sequence to highlight the different steps. It is implicit that you should ALWAYS iterate within each phase until you get the expected outcomes.
Review and Confirm Your Use Case
Although very obvious, this phase is the most critical as it will become your foundation. As you review your use case(s), you should know clearly who your target users are and within them, the different personas that will influence the user experience and the business flows. With an existing web chatbot, you have access to some very useful insights: usage, completed transactions, what is working and not working, etc. If you have an existing IVR, identify the pain points and cause of frustrations — like why they are ALWAYS pressing “0” to talk to an agent. Go through each step, validate, and confirm.
The User Experience (UX) is also extremely important, especially when building a new IVR. Users do not interact the same way with a web chatbot as with an agent or a voice system. It’s easy to read long and detailed text responses but listening to it can be painful and users tend to be more impatient with voice responses. Don’t be surprised — it’s not unusual having to redesign your business flows a little and curate your long responses with something more “voice-friendly”.
If one step is not clear, don’t be scared to iterate — go back and revisit the previous step(s), validate, and redo if necessary. One common mistake is having a scope too large (eg. Answering all insurance questions) versus a smaller more achievable scope (eg. answering questions on car insurance). Always start small, then incrementally add to it.
At the end, you should have enough to start designing your business flows on a whiteboard, flip charts or using a software (Visio, Omnigraffle).
Design Your Business Flows
As you are designing your flows, the first thread is to identify your intents (what people are looking for) and the data inputs (membership number, date of birth, etc) you need to go through your flows to complete processes. This goes into Watson Assistant.
The second thread is to identify the different components required for your architecture. The last thread is the identification of your different integration points. We will cover them in more details later.
At this phase, you start to align the different teams and resources for each area.
Identify Your Intents and Data Inputs
Now that your intents and data inputs are identified, you need to plan your data collection strategy — refer to the Data Collection section of my previous Watson STT Part 1 article for more details.
With your collected audio data and transcriptions, you can now configure your intents, entities, and dialog flows in Watson Assistant. If needed, you will also build and train your Watson STT Language Model(s), Acoustic Model (s) and Grammar(s) for voice recognition — for more details, check Watson STT Part 2 article.
As you are building and training the different Watson APIs, you also start building your unit test plans and your user acceptance test (UAT) plans.
Identify Your Different Architecture Components
In this thread, you start documenting your architecture and how each component interacts with each other. This is where you decide if you go full IBM Cloud, full on-premise (Cloud Pak for Data) or Hybrid Cloud, depending on your functional, non-functional, data and security requirements. You also design your multiple environments for development, UAT and production.
This phase typically involves multiple teams from networking, firewalls, hardware appliances to ordering hardware and instances. This is where most project delays occur so you must plan accordingly and involve them early.
Identify Your Integration Points
If you have a front-end call center solution that receives and manages incoming calls to agent queues, you need to consider how you will integrate it with the IBM Watson solution. Some things to consider are the supported voice protocols (eg. SIP), which system will anchor the calls and what data needs to be transferred between Watson and the call center solution.
If your business flows require some sort of data validation and update against existing backend systems, you need to know which ones and if they have existing APIs. You also need to know if you get the right information from these APIs. If not, you will need to build/enhance them.
To handle the data exchanges between all these different components, you need to start designing your Service Orchestration Engine (SOE) with all the required data formats and transformations, storing and managing the payload needed to complete your business flows, and more.
The outputs of these three previous threads should be documented in an Architecture Design document. Keep in mind that this is a living document: it does not have to be final and cast in stone to begin your project. I can tell you that you WILL update it and you WILL discover things you did not think about at the beginning… and that’s OK.
Design Your Architecture and Start Building
This is the phase where you start to execute and build your solution. With these brand new components available in your solution, you will add new tests cases and adjust existing ones in your Unit and UAT Test Plans.
One thing that I found really useful on a few voice engagements was to have a “vanilla” web chatbot (text only) in parallel with the voice environment. This was really helpful to validate some specific “SOE-to-Watson Assistant” functionalities like the Watson Assistant flows, inputs and responses from backend APIs, without having to make a phone call. When it works through the web chat and you have a problem with the voice environment, it narrows down your list of possible root causes.
Although not shown here, it is recommended that you break your builds into sprints (typically 2 or 3 weeks) using the Agile Methodology. Conduct playbacks and collect the feedbacks. On every customer engagement I was involved with, I strongly recommended to involve the target users as early and as often as possible because THEY are the ones who will determine if your solution is a success or a failure. To this day, whenever I bring it up with the clients, I always get pushbacks from them and at the end, it’s always the number one lesson learned I always hear from them. The longer you wait, the greater the risk… Trust me: your target users will be so grateful that you did it.
Conduct Unit Tests and UAT Tests on Your Watson APIs
Now, we are ready to start testing your different test plans with the different units. Here are some examples:
When I call the 800 number, I hear the Watson greeting message
When I give an intent, I get the expected response (right branch of the flow)
If I give a data input (eg. membership ID), it plays it back properly
When I provided a valid membership ID, I hear the right confirmation (eg. “Is this for John Smith?” / branch me to the right next step)
If you get an unexpected behaviour, here are some things to check:
I did not get the right STT transcription — Add more training data to my STT Language Model adaptation or fix my STT Grammar. Once done, re-train STT and re-test again.
— Add more training data to my STT Language Model adaptation or fix my STT Grammar. Once done, re-train STT and re-test again. I got the right STT Transcription but not the right Watson Assistant intent or entity — Add utterances to intent or add entity synonym to existing entity, then re-test.
— Add utterances to intent or add entity synonym to existing entity, then re-test. The Watson Assistant flow is not behaving as expected — Check you Watson Assistant flows through the web chatbot and make sure they work as designed. Check your context variables and data that you should receive from the SOE. Make sure your backend systems are available and your APIs are returning the expected data payload.
Run multiple iterations of your Unit and UAT tests, enhance the WA and STT training where applicable, and once complete, move these changes from your Development environment to your UAT environment.
Deploy to a Small Pilot Group in Your UAT Environment
Identify a small group of target users as your pilot users. If possible, try to bring new users who are not familiar with the system. You’ll get more representative feedback.
Provide a copy of your UAT Test Plan with valid data to each one of them, then deliver a training session. Explain to them what to do and how to collect their feedback: pass/fail, what the like/did not like, where they struggled, etc. Use a document or a spreadsheet.
Collect the audio and transcriptions from these tests, especially the failures. By listening to these calls, you will easily find explanations: hesitations, noise, stuttering. Make sure your flows behave as expected in these situations. You will also find other gaps that will require more training for Watson Assistant and STT, fixing some dialog flows, identifying unexpected behaviours, etc.
When results are to your satisfaction, you can now deploy to Production.
Move to Production
When you deploy to production, it will never be a “fire-and-forget”.
You will most probably get new users you never accounted for with new accents, jargons, environments and very creative ways to ask for information.
And when you think you have it under control, think again. As your users become familiar with your solution and processes, as new devices are available, they evolve and their interactions as well.
Monitor the collected conversations, identify “opt-outs” or dropped calls, find out why and adapt accordingly. In some cases, you will just need to enhance the Watson APIs with new incremental training data.
I bet that you already have new use cases lined up to add to this solution. No problem! Now that you know how to “rinse and repeat”….
Enjoy! | https://medium.com/ibm-watson/moving-my-old-interactive-voice-response-ivr-system-to-ibm-watson-ai-technologies-cf0c66cd3dd3 | ['Marco Noel'] | 2019-11-22 13:57:31.105000+00:00 | ['Voice Gateway', 'Ivr Solution', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Ibm Watson Assistant', 'Ibm Watson'] |
Why Positive Thinking Works | From “Thought-Forms” (1905) by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater
Why Positive Thinking Works
Toward a Theory of Mind Causation
Why should positive thinking, “manifestation,” or the “law of attraction” work at all? Before you cry “confirmation bias!” (materialism’s equivalent of “lock her up!”) take a deep breath.
In my book The Miracle Club I propose a theory of mind causation. It may be wrong, it may be grossly incomplete, but I feel that we need to at least try to theorize from the intersection of testimony, science, and mysticism. It’s necessary, I believe, for our generation of seekers to do more than tell the same stories over and over. We must experiment, we must experience, we must have results — and we must attempt to come up with reasons why mind causation just might work.
I’ll start by quoting something that mystic Neville Goddard (1905–1972) said in 1948: “Scientists will one day explain why there is a serial universe. But in practice, how you use this serial universe to change the future is more important.”
It was a striking observation, because it wasn’t until years later that quantum physicists began to talk about the many-worlds theory. Physicist Hugh Everett III (1930–1982) devised the concept in 1957. He was trying to make sense of some of the extraordinary findings that had been occurring for about three decades in quantum particle physics. For example, scientists are able to demonstrate, through various interference patterns, that a subatomic particle occupies a wave state or state of superposition — that is, an infinite number of places — until someone takes a measurement: it is only when the measurement is taken that the particle collapses, so to speak, from a wave state into a localized state. At that point it occupies a definite, identifiable, measurable place. Before the measurement is taken, the localized particle exists only in potential.
Now I have just about squeezed all of quantum physics into roughly a sentence. I think it’s an accurate sentence, but obviously I’m taking huge complexities and reducing them into the dimensions of a marble. But I believe I’m faithfully stating what has been observed in the last eighty-plus years of particle experiments. And we’re seeing that on the subatomic scale, matter does not behave as we understand it to.
Our understanding of matter in our macro world generally comes from measuring things through our five senses, and experiencing them as singularities. There is one table. It is solid and definable. It’s not occupying an infinite number of spaces. But contemporary quantum physicists have theorized that we may not normally see or experience superposition phenomena because of information leakage. This means that we gain or lose data based on the fineness of our measurement. When you’re measuring things with exquisitely well-tuned instruments, like a microscope, you’re seeing more and more of what’s going on — and that’s actual reality. But when you pan the camera back, so to speak, your measurements coarsen and you’re seeing less and less of what’s actually happening.
To all ordinary appearances, a table is solid. The floor beneath your feet is solid. Where you’re sitting is solid. But measuring through atomic-scale microscopes, we realize that if you go deeper and deeper, you have space within these objects. Particles make up the atom, and still greater space appears. We don’t experience that; we experience solidity. But no one questions that there’s space between the particles that compose an atom. Furthermore, we possess decades of data demonstrating that when subatomic particles are directed at a target system, such as a double slit, they appear in infinite places at once until a measurement is made; only then does locality appear. But we fail to see this fact unless we’re measuring things with comparative exactitude. Hence what I’m describing seems unreal based on lived experience — but it’s actual.
In any event, my supposition is this: if particles appear in an infinite number of places at once until a measurement is taken; and if, as we know from studying the behavior and mechanics of subatomic particles, there’s an infinitude of possibilities; and if we know, as we have for many years, that time is relative, then it is possible to reason — and it’s almost necessary to reason — that linearity itself, by which we organize our lives, is an illusion. Linearity is a useful and necessary device for five-sensory beings to get through life, but it doesn’t stand up objectively. Linearity is a device, a subjective interpretation of what’s really going on. It’s not reflected in Einstein’s theory of relativity, which posits that time slows down when it begins to approach the speed of light. Nor is it reflected in quantum mechanics, where particles appear in an infinitude of places and do not obey any orderly modality. Linearity is not replicating itself when a measurement taken of a particle serves to localize the appearance or existence of the object.
If we pursue this line of thought further — and this is where the many-worlds theory comes into play — the very decision to take a measurement (or not to take a measurement) not only localizes a particle but creates a past, present, and future for that particle. The decision of an observer to take a measurement creates a multidimensional reality for the particle. This is implied in the famous thought-experiment called Schrodinger’s Cat, which I describe here (yes, pre-tattoos, but remember there is no time):
So whatever that particle is doing, the very fact that a sentient observer has chosen to take a measurement at that time, place, moment, and juncture creates a whole past, present, future — an entire infinitude of outcomes. A divergent set of outcomes would exist if that measurement were never taken. A divergent set of outcomes would also exist if that measurement were taken one second later, or five minutes later, or tomorrow. And what is tomorrow? When particles exist in superposition until somebody takes a measurement, there is no such thing as tomorrow, other than subjectively.
And what are our five senses but a technology by which we measure things? What are our five senses but a biological technology, not necessarily different in intake from a camera, photometer, digital recorder, or microscope? So it’s possible that within reality — within this extra-linear, super-positioned infinitude of possibilities in which we are taking measurements — we experience things based upon our perspective.
Neville Goddard’s instinct was correct in this sense. He taught that you can take a measurement by employing the visualizing forces of your own imagination. You’re taking a measurement within the infinitude of possible outcomes. The measurement localizes or actualizes the thing itself. Hence his formula: an assumption, if persisted in, hardens into fact. But the assumption must be persuasive; it must be convincing. That’s why the emotions and feeling states must come into play. And Neville observed that the hypnagogic state — a state of drowsy relaxation — helps facilitate that process.
You can use several different techniques in connection with Neville’s ideas, and, as he did, I challenge you to try them and see what happens. You’re entitled to results. I believe strongly in results. I believe that every therapeutic and ethical and spiritual philosophy should result in some concrete change and improvement in your life or your conduct; if it doesn’t, then such an idea should have no hold on you. I feel similarly strongly that the ability to describe a concrete outcome in your life is vitally important, and that too was always part of Neville’s teaching. Testimony is both an important source of ideas and an invitation to others.
One way of using Neville’s approach to mental creativity is to enter into an inner state of theatrical or childlike make-believe. Not childish but childlike: a state of internal wonder and pretending. Children are so good at this. We get embarrassed about this quality as we age, but Neville talked about walking the streets of Manhattan imagining that he was in the tree-lined lanes of Barbados, boarding a ship to some desired destination, or in a location where he wanted to be.
He would say: “Unfoldment will come. You will see.” He would always say that an assumption, although false, if persisted in, eventually hardens into fact. He would say, “Assume the state of the wish fulfilled. Live from the end. Live from the state of your wish fulfilled.” Remember, Neville would remind listeners, you’re not in a state of wanting; you’re in a state of having received. Your aim is simply to occupy the emotional and mental state that you would experience after having received.
One simple way to use Neville’s method is to freely enter this state of make-believe, as you used to when you were a child. Of course, you must also continue to go about your adult life in this world of Caesar and currency and commerce, and fulfill your obligations and do the things you need to do. You cooperate with the world. You must abide by the world. You must do the things that the world needs you to do. But the secret engine behind what’s really going on is what you’re imagining. Within are the hidden currents of emotionalized thought, which are the actual engine of what’s occurring.
How long will it take you to see your desired changes in outer life? How long will it take for outer life to conform to your internal focus, your living from the end of your ideal? This question of time intervals has recently become very hot for me personally, because with all the stresses that life throws at us, it is not easy to adopt a feeling state and stick with it for weeks. It’s very difficult, in part because the world we live in does everything possible to disrupt our inner quietude.
Neville noted later in his life that there could be a substantial time interval between your visioning, your mental imaging, and the appearance of the wished-for thing. He would point out that the gestation period of a human life is nine months. The gestation period of a horse is eleven months. The gestation period of a lamb is five months. The gestation period of a chick is twenty-one days. There is almost always going to be some time interval. You must persist. If you want to find yourself in Paris, and you wake up every day and you’re still far away from Paris, you’re naturally going to feel disappointed or dejected. But if you really stick with it, I venture that you will see that your assumptions eventually concretize into reality, and the correspondences will be uncanny.
I’ve had such experiences in my own life; but I’ve personally observed that in some cases, there have been extended time intervals. This has been true regarding my career as a writer, speaker, and narrator. The philosopher Goethe made an interesting observation. We’ve all heard the expression “Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.” It actually has its roots in Goethe. Taking a leaf from Goethe’s play Faust, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted this dynamic in his 1860 essay “Fate,” which led to the popular adage. Emerson wrote:
And the moral is that what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us; as Goethe said, “what we wish for in youth, comes in heaps on us in old age,” too often cursed with the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since we are sure of having what we wish, we must beware to ask only for high things.
We are being warned to act with perspective: what we wish for when we are young will come upon us in waves when we are old. Many people would object to that claim, saying that they have all kinds of unfulfilled wishes. But unlocking the truth of this observation requires peeling back the layers of your mind and probing formative images and fantasies from when you were very young. What was the earliest dream you can remember when you first came into conscious memory, maybe at age three or four? I mean a literal nighttime dream. What were your fantasies when you were very young? I do believe that children — certainly this was true of me — have very intense fantasy lives even at age four or five. What were your earliest fantasies?
I believe that Goethe’s observation relates to Neville’s remarks about the perceived passage of time and the gestation period between the thought and the actualization. If you take Goethe’s counsel, you might be surprised to discover an extraordinary symmetry between the things that you’re living out in your life today and things that you harbored and thought about when you were very young. These can be positive, negative, or anywhere in between.
Neville recommends that you avoid thinking in terms of, “It will happen this way or that way” or “I’ll do something to make it happen.” His attitude was that the event will unfold in its own lovely, harmonious, perfect way. Your job is not to draw the map. Your job is to live from the destination.
I believe that Neville is going to be remembered, and is being looked upon today, as having created the most elegant mystical analog to quantum physics. He was thinking and talking about these ideas long before the popularization of quantum physics. He had a remarkable instinct in the 1940s, which has been tantalizingly, if indirectly, reiterated by people studying quantum theory — people who have never heard the name of Neville. Yet it wouldn’t surprise me if, within a generation or so, some physics students begin to read him as a philosophical adjunct to their work. That may sound unlikely, but remember that many of the current generation of physicists were inspired by Star Trek and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I believe there is greater openness today to questions of awareness and mind causation.
***
We all live by philosophies, unspoken or not. Even if we say we don’t have an ideology, we obviously have assumptions by which we navigate life. When I look back upon people like Neville and Zen teacher Alan Watts (1915–1973), I realize that their greatness is that they lived by the inner light of their ideas. That is a rare trait in our world today. We are a world of talkers. People are sarcastic or cruel over Twitter, and they think they’re taking some great moral stand. Is it brave for someone who lives miles away and doesn’t even use his real name to call people out online? That’s no victory. It’s make-believe morality.
When we look back on certain figures in the political, cultural, artistic, and spiritual spheres, those we remember are the ones who lived by the inner light of their ideas, who put themselves on the line, for success or failure, based upon an idea.
My wish for every one of you reading these words is that you provide that same example. And I really must say the following, and I mean this in my heart: if you sincerely attempt what I am describing, I believe that you will find greatness, because, if nothing else, you will be making the effort to live by the inner light of an idea.
(This article is adapted from Magician of the Beautiful: An Introduction to Neville Goddard.) | https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/why-positive-thinking-works-fa1ca49e3d61 | ['Mitch Horowitz'] | 2020-08-02 22:39:39.342000+00:00 | ['Science', 'Paranormal', 'Occult', 'Mysticism', 'Self Improvement'] |
How to measure the success of dashboards | How to measure success and what to do about them?
As difficult as it is, there are a couple of things you can monitor to measure success and collect feedback about your dashboards.
Usage Rate
Usage rate is the best indicator of the quality of a dashboard. If a dashboard is used by stakeholders regularly, it’s already reached a level of success. One wouldn’t use something that is not useful.
If you use Tableau or Looker, you can easily see in the backend users and frequency of them accessing the dashboard. If you don’t have those metrics available, try to bitly the links and monitor the number of clicks.
If the usage rate is low, it could mean your dashboard doesn’t help your stakeholders and you need to speak to them about the misalignment. But in my experience, more often than not, they just don’t know the dashboards exist or cannot find them! My trick is to have the right dashboards auto-delivered to their inbox at the right time.
Anecdotes of insights found, hypotheses confirmed, and great decisions made
The second level of success after stakeholders start using the dashboards is when they leverage them for insights and decision making. These feedback usually comes in the form of anecdotes that you can also proactively seek out by asking around. Even better, you know your dashboards are good if you see screenshots of them in presentations, email threads, or slack conversations.
Peer Review
Peer review is an invaluable way to get feedback, especially on your visual designs. Other analysts can spot issues that your stakeholders, who are not experts in the field, cannot easily detect. For example, using a partial y-axis scale to distort perception (per below).
Getting a peer review before sending it to stakeholders is a sure way to remove any misleading visual design landmines that could lead to wrong decisions made based on them.
Response Time
A dashboard that takes too long to load or to interact with is deemed to be unsuccessful, as it will constantly interrupt the user’s flow of thought and fail to keep the user’s attention, making insights discovery, which almost always requires filter/select actions, impossible. According to Miller’s research on “Response time in man-computer conversational transactions”, 1 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focused on the dialogue.
Munzner advises that “if an action could take significantly longer than a user would naturally expect, some kind of progress indicator should be shown to the user.” (Visualization Analysis & Design).
A simple test would be to interact with the dashboard yourself and see if your flow is interrupted by any response latency. Tableau also offers detailed metrics on load time for each interaction.
Common ways to reduce response time is to reduce input dataset size through change data type (string to number) or add master filters. Alternatively, you can reduce the number of charts or filter options on the dashboard.
All of that being said, you should also remember that visualization is not a simple linear optimization but a series of tradeoffs. A design that does well in one aspect might do poorly in another, such as the tradeoff between interactivity and response time.
I hope by using usage rate, anecdotes, peer review, and response time as proxies of success, visual designers can at least have something to measure against and know what to improve. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. | https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-measure-the-success-of-dashboards-511559929109 | [] | 2020-12-14 20:51:56.182000+00:00 | ['User Experience', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'Product Design', 'Data Science'] |
The Best Part of the Job Search Is NOT Eventually Getting the Job | First Occasion
It first started when I wanted to leave finance and try my hand at a career in digital marketing. It was a nine-month process that I told everybody at the start would take one month. Boy was I wrong about that too :)
I got down to the final three choices. One of those choices was the result of contacting an old colleague from the finance world who had also made the transition and had remembered me when I contacted them. It felt as though we had worked together for many years — when I work it out, it was probably more like five months.
She became someone I looked up to for the way she approached new technology in the context of an old company and an even older industry. Every encounter with her was special because she made you, and your client, feel as though you mattered. Nothing could replace that feeling.
When I had coffee with her at about month seven of the search, she suggested I have another coffee with one of her colleagues.
It seemed like it would be a complete waste of time given I’d already had so many coffees with so many random strangers in the previous months.
Image Source: memysuitandtie.com
Still, I said yes. The person she introduced to me was cool and we got on well. There was an opportunity to join him in digital marketing, except nothing happened. The opportunity led nowhere.
A few weeks after the coffee, I was introduced to someone from HR. There was no role, just lots of questions about my career and what I was looking for. I answered each question as honestly as I could.
There were several more chats which oddly enough all seemed to bring me to roughly the same place — outside of an office building near the dentist.
These conversations, late one Wednesday afternoon, transpired into an offer and a big change in career that didn’t look like it would be possible. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-best-part-of-the-job-search-is-not-eventually-getting-the-job-128a65e3e072 | ['Tim Denning'] | 2019-07-02 07:57:53.672000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Careers', 'Startup', 'Hiring', 'Self Improvement'] |
Mentoring Program | Mentoring Program
We’re making some changes (Updated 13 August 2020)
Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash
At Inspired Writer we are making changes to how we offer mentoring so we can encourage a wider range of new writers.
We will no longer be accepting mentoring applications each month. However, writers who contribute to Inspired Writer have the opportunity to get some support and feedback on their work. We offer small suggestions, changes, and work alongside writers as required. This means more emerging writers get the support they need to progress in their craft.
New writers can read our guidelines here:
Other Feedback and Mentoring Options
If you want in depth individual feedback and prefer to learn at your own pace, there are three other options available:
Personal Essay Writing
The Personal Essay Workshop. This workshop is a self-paced video course with 3 sessions of individual feedback on your writing. (This course is currently full. We will let you know when it’s open for new students. In the meantime, the Creative Nonfiction course below also covers Personal Essays).
All Creative Nonfiction
For writers interested in developing your Creative Nonfiction, check out the Creative Nonfiction Writing School. Creative Nonfiction covers memoir, personal essays, history, narrative nonfiction, travel and nature writing, and more. A basic definition of CNF is “True stories told well.”
You can sign up for one month or as long as you like. As well as weekly lessons, you also receive monthly feedback on your work for a very affordable price. It’s like doing an MFA without the debt!
Fiction or Nonfiction Mentoring
One-on-one mentoring. More in depth mentoring for developing ideas, writing, and pitching your work. Developmental editing of your stories — fiction or non-fiction. Email me at [email protected] for a quote. (Up to 2000 words at a time)
What to expect from one-on-one mentoring:
Developmental editing goes beyond the basics of checking grammar and spelling.
You may have to cut paragraphs, rearrange, or rewrite. It can be a difficult thing for writers to do — we tend to hold onto our words like they are our babies.
Obviously, it’s your writing so you need to remain in charge of it — if you don’t want to change something, that’s your call. I do find that writers who are most open to suggestions improve their work the fastest though. If you are the type of writer who doesn’t like to take on feedback, you may not enjoy mentoring.
Free Writing Tips
My free writer’s newsletter Because You Write also has weekly tips, resources, training, and inspiration. | https://medium.com/inspired-writer/write-with-us-f0f82d90ac33 | ['Kelly Eden'] | 2020-11-23 07:40:39.033000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Self Development', 'Writing Tips', 'Freelance Writing', 'Writing'] |
Struggle vs Surrender: The Writer’s Way | Throughout the busyness of a day, thoughts fly in, unbidden, searching for a place to land. I push them aside. Not yet. Not yet. I reply. I will myself to wait until dusk when my mind is not standing at attention, ready to pounce if called to action.
I tend boo boos, urge progress, respond, reply, reach out, deliver, convey, complete, speak in full sentences. I am distracted. I am needed.
Dusk falls. Family fed. The dishwasher hums emitting a lemony-clean fragrance that signals the day’s work is done. Obligations complete. My vigilance is rewarded with silence and peace.
I sit, pen in hand, but the blank page mocks me. Mind empty. Where are my lofty thoughts now? Where is the inspiration? It is elusive. It has fled in the midst of the chaos. I do not know when it left, nor when it will return. Yet I trust the process.
I stare at the empty page which mirrors my mind until the peace of blankness washes over me.
Photo by César Couto on Unsplash
Effortless effort. Thoughtless thoughts. Slowly, cautiously, ideas creep in. Small at first then, emboldened by the new peace that surrounds me, bigger ones follow. They crowd and jostle each other in an effort to be front of mind.
My pen flies across the page, recording their urgent calls to be seen and heard. My mind is active. The room in my head is full. The page now mirrors its state, filled with black symbols.
I have achieved a singularity.
I am one with my pen and paper.
I write because I am.
I finally collapse, spent and exhausted. The words have had their day.
Tomorrow it will happen all over again.
And so it goes. | https://medium.com/house-of-haiku/struggle-vs-surrender-the-writers-way-898ccb53f21b | ['Cara J. Stevens'] | 2020-12-16 23:30:38.626000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Haiku', 'Zen', 'Writers Block', 'Writing'] |
Essential Steps for Leaders to Lead Well That Are Often Overlooked | Essential Steps for Leaders to Lead Well That Are Often Overlooked
Communicate clearly, increase productivity.
Photo by Rebrand Cities from Pexels
A leader can make or break a business. Employees who have good leaders are more relaxed and have a natural incentive to work harder and be more creative in their work. You can probably think of working for that one boss who made every task you completed difficult. Having a lousy leader results in tension and anxiety in the workplace. It’s no wonder 3 out of 4 employees report their boss is the worst part of the job, according to the Huffington Post. The same report says at least 50% of employees either are looking or plan to look for a new role within the year.
It seems like we need good leaders. Employees are less productive because they are anxious, tense, and often not empowered to do good work. You’re left second-guessing your efforts and spinning your wheels. Ever felt like this? I bet you have. How can we improve leadership?
Share Goals
Ever had a project where the boss said go do “x”? You did what you thought you should do to meet the goal, burnt some midnight oil, and came up with answers to achieve the goal. You poured your heart and soul into the project and beamed as you took your effort to the boss who said, “That’s not what I’m looking for. How about this?”
Well, doesn’t that frost your fritters?
If she had told you in the first place, to interview an expert for our upcoming release. Make sure you include this talking point, and whatever else you uncover of interest is yours to add as you see relevant, you probably would have done it. But, that’s not what you did because you didn’t know how your boss preferred the topic to be handled. Now you’ve got to circle back to the interviewee and ask additional questions that you could have asked on the first approach.
Communicate Clearly
Let’s stay with the same scenario. You still have to interview an expert. The boss says, “Interview an expert on online communication, get their best advice on a particular topic, and include a short 2–3 sentence synopsis of their experience and background.”
Easy; right?
You know what you need to cover to keep the boss happy and can add extraneous relevant info that you uncover during your conversation.
Give Clear Directives
Employees can meet goals and deadlines more easily when the boss is direct about what she wants to be done. Bosses who have a specific angle in mind will want to share framework upfront. Don’t leave employees wondering what you want them to do, especially if you want it done a certain way.
As an employee, you should make sure you understand your assignment. You may need to ask some follow-up questions:
Is there a particular topic or talking point for discussion?
Is there a specific way you want this topic covered?
Am I free to cover this assignment creatively?
Get those questions and any other questions you have answered before you begin your task.
Don’t Waste Time
Employees don’t like feeling dumb or that their boss has wasted their time. If your boss has an “aha moment” of epiphany after you’ve received your assignment, you may have some follow-up to do. If your boss changes projects and timetables regularly, it may be time to have a conversation about how you can meet goals more easily and improve the use of company time, while keeping a healthy work-life balance. Get on the same page to improve efficiency and productivity.
Be Open to Feedback
Being open to feedback goes for both the employee and the employer. Feedback is an open conversation that does not attack, but reveals pain points and solves them. A helpful discussion might be I feel (blank) when (blank). How can we solve this? When all parties are open to feedback, the team wins. Sometimes current events change, and topics take a turn in how they need to be covered. Dramatic changes should be an exception and not the rule of project development.
Wrap it Up
As an employee, you want to meet the boss’s goals. If you like your job, but not your boss’s management style, you are not alone. HuffPost uncovers, Sixty-Five percent (65%) of employees would rather have a new boss than take a pay raise. More than likely, you like the work you do. You probably also enjoy your general environment and location, but your boss could use some help being a good leader. If you like what you’re doing and where you do it, take steps to preserve your relationships.
Keep the conversation open so that you and your boss can have a long, happy work relationship. Bosses, it’s time to lead your employees well. As with most things, it takes everyone working together well to keep good relationships. Keep open doors and open minds for better work-relations. | https://medium.com/publishous/essential-steps-for-leaders-to-lead-well-that-are-often-overlooked-bc53ea31db35 | ['Nicole Akers'] | 2020-08-10 11:46:09.351000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Advice', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement'] |
The Art of Testing: Where Design Meets Quality | The intention of this post is not to explain the different testing techniques out there that we can use. I’m not going to tell you what the differences are between unit, integration, feature, or end-to-end testing.
I’m going to tell you why we should consider testing as part of our daily development and how it’s directly linked to the software quality.
I’m still amazed by the lack of experience about testing in software in general. Common ignorance in this world about best testing practices for us as developers. Inexperience that you can easily see if you have already worked on some different projects and teams.
Software testing
Some horrible patterns I’ve seen (and done):
Testing for the sake of testing: testing every single file, sometimes wrongly considered as a unit.
Mocking every class that we intend to test, overriding the real implementation, and creating a fake-behavior, therefore providing a false coverage perception.
Coupling production code with tests everywhere so it’s impossible to change anything without breaking some tests, even if the feature itself it’s working as intended.
Not testing at all because “why should we even test anything if the feature it’s done and it works? Why should we spend more time on this if it’s done?”.
One of the main reasons for software testing is actually verifying a suite of proofs for the expected behavior of the final software piece. However, testing can (and should) be more than that. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-art-of-testing-39c6af8c9076 | ['Jose Maria Valera Reales'] | 2020-07-05 15:58:45.859000+00:00 | ['Software Testing', 'Testing', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Design', 'Software'] |
RISE Asked & Answered — March | RISE Asked & Answered — March
Hello RISE community,
Since coming onboard late last year, I have been working with the team to improve core areas of the RISE business. With this in mind, I believe it is important to address questions that have been raised by our great community in the past and present so we can plot a path forwards together.
What is the update on Bittrex?
Unfortunately, we cannot discuss the details. As a precaution, we encourage our members who still have RISE on Bittrex to withdraw into a RISE wallet. Download a desktop wallet here: https://rise.vision and use the web wallet here: https://wallet.rise.vision/. If anything changes, we will update the community.
What happened to the incubator projects?
We understand the frustration that the community has felt around the incubator projects over the last month. We made the decision to postpone incubator projects for the time being and are considering these for the future. There are two key considerations relating to how we move forwards with these projects:
Firstly, RISE aims to ensure absolute compliance of any snapshot/token distribution mechanisms going forward. We believe it is a prudent approach to await future partnerships and then discuss incubator projects with them for their support.
Secondly, RISE initially planned to build our core blockchain technology in parallel to the incubator projects. However, based on recent events we now have decided to focus entirely on core blockchain platform first. This ensures RISE and any party that wishes to build a DAPP on our blockchain platform, will be in a far more secure and scalable position. Key to this is refining the TypeScript code base and building out RISE sidechain technology for DAPPs in the future. Only once this has been developed, tested and deployed, will RISE then look at reinstating the incubator projects. We still see immense value in the incubator projects and look forward to exploring these projects and new DAPPs with our community.
Has the vision of RISE changed?
The vision of RISE has not changed and the mission is still to build a blockchain platform to create DAPPs and provide developer tools in multiple programming languages. For DAPPs to run on RISE, we also need to build sidechain technology, which is also highly appealing to businesses/tech startups. Previous communications from RISE outlined the initial vision and RISE is now very much in the development phase of core technology. Our new website and communication will focus on building a secure and stable core to develop scalable blockchain technology for 2018. Thereafter, we will take a linear approach to further development, building out features that will compliment and enhance core technology, together with sidechain technology. Details in the roadmap to follow.
Testing Statistics as of Feb 25th 2018
When will we see a proper roadmap on the website?
A roadmap will be released with the new website and we hope it is easier to understand RISE’s current development status and milestones that need to be achieved over the next year. However, like with most development roadmaps timelines and items are subject to change based on how well the outcome of testing is and development resources. Testing is absolutely imperative to the products we are building and therefore, we may allocate more time to this to ensure better future development.
Why is it important for RISE to be incorporated in Gibraltar?
All the relevant information is in the article: https://medium.com/rise-vision/rise-vision-incorporates-in-blockchain-friendly-gibraltar-b855f4738797
When will the website get fixed (broken links, …)
We are working on a brand new website with a creative design team who are creating a custom design for RISE. We hope this is able to be released end of March/beginning of April. This will improve the user experience and ease of access to our resources for developers and non-developers who want to engage with the RISE platform. In the meantime, if you do find broken links please alert one of the team members and we will look into this.
How many FTE’s are working on the project fulltime?
We have a working development team of five, and the wider team are full-time. However, we are a small team and with the roadmap evolving, we are constantly looking for talented developers to help us with progressing RISE technology. Therefore, if you are particularly talented or experienced in TypeScript/JavaScript, NodeJS and PostGresSQL please get in touch with @vekexasia or @jolie. If you can refer an experienced developer to us and they are successfully employed to work on the RISE project, we can offer a RISE bounty to the referrer.
Will the fee always be 0.1 RISE, even if the price is $5. Have you thought about that situation?
At the moment 0.1 is the transaction fee, however, we are aware of fluctuations in value and in the future we hope to develop and deploy dynamic fees into our technology.
Why would anyone use RISE and an ICO platform, especially giving the hefty 20% fee? What is our pricing model? Will that change?
Yes, this is subject to change. To clarify, the fee to create and run a DAPP on RISE can be amended for developers going forward. There will be a consultative approach to pricing models for each project or business that wants to run on RISE with the sidechain solution.
Will the DAPPs on RISE be forced to use the RISE blockchain hence also the 0.1 fee per transaction?
Each DAPP will have its own sidechain that is connected to the RISE mainchain and transaction fees can be decided by the creator of the DAPP. Sidechains are best for commercial use of a blockchain, thus key to any future projects built on RISE with our developer tools.
Will every DAPP have its own sidechain?
Yes, it will be possible to implement custom tokens in DAPPs, and use these tokens as the main token within their DAPPs. These tokens may be used in the same way as RISE or BTC, but the tokens cannot be moved directly from one DAPP sidechain to another DAPP sidechain. They must only move via the RISE mainchain.
Why is RISE a 1 vote system?
When RISE was first ideated, the project aimed to take the best specifications of a few different blockchain projects. That included 1 vote per wallet, 101 delegates and developer tools for multiple programming languages. This unique combination of features created the RISE blockchain.
Is RISE meant to be a big player like NEO and ETH or for small to medium businesses?
Ultimately, RISE wants to bring the development of DAPPs to developers of all levels of expertise. You will be able to build your applications on the RISE platform and rely on RISE to provide the security of using a blockchain, instead of a developer or business having to build their own. Whether RISE is meant to be used by SME’s or Enterprise businesses will depend entirely on the throughput transactions rate we achieve and if that is suitable to the prospective business deciding to use RISE sidechain technology. We believe with the TypeScript rewrite of our core codebase, this will allow for enhanced scalability.
Would there be an cooperation between RISE and universities after the platform has been released?
We hope to have the opportunity to work directly with universities who embrace blockchain technology to offer RISE products to their faculty and students. Additionally, we are open to explore how to make our products available to aspiring blockchain developers within student communities to learn and build applications on blockchain technology with RISE.
We understand the need to answer pertinent questions asked by the community and we will work on the best way to channel these for next month. Thank you for your support. | https://medium.com/rise-vision/rise-asked-answered-7af41531171a | ['Rise Team'] | 2018-07-10 22:46:28.791000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Typescript'] |
7 tips to help improve your web Typography skills | Originally published at marcandrew.me on October 29th, 2020.
A good understanding of Typography (more than imagery, and colour in my opinion) is so important in the design of strong UIs.
Why?
Because the majority of what you see on the web is content-based, so having a better understanding of typography can enable you to keep the reader’s attention, bring them a much better user experience, and strengthen the meaning of the text that is being presented.
With this article, I wanted to show you a handful of tips that will not only give you a better understanding, but also feel more confident when working with type on your next project.
Let’s dive on in… | https://uxdesign.cc/7-tips-to-help-improve-your-web-typography-skills-50f4a7e81c60 | ['Marc Andrew'] | 2020-10-29 11:35:18.637000+00:00 | ['UI Design', 'UI', 'Visual Design', 'Design', 'Product Design'] |
12 Little Things That Show People You’re Intelligent — Without You Having To Say It | I was at a breakfast meeting not too long ago.
Four people around a small table on the outdoor deck of a nice hotel, right on the beach, one of the women brought two boxes of avocado toast from the café.
“For us to share,” she said.
My first thought was, “How are we going to share avocado toast in those boxes?”
The man we were meeting with started talking about his venture, and as I was listening I noticed the woman tearing the lids and sides off the boxes.
When she was done, the untouched slices of avocado toasted sat on a bed of cardboard, out in the open for us to share.
I immediately chalked her up as being a smart person, and someone I would enjoy working with.
Whether we realize it or not, our actions say much more about us than words do.
This is a big theme that I reflected on writing my book of daily meditations, Slow Down, Wake Up.
We judge each other based on the way we act, not the way we say we act.
Keeping this in mind, here are 12 little things that show people you’re intelligent — without you having to say it.
1. Showing up on time.
The most simple indicator of all.
If you are late, you are disrespectful. It doesn’t matter the circumstance — unless the other party is luckily in the same boat (both of you enduring the same traffic). But still, it’s always best to be the one on time.
Rule of thumb: if you’re not early, you’re late.
2. Dressing appropriately.
Some people say, “It’s always better to be overdressed.”
I disagree.
Being overdressed is the same issue as being underdressed, except you’re probably a lot less comfortable. But they still highlight the same issue: you didn’t do enough due diligence to figure out what would be appropriate to wear.
Take the time to understand where you’re going and what the expectation is.
That way, you’ll present yourself in the best light possible.
3. Remembering the little things.
“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” — William Morris
If you can recall the small stuff, people will think fondly of you forever.
Something as simple as, “I got you black, no cream, because I remember you telling me you didn’t drink dairy,” can turn someone into your best friend.
And that’s because listening shows you care.
4. Holding the door open.
When I was growing up and walking beside my mother, every door we would approach she would stand in front of and wait.
She would wait for me to open it for her.
I love that she taught me that.
Such a small act, with any human being, shows your willingness to put others before yourself.
5. The art on your walls.
Ever walk into an office, or someone’s home and think, “Wow, this person must be fascinating.”
How you keep your space shows others what speaks to you. What motivates you. What interests you, and what you believe is worth looking at on a daily basis.
Choose things that give depth to your character.
6. Your shoes.
This isn’t about buying what’s most expensive, or what’s trendy.
Your style of shoes say a lot about you, as a person. They are one of the few things a person can wear that is clearly representative of their personality. For example, someone could be wearing old jeans and a t-shirt, but with nice shoes, you immediately classify them as someone who is deliberate.
Your shoes say a lot about you.
7. When you take notes.
The most obvious example happens with a restaurant server.
An unintelligent restaurant server will try to impress you by not taking out their notepad to jot down your order. An intelligent server will realize they have far more to lose than they do to gain by taking this risk, and will make notes as needed.
The same goes for just about anything in life. Why risk your friend’s pickup order? Why risk your boss’s coffee request? Why risk losing your business partner’s ideas from the meeting?
Taking notes shows you would rather things get done, and done right.
8. The state of your desktop.
How vulnerable do you feel showing someone your desktop?
If there are files everywhere, that’s a clear sign you’re disorganized and out of sorts.
But imagine someone looking at a clean, well-organized desktop with a handful of clearly labeled folders.
What sort of conclusion would they draw about you?
9. Spending money wisely.
I’m all for enjoying yourself, but how you spend your money is a very clear reflection of your values as a person.
Who you spend it on.
Where and when.
This can say a lot about you — whether you always realize it or not.
10. How you invest your time.
The activities you call your own are arguably the most powerful indicator to your priorities as a person.
Do you spend your time working on yourself? Or do you squander it trying to remain distracted from the things that truly matter?
We are all a reflection of how we invest our time.
11. The foods you eat.
Your body is your temple.
What you eat and how you prioritize taking care of yourself says more about you than you might realize. It shows what matters to you (instant gratification or long-term health). It shows discipline, consistency. And it speaks volumes about the relationship you have with yourself.
You are what you eat.
12. Your circle of friends.
“You are the reflection of the five people you spend the most time with.”
Who we associate with speaks volumes about our outlook on life, our beliefs, our goals, and what we find most important in life.
If you want to meet the right people, hang around the right people.
And if you want to improve yourself, spend time with people who value self-improvement. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/12-little-things-that-show-people-youre-intelligent-without-you-having-to-say-it-a9dd8f34f53f | ['Nicolas Cole'] | 2020-05-14 14:59:52.161000+00:00 | ['Schools', 'Careers', 'Education', 'Intelligence', 'Productivity'] |
Unwrapping the Online Presence of Manchester Open Mind Network | If you are a Manchester student with an interest in mental health, you may have come across new student society Manchester Open Mind Network, who assembled in response to the University’s building mental health crisis. It seems obvious that the success of any organisation online lies in their ability to meet their own goals. Manchester Open Mind Network have two explicit goals on their Facebook page:
1) Support those dealing with mental health issues, and
2) Educate students on how to create happy, healthy minds.
As an important component of building an online presence is to refer back to your goals, it makes sense to talk about “success” in these terms.
https://www.facebook.com/manchesteropenmindnetwork/photos/a.170319890077173.1073741825.170319230077239/170320023410493/?type=1&theater Author: Usman Khan
In terms of their first goal, there are a number of things Manchester Open Mind Network do to either provide support, or a supportive environment. On one particular post, they present as if having an informal chat, “hey guys,” appearing relaxed and personable.
This provides a safe environment for students who may be considering accessing support. Additionally, they champion the bravery of others sharing difficult stories and stress, “there is help out there,” targeted at their audience who may feel alone and without help.
The other type of post format is using quotes lifted from the article being posted. These are often relatable, humorous or emotive in content.
It’s clear that these are designed to be engaging, therefore reach more people, and there is evidence this can be successful. However it can also annoy people, so perhaps this should be used in moderation. Additionally online bloggers agree that an important component of an online presence is being sociable, and it seems simply using a quote isn’t engaging with your audience in the same way as writing a personalized message.
Similarly, they often don’t reply to comments on their posts, or simply like the comment. In doing this they have missed vital opportunities to support their followers, explore ideas in mental health and break down stigma. Instead they limit the support they offer to lists of other services such as Manchester Mind.
A few posts address their second goal. However I can’t help but feel that these posts are upstaged (at least recently) by the sheer quantity of other posts. I say upstaged, because one of these posts has zero engagement. This is likely due to posting borrowed content too frequently, causing people to switch off.
Additionally they do use social media successfully outside of these explicit goals. For example, they post a weekly blog with original, interesting stories and think pieces which has accumulated 225 followers in just a few months. This is a crucial platform as people are more likely to engage with original content.
Lastly, they successfully use pictures; which generates engagement. After all, human beings are immensely visual; and no matter how serious the organisation, people will engage with funny relatable images and memes.
Overall, although they are not consistently “on mission” in terms of their goals, there are a lot of ways in which Manchester Open Mind Network reach their audience. By capitalising on their warm friendly tone and original writing, they could help even more students, which is success in itself. | https://medium.com/digital-society/unwrapping-the-online-presence-of-manchester-open-mind-network-c11dbe09a4a5 | ['Laura Ariel Grant'] | 2017-02-12 20:53:50.506000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Mental Health', 'Digisoc1'] |
How to Create a Writing Portfolio When You Have Zero Experience | How to Create a Writing Portfolio When You Have Zero Experience
The worry-free guide to starting from absolute scratch.
Photo by Andrej Lišakov on Unsplash
How do you gain experience when you have no experience? It is a question that has befuddled college graduates and career transitioners for years, and which is only getting worse in our gig economy. Companies no longer invest in employees from the get-go, they no longer have an interest in improving the people they hire, but instead, seek someone pre-trained and perfect for that one piece of work they need. This is making it even harder to get started when you have no experience.
This new landscape has the frustrating consequence of reinforcing social inequalities because when no one will pay you until you can prove your ability, that means that your first experiences have to be done for free. Kids from richer families can afford to do an unpaid summer internship and land their first byline, or volunteer at a local paper — those that are less well off will meanwhile be working full time to pay for their next semester.
This is an annoying reality, but luckily, whatever your background, even with 0 experience, it is possible to catch up. After all, all you need is to land one writing job, and from then on, you will have experience to showcase.
The question is how do you get that first job. Say you have seen a perfect gig on Upwork, and you need to show your portfolio to apply. Or you’ve got a response from an editor about that pitch you sent, and they’re asking for writing samples.
Don’t panic: it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got previous paid work to show off. Here are five ways you can produce content to land you your first job.
1. Create Your Medium Page
The advantage of Medium posts is that you can showcase your talent while writing about whichever topic you are most comfortable with. You can draw up a few pieces about something you know well, allowing you to produce content quickly while focusing on structure and style, or you can write about a topic relevant to the job you are applying for.
If you write as a hobby but have so far not shown your work to anyone, Medium is a great place to start posting. You get feedback, you grow more comfortable sharing your work, and you enter a community of other writers. Plus, it encourages you to finish your pieces, and polish them. You can even make money from your work straight away — it might just be a few cents, but depending on how you market and how much you write, you might also start making a solid amount from your writing. However much you make, your Medium articles can be an ideal starting point for your writing portfolio.
2. Create your blog
This takes more time than Medium, as there are more things to format, but you also gain control over your page, and a blog can be a great addition to a website presenting your writing services.
3. Think Back
Are you 100% you don’t have any writing samples to use? Have a think about the work you’ve produced in the past. If you have an interest in writing professionally, I assume that you have at least some experience, even if the pieces you have penned so far have never made it out of your Notes app or torn scraps of paper. Maybe you have written product or restaurant reviews that went long and which, looking back, are actually solid pieces of writing to show to potential employers. Or maybe that angry response you wrote to a troll on Facebook turns out to be such a structured argument that you can make it into an opinion piece or blog post with only a few tweaks.
4. Write mock pieces
This is unpaid labor, but it can be a good solution if you have nothing else to show. Write fake samples of the type of writing service you are offering: this could be descriptions of random products, an interview or feature article about a friend, copywriting for businesses … Just make sure you don’t make up facts or figures, and that your work, even if it is about businesses or products that don’t exist, there are no factual inaccuracies in your piece. Make up a client and a product that are realistic.
5. Write pieces on spec
This is similar to writing mock pieces, except that you write them with a real client in mind, and you are aiming to sell your piece after writing. It involves doing the work with no guarantee of payment, but I recommend this option rather than mock pieces because it actually makes it easier by focusing your work, and it is good practice for writing for a client, taking into account real-life restrictions of style, length, and topic.
Other important tips for beginners
For your first job, focus on having three pieces to show, all well-written, factually accurate and grammatically correct. Ideally, you should have at least one piece similar to the form of the job you are applying for, and one piece that is related — even loosely — to the topic of the job.
Presentation is particularly important as a novice, to make your work seem more professional — even when you have no paid writing to show. Check and double-check your spelling and grammar. Post your articles on your website — making sure it is neat. Minimalist is fine. Messy is not. Rather than sending PDFs, put the titles of your piece in your email with links to your work.
Landing your first paid writing job does require a little effort, but with these hacks, you should be able to produce a small portfolio in less than a day. And once you have your first paid writing job, you may never have to write for free again!
Like what you read? Sign up here for my free newsletter — feminist news and curated articles from across the globe, delivered to your inbox each week ❤ | https://starkraving.medium.com/how-to-create-a-writing-portfolio-when-you-have-zero-experience-d81594cf3c86 | ['Stark Raving'] | 2020-11-24 13:09:38.092000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Experience', 'Freelance', 'Portfolio', 'Writing'] |
How to find and organize your data from the command-line | How to find and organize your data from the command-line
Introducing metaframe: a markdown-based documentation tool and data catalog for data scientists.
Repo: https://github.com/rsyi/metaframe
If you are a data scientist, it’s your job to extract value from data. But in your career, you’ll likely spend (and have spent) a non-trivial amount of time looking for and getting context around said data. In my experience, this commonly plays out as a wild goose chase — you ask the most senior person on your team who refers you to someone else, who refers you to someone else, who tells you they don’t know what you’re talking about. You then repeat this process until you find someone who can refer you to a useful table.
person = senior_data_scientist
while person and not_tired:
response = ask(person)
if type(response) == Table
rejoice()
if type(response) == Person
person = response
But this algorithm is really pretty terrible! It’s by no means an exhaustive search, and you’ll often end up with an unmaintained, unused table. If you decide to just risk it and use this in your production pipelines, you could end up costing your company a lot of money when you find out six months down the line that this table doesn’t do what you think it does. What’s more, it’s a huge waste of time! Sometimes you’ll forget what the table does months later and you’ll have to do this again, to the dismay of your coworkers. So what can you do?
A brief intro to data catalogs and their limitations
Luckily, there’s already a solution to this problem: the data catalog. Data catalogs are aptly named, for they simply provide you with a catalog of your data. They let you search and find tables by name, view their columns and metadata, and enrich this metadata with additional documentation. A number of closed source players exist, like Alation and Collibra, and open-source versions have been released by a number of tech companies, including Netflix’s Metacat, Lyft’s Amundsen, and LinkedIn’s Datahub. And tons of companies have been creating these tools for themselves (Airbnb, Uber, Google, Facebook — to name a few).
This begs the question: why not just use/implement one of these solutions?
Well, you might want to seriously consider it, eventually, but there are enormous barriers to entry: catalogs tend to be expensive to set up, or, in the case of open-source tools, difficult to set up. For companies with only a handful of data scientists and analysts, it’s hardly worth upwards of 10s of thousands of dollars or months of work to implement a tool that will, at best, save you the few minutes of turning to your neighbor and asking him/her about that table again.
I’ve talked to a number of friends at smaller startups about this, and while the problem of data documentation and data discovery is salient even at the smallest scales, the cost-benefit tradeoff simply doesn’t make sense. But just because the problem is too expensive to solve with existing methods doesn’t mean that a cost-effective solution doesn’t exist.
So what’s the solution?
I thought, “there has to be an easier way to set up a catalog.” Day-to-day, I just want to look for my data, check the column names, and take some notes. Why is that so hard? I already can do that manually by saving everything in a team-wide spreadsheet.
So I thought I’d try to 80/20 this. The result?
Metaframe.
Metaframe is a CLI-based data catalog with a custom Markdown-based metadata backend, a fzf-based search service, and an ETL pipeline written in bash and python, built off of lyft’s amundsendatabuilder library.
But that’s hard to grok. Here’s a quick demonstration:
At its core, metaframe is just a slightly opinionated documentation tool. Want to just write notes for one table? Easy, just type the following:
mf new table_name
and you’ll enter into a text file located at ~/.metaframe/metadata/table_name.docs.md , where you can add your notes on this table. These will then be accessible in your search, by running
mf
And this isn’t tied to tables — you can create a new doc for SQL queries, ML models, jupyter notebooks, or more. I personally keep a subfolder in ~/.metaframe/ called recipes , where I store named snippets of SQL.
If you want a more full-fledged data catalog experience, metaframe also supports locally-run ETL jobs. All you need to do is specify a connection in yaml by running mf connections edit , then run mf etl , and all your data will be accessible using mf . After searching and finding a table you want to take notes for, you can press enter to edit a doc associated with the selected table, and this doc will be appended to your metadata preview window in future searches.
Because the file structure is entirely text-based, you can even navigate to ~/.metaframe/metadata and version-track it with git. In a company with a number of collaborators wanting to share notes, a simple pattern could be to set up CI/CD (or an airflow job) to populate this data in a git repository automatically and have users push their personal docs to branches in this repo. Because this is version tracked, you should be able to easily see what tables your coworkers know about without even having to ask them by checking the commit history of their personal branch.
Any caveats?
The only issue I’ve noticed with metaframe is that it’ll start to chug at around 100,000 tables. But for companies that have this sort of scale, it may be prudent to (a) not run the ETL job locally and (b) restrict which schemas are being pulled. In metaframe, this is simply a matter of adding a few flags, like included_schemas or excluded_schemas , to your mf connections edit file. See the docs for more details.
Metaframe supports manual documentation and ETL over presto or neo4j (amundsen) out-of-the-box, but we also support custom build scripts to enable custom extraction jobs (from any warehouse, from pre-scraped database stores, etc.). We are also in the process of building out more native connections (e.g. Snowflake and Postgres are in the works). If you’re passionate about getting this to work for your particular setup, feel free to drop an issue and we’ll help out. Or, if you’re so inclined, make a contribution! :)
Summary
Data documentation and data discovery are serious problems, but they’re not things that data scientists typically think about. It’s easy to neglect a problem that wastes less than an hour a week, but I’m here to tell you that there are solutions for this at all scales. Give metaframe a try, and I guarantee you once you have a taste of it, you won’t be able to live without it.
Repo: https://github.com/rsyi/metaframe | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-find-and-organize-your-data-from-the-command-line-852a4042b2be | ['Robert Yi'] | 2020-10-17 20:49:52.203000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Data Catalog', 'Towards Data Science', 'Command Line', 'Productivity'] |
Why Startups Prefer Ruby on Rails? | Are you willing to be happy?
The answer to this question would be quite obvious and simple! Who does not want to? So, being the startup founder or a programmer, you would be looking for the platform that was built for exactly that purpose!
The founder of Ruby on Rails, David H Hansson, has quoted it in the best way; “Optimizing for happiness is perhaps the most formative key to Ruby on Rails.”
Your abstract idea has taken the shape of a business model, you got the team and managed to attract some Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors along the way!
You are all set to begin your own business, what a thrilling feeling! Now, you might think, what can go wrong? This part should be fun and easy, when you start breathing life into your idea.
But wait, you need to ensure that your idea goes into the perfect body and shape otherwise, your app will feel trapped in the wrong shape or the wrong body!
How can you do that? The answer is Ruby on Rails!
Ruby on Rails — A Precious Gem in the Startup World
Ruby on Rails is trending technology for development among startups. Many startups choose Ruby on Rails to develop their projects because of its simplicity. Due to this, in the previous decade, numerous successful startups built with Ruby on Rails got born and became unicorns. Let’s take a look at some of those startups;
Twitter
Twitch
Shopify
Airbnb
Github
Now, let’s see, Why is Ruby on Rails the best choice for your startup?
1. Time Efficiency
One of the most significant reasons why startups love Ruby on Rails is because it offers efficient development time.
It comes with a number of ready-made modules and plugins. Developers can begin developing your app without writing and rewriting necessary and repetitive code with Ruby on Rails. Coding is so easy with RoR that even a monkey can code!
Okay, not literally !
Ruby on Rails allows building applications 30 to 40% faster when compared to other similar frameworks. So, your MVP’s development speed will be skyrocketing.
It offers what it calls “Convention over Configuration” that saves programmers’ effort and time both.
2. Cost Effectiveness
Ruby on Rails is an open-source framework, so there is no cost to bear either hidden or otherwise. Thus it allows you to use, modify, and distribute it for free. Additionally, there are various Ruby on Rails Gems available that significantly facilitate developers’ tasks.
There are more than 4,500 people who’ve contributed to Ruby codes. As it is free to use, startups find Ruby on Rails development compatible with their tight budgets.
3. Best For Developing A Minimum Viable Product
Most of the successful startups have the effective strategy of Validating the business idea with the help of MVP. Ruby on Rails is the best choice for startups having limited time frames and a constrained budget.
Ruby on Rails comes with features that allow startups to develop future products with basic functions at a lower cost and roll it out in the market in a few days.
Let’s understand with the illustration of Airbnb:
They came with an idea to create their services, having almost zero resources. Then they created an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with Ruby on Rails with a simple web having few photos, and that decision became life-changing.
So, this was the first version of airbnb.com, which was very different from the current one!
4. Ruby on Rails is Scalable
You are always bound to think about scalability being the startup. Scalability refers to the potential to expand your services to meet up the higher loads, which is more number of requests per minute.
Every application or web owner aims to have lots of visitors. And that’s why you ensure that your web app should be able to manage all the visitors you are expecting very well. Therefore you should build your web apps in Ruby on Rails.
There was a discussion going on regarding Shopify, and many people said that even with the scalability issue of RoR, the app was successful. Then, to answer them, this is what the CEO of Shopify, Tobias Lutke tweeted;
There are 4 million requests per second that are handled at Shopify. This proves the scalability that Ruby on Rails offer!
5. High-Quality Product
Well, Ruby on Rails doesn’t compromise on quality, even after allowing for quicker development.
All the startup founders aim to have the highest quality for their products. They strive for excellent quality with zero issues & bugs. Ruby on Rails ensures bug-free, and quality development as the smallest tool is developed into the Rails core.
Ruby on Rails allows to develop simple and pure APIs as it uses RESTful architecture. RoR is desired for Agile projects as the modular design of this language is ideal for frequent scope changes.
6. Security Is The Top Priority
In Ruby on Rails, security is given the top priority. Special assurance has been given in the Ruby on Rails to make it more safe & secure to use. The built-in system of RoR gives you the protection against the attacks and threats such as;
Cross-site Scripting
Cross-site request forgery
SQL injection
Insecure direct object reference
The wide programmers’ community of Ruby on Rails across the world keeps updating it & there are rigorous security tests for plugins & applications before release.
When you use Ruby on Rails for your startup, you are following a secure development life-cycle that creates RoR as a safe environment.
7. Easy Support & Maintenance
Support and maintenance become an essential aspect of ensuring the flawless performance of the web application even after a long period for working continuously. And this will be harder if the code of the web app is of poor quality.
Ruby on Rails promotes good coding practices in development. It offers numerous gems, test codes, and debug it in short notice to improve Ruby on Rails development services. This will result in the product of the superior quality that is simple and easier to support & maintain.
Wrapping up
Ruby on Rails has a great past and more bright future. And if you are confused about which programming language will be suitable, then Ruby on Rails is the best choice for your startup. So, look for the best Ruby on Rails development company and start working on your dream project! | https://medium.com/quick-code/why-is-ruby-on-rails-the-best-choice-for-your-startup-45cab9be6568 | ['Bharti Purohit'] | 2020-09-02 16:25:05.515000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Programming', 'Ruby on Rails', 'Ruby On Rails Development', 'Startup'] |
The Thing That’s Costing You the Most in Life? Your Insecurities. | I used to think it was some myth artists would spew…
“I’ll get a million positive comments and affirmations about my work. Then I’ll get one negative comment and it gnaws at me. You might as well erase all the compliments I’ve received. Because these few worthless, negative words are overstaying their welcome.”
And then it happened to me.
I was fed a handful of supportive positivity, alongside a small dose of pesky criticisms.
To my disbelief, it really affected me.
I’ve been working in the entertainment industry for a decade. I thought my conditioning to navigate rejection was on fleek.
But I couldn’t shake it from my thoughts.
My higher self was cooing, trying to comfort me. “Let it roll off your back. Don’t worry about what anyone says. A dose of rejection is healthy. Focus on WHY you’re doing it and keep on keepin’ on. You’re a badass and YOU GOT THIS!”
While my child self, who is the keeper of my creativity, and also the keeper of my deep dark insecurities, couldn’t help but start antagonizing me…. “Maybe they’re right…. What are you doing anyway? Why would your words mean anything? Accept that you’re an imposter and your words may never be worthy of anyone's time.”
I texted a brilliant friend to help curb the cyclone of negativity that was taking over my evening. “How could I get these sweet, thoughtful responses from people, but get consumed by a few words of negativity?”
“We harp on the negative because it pokes at the insecurities we already have.” She reminded me.
Ah, yes…. These insecurities that already exist inside of me are getting something to snack on. And it’s fueling their unwanted energy. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/the-thing-thats-costing-you-the-most-in-life-your-insecurities-117285742c48 | ['Maddie Mcguire'] | 2020-12-12 20:03:08.371000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Insecurity', 'Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement'] |
Oui: Facebook’s local news problem | By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>
Dec. 8, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co
Journalism has a focus problem: How to combat ‘Shiny Things Syndrome’: In an era when change is a constant, it’s easy for newsrooms to be distracted by the latest and greatest promise to … engage with the audience, restore revenue etc etc. Yet Julie Posetti calls for newsroom to slow down, take a more measured, strategic approach to change. Interesting read, based on her research published in the Journalism Innovation Project for the University of Oxford.
Interesting tips on dealing w newsroom editors: A common complaint, from both young and seasoned reporters, is how to deal with editors who dismiss ideas out of hand or who run roughshod over copy. Here’s some tips on how to deal with what can be a difficult situation, by Wilson Lievano for The GroundTruth Project. Interesting ideas on a perennial problem.
The “Yellow Jackets” riots in France are what happens when Facebook gets involved with local news: Ryan Broderick for BuzzFeedNews argues that changes in the Facebook algorithm to emphasize local news helped lead to the recent riots in France. I’m not entirely convinced by the claims, but it is more evidence that Facebook is fairly clueless about what they have unleashed and are amazingly sluggish about reining in bad actors. It seems they still think of themselves as engineers playing with software, when in fact they are a media company. | https://medium.com/3-to-read/3-to-read-shiny-things-syndrome-dealing-w-editors-facebooks-local-news-problem-647054c43813 | ['Matt Carroll'] | 2018-12-08 13:06:00.836000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Media Criticism', 'Matt Carroll', 'Media', 'Spotlight Movie'] |
I Have Been Downsized | I’ve had the same job for nearly nineteen years. Though there has never been any opportunity for advancement or pay increase, I knew that when I took the position. It has been a good job.
Now, however, the job has changed and my position has changed, as well. It’s been downsized and, while this hasn’t come as a surprise, it is still an adjustment.
The Backstory
You see, for the past nearly nineteen years, I’ve been a Stay-At-Home-Mom. This is one of those positions that is seen by some as a glorious luxury and by others as an absolute nightmare.
Personally, I don’t like to label it. This just happens to be the way I chose to take on raising my son. I do feel fortunate that my husband and I agreed, and that we were able to make it work for us. It seemed the best route for our family.
Your mileage may vary.
At any rate, Stay-At-Home-Mom has been my official job title for quite a long time now. There have been years of exercise classes, play groups, basketball leagues, year-round swim lessons, summer swim teams, tennis lessons and teams, chess lessons and teams, and on and on.
My duties were not limited to actions related to rearing my son. I also took on tasks associated with the well-being of his school and our church. In other words, I volunteered. A lot.
I served as a homeroom parent, sat on a district advisory committee related to Title I programs, sat on the Continuing Improvement Team for a public elementary school, served four years on a School Advisory Board for a private elementary school (which included three years as an officer), helped establish a parent-based development committee for that same school, and volunteered in a handful of roles at our church.
The position must evolve.
My duties have changed as my son has grown. Play groups are long gone and elementary school parent committees are, likewise, relegated to the past. Other parents have stepped into those roles, which is exactly as it should be.
The biggest change, however, took place over this past weekend.
We moved our son into his dorm at his new university.
In another city.
Two hours away from home.
The object of my nearly-two-decade job is trying out some independence. Exactly as it should be.
However, this means some fairly significant changes in my role.
Opportunities abound.
Of course, I am a mother forever. That’s the way this works. There will never be a time when my role as parent will ever entirely disappear.
The way in which I am a mother is what changes.
Just as I don’t serve up pureed peas or change diapers anymore, I won’t be supervising homework any longer. I won’t be setting out the weekly list of chores (well, maybe during summer break).
What I will do, however, is try out some entirely new duties.
Perhaps writing will take a much bigger role in my day to day life than it has previously. Maybe my volunteer hours will shift to a native bird rescue organization. I might try a return to teaching as a volunteer at the local zoo.
It’s even possible that I will try an entirely new career that I have yet to consider.
The options are so numerous and it’s tempting to try them all. The biggest challenge will be to keep from running wildly from one new activity to another.
So, now what?
With all these choices before me, how in the world will I decide what I’ll do next?
I think I’ve decided not to decide. At least, not yet. Maybe, not ever.
There isn’t any particular reason to commit to any single thing right now. I know I would like to give my writing some serious attention to see what will happen. That seems a reasonable place to begin.
From there, I may branch out into some other things. Before a nasty car accident a couple of years ago, I had taken up archery and was just beginning to be serious about it. It might be time to take that up again.
I admit, it would be pretty great to go back to earning a paycheck. Writing gets the chance to do that, first. However, there are other ways of achieving this particular goal and I’m not going to ignore opportunities that may present themselves.
There won’t be regret.
I won’t lie. I’m going to miss my son enormously. I’m going to talk and write about him often. I’m going to spend a lot of energy wondering if he is eating well and getting enough sleep and getting to his classes and his job on time.
After all, as I said before, I’m still his mother and I always will be.
I find, however, that I’m not as unhappy over my change in position as I expected to be. Instead, there is a feeling of accomplishment. We sent a young man to college who was ready to be there, ready to take on the new responsibilities, and ready to find his own place in the world.
I’m looking forward to taking some of my energies no longer required for the role of Mom and diverting them to whatever new thing captures my interest.
I never regretted my choice to stay at home to be a mother. It was what worked for me and my family. It was a good decision. It has led me to this new place, rich with new opportunities.
I’ve been downsized, but I really can’t be unhappy about it.
Want to hear more from S. J. Gordon? | https://medium.com/because-life/i-have-been-downsized-df209212f23e | ['S. J. Gordon'] | 2019-08-27 20:24:39.516000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Self', 'Parenting', 'Life Lessons', 'Life'] |
The Most Expensive Party In The World’s History | “Earn your success based on service to others, not at the expense of others” — H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
This is the story of the most exclusive and expensive party the world has ever seen. You already heard some of the lavish, extravagant parties in today’s century. However, many of you have not heard about Iran’s extravagant and exclusive party, which they had arranged in 1971 in commemoration of the 2500th birth year of the Persian dynasty lasted for three days. Economists estimated that the total worth of the party was $635 million in today’s currency rate. The party was splendor and magnificent in the world’s record history.
It got delicious food and drinks from the world’s best restaurants, luxury suites for each guest with equipped every kind of facility and luxury. Everything was embellished, with European and French style décor. Moreover, the guest list was exclusively furnished, with important guests such as the head of state from 65 countries, emperors, kings, queens, prince, princess, Saudi’s sheik, Sultans, business figures, and other richest, guest from five different continents.
Now you all think that venue was also luxurious for entertaining such elite guests. You might think that may be a historic castle or seven-star hotels. But No, the venue was middle of the desert with 50 plastic tents with the unbelievable cost estimated around $635 million. But the area of the desert was enlightened with various luxurious facilities. In this thread, let’s explore the world’s most extravagant party in world history.
Brief Information about the host
In 1971, was the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the emperor of Iran, was hosted the most popular party in the entire history. That was the period when the Iranian revolution occurs and the Iranian Monarchy that changed the future of the country forever. Iran in the year of 1960 was in tough condition and miserable state. The emperor Shah, got all government’s powers (appointing Prime minister, dissolving the parliament, raising an army, declaring war, concluding peace, and authorized for all decision making) and said to be the richest person in the world.
Emperor educated in Switzerland, and He loves the western and modern lifestyle. He was fond of freedom and modernity, but on the contrary, the people of Iran have different thoughts about liberalism and modernity. Whenever people raise their voices against the dynasty, the secret police of Shah arrest them. He was fond of modernity and freedom, but he never gives freedom to his people to raise their voice against the government. People addressed their emperor as a “cruel king” because of his several atrocities and death penalties at their will.
The people of Iran were screaming for help, despite being an oil-rich country, the condition of socio-economic was unpleasant. The infrastructure was in a miserable state, and half of the population was surviving in poverty. The heavy shortage of water, medical facilities, educational organizations, and bad situations of industries were major depressing issues. All the substandard conditions were calling for the new state or reform of new orders, but emperor Shah was thinking about the High-Standard party.
Emperor thought that huge, exquisite, and lavish multi-day events would gain the reputation of Iran. According to him, this event raises the splendid and magnificent dynasty’s lost reputation. So, the emperor decided to arrange a three days event in commemorating of 2500th anniversary of the foundation (lead by the glorious Persian empire, by Cyprus the Great). The emperor of Iran thought that it would be a great idea to introduce myself as a new Great emperor to the world.
Arranging Party by various Organizations (Site of Celebration)
Before one year, the preparation of the party started, and several organizations were working on inviting guests. As I mentioned earlier, the venue was selected as the middle area of the desert (the ancient dry, dusty city of Persepolis) because Iran has no proper infrastructure to host the event for such an elite class people. They decided to set-up a small village with luxurious tents, but they turned the whole place with green life.
The Shah imported trees, and several species of plants, planted in that area. Approximately 15000 trees and also with several equal numbers of flowers planted there. If that, a large number of green life planted, they required tons of water for them to grow. As already, Iran was suffering from water shortage, and planting in a desert was an insane idea. The separate garden was created with especially with several species of roses and tall cypresses by George Truffaut (The famous florist from Versailles).
The whole deserted area got poisonous creatures like snakes, Scorpios, and spiders, whose one sting is enough to kill anybody. To remove this hurdle, they sprayed creature killing chemicals up to 30km and gathered the creatures from there. They found several species of reptiles and sent them for research institutions for research. To populate that particular area, the emperor of Iran imported 50,000 songbirds from Europe, 20,000 sparrows from Spain, and released them towards his newly created forest. Mostly, those bought birds died after a few days because of the hot temperature and lack of water. The area was deserted, so that place was reached at forty degrees centigrade at noon, while a drop below zero degrees at night.
The separate golf course in the desert developed with bunkers, greens, and fairways. For embellishment or decoration, Shah hired world-class professionals; all were from the renowned European companies. To build the royal tent city, he hired the most popular Jansen Company from Paris. The Jansen built the air-conditioned luxury suite for guests and turned them in traditional Persian cloth to flourish its outer look like a tent. The interior of the tent was furnished, with modern décor, each tent contains two bedrooms with a sitting area and two bathrooms, a separate kitchen with a cook and other services available all the time.
Each tent is reserve for five people because of its spacious infrastructure. Hundreds of French architects, craftsmen workers, and interior designers worked for over a year to build such magnificent tents. A total of 50 tents assembled with five avenues, with a central fitted fountain. The whole area was looks like a star shape, representing five continents. The other special tent was settled as “the tent of Honor” for the reception of guests and the “Banquet Hall-Tent”
Food for celebration
At that time, the Maxims based in Paris (Maxims de Paris) was the best restaurant in the world, so Shah signed a deal with Maxims. That deal got attention from the whole world and expected that the party would have delicious cuisines. Ten days before the party, Maxims shift their whole crew (chefs, waiters, staff, types of equipment, and other workers) to Persepolis. It was estimated that 18 tons of food accumulated, including millions of eggs, 2700 kg of beef, and 1280kg fowl with other extraordinary food items. The Max Blouet, who was known as the legendary hotelier, joins, to supervise the banquet. Initially, the menu kept secret, but later it got leaked to media.
It became controversial that hundreds of tons of foods and goods had been transported and imported to separate desolate desert. Reaching a venue (Persepolis) was challenging and required demanding logistics. To transport goods, the emperor ordered the built airfield in Shiraz some 50 km away from the Persepolis (Venue), and the highway was route connecting these two sites. From this track, all the imported goods, materials, and needed supplies reached the venue (Persepolis).
Decoration
The decoration was done by The Jansen, all the tents were fully equipped and air-conditioned, Italian drapes, Italian curtains, Baccarat crystals decoration pieces, Porthault linens, Limoges china with Pahlavi coat of arms, an exquisite Robert Havilland cups, saucers, and crockery services were marvelous. Moreover, 12 tons of expensive beverages included expensive wines bottles (2500 bottles of Champagne, 1000 bottles of Bordeaux, and 1000 bottles of Burgundy), were imported for the party. They imported 30 tons of kitchen equipment and settled that equipment at the venue for the Maxims kitchen. Also, ice-cubes were separately bought for the occasion.
Security
At the place like Persepolis and the world’s high-class guests, it was crucial to take care of the security. As already, the emperor was facing, tough resentment and anger of people unpleasant maybe happen at the venue. It was a big tough challenge to prevail security because it was already acts of violence sighted at that time. Many threats were facing from the activists, opponents, and Guerrillas (The opponent independent group) that can wreck the party.
Emperor Shah deployed his secret police along with troops, estimated around 65000 for the hundred guests. There were security checkpoints every few meters. One of the greatest threats they were facing at that time was the poisoning of food so, that’s why they built a tightly secure banquet hall where no one allows access, that area except some workers. Chefs and waiters got checked twice or thrice to enter the banquet hall. The special servers got hired from Switzerland. Also, he tightly packed the Iran border, and guests were the only allowed entering or leaving the place. The whole city was raided at the suspicious by police, and many arrested. Schools and Universities were closed at that time.
Many headlines, were sighted at the newspaper that “Iran isolates Tent City to protect VIP guests.”
Promotion of Party
As the preparation for the grand party was about to complete. The emperor of Iran invested the chunk of money was spent on the promotion of the event. Emperor of Iran signed contracts with TV channels in different countries to live broadcast the event to foreign citizens. Iranian Embassies in different countries were directed to organize conferences, symposiums, gatherings, and other cultural activities to draw attention towards the occasion. Many translated copies of books that were published, in Iran, were distributed around the world.
Everywhere there were highlights of main events, every media channel covers its secret menu, venue, expenditure, and, special dresses. The party became the new topic for controversies and got the attention of the masses. Overall the promotions of the main event remain successful. Also, in that one year, the ministry of tourism inaugurated two new luxury hotels in Shiraz, named Khoroush and Daryoush. These hotels were quite big about 150 rooms’ capacity. Those hotels are built for media people and lesser prominent people.
One of the American newspapers wrote that “Sky’s No Limit When Shah Throws a Bash.”
Dresses for the great Occasion
The dresses for the great party were all exclusively designed by French tailors, by utilizing precious gems, diamonds, and golden threads. Each dress was prepared, with thousands of dollars in expense. Every dress was especially sewed by French tailors. Many gossips and controversial highlights were also sighted, on many TV channels and newspapers.
“After everything got ready, the only thing was remaining guests.”
The Big Day
Finally, the day had arrived; we can assume that how everyone was alert and conscious at the same time because their reputation was at stake. October 14, 1971 media team was gathered from all over the world to cover the party footage and for witnessing the fulfillment of the great promise. Initially, it was hard for guests to believe that Iran could be able to throw the party as they promised.
The guest started arriving, the number of VIPs are one by one reached at ancient city Persepolis. Now it’s time to see the fruitful result of the emperor’s struggle to gain their reputation. The guest was included, Vice-president of the USA -Spiro Agnew, president of USA Nikolai. Austria, Finland, and Switzerland were represented by their Head of State. Prime minister of France, Italy, South Korea, and Switzerland was also seen by the media team. Western Germany sent their President of the Bundestag. Portugal sent its Foreign Minister. Pope Paul VI sent his special representative. Presidents of Bulgaria, Turkey, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, and India all attended the party. The presidents from Africa, Senegal, Dahomey, Zaire, and Mauritania arrived on time. President of Yugoslavia and Romania had arrived with their wives; Governor-General of Canada and Australia were also spotted at the sight. China sent their ambassador, Poland’s deputy Chairman was also were the attendees of the royal party. Imagine how everyone was sparkling in their outfits, many other Emperors, Prince, Princess have all joined the party. The Emperor of Denmark, the Royal couple (King and Queen) of Denmark, Belgium, Nepal, Denmark, Belgium, and Greece. King of Jordan, Norway, and Lesotho have arrived. Sultan of Oman and Emir of Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi reached. Princess and princess of Afghanistan, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Monaco, France, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Japan and Morocco, Jordan, Thailand, and Malaysia were all gathered in one place.
Queen of Britain didn’t attend the party, but on her behalf, her husband Philip of Edinburg and Daughter Anne have arrived at Persepolis. Many other western countries didn’t attain that gathering because Iran’s Emperor was considered as a dictator. Around 250 Limousines were ordered by Emperor to transport the guests from Shiraz to Persepolis.
Celebration
Everything was flawless; the ceremony started from the tomb of Cyprus- the Great. Emperor of Iran entered at the site with her Empress Farah and Crown Prince Reza. Shah delivered a heartwarming speech and promised that the dynasty’s heir act according to the vision of the dynasty. The party was started, after that, and according to preparation, it went successful.
The whole three days and nights were enjoyed by VIPs, and the whole world was witnessed about the grand party, through media coverage. Overall, it was an amazing, Surreal, and unique experience for everyone. All guests were covered, with their glorious outfits women dressed in royal dresses and jewels. Not only the luxurious tents, but also set many entertainments, clubs, hairdressing Salons, and Makeup Salons for guests with hundreds of designers and makeup-artists were also present at the site. Everything was pre-planned and praised by guests.
Overall it was a luxurious party the world had ever witness. Each day of the party was a surprise and worthy of royal guests. On October 16, 1971, the guests start returning to their homeland. Some of the guests were impressed by the party, while others feel jealous. Emperor of Shah proved his royalty and gain reputation among guests and in the whole world.
After Party
Emperor of Iran’s party was not appreciated by his people and among abroad citizens. Shah was ones again pointed out as a money Squanderer and Show-off person. The circumstances got complex and everyone in his land was starts revolt. Ayatollah Khomeini, who was the leader of the Iranian revolution, was exiled from Iran.
Ayatollah Khomeini stated that “In many of our cities and most of our villages there is no doctor or medicine, there is no sign of school, bathroom and drinking water. Children are hungry-no food-but this tyrannical regime spends millions of dollars on various shameful festivities, most catastrophic of all. The 2500th anniversary of the founding of the monarchy.”
Iran law forbid alcohol consumption, and all citizens of Iran were shocked by hearing the amount of alcohol consumed, scandalous low-cut dresses during the celebration, and absence of the Iranian public at the ceremony. The attitude of Iran’s Emperor was considered as “Imperial Arrogance” and highly defamed by his acts and decisions. The total estimated amount counted $635 million. But according to Emperor, the amount was not large, and the celebration reason was to gather donations for the construction of schools and other required buildings. Emperor of Iran lost all the trust and support of his people.
End of Throne (End of Palvani Dynasty)
Opposition parties and citizen starts a revolution and gathered against Shah. After three years of continuous defaming, Shah apologized to his public for bad decisions, corruption, and cruelty. But it was too late for him. Shah was exiled in Egypt and died after one year. | https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-most-expensive-party-in-the-worlds-history-1b4b51948812 | ['U.F.M Techie'] | 2020-09-13 13:02:06.562000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'History', 'Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Self Improvement'] |
Kink as a Form of Sex Therapy | It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure — Marquis de Sade
Ah spring is in the air, and the birds are doing it, the bees are doing it, my neutered house-cat would like to do it (adorable, elevator butt is a dead giveaway) and, thanks to Coronavirus social distancing, I’m…um…writing about doing it.
Well, I have read some interesting books and articles during this slowly-ending quarantine. I’ve been very interested in kink here lately. One of my favorite academics is social psychologist Roy Baumeister. He has done some fascinating research on the psychology of masochism, including his well-known book “Masochism and the Self”.
From the outside, masochism (deriving sexual pleasure from pain or humiliation) seems like an odd lifestyle choice. After all, why would anyone willingly choose to experience pain, be humiliated, or pay someone to call them names? Baumeister has an interesting take on the subject.
He believes that “adulting” is this day and age is a real pain in the ass!
All the work, stress, house payments, Cornonaviruses, and pressures to measure up are often too much for the modern man or woman. Masochism, the “M” in the “S&M” relationship offers an escape from all that. At least for a while.
According to Baumeister, research indicates that stress is most damaging when it is unrelenting. Somehow, if the stress lets up enough that we can breathe for a moment, it’s more manageable.
Kink allows the masochist to throw off the shackles of self-awareness and be in the moment for once. It is a break from adulting. While many of us obsess over our reputations and our Instagram feeds, the masochist seems hellbent on throwing this whole self-esteem bullshit out the window! When you’re groveling on your knees and being led around by a dog collar, it’s safe to say that self-respect isn’t one of your prime goals at the moment.
When you’re groveling on your knees and being led around by a dog collar, it’s safe to say that self-respect isn’t one of your prime goals at the moment.
But…ah…how freeing.
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. — Kris Kristopherson
Many of us walk around presenting a fake self that others will approve of and that may have little to do with the reality of who we really are. Our cover can be blown at any moment. So, any part of us that our boss or mother-in-law might find offensive gets shoved into the back corners of our unconscious. And it takes work — real work to control and micromanage the real self so it doesn’t rear its ugly head at the wrong moment.
Self-suppression is fucking exhausting.
The masochist, by contrast, lets go of this control, this constant need to be perfect, accepts being a sniveling dog begging for treats, and revels in his or her body and sensory experience:
“Masochism is a set of techniques for escaping from self-awareness, that is, for temporarily putting the individual into a state in which his or her normal identity is forgotten. Such an escape relieves the stressful burdens and demands that attend the modern Western form of selfhood. Loss of self-awareness is inherently conducive to sexual pleasure.” — Roy Baumeister
In his research, Baumeister makes a startling comparison between kink and sex therapy and believes that the former has some aspects of the latter.
In other words, kink can be a healing sexual balm.
Baumeister wanted to understand why masochists claim that pain is the ultimate aphrodisiac and often report enviably hot sex lives. He looked at the research and found that there were five similarities between the role of the “M” in the S&M relationship and the mechanics of sex therapy, as practiced by Masters and Johnson (Masters of Sex). | https://medium.com/sexography/kink-as-a-form-of-sex-therapy-dfe30ea33780 | ['Kaye Smith Phd'] | 2020-05-29 15:26:37.933000+00:00 | ['BDSM', 'Relationships', 'Sex', 'Psychology', 'Kink'] |
Drawing for Discovery | Every designer who has completed a degree in product design can share stories about the volume of sketching he or she had to do to become capable of quickly visualizing something on paper so that others can understand the vision. For most people, this is not an easy skill to develop and requires considerable time* to produce. Some students show a natural proficiency for product sketching, while others have to wrestle considerably to learn this skill. (I’m one of these people.) The time required to learn to draw well in the field of product design is likely an outcome of a few variables: individual spatial/visual intelligence; ability to focus; the state of development and efficiency of the individual’s pre-frontal cortex—the “processing” area; and the degree which muscle “memory” has been developed through the repetitive behavior of sketching rapidly. The likelihood that some part(s) of this concert will need improvement is high for pretty much everyone.
The professional need for developing the skill of product sketching is to communicate clearly to others. As an individual designer or a design team moves through the process, ideas evolve from abstract to concise, with the fidelity of the idea(s) increasing along the way. Strong design teams facilitate time and space for both personal and collective concept generating sketching sessions.
However, how one draws personally to generate ideas is another matter. There’s a danger in drawing overly formal during this stage, especially if the individual’s drawing skills for team communication are well developed because those more refined techniques will tend to become the default style. The purpose of personal concept generation sketching isn’t to communicate, but rather to discover.
Drawing for discovery is different from drawing for communication. It requires allowing your subconscious to guide the pen and turning off the analytic, judgmental parts of your brain. This isn’t necessarily easy to do, especially if you’ve developed the skills necessary for drawing for group-based communication well.
Japanese Architect Sou Fujimoto is a master of drawing for discovery. The 2016 published collection from one of his personal sketchbooks, Sou Fujimoto: Sketchbook, is a meditative journey through this style of sketching. The gestural scribblings document fuzzy ideas, inarticulable insights, and loose notes for some projects that have materialized and some that haven’t, yet. In the red ink sketches, nothing is overly committed to or even fully understood. The sketches often appear ghostly. Very few instances of written notes appear with the sketches explaining what they are. Whether the sketches led to action isn’t important; materialization of the idea is secondary to the process of discovering the idea itself. Fujimoto describes this process as a “dialogue with himself.¹” Expanding, he describes sketching as a phenomenon where,
The lines are never certain, never knowing where the next will lead to. Never knowing, but continuing to draw. And for this very reason, there is always an opportunity for something new. From the infinite dialogues of the brain, eyes, hand, paper, and space, new architecture is born.¹’ — Sou Fujimoto | https://colorandstory.medium.com/drawing-for-discovery-7e47ae6943da | ['Christopher Scott'] | 2020-12-03 01:32:55.888000+00:00 | ['Industrial Design', 'Design Process', 'Design', 'Sketching', 'Product Design'] |
6 Tips To A Successful Code Review | In every software development life cycle, the code review remains one of the key steps in delivering a successful and qualitative product.
In most of the cases, the code review is a ‘ Make It Or Break It ‘ moment.
Often neglected, regularly underestimated, the code review is sometimes skipped for deceptive reasons.
Today, we are going to enumerate the 6 best tips in order to perform a successful and fruitful code-review. | https://medium.com/schkn/6-tips-to-a-successful-code-review-ff312eeac6ad | ['Antoine Solnichkin'] | 2019-05-01 07:33:57.039000+00:00 | ['Teamwork', 'Programming', 'Productivity', 'Code Review', 'Soft Skills'] |
4 Uses Of Mind Maps To Improve Your Design Process | 4 Uses Of Mind Maps To Improve Your Design Process Visualmodo Follow Dec 12 · 4 min read
From breaking down client briefs and doing research to developing concepts, making revisions, and presenting the final design. Every design process constitutes several steps and stakeholders. As a designer. If you find yourself scrambling through notes or making sense of scattered ideas. It’s time to bring order to the chaos. in this article, you’ll see how to use mind maps to improve your design process.
Go beyond the traditional ways of working and turn to more practical tools that can help streamline your design process and improve efficiency. Mind maps are one such tool.
A mind map is a visual thinking tool that lets you capture and organize ideas in the form of a diagram. The main idea is placed in the center, with supporting ideas branching out from it.
Let’s take a look at how you can use it to enhance your design process and become a more productive designer.
1 Brainstorm ideas
Ideation is at the heart of the design thinking process and brainstorming is one of the techniques. It requires you to generate as many ideas as possible.
Whether you’re brainstorming individually, with your team, or even working remotely — if your brainstorming session involves jotting down ideas in a linear fashion, you might want to consider a more productive approach.
Using bubble maps to brainstorm ideas is a great way to organize, connect, and group ideas. It helps you take a holistic approach while ideating and generate a multitude of ideas.
Here’s an example of a bubble map template you can use to visualize your ideas. Notice how the template makes use of color-coding to differentiate between the different idea buckets.
Source: Venngage
2 Organize your research to improve design process
According to a Telepathy article: ‘design research allows for the exploration and definition of highly abstract concepts. It reduces guesswork, miscommunication, and inefficiencies in the development process through prioritizing early-stage testing and definition’.
This shows the critical role research plays in the design process.
How does mind mapping help here? It enables you to identify research opportunities or organize your research data.
For example, let’s say you’re a UX designer and want to conduct user research. You can use a mind map to outline survey questions and further build upon them with your findings from the research.
Doing this gives you a bird’s eye view of the situation, helping you identify gaps and implement learnings while designing.
Here’s an example of a buyer journey map you can use to categorize the different stages.
Source: Venngage
3 Illustrate the design project plan
Considering the extent of planning, coordinating, and expectation management involved, designers are also expected to be good project managers.
Once you’ve finalized the design project plan with your team, it’s important to communicate the same to your internal stakeholders or clients.
This is where you can use a project management mind map to visualize the project and highlight the steps involved while ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Here’s an example of a project mind map that outlines the goals of the project and uses colored boxed to differentiate every step.
Source: Venngage
4 Present the design concept to improve the design process
You might have developed a brilliant design concept but if you fail to present it effectively, there’s no way your client is going to give you the green flag.
A strategy mind map is an impressive way to communicate strategy, present concepts, and improve comprehension while keeping readers engagement. Use it in your client presentation or report to break down the overarching concept and provide context.
This helps the client understand the thought process behind your strategy, making it easier for you to convince them.
Here’s an example of a strategy map template that breaks down information into manageable chunks. So, lets readers see the big picture.
Source: Venngage
The takeaway: use mind maps to improve your design process
From the ideation stage to the client presentation, mind maps can be used for various purposes along the design process.
When used correctly, they prove to be effective visualization tools. That not only aid comprehension but also improve productivity and team collaboration.
Simki Dutta is a content marketer at Venngage, a free infographic maker and design platform. When she’s not working, she can be found refreshing her Twitter feed and binge-watching Netflix shows. | https://medium.com/visualmodo/4-uses-of-mind-maps-to-improve-your-design-process-7d2e7cd38135 | [] | 2020-12-12 00:39:49.095000+00:00 | ['Improv', 'Design', 'Mind Maps', 'Usage', 'Optimize'] |
Top Javascript Development Companies in the World | 2020–21 | Although Java is a new programming language in the technical space, surprisingly it’s not precisely newfangled. The year 2020 marks the 25 glorious years of this versatile programming language. Over the last years, Java has maintained the top position among the top three most popular programming languages across the globe.
Presently, Javascript development solutions avowals an active community and is used explicitly for the server-side languages for several back-end development projects, consisting of Machine Learning projects and Big Data and obviously web and mobile app development.
Firstly, let’s uncover what makes Javascript popular?
The attribute which makes Java one of the multifariously loved languages is that, at its core, Java is an Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) Language. OOP provides a clean advanced structure, thus making it a lot easier to solve complicated problems. It’s progressive nature to write reusable code helps you hire expert Javascript developers that enhance the development process.
In Java programming, classes are used to develop objects. Also, it includes features like polymorphism, abstraction, encapsulation, and inheritance, accompanied by best practices and built-in packages, streamlining the lines of code of Java. Since Java objects don’t require any external references; therefore, it makes Java code exceptionally robust.
A few more to list are here!
Java is well documented
Javascript has a suite of dynamic development tool
Java is for everything!
Java vaunts of rich API
Javascript has a user-friendly approach
A robust community braces Javascript
Despite the presence of leading Javascript development companies worldwide, aligning with the experienced and trusted team is a daunting task. Well, it’s the Java experts who bring a project to successful reality, handle development challenges and offer zeal to the business exclusiveness and reliable requirements.
These are some of the reasons why Javascript development services are soaring high. However, you will be slightly overwhelmed with the number of firms offering their best-in-class services. The vetting process becomes a lot more tedious when you are new to the web development world.
So, if you are in betwixt and between about choosing the best Javascript development company, I am here to guide you through. But, before you make your mind and put your finger on any company from over-crowded market,
I have jotted top Javascript development companies after diving deep in the internet based on the following crucial parameters.
Client’s testimonials, reviews and feedback on trusted and popular B2B and B2C platforms like Clutch, Goodfirms, Glassador.
Abilities and experience to meet up project complexities.
Verified business entities and customer review on Clutch.
High client retention rate along with the firm’s cumulative annual growth.
Recommendations and referrals from past clients.
Strict NDA agreement with 100% Money back assurance.
Top clients of the company.
A visit on the portfolio.
Lastly, hands-on-experience with emerging technologies.
As now you have all the prerequisite of choosing the right resources handy, hire the best Javascript developers that you believe will be the ideal fit for your project paramount success.
Let’s begin!
1. Xicom Technologies (Top Leading Javascript Development Company)
Founded In: 2002
Location: India, USA, and Dubai
Team Size: 350+
Pricing: $25–49/hr
Globally known for the best Javascript development services, Xicom Technologies has paved its way in the space of mobile and web development services since 2002. Their team of 350+ professionals dwells with exclusive experience in creating and curating bespoke digital solutions blended with emerging technologies and agile methodologies.
Their excellent and distinctive service to hire Javascript developers in India, USA and Dubai makes them a hot-pick for SMEs, flourished names and millions of clients worldwide. Along with cementing footsteps in mobile and web app development, their experts are well-versed with technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, IoT, Cloud Computing carving them the top place in the global marketplace. Notably, the firm is an ISO:9001 certified with being a premium member of BBB, NASSCOM & STPI holding the trust of over 1500+ global client dwelling from varying business verticals.
Service Section: Web design and development, mobile app development (iOS and Android), cross-platform app development, Quality assurance and testing, custom software development, IT consulting services
2. Utility (A Trusted Choice For Javascript Development Company)
Founded In: 2013
Location: Dubai and USA
Team Size: 100+
Pricing: $150–199/hr
The team at Utility pay special attention in creating custom web and mobile apps along with innovative software solutions, making them craft a place as a trusted web development company and established marketplace.
Their dedicated team of product strategists, developers and designers solely take the responsibility from ideation to making it operational with seamless development journey. Their specialization and innovation make them among the favourite choice for startups to fortunes brands. Lastly, Utility is built by professionals that have always been staying on the other side of the table adhering to deliver nothing less than the best.
Service Section: Web development, Android app development, iOS app development, UX/UI Design
3. Ads N Url (In The List Of The Best Companies For Javascript Developers In India)
Founded In: 2015
Location: India and Dubai
Team Size: 50+
Pricing: $75/hr
Ads and Url is a reliable, affordable and innovation hub established in 2015 with their core adherence to help the ventures and brands of startups and established names offering excellent, high-tech and IT centralized solutions.
The level of proficiency and professionalism offered at Ads and Url is comparable to the best companies for Javascript developers in India with their team of developers, UX/UI designers and marketing professionals. Moreover, their team helps in hitting the pioneers of the industry at an affordable, fast pace.
Presently, the firm is working with a force of 200+ professionals to offer delightful, unique, and results-oriented solutions all across USA, UK, UAE and India. By now, the team have catered to the unique needs of 500+ clients with their inventive and out-of-the-box custom solutions.
Service Section: Web development, Branding, Mobile app development (Android and iOS)
4. MentorMate (A Reliable Firm For Top Javascript Development Services)
Founded In: 2001
Location: USA
Team Size: 150+
Pricing: $50–99/hr
If you are in the search for an affordable and productive hub, then Mentore Mate can be a choice. But, if you are looking for a long-term relationship with a highly-efficient, easy-to-approach global leader, you have landed at the right place.
The firm enrols innovative and passionate minds in their firm that let them offer top Javascript development services delivering innovative custom software solutions with an essence of personal touch. Their experts recognize the potential and grow it into the tech hub. Along, they built long-term relationships with clients as their technology needs grew.
While continually evolving technologies make it little daunting, the team at MentorMate pride themselves on their ability to demystify digital trends, cutting through the jargon.
Service Section: Web development, custom software development, mobile app development, UX/UI design
5. Unleashed Technologies (A Javascript Development Company In The USA For Your Project)
Founded In: 2007
Location: USA
Team Size: 50+
Pricing: $150–199/hr
Unleashed Technologies is a customer-centric team of experts with a zeal for creating, enhancing and managing avant-garde websites, web apps, and inventive digital experiences. Popularly known as the trusted choice for Javascript development company in the USA among the already established hierarchy, their development and design makes the subtle difference.
Also, their growth model facilitates its clients to exceed their objective while integrating their team with the clients. They offer impeccable and robust technological solutions, stunning visuals, and innovative strategies to share it with your organization’s story, which gratifying data-driven results.
So, if you are in the lookout to hire a talented resource, consider Unleashed Technologies a worth-the-value choice.
Service Section: Web design and development, digital strategy
6. RoleModel Software (In The Midst Of The Best Companies For Javascript Developers In The USA)
Founded In: 1997
Location: USA
Team Size: 100+
Pricing: $150–199/hr
RoleModel Software is known to develop mobile and web app solutions, gratifying clients with an unparalleled user experience that curates them a nook among the best companies for Javascript developers in the USA. Their in-house team of professionals allow their customers to accomplish a higher ROI with their innovative and unique ideas.
They offer the technical competence and experience to deliver operational ideas with deep and varied skill sets in both “concept development” and “product development”, making clients ideas a successful reality of today. Also, they continue to offer excellent expertise in developing digital solutions that make their client retention rate high.
Service Section: Web development, custom software development, UI/UX design
7. Highland (A Credible Choice For Top Javascript Development Company)
Founded In: 1999
Location: USA
Team Size: 50+
Pricing: $150–199/hr
At Highland, their dedicated team research, design and create digital products and experiences for client-oriented companies and mission-driven firms curating them a palace as top Javascript development company for over 20 years.
Their team of experts have helped organizations turn their biggest demurs into potentials for outgrowing. They have built and launched over 250+ digital products, and are always ready to take your ideas from dream to deliver.
Known globally, as fore-runner leader in mobile platforms makes them the top-most choice of established firms to startups with a team of 50 dedicated professionals. Their team have a long-term proven track record in developing and deploying innovative, scalable and robust apps in minimal time.
Service Section: Web development, CRM consulting and SI, custom software development
8. NIX (Among The Top Javascript Development Companies)
Founded In: 1994
Location: USA
Team Size: 1000+
Pricing: $125–149/hr
In the list of top Javascript development companies, NIX is a custom software development partner dedicated to offering advanced technology-oriented solutions facilitating and adding value to client’s businesses. They are known to provide you with an entire spectrum of exclusive services varying from web to mobile application to complex enterprise solutions.
Their team includes highly-experienced, creative and passionate experts who are ready to solve complex technical challenges; they always strive to build the impeccable solutions and meet clients expectations with a seamless development process. Their core competency lies in their comprehensive software solutions created on the committed end-to-end development process. To add, they help business owners gain a competitive edge in the tech race and take over leadership in the industry.
Service Section: Web development, mobile app development, Quality assurance, integrations and customization, custom software development
9. Indus Net Technologies (In The Array Of Top Javascript Development Company In India)
Founded In: 1997
Location: India and UK
Team Size: 350+
Pricing: <$125/hr
Indus Net Technologies is an experienced and pioneer choice in the aisle of digital innovations. Their out-of-the-box development services and strategic decisions craft them an unskippable presence as a top Javascript development company in India, helping clients achieve outstanding and unparalleled end-user experience.
Their techno-wizards enable firms and SMEs to opt for digital processes and increase client interactiveness to offer them a remarkable journey. Also, they help clients from varying distinctive verticals to achieve this through their enterprise-wide digital transformation, optimization, modernization of their IT environment with the latest in. lastly, with over 1000+ projects delivered successfully to global clients, they offer technical expertise round-the-clock.
Service Section: Web development, mobile app development (iOS and Android), Quality assurance and testing, creative services
10. Urban Insight (Known As The Top Javascript Development Company In The USA)
Founded In: 2009
Location: USA
Team Size: 50+
Pricing: $150–199/hr
Urban Insight is a reliable name when you want a champion for your mission-focused organizations. Their team create alluring and flexible websites and apps which craft them a place as top Javascript development company in the USA. To add, they offer strong project leadership, honest advice, insightful thoughts and designs and technical expertise.
They plan, design and create inventive websites using open source web content management systems like WordPress and Drupal along with Java codes. Their value proposition brings you the project management leadership, design precision and accuracy accompanied by technical expertise, all at the price of a boutique firm.
Established in 2009, the company has completed over 500+ projects paving their way in the trusted names led by industry veterans with real-world experience of creating and launching solutions.
Service Section: Web development, web design, mobile app development
11. ARKA Softwares (A Popular Choice For Top Javascript Development Company In The World)
Founded In: 2010
Location: India and USA
Team Size: 250+
Pricing: $80/hr
ARKA Software has a decade experience in creating mobile and web solutions which path them a nook across the top Javascript development company in the world. Besides, ARKA Software offers onshore client service and project management team dwelling with extensive experiences and passion for bringing innovation to gratify clients with maximum benefits.
Their experienced professionals commit and adhere to minimize the hurdles and headaches often related to the conventional outsourcing model. Their clientele base does not have to worry about culture gaps or communication challenges that can arise from an overseas outsourcing firm.
Lastly, they offer web development Services on various technologies platforms that make a client’s project an undefeatable success.
Service Section: Mobile app development, web development, E-commerce development
12. Air Dev (In The Thick Of Top Javascript Development Company In California)
Founded In: 2015
Location: India and USA
Team Size: 100+
Pricing: $125–149/5hr
If you are looking for a trusted and experienced Javascript development company in California, USA, then Air Dev is worth the consideration. Air Dev is the fore-runner in the ultra-rapidly changing web development using no-code technology.
They use their dynamic speed advantage to offer their clients launch and iterate quicker, concerning creating products that users actually desire. The things that make the firm different from others are listed below:
Lightning Fast Pace: More projects get completed in 1–5 weeks and within timelines are assured.
Works irrespective of any scale: Their team works with an extensive range of firms from early-stage to enterprise-level, making them able to accelerate resources up and down as required.
Techie Talks: The experts of product owners at the firm will help you assist the right product in creating and validating your ideas.
Service Section: Web development, custom software development, mobile app development (iOS and Android)
13. RIKSOF (A Considerable Choice For Top Javascript Development Company In Dubai)
Founded In: 2009
Location: Dubai and UK
Team Size: 150+
Pricing: $69/hr
RIKSOF is an award-winning firm with exclusive expertise in creating custom mobile and web development solutions along with curating a niche as a top Javascript development company in Dubai since 2009. Leveraging 11+ years of excellence years in business, their team have successfully delivered more than 500+ projects to global clients.
Moreover, they strive to create long-term relationships with their clients and build solutions that help them stand exclusive from the flooded choice. Secondly, it’s an award-winning firm globally known for its high client-retention rate along with building solutions that help them stand out in the crowd with their explicit project.
Service Section: Web development, Android app development, iOS app development
14. eTeam (Crafting A Place Among The Top Javascript Development Companies)
Founded In: 2016
Location: USA
Team Size: 50+
Pricing: $125–149/hr
eTeam has been building custom software solutions and web solutions for its clients, partners and own products since 2016. Their team consists of experts in Javascript, Python and Ruby plus engineers with AWS certification, making their way straight to the top Javascript development companies across the globe.
From UX design, project management to development and delivery, they have got the entire life-cycle of the development process, native app or webapp covered. Their approach and dedication to agile methodologies, iterative development with complete transparency facilitating them to bring decades of combined experience to new startups and fresh innovation.
So, whether you’re looking for a dedicated team to align with your firm or for a partner to offer an all-in-one solution, eTeam is ready to work with you.
Service Section: Web development, mobile app development (Android and iOS), Custom software development
15. Infinum (An Established Name For Javascript Development Company In India)
Founded In: 2005
Location: US, Croatia and Slovenia
Team Size: 250+
Pricing: $100–149/hr
At Infinum, the developers and designers adhere to creating excellence. They develop and design great software for mobile and web along with making their way as an entrusted Javascript development company in India and the USA. Their clients vary from trusted brands, banks, insurance companies, media publishers, mobile carriers and other companies who are in the lookout for professional software solutions.
Also, many awards prove the quality of their work, the experts working here share their knowledge and experience for delivering excellence. Lastly, they are a bunch of young and talented people. That appreciates beautiful design and a friendly work atmosphere allowing their team to think creatively and provide creative and unique solutions.
Service Section: Mobile app development (iOS and Android), web development, UX/UI Design, software development
In The End…
The ear of programming languages is an ever-expanding one. Even emerging and innovative technologies frequent update introduce to meet the upsurging rise of businesses looking to hire Javascript developers.
Therefore, choosing the right partner for your project development is a more or less challenging task. Be it for an established multinational organization or a start-up in nascence, the subtle difference makes a significant impact on your business, and it’s future.
Hence, before making the final decision, evaluate your partner company on the aspects as mentioned earlier, analyze them on relevant factors and move ahead. | https://medium.com/front-end-weekly/top-javascript-development-companies-in-the-world-2020-21-96224245c93 | ['Adara Khan'] | 2020-11-25 06:07:52.081000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Business', 'Development', 'Web Development'] |
Class vs Struct in Swift | When we need to decide how to store data and model behavior, there are two choices: Classes and Structs. In this article, I will explain which type should be preferred in different situations.
Classes and Structs may look like the same person at first glance
Let’s talk about what they can offer in common.
They both define properties to store values. If we want to create an object with some properties and behaviors, we can use both of them.
Both of them define subscripts so we can reach their values via subscript syntax.
Classes and structs have initializers to create instances with initial values.
Conforming to protocols are also in common. Some protocols may be class only so only classes can conform to that protocol, otherwise both can conform it.
Finally, they can be extended.
Classes yet have some extra capabilities that structs don’t have.
They can inherit another classes characteristics.
A class can free up assigned resources by deinitializers.
So, what about the differences?
The main difference between those two is that Classes are reference type, Structs are value type objects. Okay but what does it mean?
Do you remember that cartoon? :)
What is a reference type?
When we are initializing an object, RAM allocates memory space and address to it. Then, assigns its memory address to the object we created.
Let’s see this with an example.
We have an Animal class that only has a name property. Then, we create a dog object and create cat object but assign dog to the cat object.
Since they are reference type objects, they are pointing to the same memory address, so they are actually the same objects! If we change one of their property, other one will be affected as well because they are pointing to the same address. Let’s take a look below.
class Animal { var name: String init(name: String) { self.name = name } }
var dog = Animal(name: “dog”) var cat = dog
print(dog.name) // prints "dog" print(cat.name) // prints "dog"
dog.name = “hound”
print(cat.name) // prints "hound"
A note from Swift official documentation
Unlike value types, reference types are not copied when they are assigned to a variable or constant, or when they are passed to a function. Rather than a copy, a reference to the same existing instance is used.
What is a value type?
Another note from Swift official documentation
A value type is a type whose value is copied when it’s assigned to a variable or constant, or when it’s passed to a function.
Period. It is that simple.
Let’s see the above example with minor modifications.
struct Animal { var name: String init(name: String) { self.name = name } } var dog = Animal(name: “dog”) var cat = dog
print(dog.name) // prints "dog" print(cat.name) // prints "dog"
dog.name = “hound”
print(cat.name) // prints "dog"
When to use classes?
We need to use classes when we need Objective-C interoperability. If we use an Objective-C API that receives data from our side, those data must be a class because Objective-C doesn’t have structs.
Another use case for classes is when we need to control identity. If we need an instance of an object through the app and we want to control its identity, classes are the solution.
When to use structs?
Almost anytime. We must use structs by default to represent common kinds of data. Structs in Swift are powerful and have many features. They have stored properties, computed properties and methods. Also, they can conform to protocols and gain their behaviors. Many of types from Foundation and the Swift standard library are structs; for example strings, arrays, numbers and dictionaries.
Structs help you track a portion of your code since they are value types. We only need to focus to the area where the struct is used, because there is not any object that points to struct’s address and manipulate it. Otherwise we need to look at possible places that may change our object’s value.
Apart from classes, we should use structs when we don’t control identity. Think about fetching data from server, there may be same objects but since we are not controlling identity, we better use structs.
References: | https://medium.com/quick-code/class-vs-struct-in-swift-f8c48eaacdba | ['Burak Akyalçın'] | 2019-08-28 06:23:20.658000+00:00 | ['Objective C', 'Apple', 'iOS', 'Swift', 'Programming'] |
How To Use Microsoft LUIS With Bot Framework Composer | How To Use Microsoft LUIS With Bot Framework Composer
Here Is A Simple Tutorial To Get You Started With NLU
Introduction
How can we integrate Composer with LUIS…
Firstly, we are going to run Composer locally on my machine and connect to LUIS in the cloud. The NLU configurations we create on Composer will be deployed to a LUIS account. What is LUIS?
Language Understanding (LUIS) is a cloud-based API service that applies custom machine-learning intelligence to a user’s conversational, natural language text to predict overall meaning, and pull out relevant, detailed information. A client application for LUIS is any conversational application that communicates with a user in natural language to complete a task. Examples of client applications include social media apps, chat bots, and speech-enabled desktop applications.
And, Composer is a tool from Microsoft which allows for graphic development of a conversational application; with language generations, state management and integration points.
Setup Composer Recognizer
Within Composer you can setup three recognizer types:
None (Of course)
Regular Expressions
LUIS
Composer Has Three Recognizer Types
It has to be stated that the regular expressions are very powerful and handy.
Without using any NLU, you can build a decent conversational interface merely based on regular expressions.
You will see the moment we select LUIS a text editor appears.
This text editor is where the intents and entities are defined which will be uploaded to LUIS in the cloud.
The file format is very simplistic and the editor alerts you to syntax errors.
Whenever a change is required, you can update the LUIS configuration file and the changes will be deployed to LUIS. Successful deployment can be verified by logging into LUIS.
LUIS File Format
This simple demo cover all the aspects you will require. This demo can easily be built out into a larger application.
The language understanding file we will use:
# BookFlight
- I want to book a flight
- I need to book a flight
- book a flight for me please #FlightDetail
- My family and I want to go on holiday to {toCity=Seattle}
- We are thinking of traveling to {toCity=Denver}
- Our destination will be {toCity=Milan} for our holiday
- We want to visit {toCity=Lisbon}
- On our trip our first stop will be at {toCity=Lisbon}
- We want to travel to {toCity=Lisbon}
There are two intents in the file, BookFlight and FlightDetail.
Bookflight does not have any entities, and we merely want to capture the intent for directing the dialog. This intent can be used to determine which dialog to invoke.
The FlightDetail intent has entities defined. There is only one entity of toCity type. The aim is to capture the city name which will be the travel destination.
Three things need to be noted on these entities: | https://cobusgreyling.medium.com/how-to-use-microsoft-luis-with-bot-framework-composer-c32572bec0b0 | ['Cobus Greyling'] | 2020-07-24 21:34:51.148000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Chatbot Development', 'Conversational UI', 'Machine Learning'] |
How to reach fundraising goals through generational marketing | It’s a summer evening and you’re attending a benefit concert for a local nonprofit.
As your eyes sweep the crowd, you notice a 55-year-old woman subtly snapping pictures of the band that she’ll later post to Facebook or text to her kids. She has donated to the nonprofit for years, and the concert is just one more opportunity to make a contribution.
Meanwhile, a 37-year-old couple is hovering around the beer garden, waiting for their chance to take a picture with the nonprofit director and big benefactors so they can impress their Facebook friends. As they wait, they browse the organization’s website to learn about donation opportunities.
A group of 25-year-old friends first learned about the concert thanks to the trendy band. When they found out it was a benefit concert — extra bonus! As the lead singer croons, they artfully take pictures and videos for their Instagram feed: #giveback.
Everyone appears to be enjoying the evening, but as a member of the board of directors, you’re concerned that the nonprofit has missed an opportunity to drive home its message with potential advocates.
What could have been done differently?
Generational marketing
Generational marketing, the strategy of segmenting audiences based on generational characteristics, provides marketers with insights to the preferences, ideals, and values held by different age groups.
This knowledge allows organizations to craft messages that will resonate with target audience segments. That said, as with any segmentation strategy, remember that each audience group is comprised of unique individuals. Be wary of making sweeping generalizations or stereotypical appeals.
How to use it
Depending on your business sector, your unique selling point or brand promise could be cross-generational. This is especially likely if you’re directing a nonprofit.
Regardless, when sharing your message you’ll need to adjust your approach to effectively reach different generational segments.
Start with common characteristics, and then dig deeper for each targeted generation.
What are their emotional, informational, and functional needs?
What appeal (emotion, fear, humor, logic, etc.) will resonate?
What will motivate them to take action?
Once you’ve nailed down your message for each segment, you can ask:
What media platform will work best for your refined message and target audience?
Messages that drive action and engagement
So, how can you use generational targeting to drive engagement and action among different audience segments? Here are some ideas to get you started.
For Baby Boomers, your message could appeal to their desire for self-fulfillment by using the second person point of view. Also, do not remind them that they are aging.
Marketing tactics for baby boomers
Use a mix of digital and traditional marketing techniques.
Provide detailed information online that allows Baby Boomers to feel informed.
Show you’re focused on customer service through user-friendly websites and opportunities for face-to-face interaction.
When creating a compelling message for Generation X, focus on your brand value. Make a direct connection between their individual needs and how your brand could impact their life. Also, if appropriate, subtly appeal to status.
Marketing tactics for generation X
As with Baby Boomers, used a mixed media approach.
Encourage email subscriptions and send regular email updates.
Use social media marketing for continual engagement.
When targeting Generation Y (aka Millennials), brands have the opportunity to align their message with this generation’s desire to make a difference and help the greater good. If you do this while creatively communicating your brand’s personality, you’ve struck gold.
Marketing ideas for millennials
Tap into online opportunities to engage one-one-one, such as in direct messages on Instagram or Facebook Messenger.
Show your brand personality through behind-the-scenes content.
Look for and encourage user-generated content.
Encore: Taking these principles to the next concert
Another benefit concert has arrived.
This time, your nonprofit has a firm understanding of the generational differences and preferences among its target audience groups. With this knowledge, you’ve used targeted messaging in your pre-event promotions to encourage attendance.
You recognized Baby Boomers as valuable contributors, thanked them for their regular donations, and told them that the founders wanted to meet them in person at the concert. At the concert they received material about becoming a legacy donor, meeting their desire to make a long-term impact.
You encouraged Generation X to attend, since the funds raised could improve their families’ access to a new community initiative. The invitation to become a regular donor was included in their confirmation email.
You targeted Generation Y through messaging that clearly outlined how attendance would help the organization raise the remaining funds necessary to finish a community project. You also provided the opportunity to text your nonprofit a small donation, as the first step towards a long-term relationship.
As a result, attendance increased 20 percent over the previous year, and the nonprofit met its fundraising goal. Better yet, individuals from Generation X and Y — groups that had been minimally engaged — signed up for volunteer opportunities and sustaining, automated donations.
Knowing your target audience’s age and the factors that shape generational attitudes and perceptions allows you to craft a message that is more likely to resonate and drive action. | https://medium.com/madison-ave-collective/how-to-reach-fundraising-goals-through-generational-marketing-c7223e0312b5 | ['Hanna Knowles'] | 2018-01-25 20:24:52.500000+00:00 | ['Millennials', 'Marketing', 'Higher Education', 'Nonprofit', 'Messaging'] |
Why is Data Science Losing Its Charm? | Opinion
Why is Data Science Losing Its Charm?
Data science was once the most loved career option but the trends are changing.
Earlier every Computer Science student wanted to pursue a career in the data science field. The field also attracted students from many other educational backgrounds. While the hype around data science still exists, the job profile isn’t readily available for all.
The past two decades have been a revolution for the data science community. The developments in the past two decades are phenomenal and have taken everyone by storm. The applications of data science have amassed all the industries and had readily increased the demand of data scientists.
But the trends are changing nowadays. The demand is no longer the same as before. Even if there is a demand for data scientists, either people lack the skill set or the experience. I have tried to list all the potential reasons I think of when I see the community losing its charm.
1. People are not able to start their careers in this field.
Once out of universities, people want to kick start their careers as a data scientist but the job offerings require a minimum of 2–3 years in most of the cases. People are not able to directly start as a data scientist and have to start their career in different profiles.
Companies are not ready to invest their time on new incoming talents instead they want the ones with the excellent skill set and experience in the field. While almost all the tech companies have their own Data Science departments, the others which do not have one, need a person with a lot of experience in this field to start one.
There’s only one way I think that could help them is doing internships while they study and gain experience to meet the demands of the companies.
2. People aren’t aware of the difference between Data Analyst, Business Analyst and Data Scientist
Another major reason is that data science enthusiasts nowadays do not know the difference between different job profiles available in the field. All of them want the ‘Data Scientist’ title without knowing what the actual work of a data scientist is. They mistakenly consider Data Analyst, Business Analyst and Data Scientist as being similar profiles.
Without knowing what they want to work upon they apply into roles they aren’t a perfect fit for and end up empty-handed.
3. People find Data Science too easy
People directly start working on learning algorithms, ways of tweaking the data but what they do not consider is the Math behind the algorithms. With average programming knowledge and knowledge of the Machine Learning algorithms, they think they are ready to face real-world problems.
People usually ignore statistics, the actual hard work just because they do not find it interesting. Data science is one such field where the development isn’t stagnant. Natural Language Processing has seen some massive developments in the past 2–3 years. One has to keep themselves updated with the state-of-the-art models.
People also find data science easy because they haven’t worked on real-life data. All the years that they have spent learning, they have worked on structured data or some pre-processed data that was made available for people to learn.
On the other, almost 99% of the data in the real world is unstructured. Data scientists need to spend most of their time pre-processing the data so that they can extract something meaningful from the data.
4. AutoML is making the road to landing a job even tougher.
As soon as tech giants Google, Microsoft launched AutoML, it shook the aspiring data scientists. Companies’ interest and their curiosity grew into AutoML, while data scientists fear losing jobs.
AutoML is automating the process of applying machine learning to the datasets. AutoML can preprocess and transform the data. It can cover the complete pipeline from working on raw data to deploying machine learning algorithms.
AutoMLs are good at building model but when it comes to preprocessing, they cannot outshine humans. The major work of the data scientist lies in pre-processing the data. It is clear that as of now AutoMLs cannot replace human data scientist.
Although the fact that AutoMLs reduce the costs cannot be overlooked. The average annual salary of data scientists in the US is around $120k whereas the annual cost incurred by Google and Microsoft AutoMLs is somewhere around $4k to $40k.
Though the effectiveness of data scientists at pre-processing data cannot be denied because the data in the real world is highly unstructured and requires a lot of pre-processing.
There so much to learn and no one is willing to do the hard work. It is difficult for someone to start with the basics and excel in this field. This would take a lot of time and people need to be patient. There is a lot of scope in this field but the lack of people with the actual skills needed is snatching the title of most promising job away from Data Science and people are walking away from it. | https://towardsdatascience.com/why-is-data-science-losing-its-charm-3f7780b443f5 | ['Harshit Ahuja'] | 2020-08-24 03:48:30.462000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Jobs', 'Data Scientist'] |
The Enduring Legacy of “Modern Family” | A Review of the Modern Family Series Finale
The timing of the Modern Family series finale was somewhat cruel for two reasons. First, it came amidst the coronavirus pandemic. This is a time when we need comfort not more loss and sadness. Second, it aired exactly 24 hours after the series finale of Schitt’s Creek, another long-running show I was deeply invested in. Nevertheless, I tuned in live to the two-part finale and the one-hour retrospective documentary that preceded it.
Image from the “Modern Family” series finale (Image Copyright: ABC/20th Television)
The documentary, A Modern Farewell, did a great job of reminding me what an astonishing legacy the show had. It chronicled the grueling process of auditioning literally thousands of people for the ten central roles, the reaction of the cast and crew to the initial breakout success, what it was like to literally grow up on set for the show’s younger actors, the watershed portrayal of same-sex relationships (more on that later), and the cast and crew’s difficulty letting go of the show and each other.
Image from the “Modern Family” series finale (Image Copyright: ABC/20th Television)
The two-part series finale will not join the ranks of the truly great series finales like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Golden Girls, Friends, and The Good Place. But it will decidedly not join the massive disappointments of the Seinfeld, Roseanne, and (original) Will & Grace series finales. It was a rock solid affair that hit all the notes it needed to — no more, no less. It essentially centered on two main plot lines. In the first, Cam and Mitch have moved into their new home and brought home the new baby they have adopted only to find out that Cam got his dream job in Missouri. Mitch selflessly (but anxiously) agrees to give up their life in LA and go on an adventure. In the second plot line, Phil and Claire lay down the law and tell their three free-loading kids that it’s time to move out. But when the kids take them seriously and move on with their lives, they are devastated.
Image from the “Modern Family” series finale (Image Copyright: ABC/20th Television)
The finale feels chaotic and exhausting at times in large part because it attempts to provide closure to every relationship on the show. It not only gives us beautiful moments between Jay/Gloria, Mitch/Cam, and Claire/Phil, but also between Mitch/Claire, Gloria/Manny, and the Dunphy children. (It also features a bizarrely cold interaction between Gloria/Cam that marked the low point of the finale for me.) On paper, it ended just as it should. Jay and Mitch have decided to sacrifice for their partners. Claire and Phil adjust to being empty nesters by going on an adventure. All four of the kids are ready to finally grow up (and, in a beautiful touch, Haley and her family move into Mitch and Cam’s recently vacated home). In execution, however, it was a bit unevenly paced, peaking a bit too early in the hour and not quite knocking all of the key emotional moments out of the park.
But, these minor quibbles aside, it really did hit all the right notes. It invoked laughs, tears, and nostalgia and managed to give each member of the gigantic ensemble at least one special moment. And the final image of the lights going off at each of their homes, with Phil and Claire turning the porch light on in case any of the children needed to come back home was both hopeful and heartbreaking. | https://medium.com/rants-and-raves/the-legacy-of-modern-family-617d0e705f1b | ['Richard Lebeau'] | 2020-04-11 15:53:44.753000+00:00 | ['Television', 'LGBTQ', 'Media', 'Culture', 'Writing'] |
3 to read: ‘Deep fakes’ are coming | 2d & 3d subscriptions? | Behind the curtain: FB’s big fail | By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>
Nov. 20, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co
You thought fake news was bad? Deep fakes are where truth goes to die:Fake news is about to get a lot faker. Improving technology means it is getting more and more difficult to tell doctored videos from real life. Heck, even badly edited fake videos are taken for the truth — what happens when people can’t tell the difference? A chilling look a the future of fake news by Oscar Schwartz for The Guardian. Extra: World’s first AI TV news anchor unveiled in China.
How many people will pay for 2d or 3d news #subscription?:Quartz and New York mag just put up paywalls, joining a lengthening list of high-profile, quality news pubs that have done so, such as the NYT and WaPo. But how many people can afford to pay for two, three or more news sites?, asks Joshua Benton of NielamnLab. He’s pessimistic, citing research that says only 16% of Americans will pay for any news. (Myself, I’m more optimistic. As more paywalls go up, people will of necessity read fewer sites. But from the perspective of the newsrooms, they don’t care, as long as they have enough paying customers. We’ll see how it plays out.)
Delay, deny & deflect blame at others — How Facebook’s leaders handled crisis: This story will only reinforce your worst fears, if you’ve had doubts about Facebook’s ability to come up with a successful solution in the wake of the Russian election scandal and the company’s unscrupulous handling of data from millions of users. FB’s top leaders were slow to realize they had a problem, slow to realize the breadth and depth of the issues, including the anger of the public, and seemed mostly interested in wallpapering over concerns. The NYT story paints a picture of a dysfunctional platform. Not pretty, but a great read. | https://medium.com/3-to-read/3-to-read-deep-fakes-are-coming-2d-3d-subscriptions-behind-the-curtain-fb-s-big-fail-f2d2e3619217 | ['Matt Carroll'] | 2018-11-20 14:55:14.201000+00:00 | ['Media Criticism', 'Journalism', 'Journalism Ethics', 'Spotlight Movie', 'Journalism Innovation'] |
When My Carer Needs Care | When My Carer Needs Care
Marriage is supposed to be partners helping each other through their times of difficulty
By Farknot Architect / adobestock.com
My husband is the mainstay of my support system and, in large part, my caregiver. I cannot count the things he has done for me and does for me every day. We’ve been married for over 35 years and during that time he has helped me through daily life, major depression, anxiety attacks, loneliness, irrational thoughts, school, therapy. He makes sure I practice self-care and cares for me as needed.
Recently, though, he needed my help and care. The other day he experienced distressing eye-related symptoms — a large “floater” (dark spot) in his vision and unexpected flashes of light. What could I do about it? First, I answered his request to get a flashlight and look in his eye, but I saw nothing.
Next I arranged an appointment for him at our eye doctor. Dan used to be terrible at admitting when he needed medical treatment, but since a heart scare he’s been much more amenable to seeing a doctor. That particular evening, he was scared and cranky, and made up excuses. He left his phone in the car. That’s okay. I had mine right there. He didn’t know the number. That’s okay. I have it programmed into my phone. I waited on hold. “Forget it,” he said. “Never mind,” I replied. “I’ve got nothing else to do.” He said he didn’t see the floater any more. I pointed out that his eyes were closed. I got through to the doctor and made him an appointment for the next day.
Naturally, I drove him to the appointment, as they would have to dilate his eyes. Then, afterward, I drove him on several other errands (including an appointment with a different doctor) and made sure he ate lunch. I canceled one of the errands and put off others when I saw how tired and nervous he was getting. I took him home and tucked him in bed. (The floater turned out to be nothing truly alarming, just an effect of his aging eyes. He named it “Freddie the Free-Floater.”)
Dan has done almost exactly the same for me, many times. I could usually make my own appointments, but he encouraged me to do so. He has driven me to appointments countless times. He makes sure I eat. When I run out of spoons, he cancels or postpones errands, or even runs them for me. He reminds me when I need to have a lie-down or to sleep or to shower.
It was unusual for me to be the caregiver in this situation, and at times difficult, but I didn’t begrudge it. How could I possibly?
Of course, later in the day, I had a crisis and a mini-meltdown of my own, and there was Dan, ready to be with me, talk me through it, and make sure I didn’t skip a meal.
I know this is what marriage is supposed to be — partners helping each other through their individual and mutual times of difficulty. I also know that mental illness can put a terrible strain on a relationship. I admit that I am very needy at times, and was even more so at other times in my life.
But this time I got to be the strong one and take care of his needs before my own. And I was pleased and proud to be able to do that. Often there’s little enough that I can do for him, except offer him encouragement and remind him that I love him and appreciate him and all he does for me. If he asks for something he needs, I try to make sure he gets it (except for the $900 woodchipper, I mean).
And I do what I can that benefits both of us — working to bring in money, paying the bills, doing computer research, handling phone calls, reminding him of appointments when I can — mostly stuff that involves computers and phones and recordkeeping and occasionally knowing where missing stuff is. And reassuring him when he gets trapped in the depression that he also suffers from that I love him and that he is strong and good and that he needs to take care of himself, and that if he can’t, I will try and do my best. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/when-my-carer-needs-care-56e17065a26c | ['Janet Coburn'] | 2020-08-10 01:39:48.832000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Mental Health', 'Caregiving', 'Marriage', 'Bipolar'] |
Geogebra Plus Linear Programming | Geogebra Plus Linear Programming
We’ll Create a Geogebra program to help us with our linear programming — #PySeries#Episode 02
First, we’ve got this problem that comes from the math to your course guide from the Pingree school.
It is the tape’s verse CDs example:
Suppose you want to buy some tapes and CDs. Does anyone really buy tapes anymore? Anyway, you can buy up to 11 tapes; You can buy up to 7 CDS, but you want at least 3; You must get enough tapes or CDs to hold at least 10 hours of music; Each tape holds about 45 minutes of music and each CD holds an hour a tape costs $8 and a CD costs $12; So how many tapes and CDs should you buy to minimize your cost?
Let’s see the solution using Geogebra than in the end I will present the Python solution.
1# Define Your Variables:
x=The number of tapes to buy;
y=The number of CDs to buy;
2# Translate your constraints:
x<=11
3<=y>=7
600<=45x+60y
3# Type your objective Function:
T(x,y)=8x+12y
4# Open a Geogebra New Activity session, Hit Geogebra, Create an Applet and get a name to your applet (mine is GeoPlusLinearProg):
Fig 1. Opening and Creating New Activity in Geogebra App.
You can expand the applet according to your screen resolution:
Fig 2. Expanding the Applet view!
Just fine!
5# On Geogebra, on the left, type the inequality as well as equality like this:
a: x <= 11
b: x = 11
c: 3 <= y <= 7
d: y = 3
e: y = 7
f: 45*x + 6*y >= 600
g: 3*x + 4*y = 40
The regions in the graph are presented, now configure them according to your taste, clicking on each inequality and changing the style and color properties. Here are my settings.
Fig 3. Entering all the constraints and equations.
6#Now, click Point > Intercept and create 4 points, in the region of interest:
Fig 4. Separating the solution region.
7# On Geogebra, open a Spreadsheet and type (hamburger icon>View>Spreedsheet located at top-right):
Fig 5. Delimiting each intercept points of the solution.
Now, in the spreadsheet type this (drag the little rectangle down):
Points - Total Cost, T
A =8*x(A2)+12*y(A2)
B =8*x(A3)+12*y(A3)
C =8*x(A4)+12*y(A4)
D =8*x(A5)+12*y(A5)
Fig 6. We found the region of the solution; Any of the combinations are valid; the lowest cost is 9.33 Tape and 7 CDs (A3).
Any of the vertices of the trapeze serve as an answer. I choose the second option(9 Tapes and 3 CDs).
Let’s see what python decides …
8# Python Solution:
from pulp import *
prob=LpProblem('Example', LpMaximize)
x1=LpVariable("Tape", 0)
x2=LpVariable("CD", 0)
prob += x1<=11
prob += x2>=3
prob += x2<=7
prob += 45*x1+60*x2<=600
prob += 8*x1+12*x2
prob.solve()
for v in prob.variables():
print(v.name,"=", v.varValue)
print("Total Cost = ", value(prob.objective)) CD = 7.0
Tape = 4.0
Total Cost = 116.0
Fig 7. Using Visual Studio code App; please see this post about it: Python 4 Engineers — Exercises! linked bellow…
And that’s all for now!
I hope you were impressed with the Geogebra app like I am!
Bye for now!
See you in the next episode of Python Series!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DkycafWLUZeprvnTQcSgaasyniTWTeDe4cEzEnN6hes/edit?usp=sharing
References & Credits
Fig 8. Here is the inspiration for this lesson! Thanks to Wicked Math 👌
Posts Related:
00Episode#PySeries — Python — Jupiter Notebook Quick Start with VSCode — How to Set your Win10 Environment to use Jupiter Notebook
01Episode#PySeries — Python — Python 4 Engineers — Exercises! An overview of the Opportunities Offered by Python in Engineering!
02Episode#PySeries — Python — Geogebra Plus Linear Programming- We’ll Create a Geogebra program to help us with our linear programming (this one)
03Episode#PySeries — Python — Python 4 Engineers — More Exercises! — Another Round to Make Sure that Python is Really Amazing!
04Episode#PySeries — Python — Linear Regressions — The Basics — How to Understand Linear Regression Once and For All!
05Episode#PySeries — Python — NumPy Init & Python Review — A Crash Python Review & Initialization at NumPy lib.
06Episode#PySeries — Python — NumPy Arrays & Jupyter Notebook — Arithmetic Operations, Indexing & Slicing, and Conditional Selection w/ np arrays.
07Episode#PySeries — Python — Pandas — Intro & Series — What it is? How to use it?
08Episode#PySeries — Python — Pandas DataFrames — The primary Pandas data structure! It is a dict-like container for Series objects
09Episode#PySeries — Python — Python 4 Engineers — Even More Exercises! — More Practicing Coding Questions in Python!
10Episode#PySeries — Python — Pandas — Hierarchical Index & Cross-section — Open your Colab notebook and here are the follow-up exercises!
11Episode#PySeries — Python — Pandas — Missing Data — Let’s Continue the Python Exercises — Filling & Dropping Missing Data
12Episode#PySeries — Python — Pandas — Group By — Grouping large amounts of data and compute operations on these groups
13Episode#PySeries — Python — Pandas — Merging, Joining & Concatenations — Facilities For Easily Combining Together Series or DataFrame
14Episode#PySeries — Python — Pandas — Pandas Dataframe Examples: Column Operations | https://medium.com/jungletronics/geogebra-plus-linear-programming-a51661c99590 | [] | 2020-09-18 15:41:13.403000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Geogebra', 'Linear Programming', 'Python3', 'Linear Regression Python'] |
For the Love of Food, People, and UX | For the Love of Food, People, and UX
A usability case study on food delivery app Eat24
Objective
My goals for this UX study were to:
Critically analyze problems in an existing app Back up my decisions and solutions with sound reasoning and data Communicate my thinking and design process Show, not just tell, my ability to do the above things Learn to identify the unsuspecting civilians most likely to be convinced into doing a usability test (and then bribe them to get them to spend 5–10 minutes with someone they’ve never met)
Why Eat24?
Food delivery is arguably the most breakthrough idea anyone’s ever had. It’s even better now with smartphones. Not having to talk to anyone to order food? The dream.
Eat24 has the power to leverage Yelp reviews and ratings to help hungry users pick the best place to order delivery from. I thought this was a great chance for me to flex my design muscles and explore how I can improve the experience of the app (but most importantly, stare at pictures of food).
This is all of us. (Source: Yelp Eat24 Twitter)
User Research
On a rainy day, I approached strangers to run usability tests on Eat24 (see Goal #5). Using a GoPro to record their voice, fingers, and the screen, I interviewed 7 people and later compiled the insights drawn from the interactions. I approached users with the prompt:
Imagine a night where you’d more likely order delivery than go out to eat. Show me how you would order delivery using Eat24.
Throughout the process, I encouraged participants to express general thoughts, many of which were laments about how freakin’ good a side of garlic bread sounded. | https://uxdesign.cc/for-the-love-of-food-people-and-ux-11251d6a0303 | ['Katie Chen'] | 2017-04-05 02:00:31.762000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Eat24', 'Case Study', 'Product Design', 'Yelp'] |
Text Data Pre-Processing Using Word2Vector and t-SNE | Multi-class data classification to predict the Phrases from the sentences of the movie review given user onthe sentiment scale of 0–4.
Introduction
With the growth of web text data such as: online review data posted by users for hotel booking, e-commerce website and movie reviews, can be of great help to understand the business and the need of the user plays an important role in making decisions for companies [2]. The objective of this project is to use multi-class classification,instead of binary class classification (positive/negative) to predict the Phrases from the sentences of the movie review given user in the sentiment scale 0 to 4, where 0 is the lowest sentiment (negative) and 4 is the highest sentiment(positive). This project first introduces the description of data in mathematical form and also the description of the features of the datasets. It then describes one of the major tasks in sentiment analysis which is pre-processing text data into numeric data. Next, it focuses on analysis and distribution of the feature which helps in the next step which is feature extraction. Furthermore, it also introduces several machine learning methods such as logistic regression, decision tree and random forest used for classifying sentiments. Finally, the result of the machine learning is presented with comparison and suggests future direction for this project.
Data Description
The datasets is a collection of movie reviews from the website “www.rottentomatoes.com”. The dataset was provided by the website “www.kaggle.com”, originally collected by Pang and Lee. The dataset consists of Tab Separated files (tsv), which consist of phrases from the Rotten Tomatoes dataset. Here, each phrase has its phrase Id and each sentence has a sentence Id. Phrases which are repeated are only included one in the dataset. The source of the dataset is https://www.kaggle.com/c/sentiment-analysis-on-movie-reviews/data.
Description and format
Description of dataset in mathematical correct formalism
Universe Ω = {Website (Rotten Tomatoes), User who is writing a review, Internet} Elementary Events ω= The possibility of the user writing the review in the comment section. Measurable Function (RV-function)= procedure of reading reviews given by the users and measuring the reviews according to the sentiment. Data Value Space= {PhraseId, SentenceId, Phrase, Sentiment}
Format of the dataset
The dataset is divided into training and test data, represented by “train.csv” and “test.csv” files respectively. The RV-function of the dataset is a procedure of reading reviews given by the users and measuring the reviews according to the sentiment. Starting with the training dataset file, whose first line identifies the feature names followed by feature values. The feature name or the Data Value space (DVS) of the training dataset are PhraseId, SentenceId, Phrase and Sentiment. Table 1 shows a version of the data for the train.tsv.
Similarly, the test.tsv file is formatted using the same structure except for the Sentiment column, which is unknown. The purpose of this project is to predict the sentiment of the phrases from the model trained with the help of train.tsv where sentiment is known. Table 2 shows a lightweight version of the test.tsv.
The columns have the following meaning:
PhraseId: The ID of the Phrase. SentenceId: The ID of the sentence, which helps to track the phrases taken from sentences. Phrase: The phrases from the sentences written by the user in Rotten Tomatoes. Sentiment: It is a label given to the phrases to convey sentiments. The sentiments range from 0–4. The sentiment labels are:
Data Pre-processing
For the purpose of this project the data taken from train.tsv and test.tsv is of a shape of 100X4 and 100x3 respectively. The dataset is fairly clean with no missing values. For each phraseId there is a phrase, sentenceId and sentiment mapped to it in traiv.tsv file. Similarly, for test.tsv for each phraseId there is a phrase, sentenceId mapped to it.
Before preprocessing the data I used several statistical methods to understand the data. The number of each sentiment in the train.tsv file was visualized using a barplot. Figure 1 shows the barplot of the division of the phrase according to their sentiments.
Figure 1:Barplot for sentiment count
According to the barplot, sentiment class seems to be following a normal distribution, with most of the frequently distributed class sentiment labelled 2 — which represent neutral from the range given.
One of the features in the dataset is “Phrase”, this feature stores data in the form of words. These words need to be tokenized into numeric format. Figure 2 shows the example of a phrase from the dataset.
Figure 2: One of the phrase from the dataset
To begin with, in order to change the word to a numeric format, I used the Word2vec method. The word2vec method takes the corpus of text as its input and converts the text into a vector space with several dimensions. Words which are common in context in the corpus are located close to one another in a vector space. For example “Have a nice day.” and “Have a great day.” Here great and good will be placed closer in the vector space because they convey similar meaning in this context. Figure 3 shows the conversion of words into a vector space.
Figure 3: From word to a vector conversion using word2vec.
The frequency of the words present in the phrase column in the train.tsv is shown in figure 4.
Figure4: Word frequency of training dataset
Similarly, The frequency of the words present in the phrase column in the test.tsv is shown in figure 5.
Figure 5: Word frequency for testing dataset
At this point we can visualize the frequency of the words in the phrase. However, we still do not know the sentiment of the phrases, since the sentiment of the phrases, also the number of features after converting word into its numeric format has increased drastically. Therefore, to understand the relationships between the features I analyzed the correlation between words. Figure 6 shows the graph for correlation of words with each other.
Figure 6: Correlation between words
We see that in Figure 6 the correlation between words are difficult to interpret, also it will affect the machine learning models’s performance. Therefore, the next step is to reduce the dimension. Here, in this project to understand the data better, I used an algorithm called t-SNE, which is an effective algorithm suitable for dimension reduction for word embedding and also sued for visualization of high dimensional datasets and also visualization of the similar words clustered together in the graph which will give us an idea about the sentiment of the phrase profoundly. Figure 7 shows the t-SNE visualization of a word “Good” and the words which are closer to this word.
Figure 7: t-SNE visualization for Good.
Machine Learning
Logistic regression approach
Logistic regression is a simple classification technique, it is a common and useful regression method for solving binary classification problems [3].Here, I fit the model on the training dataset and performed prediction on the test set, the accuracy of this model was 83%. Figure 8 shows the plot for the predicted result from the model.
Figure 8: Prediction result for Logistic regression
Decision tree model
Decision tree model is another model for classification and is capable of both binary and multiple class classification. The goal of using decision trees is to create a model that predicts the value of sentiment for the test dataset by learning simple decision rules inferred from the training dataset [4]. The accuracy of this model was 99%. Figure 9 shows the plot for the predicted result from the model.
Figure 9: Plot result for Decision tree
Random Forest Approach
Random forest consists of a large number of decision trees that operate on ensembles. In this model each individual tree runs its class prediction and the class with most common votes becomes the prediction of the model [5]. In our dataset based on the number of classes in the training dataset yields accuracy of 98%. Figure 10 shows the prediction result for the model.
Figure 10:Prediction result for decision tree
Lastly, by comparing the result of three different approaches : Logistic Regression, Decision tree and random forest. By training a data set for 100 rows, we see that the majority of the prediction shows that phrase has sentiment class 2, which represents “Somewhat negative” according to the labels given to the sentiments. Figure 11 shows overall prediction for each model.
Figure 11: Result for each method
Conclusion
This report concludes by encompassing the basic steps of statistical learning, such as collecting data, cleaning the data, preprocessing data which could be fit for the model, analyzing data distribution and finally using machine learning algorithms to make better prediction. Defining data samples in the form universe, event, RV-function and data value space helped to understand the fundamentals of the dataset and then by analyzing data distribution, frequency of the word and correlation among the features helped to understand the data in a deeper and meaningful way.
Specifically, data preprocessing step where words had to be converted into numeric format using word2vec method played an important role in classification of sentiment class. Using logistic regression, decision tree and random forest as classification problems can prove to be beneficial for text analysis and sentiment analysis.
Finally, the model accuracy was around 80–90% in all three models. In both training and testing dataset, the variation in the sentiment was not diverse, which led the models to overfit the prediction.
Reference
[1] Data source- https://www.kaggle.com/c/sentiment-analysis-on-movie-reviews/data
[2] Zhou, Li-zhu, Yu-kai He, and Jian-yong Wang. “Survey on research of sentiment analysis.” Journal of Computer Applications 28.11 (2008): 2725–2728.
[3] Kleinbaum, David G., et al. Logistic regression. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2002.
[4] Kothari, R. A. V. I., and M. I. N. G. Dong. “Decision trees for classification: A review and some new results.” Pattern recognition: from classical to modern approaches. 2001. 169–184.
[5] Biau, GÊrard. “Analysis of a random forests model.” Journal of Machine Learning Research 13.Apr (2012): 1063–1095 | https://medium.com/swlh/text-data-pre-processing-using-word2vector-and-t-sne-2321fbce5b9 | ['Sanyukta Suman'] | 2020-11-14 12:53:36.141000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Word2vec', 'Decision Tree', 'Linear Regression', 'Random Forest'] |
10 cheat codes for designing User Interfaces | I’d probably assume that most of us started in UI design with the littlest knowledge or nothing at all. But even though the odds were against us at the start, we managed our way through numerous design books and articles to understand how colors, typography, layout etc works. I remember how it is established in us at Make Technology, a UX driven company, that Design can’t be simply explained by colors, shapes, and text. It is a process that has a “Why” behind it, that whenever we create a text bigger, add a shadow, or change the color, there has to be a reason of why things have to be.
Thus in this article, I’ll be sharing a list of things I’ve learned from different companies, designers, things I’ve learned in designing user interfaces, and new discoveries I found along the way:
*Disclaimer: The following “Don’t” samples provided doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong. It’s our basis of how we can improve from a good design solution to a much better one 😀
1. This text is important, make it bigger!
When faced with content that needs font hierarchy, making the text bigger to give emphasis and importance usually doesn’t solve the problem, just like the one below:
Font hierarchy is just not about small to big font sizes. It is about the right mix of size, weights, and colors that creates contrast. Bigger contrast, the better.
Apologies if the photo comes in low res format ✌️
So how do I create better contrast?
Don’t use one kind of weight with different font sizes to create contrast and hierarchy.
Instead, use bolder and darker style for primary content, or smaller and lighter for secondary content (less important).
Create three kinds of text colors that varies from dark to light (see example below). Usually I use my base color as body text color.
Don’t be afraid to apply big font gaps to your items (i.e. 24px header, 16px body text, 10px meta etc). Bigger gap = better contrast.
Check out Modularscale an online calculator you can use to create better font hierarchy.
Remember, contrast is = size + weight + color.
Lastly, make sure to check its contrast ratio. You can use this calculator to check its accessibility.
from my base color, I move from darker for headlines to lighter for ancillary content.
2. Don’t create multiple shades of black
Don’t make your life difficult by moving your color picker up and down to produce different shades of black text over white background.
We all know that using black text color (#000) causes eye strains for readers, and so our solution is to create darker variants as an alternative. But instead of color picking 3 or more hex color values, we can use black with different opacity as a solution:
In my example above, I used black as my primary color (#000) and decreased its opacity depending to where it will be applied (i.e. primary content, secondary content, etc)
*Update (July 2020): This kind of tweak works best on a white background, so I would suggest utilizing different shades of black instead for it is more scalable than opacity 💪🏽 (yes this is me contradicting my thoughts, cuz why not? we learn!!)
3. Do the math for understanding colors
Most of us suck at picking the right color combinations, and whenever we see a design with a well orchestrated color palette, we question ourselves “How the F they did it?” (just like the one below):
taken from momoandspirits
Until I learned that understanding colors is not just for those who have the gift of design since the beginning of time, that a simple addition and subtraction at Hue, Saturation, Brightness (HSB) will do the magic (we will be using HSB for this formula instead of RGB). You can easily get rid of the boring white over colored backgrounds, and turn it into a Picasso work like the one below:
So where does the addition and subtraction in HSB comes in?
Two approaches for understanding colors
There are actually two approaches we can do, and as we can see, both options has the same base color #B9F4BC (circle background) but differs when it comes to Folder and Strip color. As we start, always remember that the first number corresponds to Hue, followed by Saturation and lastly, Brightness.
Option A
Option A
In Option A, we can see that we kept the Hue value 123 all through out the shapes (circle, folder, strip) while the Saturation and Brightness is where the change happens.
Now, as we focus on the Saturation of the base which is 24 and its Brightness, 96, both values changed when we created darker green for the Folder. From Saturation of 24 it became 40 (increment of +16) and from Brightness of 96 it became 82 (decrement of -14), which shows us that a change in saturation whether incremental or decremental needs an inversely proportional adjustment to brightness, in order to create a good contrast (vice versa). And the same thing happened in Strip, using the Folder’s Saturation and Brightness as base value, we moved from 40 to 44 (increment of +04), and decreased from 82 to 75 (decrement of -07) for Brightness.Thus, leads us to the formula:
Darker Value = Increment in Saturation is a decrement in Brightness Lighter Value = Decrement in Saturation is an increment in Brightness
This formula helped me every time I’m in wonder of what right colors should I use on my designs. I learned that the best starting point is to have a base color, and from there, start the adjustments in Saturation and Brightnesswhile keeping the Hue value the same.
Option B
Option B
In Option B, the same principle is still applied (the formula we had above) but the Hue values change. And the terminologies RGB and CMY which we used to pass by in various design materials, will now make sense for us.
RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue, while CMY is Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. These terminologies haven’t made any importance for me when I first started, until I came across this discovery of using RGB and CMY for color combinations.
Now In Option B, if we want to have a darker variation of the base color, all we need to do is move our color picker to the direction where the nearest RGB is located in our color palette, or move it the direction of CMY for lighter variation. For example:
Color Picker
Since we want to create a darker variation of our base color #B9F4BC (circle background) which is to be applied in our Folder icon, we need to move our color picker to the direction where the nearest RGB is located (which is Blue in this case). But if we want to have a lighter version of our Folder, we will be moving our picker to the left, near CMY (in this case Yellow).
*More often RGB leads to darker variation and CMY for lighter one
After moving the color picker to our desired variation, we now apply the formula in Option A, which results us to having this color combination:
Red, Green, Blue (RGB) + Option A formula = Darker variation Cyan, Magenta, Yellow (CMY) + Option A formula = Lighter variation
4. Use spacing to separate groups
Be a generous space giver
Aside from adding a line between two groups to show separation, using a generous space between is a better and easier solution.
As what the Law of Proximity states:
Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.
From my example above, my goal is create a separation between my title and its writer by using a large space gap between them which is 24px.
5. Use colors to separate rows
Colors as separators
Doing row interfaces could be boring at times to design, since it only requires duplicating the component for n times. But on the user side, reading them can be difficult specially if there’s no great distinction between one row to the other. Thus aside from using lines, adding color background in rows can be a lot helpful for users in reading, and also will be more enjoying to do for us designers 👍
6. Multiply instead of Drop shadow text
Header design
It’s quite challenging designing header components or adding text over an image specially if the image background will be dynamic (or can be changed from time to time).
Usually the common solution for text with dynamic image background is adding drop shadow, but it doesn’t help user’s readability. It adds more visual clutter around the letters and words because they fill up the spaces in between them.
For some, black/white color overlay is the solution which is a helpful hack for these kinds of designs. But recently, I’ve discovered about using Multiply as blend tool for a gradient fill.
Specs for Multiply blend options
Doing it is much easier than creating a black background over the image and lessen its opacity. Also, having it grayed scale makes the other part of the image retain its natural color, and makes the part where the text is located a little bit darker, for text readability.
7. Line Length
The common thing most designers do is making the line length longer so that it may fit its container. But doing so, creates eye strain for our users unlike having a 45–65 characters per line which is the ideal.
If you ever came across the dilemma of making the length shorter to make it ideal but will result to a big white space at the right side like the one below:
with big white space at the right
Don’t hesitate to do so, and make the whole text column center aligned to its container, so that you can remove the white space.
centered content
8. Don’t reinvent the wheel
What makes a design inconsistent is when it is not component based. It is when you came to realize that you’ve made 5 kinds of card interface, 10 buttons, 5 heading title styles etc.
Before you start creating an interface for a specific content, try to look around your previously created designs, for you might see a pattern which you can recycle and use.
Instead of reinventing the wheel and create another card for an Art Group (example above), we can use the Article card and replace it with the Art Group’s content. This will save time for designers and also make the interface consistent.
9. Use brand colors as accents
We usually think that branding colors must occupy a big chunk of our interface colors. We are having a hard time where to showcase our client’s shocking neon yellow, orange, and pink branding colors in our clean and minimalist layout. The answer? use them as accent colors.
10. Hang the bullets
And lastly if you are creating a list design like the one above, make the bullets, glyphs, or number sit in the margin to highlight the list. This will make the user readability flow uninterrupted and more legible. | https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/design-cheatsheet-274384775da9 | ['Riel M'] | 2020-07-18 03:44:57.557000+00:00 | ['User Experience', 'Design', 'Graphic Design', 'Sketch', 'User Interface'] |
Failure Should Be Your Fire-Lighter | Looking back on the days of the past, we can clearly spot our failures. The glaring recollection of falling short is not invisible to us. Some people see it as areas in their lives to improve on. They consider the possibilities of a better outcome, take notes, and continue on with their journey.
Others—well, they remain stuck in the past. The glare apparently becomes so bright it blinds them of their potential. They don’t consider what they could do if they only tried.
Most of us fall into either one of these two camps. And whether we choose to accept it or not, the idea of failing should invoke a sense of optimism.
Falling Short Teaches You How to Succeed
You will never know how to win without losing at some point. Living a life without any losses is a myth that has been debunked forever. But that doesn’t stop us from comparing ourselves to people we assume have always won.
From all we can tell, they woke up one morning with a knack for winning. What we forget to recognize is the road that got them there. It was a road riddled with potholes and nails. The steep declines were crazy.
This is why we have to change the way we view success. If the end goal isn’t to progress, you’re doing it wrong. You’re ultimately setting yourself up for a life of bad failure.
This is when you fail with no purpose at all.
In this phase, the only important pursuit is fitting into the mold we’ve noticed around us. And that doesn’t lead anywhere, because we abandon ourselves in the process.
Ask any successful person and they’ll tell you. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. J.K. Rowling, the author of the notorious Harry Potter novels, heard a list of “no”s before she heard “yes.”
But they didn’t give up, even though it was tough. They used failure as a launching pad to propel them forward
Falling Short Strengthens Your Endurance
As we all know, it’s not as simple as ‘fail and move on.’ It definitely isn’t as easy as some people make it. It hurts—bad. But it does something that quitting doesn’t.
Failure gives you the endurance to withstand whatever happens next.
Now I don’t know about you, but the list of shortcomings is long for me. If I sat all day long thinking about how bad I was at that one thing, or how stupid of a choice that was, I’d probably blow a fuse in my brain.
Yet, we do this so often in our culture. Rather than moving on from where we went wrong and considering how to do it right the next time, we either give up or classify ourselves as the biggest failures who ever walked the planet.
Because we see failure as negative, we associate ourselves in the same light. One mistake and we’re done, no point of moving forward. But is that really what falling short means, that you will never amount to anything — ever — because you failed at something? I think not.
Failure is a fire-lighter.
Forgive Yourself
As with a ton of other things, we often neglect to recognize the important tool of self-forgiveness. We tend to be harder on ourselves than we should be, especially when comparing ourselves to people around us.
Trying to measure up to someone who is completely different from us, we land in a state of recurring frustration that leads to headaches and depression.
Start by giving yourself some time to acknowledge your amazing qualities.
Identifying what you’re good at in your free time takes your mind off of the potentially harmful mindset of focusing on what you didn’t do.
Realize that you aren’t perfect—none of us are. We are going to make mistakes. A great leader will say this. But they will also add another crucial point: the key is to learn from those mistakes.
Gather the data on what caused you to fall short. The biggest mistake you can make is doing the work and not identify what went wrong, what steps were taken in the wrong direction.
If you want to make progress, learn to give yourself some slack. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/failure-should-be-your-fire-lighter-2f56f0a8567f | ['Kevin Horton'] | 2019-03-29 16:20:40.025000+00:00 | ['Inspiration', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Self Improvement'] |
To The Novice Writer From The Hobbyist Writer | Writing Advice For The Noobs, All of Us Started As One
To The Novice Writer From The Hobbyist Writer
A piece of advice learned after a few hundred failures, and many successes while writing online.
Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash
I know we have read a bit too many articles on how to get better at writing.
Heck, I see them every day, in my feed. There are at least ten different types you see here. But it has decreased for a few weeks.
But the crux of the matter is there isn’t much applicable advice for the novice from the underdog. They are just too confused how or what to do with it.
The fact of the matter is the advice is just a detailed explanation for “how it worked for them” and selling it “how it can work for you?”
It can but chances are it won’t. The chance of succeeding at writing on the first try are slim. Unless you’re Seth Godin of course.
The man writes one 2 minute article and the algorithm just puts him on the front page. Whew!
And then some writers try hard to break it, but the algorithm never seems to fare them at all. I have read hundreds if not thousands of writers on medium as of this year.
From poets to comics, self improv gurus to mental health advocates, life lesson advisers to “America is on fire” mind bangers. You know who I’m talking about. 😉
There is a diverse set of variety on medium and I take my time exploring every part of it. I usually search topics through google’s advanced search when reading good stuff on medium.
You’d be surprised google favours medium a lot, especially when it comes to ranking humour pieces if you know what you’re searching for.
Chances are you’re going to find it on medium.
What irks me though is that these writers are barely not even famous. Their writing blows me away, and their style is highly addictive to read.
So much so I save them in my reading list; they deserve a place to be read and shared hundreds of times.
Well, where was I, oh yeah when it comes to writing on the medium platform?
Things have changed; in my life so much so it has broken my habit of writing. Or I just become severely depressed that takes the life out of my writing.
And then I stop writing.
And that’s that. | https://medium.com/illumination/to-the-novice-writer-from-the-hobbyist-writer-b7dc21557185 | ['Riku Arikiri'] | 2020-12-30 04:44:35.969000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Advice', 'Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Self Improvement'] |
It’s okay to not thrive during all… 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴. | Just do what you can, okay?
https://www.dieselsweeties.com/ics/1053/ | https://rstevens.medium.com/its-okay-to-not-thrive-during-all-69e5d0126c3e | [] | 2020-07-29 02:59:06.286000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Comics', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity'] |
Deep Learning: GoogLeNet Explained | Characteristics and features of GoogLeNet configuration table (figure 1)
The input layer of the GoogLeNet architecture takes in an image of the dimension 224 x 224.
Type: This refers to the name of the current layer of the component within the architecture
This refers to the name of the current layer of the component within the architecture Patch Size: Refers to the size of the sweeping window utilised across conv and pooling layers. Sweeping windows have equal height and width.
Refers to the size of the sweeping window utilised across conv and pooling layers. Sweeping windows have equal height and width. Stride: Defines the amount of shift the filter/sliding window takes over the input image.
Defines the amount of shift the filter/sliding window takes over the input image. Output Size: The resulting output dimensions(height, width, number of feature maps) of the current architecture component after the input is passed through the layer.
The resulting output dimensions(height, width, number of feature maps) of the current architecture component after the input is passed through the layer. Depth: Refer to the number of levels/layers within an architecture component.
Refer to the number of levels/layers within an architecture component. #1x1 #3x3 #5x5: Refers to the various convolutions filters used within the inception module.
Refers to the various convolutions filters used within the inception module. #3X3 reduce #5x5 reduce: Refers to the numbers of 1x1 filters used before the convolutions.
Refers to the numbers of 1x1 filters used before the convolutions. Pool Proj: This is the number of 1x1 filters used after pooling within an inception module.
This is the number of 1x1 filters used after pooling within an inception module. Params: Refers to the number of weights within the current architecture component.
Refers to the number of weights within the current architecture component. Ops: Refers to the number of mathematical operations carried out within the component.
Figure 2: Partition of GoogLeNet
At its inception, the GoogLeNet architecture was designed to be a powerhouse with increased computational efficiency compared to some of its predecessors or similar networks created at the time.
One method the GoogLeNet achieves efficiency is through reduction of the input image, whilst simultaneously retaining important spatial information.
The first conv layer in figure 2 uses a filter(patch) size of 7x7, which is relatively large compared to other patch sizes within the network. This layer's primary purpose is to immediately reduce the input image, but not lose spatial information by utilising large filter sizes.
The input image size(height and width) is reduced by a factor of four at the second conv layer and a factor of eight before reaching the first inception module, but a larger number of feature maps are generated.
The second conv layer has a depth of two and leverages the 1x1 conv block, which as the effect of dimensionality reduction. Dimensionality reduction through 1x1 conv block allows the decrease of computational load by lessening the layers' number of operations.
Figure 3: Partition of GoogLeNet
The GoogLeNet architecture consists of nine inception module as depicted in figure 3.
Notably, there are two max-pooling layers between some inception modules.
The purpose of these max-pooling layers is to downsample the input as it’s fed forward through the network. This is achieved through the reduction of the height and width of the input data.
Reducing the input size between the inception module is another effective method of lessening the network's computational load.
Figure 4: Partition of GoogLeNet
The average pooling layer takes a mean across all the feature maps produced by the last inception module and reduced the input height and width to 1x1.
A dropout layer(40%) is utilised just before the linear layer. The dropout layer is a regularisation technique that is used during training to prevent overfitting of the network.
Dropout technique works by randomly reducing the number of interconnecting neurons within a neural network. At every training step, each neuron has a chance of being left out, or rather, dropped out of the collated contribution from connected neurons.
The linear layer consists of 1000 hidden units, which corresponds to the 1000 classes present within the Imagenet dataset.
The final layer is the softmax layer; this layer uses the softmax function, an activation function utilised to derive the probability distribution of a set of numbers within an input vector.
The output of a softmax activation function is a vector in which its set of values represents the probability of a class or event occurrence. The values within the vector all add up to 1.
Auxilary Classifiers
Before bringing the exploration of the GoogLeNet architecture to a close, there’s one more component that was implemented by the creators of the network to regularise and prevent overfitting. This additional component is known as an Auxilary Classifier.
One main problem of an extensive network is that they suffer from vanishing gradient descent. Vanishing gradient descent occurs when the update to the weights that arises from backpropagation is negligible within the bottom layers as a result of relatively small gradient value. Simply kept, the network stops learning during training.
Auxilary Classifiers are added to the intermediate layers of the architecture, namely the third(Inception 4[a]) and sixth (Inception4[d]).
Auxilary Classifiers are only utilised during training and removed during inference. The purpose of an auxiliary classifier is to perform a classification based on the inputs within the network's midsection and add the loss calculated during the training back to the total loss of the network.
The loss of auxiliary classifiers is weighted, meaning the calculated loss is multiplied by 0.3.
Below is an image that depicts the structure of an auxiliary classifier.
An auxiliary classifier consists of an average pool layer, a conv layer, two fully connected layers, a dropout layer(70%), and finally a linear layer with a softmax activation function.
Each of the included auxiliary classifiers receives as input the activations from the previous inception modules.
The image below illustrates the complete GoogLeNet architecture, with all its bells and whistles. | https://towardsdatascience.com/deep-learning-googlenet-explained-de8861c82765 | ['Richmond Alake'] | 2020-12-23 04:18:08.476000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Deep Learning', 'Technology', 'Data Science'] |
Top 10 Reasons Why 87% of Machine Learning Projects Fail? | We see news about Machine learning everywhere. Indeed, there is a lot of potential in Machine learning. According to Gartner’s predictions, “Through 2020, 80% of AI projects will remain alchemy, run by wizards whose talents will not scale in the organization” and Transform 2019 of VentureBeat predicted that 87% of AI projects will never make it into production.
Why is it like that? Why do so many projects fail?
Not Enough Expertise
One of the reasons is that the technology is still new to a large audience. In addition, most of the organizations are still unfamiliar with the software tools and the required hardware.
It seems that today, anyone who has worked in data analytics or software development who has done some sample data science projects are labeling themselves as data scientists after taking a short course online.
The fact is that experienced data scientists are needed to handle most of the machine learning and AI projects, especially when it comes to defining the success criteria, final deployment, and continuous monitoring of the model.
A disconnect between Data Science and traditional Software development
A disconnect between Data Science and traditional Software development is another major factor. Traditional software development tends to be more predictable and measurable.
However, Data science is still part-research and part-engineering.
Data science research moves ahead with multiple iterations and experimentation. Sometimes, the whole project will have to loop back from the deployment phase to the planning phase since the metric that was picked is not driving user behavior.
Traditional Agile based project deliveries may not be expected from a Data science project. This will cause large scale confusion for the leader who has been working with clear deliveries at the end of each task cycles for normal software development projects.
Volume and Quality of Data
Everyone knows that the larger the dataset, the better the prediction from the AI system. Apart from the direct implications of the higher volumes, as the size of the data increases, a lot of new challenges arise.
In many such cases, you will have to merge data from multiple sources. Once you start doing it, you will realize that they are not in sync many times. This will result in a lot of confusion. Sometimes you will end up merging data that were not supposed to merge, which will result in having data points with the same name but different meanings.
Bad data at best will produce results that aren’t actionable or insightful. Bad data can also lead to misleading results.
Labeling of data
The unavailability of labeled data is another challenge that stalls many of the machine learning projects. According to the MIT Sloan Management Review,
76% of the people combat this challenge by attempting to label and annotate training data on their own and 63% go so far as to try to build their own labeling and annotation automation technology.
This means that a huge percentage of expertise of those data scientists are lost for the labeling process. This is a major challenge for the effective execution of an AI project.
This is the reason many of the companies are outsourcing the labeling task to other companies. However, it is a challenge to outsource the labeling task if it requires enough domain knowledge. Companies will have to invest in formal and standardized training of annotators if they need to maintain quality and consistency across datasets.
Another option is to develop their own data labeling tool if the data to be labeled complex. However, this often requires more engineering overhead than the Machine learning task itself.
Organizations are Siloed
Data is the most important entity of a machine learning project. In most organizations, these data would reside in different places with different security constraints and in different formats — structured, unstructured, video files, audio files, text, and images.
Having these data in different places in the different format itself is a challenge to handle. However, the challenge doubles when the organization is siloed, and responsible individuals are not collaborating with each other.
Photo by Dmitry Demidov on Pexels
Lack of collaboration
Lack of collaboration between different teams such as Data Scientists, Data engineers, data stewards, BI specialists, DevOps, and engineering, is another major challenge. This is especially important for the teams in the engineering scheme of things to Data science since there are a lot many differences in the way they work and the technology they use to fulfill the project.
It is the engineering team who is going to implement the machine learning model and take it to the production. So, there needs to be a proper understanding and strong collaboration between them.
Technically Infeasible Projects
Since the cost of Machine learning projects tends to be extremely expensive, most of the enterprises tend to target a hyper-ambitious “moon-shot” project that will completely transform the company or the product and give oversized return or investment.
Such projects will take forever to complete and will push the data science team to their limits.
Ultimately, the business leaders will lose confidence in the project and stop the investment.
It is always best to focus on a single, achievable project with the proper scope and target a discrete business challenge.
Alignment problem between Technical and Business teams
Many times, ML projects are started without a clear alignment on expectations, goals, and success criteria of the project between the business and data science teams.
These kinds of projects will forever stay in the research stage itself because they never know if they are making any progress since it was never clear what the objective was.
Here, the data science team will be focused mainly on accuracy, whereas the business team will be more interested in metrics such as financial benefits or business insights. In the end, the business team ends up not accepting the outcome from the Data Science team.
Lack of Data Strategy
According to the MIT Sloan Management Review, only 50% of large enterprises with more than 100,000 employees are most likely to have a Data strategy. Developing a solid data strategy before you start the Machine learning project is critical.
You need to have a clear understanding of the following as part of Data strategy,
The total data you have in the company
How much of that data is really required for the projects?
How will the required individuals have access to these data, and how easily those individuals can access them?
Specific strategy on how to bring all these data from different sources together
How to clean up and transform these data.
Most of the companies start without a plan or don’t start thinking that they don’t have the data.
Lack of Leadership support
It is easy to think that “you just need to throw some money and technology at the problem and the result would come automatically”
We do not see the right support from the leadership to make sure of the needed conditions for success. Sometimes business leaders do not have confidence in the models developed by the data scientists.
This could be because of the combination of a lack of understanding of AI of the business leader and the inability of the data scientist to communicate the business benefits of the model to the leadership.
Ultimately, leaders need to understand how Machine learning works and what AI really means for the organization. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/top-10-reasons-why-87-of-machine-learning-projects-fail-82cb59dba4fa | ['Prajeen M V'] | 2020-09-18 00:01:01.915000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Data Strategy', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'An End To End Ml Project'] |
20 Years of Music Reviews. What Has Changed? | Some of the questions we are hoping to answer:
How nostalgic are we really when it comes to music?
Do users and critics usually agree in their assessments?
What does the future of reviews look like?
Is the music industry gender biased?
In this part we will tackle the first of these and to start of, let’s ask a simple question:
What was the best year for music?
Let’s see what Pitchfork has to say about this. We plot the average album score on Pitchfork of the past six decades:
only years with more than 5 releases were considered
the top 10 years measured by average score
There it is: 1986!
Who knew the answer could be this simple…
It should be no surprise to most people that the highest average score is from a year before Pitchfork started operating online. Of course nobody in the Pitchfork team will spend hours listening to Eddie Murphy’s 1986 “Party All The Time” just to write an extensive review about how uninspiring the instrumentals were. The disc has been forgotten and should stay forgotten. (Actually…scrap that. Treat yourself. You deserve this)
On the other hand it is by no means a surprise, that at some point in their 20 year history, someone at Pitchfork has decided to give us their take on The Beatles’ white album and it also shouldn’t come as a surprise either, that it will score very highly on the list (a 10).
However unsurprising this result is, let’s visualize it:
plotting the nostalgia factor
There is a very clear trend to be seen here:
The longer the time between an album release and its review, the better the score is on average. Just like we suspected. If an album covered on pitchfork is over 30 years old it has an average score of about 8.5, whereas a new album’s average score is closer to 7.0. This trend is also clearly visible for albums released after 1999, when Pitchfork was already writing online reviews.
Can we thus conclude, that reviewers are biased towards older albums? Well… not quite (yet). The point we made earlier about reviewers being more likely to pick out a (subjectively) good old album to feature in their review as opposed to a bad one (often dubbed as “survival bias”) remains valid. But we now have strong evidence suggesting that this theory is indeed supported by the data we are given. This also explains, why many people tend to say that the best years in music lie behind us. Our judgement is subconsciously skewed by the disproportionate amount of positive reviews we see of past albums, as well as by our own selective memory of only “the greats”. These at least are two factors explaining the phenomenon.
To answer the question whether or not reviewers are really influenced by their own nostalgia, let’s have a look at one more graph. We want to find out how many perfect scores (10) have been given out to albums every release year. That way the results are not taking into consideration the proportion of bad albums and are not biased in that regard.
A few stats:
Out of the ten years with the most amount of “perfect albums”, seven years are from before 1999, while only three years are from after 1999, when Pitchfork started reviewing online.
On average a year from before 1999 has 2.44 perfect albums whereas a year from after 1999 only has 1.94
According to this measure 1977 was the best year for music
However, upon closer inspection we can see that many of the albums are actually compilations or re-releases of much older projects. When we sort by the original release date, the graph is even more skewed!
A few updated stats: | https://medium.com/swlh/20-years-of-online-music-reviews-what-has-changed-3f27c75b0293 | ['Lionel Emilion'] | 2020-11-03 20:03:53.452000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Music Review', 'Data'] |
Resilience or Flexibility | Resilience…… When we heard the word resilience doesn’t matter when or where its use. Our mind thinks what exactly resilience it? Why it is so important to be resilient? How resilient can be built? When we study resilience furthermore we begin to think if resilience is such a good thing so either it has adverse effects or any dark side? In this article, I’m discussed about it and much more. So the first things first.
What resilience is?
As Robert Jordan wrote in his novel The Fires of Heaven
“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.”
Generally, Resilience defined as:
The capacity to recover swiftly from problems and harsh conditions.
But Health Education England states resilience as:
The ability to bounce back — a capacity to absorb negative conditions, integrate them in meaningful ways, and move forward.
According to Dr. Amit Sood, MD and executive director of the Global Centre of Resilience and Well-being said about it:
It's your ability to withstand adversity and bounce back and grow despite life’s downs.
Why resilience is important?
Life is like a trampoline, ups and downs are an essential part of our life. Some patches of life are very harsh and incidents that took place in these patches are hard to forget. These incidents leave unforgettable marks in our lives.
To cope with these incidents resilience helps us. Resilience provides us with the emotional strength to cope with misfortunes, miseries, and hardships. Not everyone is resilient or I can put in this way that the level of resilience is different from each other.
Those who commit suicide have very less resilient because they are unable to face the hardships of life. They felt overwhelmed, lose hope, and used unhealthy coping techniques such as self-medication, seclusion, and avoidance because at that time it seems to be easy to isolate themselves from family, friends, and community. But that leads to mental health problems like depression and anxiety. As a result, they quit. End up taking their own lives.
Types of Resilience
There are mainly four types of resilience:
Emotional Resilience Mental Resilience Physical Resilience Social Resilience
Emotional Resilience
Emotional resilience includes emotional intelligence, emotional awareness, perseverance, optimism, and acceptance. With the help of emotional resilience person always try to find positive things or situations in bad times. What if it's a bad time it’ll pass for sure.
Mental Resilience
Mental resilience or psychological resilience helps a person mentally to cope with hardships and challenges. A mentally strong person always consider every option to face the challenge of life. He develops strategies and alternatives to reach his goals. This helps them to manage their problems positively.
Physical Resilience
Physical resilience is usually considered as the stamina and ability of a body to face physical challenges. It helps our body to recover efficiently and maintain its stamina. Research also shows that physical resilience is one of the main reasons for healthy aging because people know how to cope with physical stressors.
Social Resilience
Social or community resilience has proven to be helpful for communities i.e groups of peoples to cope in case of adverse natural disasters like epidemics or outbreaks, acts of violence, etc. Community resilience is built on trust, diversity, patience, care, and respect.
How to become a resilient person?
As we discussed resilience, its types. Now it's time to talk about how we can become resilient? What are the factors or principles?
American Psychological Association shares 10 ways to build resilience. That is as follows
Make Connections
Good relationships with family and friends are very important. Respond to their problems positively and help them in their hard time. In your hard time don’t isolate yourself from them. Accept help from them. It boosts resilience. Don’t degrade yourself, have self-confidence.
Accept the change
Try to be a neophile. Accept the change don’t resist. When circumstances change some goals have become unattainable. Let them go don’t stick to them. That’ll help you to become more resilient.
Avoid seeing crises as unconquerable problems
You can’t change the fact that we must have to face harsh and unforgettable events but we have control over our thoughts. So we can change how we interpret the situation. We should try to look or consider our future. How bright it looks after this problem.
Move towards your goals
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
We must have some realistic goals. That excites and scares us at an equivalent time. So it develops an urge to achieve them. We start with some small goals. After their accomplishment, we must celebrate them.
Take conclusive actions
Act on any severe situation. Take determining and settling actions rather than over-thinking and detaching completely from the problems. It will help us to be confident.
Self-discovery
We should take steps to improve ourselves. Most of us feel that part of them become more strong and mature after facing the downfall or bad situation. Many peoples who have experience in facing tragedies and hardships have appeared to be better in relationships, are self-confident, high strength sense instead of feeling vulnerable, they feel strong and have high self-esteem.
Nurture a positive view of yourself
To be resilient you must have confidence or courage to face the problems. So developing self-confidence and trusting ourselves, help us to solve the problem.
Maintain a hopeful look
“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” Emily Dickinson
Always be an optimistic person. It helps us to see good in everything and also help to expect that good thing will occur once it all finishes. If it helps try to see or think what you want rather than worrying about your fears but remember that your thought must be realistic.
Keep things in perspective.
When something is not goin’ well it's easy to be distracted by it completely. So in that case we have to stop and think about what is goin’ well. It motivates us to keep working. we should consider every setback as a learning opportunity.
Take care of yourself
To become resilient, self-love is one of the basics. We must take care of ourselves and our feelings. We should take part in activities that provide us happiness.
“It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.” Bram Stoker, Dracula
The dark side of Resilient
As far as we learned from this article is that resilience is very important and good for our lives. Then a question arises that is there any bad effect of resilience. If yes, then what is it, and when it happens. We had been hearing since our childhood
Excess of everything is bad.
Here’s the same case in resilience. Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant state in their book that resilience is kind of a muscle that contracts during good times and expands during bad times. When we work hard physically our muscles become strong same is resilient. A person becomes more resilient as he faces more difficulties.
Nevertheless, too much resilience is dangerous life excessive exercise is dangerous for muscles. No doubt we consider that person more ambitious who have high goals, but it’ll be more effective when a person has achievable goals. On the other hand, Extreme flexibility or resilience can force people to be overly diligent on insufficient goals. Too much resilient can result in “false hope syndrome”.
False Hope Syndrome indicates unrealistic expectations about the potential speed, quantity, ease, poor coping skills, and the result of self-transformation efforts.
Research shows that people spend most of their precious time in pursuit of unrealistic goals. Even from their past, it becomes clear that this goal is unattainable. Their over-confidence and unsupported degree of optimism can lead people to waste their time on useless tasks. At the same time, too much resilience could make people unduly tolerant of misfortune and suffering. Too much resilience can also prove dangerous in leadership effectiveness and organizational effectiveness. Too much resilient man become fearless and unemotional. | https://medium.com/plus-marketing/resilience-or-flexibility-2ff896652004 | ['Muhammad Mohsin Raza Jutt'] | 2020-11-30 16:14:58.692000+00:00 | ['Content', 'Resilience', 'Blog', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Self Improvement'] |
Live the Present | Surrender
to the
present
let go
of the
past
and have
faith
in the
future | https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/live-the-present-be8788e98c43 | ['Ivette Cruz'] | 2020-09-24 15:53:58.599000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Mindfulness', 'Spirituality', 'Poetry', 'Spiritual Secrets'] |
Thank Your Muse: Gratitude Enhances Creativity | Thank Your Muse: Gratitude Enhances Creativity
If you don’t appreciate the beauty of the flame, you take away its oxygen.
If there’s one thing we writers specialize in, it’s self-loathing. We tend to beat ourselves up, whether we’re stuck in the muddy middle of a rough draft or slogging through a seemingly endless revision of a novel. We somehow forget the wondrous flow of a mellifluous sentence we write one day as we clank our way through a ragtag snarl of words the next. The novel idea we were once so thrilled by too quickly becomes a burdensome yoke around our neck.
Our demands are akin to a candle snuffer that smothers the flame of a candle. We forget how to appreciate the beauty of the flame, so we take away its oxygen without even knowing it.
Despite all the artistic mythology built around the anguished artist creating great works in fits of dark thrashings, ideas are like people: they’re attracted to positive energy, warmth, kindness. They don’t like being taken for granted or used and tossed aside. They don’t like to be ridiculed or disparaged or abused. They yearn to be lifted by the love and excitement around them — and when they feel the buoyancy of such exultation, they call out to their friends to join in the merriment.
So it’s good to pause and give thanks for your story, to bow to the transcendent powers of your creativity, to remember those fine moments when your words glowed, and pay heed to the specialness of your ability to conjure them.
Give thanks that you have a story breathing within you, and that you have the pencil and the paper or the computer to write it. Instead of focusing on the things you think you deserve or your inadequacies, take a few moments to focus on all that you have. Give thanks that you have a desk or a favorite mug for your coffee or tea. Give thanks for your singular life experiences — experiences that only you have. You’ve traveled to another planet in your life, and it’s a planet whose terrain only you know. Give thanks for your imagination, all those synaptic sparks constantly firing in their mysterious ways, seeking meaning, seeking thrills, seeking life.
Gratitude makes you healthier, happier. Gratitude makes you less self-centered and friendlier. Gratitude leads to more exercise and better sleep. Gratitude makes you a better manager or employee, a better teacher or student. Gratitude makes you more optimistic and builds your self-esteem. Gratitude builds your resilience and improves decision-making. Gratitude builds empathy and reduces envy.
Gratitude opens the soul to those everyday epiphanies that enrich us and our stories.
And gratitude makes you more creative. It instills a peace that opens up possibilities on the page. When you appreciate the incandescence of your creativity, it’s like putting on a sweater that keeps you so warm that the chills of any failure won’t make you cold. Gratitude opens the soul to those everyday epiphanies that enrich us and our stories. It lightens the burden of all the baggage we’ve loaded upon ourselves so that you suddenly can remember what it’s like to be yourself, a creator. When you recognize and acknowledge the abundance you have, your abundance grows.
You can replenish your gratitude each day as you sit down to write. Give thanks ahead of time for the chapter you’re going to write. Don’t focus on what you don’t have — don’t pick apart your writing ability or seize upon what’s wrong with your story, because you’ll always find yourself lacking. The next sentence you write is going to be a special one. Do you know how I know? You’ve never seen it before. And it’s going to lead to another sentence, and then another one after that.
So praise each word that flows from your pen. None of these words are bad. None of them wish you ill. If they’re awkward or cantankerous or just don’t sing in quite the way we’d like them to from time to time, we just have to be patient with them. Don’t disparage roses for their thorns. They wouldn’t be roses without those thorns.
Try This: Make a Gratitude Jar
Write down one thing about your creative life you’re appreciative of each day on a small piece of paper. Perhaps it’s a sentence you like. Perhaps it’s the title of your novel. Perhaps it’s the way you show up each day to write with fortitude and gusto. Or perhaps it’s the way you’ve helped others to write, how you’ve formed a creative community.
Put each piece of gratitude in a jar. When you’re feeling down, take out a piece of paper and read it. Read several at the beginning of the week or the month. Read all of them on New Year’s Eve and toast yourself.
Grant Faulkner is the author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo and the co-host of the podcast Write-minded. His essays on creative writing have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer.
For more, go to grantfaulkner.com, or follow him on Twitter at @grantfaulkner. | https://medium.com/nanowrimo/thank-your-muse-gratitude-enhances-creativity-88f8e087b60e | ['Grant Faulkner'] | 2018-11-27 14:12:46.385000+00:00 | ['Creative Process', 'Inspiration', 'Creative Writing', 'NaNoWriMo', 'Writing'] |
Young-earth evolution: How modern creationists embrace their own undoing | The evolution of creationism
Young-earth creationism is a relatively recent development. The earliest creationists had no particular dispute with deep time or mainstream geology; rather, religious objections to Darwin’s theories had to do with their implications for human identity. Some opposed the idea of common descent because they felt it took God out of the process of creation; more protested the shocking notion that the various races shared the same origins.
Originally, creationists insisted that the natural selection described by Darwin was as much a myth as universal common descent. A species could produce a variety of breeds by varying small characteristics, but all the breeds remained part of the same collective population. They believed God had created all species essentially in the same state they are found today.
By the time organized religious creationism synthesized its young-earth position — complete with six-day creation and the full-size Noah’s Ark, as described by 1960’s The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris — the argument had changed. Apologists began advancing a distinction now familiar to those who exposed to creationist ideas: the concept of microevolution and macroevolution.
While these terms have valid definitions in modern biology, they have different meanings for creationists. Microevolution is the term they use for change or variation that takes place within a “kind” of organism, while macroevolution is used to describe “change between kinds”. To creationists, microevolution is a viable, observable natural process, but macroevolution is impossible.
This, of course, begs the question of what constitutes a “kind”.
Early Answers in Genesis graphic from a Ken Ham presentation
The most common example, provided by even the earliest creationists, is the difference between dogs and cats. The diversity of dog breeds, they explain, is the result of microevolution, or variation among a large population of canids— initially only among domesticated dogs, then all dogs, dingoes, and wolves, and now expanded to include foxes and other genera— but that a dog could never, ever evolve into anything like a cat. They claim microevolution is characterized by a loss or filtering of genetic information, moving from a more complete genome to a restricted one; they argue macroevolution (e.g., to get from a dog to something like a cat) would require adding new information to the genome and is thus impossible.
A creationist’s best friend
The comparison of dogs and cats provides a simple, readily-accessible rule suitable for the lay audiences courted by Answers in Genesis and other creationist groups. It’s easy to remember: small changes “within a kind” are natural, observable variation (and part of God’s plan); large changes “between kinds” are evolutionary nonsense with no evidence. They trot out the example with dogged regularity:
The same example is even used to build out additional polemics against their caricature of mainstream biology:
While these simplistic arguments are embarrassingly easy to refute — the March 2018 tweet above obscures the difference between artificial selection by breeders and natural selection by environmental change — they remain convincing to the millions of evangelical Christians who continue to believe evolution is a secular conspiracy. However, as with most pseudoscience, the flaws become evident when you try to follow the idea to its natural conclusion. The work done in constructing the new Ark Encounter does exactly this.
Filling the Ark
The tale of eight righteous people keeping tens of thousands of animals alive on a prehistoric wooden barge for the better part of a year strains credulity, even for true believers like Ham. In order to make the whole affair seem more feasible without appealing to an endless string of miracles, the designers of the Ark Encounter push to minimize overcrowding. Since the dimensions of Noah’s vessel are set by Genesis, their only way to reduce crowding is to consolidate more and more species into an ever-shrinking number of baramins. Perhaps no better example of this arises with the very illustration used most often by creationists: cats, dogs, and the rest of Order Carnivora.
Answers in Genesis has repeatedly posted large, detailed lists of various species, families, and orders with attempts to organize them according to the new creationist taxonomy. One of the largest such postings, by retired veterinarian Jean Lightner, organizes the majority of Order Carnivora into eight distinct baramins: cats, civets, dogs, hyenas, bears, weasels, mongooses, and red pandas.
Conveniently for creationists, this means the ~250 extant terrestrial carnivoran species (plus numerous extinct relatives) would be represented by only 16 individuals on the Ark, as depicted below.
As the Ark Encounter neared completion in 2016, designers worked to build out models that would be used to depict each original pair. The problem arose when they began to imagine what each of these original “created kinds” must have looked like.
Because creationists insist all genetic information ultimately traces back to a divine author, rather than being generated by the iterative process of mutation and natural selection, they must claim adaptation and speciation only take place as a result of information loss. This requires each “original created kind” be the ultimate representative of all its descendants, which in turn guided their designers in coming up with the models for the Ark project. Combining the characteristics of all extant cats to form a super-cat, all bears to form a super-bear, and so forth produces a picture of what each “Ark kind” would have had to look like: | https://medium.com/discourse/young-earth-evolution-36cf7723a4b3 | ['David Macmillan'] | 2019-11-24 20:22:27.432000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Religion', 'Science', 'Evolution', 'Creationism'] |
Explicando aprendizaje supervisado a un niño (o tu jefe) | Head of Decision Intelligence, Google. Hello (multilingual) world! This account is for translated versions of my English language articles. twitter.com/quaesita
Follow | https://medium.com/datos-y-ciencia/explicando-aprendizaje-supervisado-a-un-ni%C3%B1o-o-tu-jefe-167293e17d4c | ['Cassie Kozyrkov'] | 2020-04-06 03:29:36.707000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Ciencia Y Datos'] |
Back to Legacy Transform in Photoshop CC 2019 | Are you also annoyed by the change Adobe added in the latest version of Photoshop that you don’t have to hold down the shift key when you want to scale an item proportionally?
Don’t hold the shift key when scaling
The old way is so engraved in my brain that this new way of scaling just doesn’t work for me personally. Luckily it is an easy adjustment to have the original way back.
Here’s how you can undo this change:
Use Notepad (Windows) or a text editor on macOS to create a plain text file (.txt). Type this text in the text file: TransformProportionalScale 0 Save the file as ‘PSUserConfig.txt’ to your Photoshop settings folder: Windows: [Installation Drive]:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2019\Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 Settings\ macOS: //Users/[User Name]/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 Settings/ (Hold down the Option key and go to the ‘Go’ menu to reveal ‘Library’ in the menu).
This article first appeared on Veerle’s Blog 4.0 | https://veerlepieters.medium.com/back-to-legacy-transform-in-photoshop-cc-2019-fa1df7d49580 | ['Veerle Pieters'] | 2019-01-14 11:00:24.718000+00:00 | ['Photoshop', 'Design'] |
Two Tools Every Data Scientist Should Use for Their Next ML Project | Uber’s Manifold
Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash
For my project, I am creating an Ensemble. An Ensemble is a collection of machine learning algorithms that each individually train and predict on the same data. The advantage of an Ensemble is that it provides a range of different strategies for finding a solution and utilizes a majority vote that democratizes the classification by all the models. This is useful because whilst an individual model may predict some portions well, it may struggle on other portions of the data. Hence, an ensemble is just the machine learning version of the strength in numbers adage. In order for an ensemble to perform well, the individual models that make it up must have diversity of prediction. Diversity of prediction is a fancy way of saying that the models can’t all be predicting exactly same for the exact points, rather they should be performing well on different selections of points. This raises the question however, how do you know if the parts of your ensemble are diversifying their predictions? This is where the transportation tech giant Uber’s Manifold comes in.
Uber’s Manifold is an open-source long-term project that aims to provide a model-agnostic visual debugging tool for machine learning. In layman's terms Manifold allows you to visualize which subset of the data your model or models are underperforming on and which features are causing ambiguity.
As you can imagine this is very useful when working on ensembles. The tool creates a widget output that can be interacted with within your notebook for quick analysis. It is important to note, however, that this tool currently only works in classic Jupyter notebooks. It doesn’t function on Jupyter Lab or Google’s Colab.
Manifold works by using k-means clustering, a neighbor grouping technique, to separate the prediction data into performance similarity segments. You can imagine this as splitting the data into subcategories of similarity. The models are then plotted along each segment, where the further to the left the model is the better it performed on that segment, you can see this on a randomly generated example below:
Manifold’s performance comparison widget within my Jupyter Notebook. Mousing over the lines provides values and insight into the results. Image by Author.
In the example above we have three models and the input data has been split into four segments. Using log-loss as our performance metric we can see that model_1 performs poorly on segment_0, whereas model_2 performs poorly on segment_2. The shape of the lines represents the performance distribution and the height of the lines represents the relative data point count at that log-loss. So again, for example, on model_1 in segment_1, we can see that there is a low but intense concentration of points with a log loss of 1.5.
Manifold also offers a feature attribution view:
Manifold’s feature attribution widget within my Jupyter Notebook. Mousing over the lines provides values and insight into the results. Image by Author.
The feature attribution view highlights the distribution of features for each segmentation. In the example above data group 0 includes clusters two and three, and we are comparing them to data group 1 which includes clusters zero and one. Along the x-axis is the feature values and the y-axis is the intensity of the cause. Feature_0 highlights these differences at small intervals whereas feature_1 highlights the histogram of feature values. Because this is an interactive widget the values aren’t shown unless moused over. If you are interested in a closer look check out the example here.
So how do we integrate Manifold in our project?
Manifold is still in the early stages of development and there are still some bugs and nuances to the tool, however, this should not discourage you from trying to use it in your own project. In my circumstances, I needed to install a few packages to get it to work in my Jupyter notebook. This required some trial and error but eventually resulted in the following commands:
!jupyter nbextension install --py --sys-prefix widgetsnbextension
!jupyter nbextension enable --py --sys-prefix widgetsnbextension
!pip install mlvis
!jupyter nbextension install --py --symlink --sys-prefix mlvis
!jupyter nbextension enable --py --sys-prefix mlvis
It wasn’t sufficient to just install the nbextention packages, I also had to enable the packages. From here we can import a few tools for our demo:
from mlvis import Manifold
import sys, json, math
from random import uniform
To use the Manifold framework your data needs to grouped into three specific formats. The first group is all of your x-values, which must be in a list of dictionaries:
#Example of x-values
x = [
{'feature_0': 21, 'feature_1': 'B'},
{'feature_0': 36, 'feature_1': 'A'}
]
The second group is your different model predictions, which must be a list of a list where each list is a different model’s predictions:
#Example of model predictions
yPred = [
[{'false': 0.1, 'true': 0.9}, {'false': 0.8, 'true': 0.2}],
[{'false': 0.3, 'true': 0.7}, {'false': 0.9, 'true': 0.1}],
[{'false': 0.6, 'true': 0.4}, {'false': 0.4, 'true': 0.6}]
]
The final group is the ground truth values or actual correct y-values, which are in a list of values:
#Example of ground truth
yTrue = [
'true',
'false'
]
Once your data is in this format we can pass the values into the Manifold object and execute to get the widget, which looks like the examples above:
Manifold(props={'data': {
'x': x,
'yPred': yPred,
'yTrue': yTrue
}})
Using the Manifold tool you can then visually evaluate how your different models are performing on the same data. In my case, this was very helpful for building the ensemble because it allowed for me to understand which models performed where, and which data clusters were the hardest for the models to classify. Manifold also helped me evaluate the diversity of prediction for each model within the ensemble allowing me to construct a more robust apparatus that was able to classify over a range of different inputs. | https://medium.com/gsi-technology/two-tools-every-data-scientist-should-use-for-their-next-ml-project-fa4fce5cf868 | ['Braden Riggs'] | 2020-09-11 18:18:28.056000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Programming', 'Deep Learning'] |
What Does Brand Authenticity Look Like in the Era of Fake News and Fake Followers? | Trust is a critical part of marketing. It doesn’t matter how earth-shattering your claims of performance are, or how amazing your storytelling is, or whether you nail your persona and audience targeting across digital channels — if your prospects don’t believe what you’re saying, they’re not going to be any more likely to buy from you.
It’s more important than ever to ensure your business is trusted by the people you’re trying to sell to. The public cares more than it ever has about whether or not a business is trustworthy, and they’re less likely than ever to trust you naturally. And that should be no surprise — from “fake news” to fake followers on social media, what was once regarded as truth is being called into question each and every day.
So how can your business cut a path through all the cynicism and deception and show your customers that you are really, actually authentic, and not simply trying to get their hard-earned money to improve your own profit margin? Well, an authentic brand presentation is a good start. Let’s talk about the problem in a little more depth, and then consider how we might move towards a solution.
The Problem: People Think We’re All Liars.
A number of recent studies show us some pretty damning data about how consumers feel about brands these days. In short, they think we’re all liars. Here are some fun examples of just how much confidence the public has lost in marketers and business:
According to a survey conducted by McCann’s Truth Central unit, 42% of Americans find brands and companies less truthful than they did 20 years ago. At least some of this is wrapped up in the increasingly fractious political climate in the country — Steve Zaroff, chief strategy officer of McCann North America, said that the study wasn’t intended to focus on politics, but “the people in America would not let [them]” ignore it, as politics has “risen to the level of popular culture.”
In a late 2017 study, Forrester found that consumer trust is at an all-time low; customer experience scores have stalled, with no brands significantly improving trust or experience scores over the previous year.
It’s not just Americans, either — consumer trust in brands is at its lowest point in the UK since the market crash of 2008, according to the Reputation Institute. Trust in brands to “do the right thing” dropped by 10% last year, while the likelihood of giving brands “the benefit of the doubt” dropped 13%. When it comes to recommending brands, only 38% of consumers said they were likely to recommend a brand, a decrease of 7% from 2016.
Finally, according to a study by Trinity Mirror and Ipsos Connect, 70% of consumers don’t trust advertising, and 40% distrust brands, seeing them as part of the “establishment,” arrogant, and “self-serving.” Consumers see brands claiming to serve a higher purpose, but rising cynicism means 58% don’t believe them until they’ve seen genuine proof that they’re actually doing it.
So yeah, things aren’t great. How did we get here?
What Happened to Consumer Trust?
One of the reasons why consumers aren’t as trusting as they used to be is simply because they’re paying more attention. It’s far easier to get information in 2018 than it was in 1958, after all. Back in the day, you couldn’t just look up a business on Yelp (or even Google) — you had to make do with what they said to the public through advertising, as well as word of mouth from other consumers and newspaper reports and the like.
Today, everything that pretty much any business does — good or bad — is available to all, quickly and easily. And consumers take advantage of that. You can’t simply hope people will overlook a scandal, or even a misbehaving employee.
Most brands have leaned into this shift, attempting to help shape the narrative by being active online — from the obvious activity, like building and maintaining a website that informs customers and (hopefully) drives leads and conversions, to more participatory efforts, like leveraging social media and digital advertising to listen to and engage with their customers.
These are positive developments, because they give a business the opportunity to meaningfully engage with its customers in ways that were previously not possible. But these new channels can also cause issues. The significant increase in the number of interactions between people and brands doesn’t just create opportunities to build brand loyalty; it also provides opportunities to create dissatisfied customers. A bad tweet can turn the public against your business, or at least create a big mess for your PR team to clean up. In other words, more touchpoints mean more places you can screw up.
Digital advertising is a big source of consumer frustration. Despite the fact that digital advertising has now been around for over two decades, the pace of change has led many brands to develop bad habits. They’ve fallen into “budget brand” behaviors that wouldn’t cut it in more traditional channels — habits like aggressive retargeting. According to Trinity Mirror and Ipsos Connect’s research, 40% of consumers think of brands as “pushy,” and 57% of adults think brands should be more careful where they place their advertising.
Other research has found (not surprisingly) that social media is the least trusted channel of all, as 63% of respondents said they would respond more positively to the same ad if it appeared on a more traditional advertising channel than if it was on social.
Does this mean we avoid social and other digital marketing? Of course not. But it does mean that, if you’re not diligent about meeting high standards, shoddy digital work can easily turn prospects off from wanting to work with you or buy from you.
The Solution: Prove to Your Customers You’re Worthy of Trust.
So what can we do to regain the trust of the people we’re trying to sell to? We have to show them that, despite how they may feel about brands in general, yours is worthy of trust — that your brand is authentic, not just a try-hard. Note that I say show, because that’s very important — simply telling people how great you are is not going to break through the wall of cynicism. If anything, it’ll only make it worse.
Here’s how you can pull it off.
Find Your Authentic “Why.”
Remember earlier, when we saw that people don’t believe brands when they say they’re trying to serve a deeper purpose than profit? There’s a good reason for that — a fair number of brands aren’t really devoted to their supposed mission. It’s more there as window dressing to make them seem more appealing. That’s probably one of the worst things a brand can do.
What you need to do is find an authentic “why” behind what you do. You’ve probably heard Simon Sinek’s TED Talk before (if not, we’ve talked about it before, go ahead and watch it). And the reason marketers talk about it so much is because it’s great advice! But again, it only works if it’s real. Hopefully, you already have a good idea of what your “why” is, because it’s the real motivator behind what you do every day. If not, go through the exercise of finding yours.
Then truly live it. Back up your words with action, and practice what you preach.
Provide Value, Both in Price and Otherwise.
Discounts are great, at least for your customers. Who doesn’t like paying a little less for something they need than they expected? But for your business, they aren’t always so helpful in the long run — people are wary of deals that might not be as good as they sound, and too many deals can erode their confidence in you. Still, though, discounts can be a useful tool when used sparingly and intelligently.
But that’s not the only way to provide value for your customers. You can make sure they get more than they’re paying for without dropping your prices. Loyalty programs, personalization, and partnerships with other related businesses can all give customers a little more bang for their buck — and keep them coming back for more.
Be Truthful With Your Customers—Show How the Sausage Is Made.
Transparency is critical in pretty much every facet of your business. It’s important internally — actually, transparency is one of our core values at Element Three — but it’s also important to be transparent with your customers.
That’s easy enough when things are going well. When your business is firing on all cylinders, of course you’re going to want to share that with people. But when things aren’t so great, that’s actually when transparency is most important. If you show your customers you’re willing to be frank with them about negative things, they’ll know that they can trust you when you talk about anything else.
Openness is a great antidote for mistrust. Let people know what’s going on, and they’ll be more likely to listen to what you want them to hear.
Don’t Ignore Feedback, and Respond to Problems.
It’s easier than ever today for customers to provide feedback after interacting with your business. There are tons of avenues just online available for praise and complaints, and frankly that’s a good thing. Whether it’s a phone call or a Facebook comment, it’s easy to know where you’re successful and where you could use some improvements.
It’s important not to ignore that feedback, and to make changes based on what you’re hearing from customers. But it’s also important to make sure customers know they’re being heard. Especially when feedback is given publicly (again, think about Facebook comments) it’s a good idea to respond. It shows the complainant that you care about their issue as you work to resolve it, and it shows everyone else on the platform that you’re diligent in providing great customer service.
Prove to People That They Should Trust You.
A much shorter way of saying all of that: words alone are never going to pop the cynicism balloon. You have to take action. Build trust in your brand by showing again and again — every day — that you’re worthy of trust. Prove your value, respond to your customers, be truthful and open, and always make decisions based on your “why.” In today’s world, where truth and trust are more precious commodities than ever, it’s critical that you do everything in your power to affirm your integrity to your customers. It could be the difference between success and failure.
Plus, you probably expect the businesses you support to do the same for you.
Perspective from Thomas Wachtel, Editor at Element Three | https://medium.com/element-three/what-does-brand-authenticity-look-like-in-the-era-of-fake-news-and-fake-followers-e1bb9deb43d | ['Element Three'] | 2018-07-27 15:12:43.593000+00:00 | ['Branding', 'Marketing Strategies', 'Marketing', 'Brand Strategy', 'Customer Experience'] |
How I made my portfolio website blazing fast with Gatsby | If you are thinking of building a static site with React and want it to perform as fast as a cheetah, you should consider using GatsbyJS. I decided to try it out and was amazed with how easy it was to setup, deploy, and how fast the site loads now. Gatsby uses the best parts of other front end tools to make the development experience feel like you’re on vacation.
After rebuilding my website with Gatsby and React 💜
Performance Issues With Original Website
I had been meaning to optimize the images on my portfolio website, which was one of my first freeCodeCamp Frontend Development projects.
Before the help of Gatsby -_-
Ouch! A 33/100 Google optimization score was painful to see. Yup I needed some help from the optimization gods. My website contained at least 17 project screenshots. I didn’t want to have to compress each image, generate multiple sizes and resolutions of each image, and lazy-load them.
When I first created this website, the Bootstrap 3 img-responsive class took care of scaling the images to fit different screen sizes, but I didn’t think about the fact that it was still loading some of my screenshots that were around 1400 x 860 pixels on mobile devices!
My score was also low because I had not minified my CSS or setup browser caching for it, and was not async loading external CSS resources.
Gatsby To The Rescue
I really wanted to rebuild this project using React. I could have used create-react-app which provides an out-of-the box build script and development server, but this still didn’t take care of the long task of having to crop different image sizes for all of my images.
Fortunately I was listening to Syntax’s, “Why Static Site Generators are Awesome” episode, and they talked about a few static site generators on the StaticGen.com list. If you haven’t heard what static site generators do, they transform your site into a directory with a single HTML file and static assets. No database or server code needed.
Gatsby won me over due to the similarities it has with create-react-app, which includes hot reloading, easy dev environment setup, and a build script. Gatsby takes it further by offering server-side rendering, smart image loading, and dedication to performance.
Since Gatsby is built on the React, GraphQL, and Webpack stack, we can write our content as React components! Winning! Gatsby takes care of rendering at build time to the DOM as static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Gatsby-image Component is BAE
So now to what I’ve really been wanting to share with you. Gatsby-image! Gatsby-image, is a React component that was designed to work with Gatsby’s GraphQL queries to completely optimize image loading for sites.
The approach is to use GraphQL queries to get images of the optimal size and then display them with the gatsby-image component.
How did I use this component to automatically create 3 thumbnails for each of my 17 project images? Magic! Not really, but it feels like it!
In my src/pages/index.js file, I queried all of the project images and gave it an alias of ProjectImgs. Since the queried data is now accessible through the data object as a prop, I was able to pass the projectImgData data (which is a node list of my project images) to my <Projects /> component:
//imports const HomePage = ({ data }) => {
const siteTitle = data.site.siteMetadata.title;
console.log(data.ProjectImgs);
const { edges: projectImgData } = data.ProjectImgs;
const { edges: iconImgData } = data.iconImgs;
return (
<div>
<Helmet
title={siteTitle}
link={[{ rel: "icon", type: "image/png", href: `${favicon}`}]}
/>
<Cover coverImg={data.coverImg} />
<div className="container-fluid main">
<Navigation />
<AboutMe profileImg={data.profileImg} iconImgs={iconImgData}
/>
<Projects projectImgs={projectImgData} />
<Contacts />
<Footer />
</div>
</div>
);
}; export const query = graphql`
query allImgsQuery {
//additional queries
... ProjectImgs: allFile(
sort: { order: ASC, fields: [absolutePath] }
filter: { relativePath: { regex: "/projects/.*.png/" } }
) {
edges {
node {
relativePath
name
childImageSharp {
sizes(maxWidth: 320) {
...GatsbyImageSharpSizes
}
}
}
}
} //additional queries
...
}
`;
Note: I had some trouble getting my graphQL queries to work and had to do a little digging around to figure out how to query for multiple images within a folder. What helped me was looking at other portfolio sites made with Gatsby.
Using the console, we can see what data.ProjectImgs returns to give you a better idea of what I am receiving from the query and what I am passing to my Projects component:
Console.log(data.ProjectImgs) returns an array of edges:
{edges: Array(17)}
edges
:
(17) [{…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}, {…}]
__proto__
:
Object{edges: Array(17)}
Extending one of the edges shows a node object that contains a childImageSharp property. This contains a sizes object which holds the image’s thumbnail sources. This sizes object is what we ultimately want to pass to our gatsby-image’s <Img /> component.
Extending an edge to show the information in a node:
{edges: Array(17)}
edges: Array(17)
0:
node:
childImageSharp: {sizes: {…}}
name: "CamperLeaderboard"
relativePath:"projects/CamperLeaderboard.png"
__proto__:Object
__proto__:Object
1:{node: {…}} //more nodes
...
In my <Projects /> component, I receive the node list of project images as a prop and for each project, I extract the childImageSharp.sizes object (which is renamed to imageSizes), and pass it into the gatsby-image’s <Img /> component:
import React, { Component } from "react";
import Img from "gatsby-image";
//more imports
... class Projects extends Component {
constructor(props) {
super(props); this.state = {
selectedType: "front-end"
}; this.onSelectChange = this.onSelectChange.bind(this);
}
onSelectChange(e) {
this.setState({ selectedType: e.target.value });
} render() {
const projectImgs = this.props.projectImgs;
const { selectedType } = this.state;
return (
<section id="projects" className="section projects">
<h2 className="text-center">PROJECTS</h2>
<div className="section-content">
<div className="subheader">
<FormGroup controlId="formControlsSelect">
...
</FormGroup>
</div>
<div className="project-list">
{projectList.map(project => {
const isSelectedType = selectedType === project.type;
const singleCardClass = classNames("single-card", {
hide: !isSelectedType
});
const image = projectImgs.find(n => {
return n.node.relativePath ===
`projects/${project.img}`;
});
const imageSizes = image.node.childImageSharp.sizes;
return (
<a
href={project.url}
key={project.url}
className={singleCardClass}
target="_blank"
>
<div className="card-img">
<Img
title={project.name}
alt="Screenshot of Project"
sizes={imageSizes}
className="card-img_src center-block"
/>
</div>
<div className="blue-divider" />
<div className="card-info">
<h4 className="card-name">{project.name}</h4>
<p>{project.description}</p>
</div>
</a>
);
})}
</div>
</div>
</section>
);
}
} export default Projects;
And this is the end result:
Example of lazy loading and blur effect using gatsby-image in a slow 3G network
That’s it! The <Img /> component takes care of using the correct image size, creating the blur up effects, and lazy loading my project images, since they are located further down the screen. The above querying was a bit more complex than querying a single image.
If you’re new to GraphQL, below are a few resources that better explain how to use GraphQL queries and the gatsby-image component:
Hosting To Netlify Was a Breeze
Since Gatsby generates static files, you can pretty much use any hosting provider. I decided to change my hosting provider from Github Pages to Netlify. I had been hearing about how easy it is to deploy a website to Netlify and they were not lying. Their free tier provides awesome features that makes the deployment process and making a website secure a breeze. It provides one click HTTPS, global CDN, continuous deployment, and the list goes on.
The setup process was so simple. I logged into Netlify, clicked the “New site from Git” button on my dashboard, and chose the Git repository for this project. I configured the site to deploy from master and clicked “Deploy Site”. That was it! Netlify takes care of the build process and publishes it to the web.
As I mentioned, Netlify offers continuous deployment, so now whenever I push changes to my master branch on GitHub, this automatically triggers a new build on Netlify. Once the build is complete, my changes will be live on the web.
Deployment setting is set to auto publishing
The Future Looks Bright
By rebuilding my website with Gatsby, not only did I learn about the different image optimization techniques for future projects, I also learned a bit about GraphQL, practiced my React skills, and took the opportunity to try out a new hosting provider.
I am really excited for the future of Gatsby and similar front end tools that remove the complexities of configuring environments and build tools. Instead, we can focus our energy and time on our code to build awesome stuff for our users. | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-i-made-my-portfolio-website-blazing-fast-with-gatsby-82ccddc2f671 | ['Maribel Duran'] | 2018-08-12 19:25:48.034000+00:00 | ['Web Hosting', 'Web Development', 'React', 'Tech', 'Gatsbyjs'] |
How to Turn the Internet Into Your Writing Laboratory | Publish Often
The key to treating the internet like a laboratory is to publish often so that we can experiment with a variety of different styles and techniques in a short period of time.
Every single time that we publish an article, we’re providing ourselves with another chance to gather data about how it’s received.
I love novels and long essays, but short pieces are best when it comes to getting quick feedback. The fast turnaround time of a short article or blog post allows us to rapidly test different writing techniques.
To me, there’s no worse feeling as a writer than to spend months working on a project, and then end up with barely any readers when it finally comes time to publish.
So should long writing be avoided entirely? Of course not. My solution is to work on long and short versions of an idea simultaneously.
As I continue to work on a long article or essay, I publish the shorter versions of the essay so that I can start gathering feedback. Based on that feedback, I know whether to adjust the style of the longer version or to keep it as is.
There’s no way to guarantee the success of any piece of writing, but experimenting with shorter articles is the best way to improve our chances.
Publish on Multiple Platforms
There are a lot of great publishing platforms online. Unfortunately, it’s easy to allow ourselves to find one that we like and forget about all the others.
Just as I experiment with how I write, I also make sure to experiment with how I publish.
If you only publish on a single website, it can be tough to tell why your writing gets the reaction it does. If you’re getting barely any readers, it might be because your writing needs improvement, but it’s just as likely that you simply haven’t found the right audience yet.
Finding the right audience is just as important as writing well. Even the best writing in the world won’t flourish if it’s being put in front of a group of people who just aren’t interested in the topic.
Learn From the Data
If you want to use the internet as a writing lab, the most important step is to actually read and learn from the data.
Checking to see how many readers each story got is not enough. The essential skill is learning to compare data between stories.
There are so many variables that can affect how a story is received, so we need to be systematic about comparing stories. What I like to do is separate my stories into different categories based on variables that I think might be affecting readership.
For example, how do my stories about one topic do when compared with stories of another? How do two stories about the same topic compare when published on different platforms?
Some of the other variables I think about are whether the story is personal or objective, the overall tone of the story, paragraph length, sentence length, and publication time.
Even after comparing stories, it isn’t always clear what exactly makes one story more successful than another.
When I’m not sure what has attributed to a story’s success, I know that I should experiment with similar stories in the future so that I can have more data to look at. By tweaking the style a little with each story, I can get closer to narrowing down what works and what doesn’t. Experimenting with our writing is a never-ending process, but if we do it correctly, we can get a little better with each article we write. | https://benyaclark.medium.com/how-to-turn-the-internet-into-your-writing-laboratory-22763ecf2872 | ['Benya Clark'] | 2018-12-15 22:42:35.912000+00:00 | ['Writing Tips', 'Blogging', 'Internet', 'Learning', 'Writing'] |
Why Conversation is Important in Designing Voice UI? | Image Credit: Gleb Kuznetsov
The sense of touch and pressure has been the common form of interaction in terms of Human-computer interaction for the past few decades but one thing which we forget is that there is another more natural and intuitive way of interaction which is our voice.
Voice UIs have gone standard and are changing lives and expanding availability for some consumers. At a similar time, the present voice user encounters (most popular as Cortana, Alexa, and Google Home) remain established in an extremely basic, order and-control procedure. We can just call the present encounters “conversational” in the broadest feeling of the word — as verbally expressed words exchanged.
There is a lot of skepticism around the field of Conversational and Voice Design. At least this was the case when I first started working on a voice project, we were a team of myself — and a few other UX researchers. Very soon we learned that conversational design is like creating chatbots and voice UI design is an infusion of both conversational design and to create an interaction flow between a voice assistant and a human.
Comparing to other projects that I have been a part of is more or less the same, you recruit participants, do a contextual inquiry, gain some understanding of what their pain points and needs are and then you move on to create a persona and finally skinning the product. Now coming to the Voice project it is not the UI you are trying to create its the conversation; here you need to have a good writing skill.
In voice, writing is design.
You must have a few good writers in your team who can use their creative thinking and increase the quality of voice applications.
What the future of Voice Interaction looks like
Now Voice Interaction could be divided into two parts:
Order / Command Control / Response
One thing which we lack in Interaction design is the Response phase. Making a Natural Language Voice Assistance(NLVA) in a foreseeable future is not a very tough task because people around the world are helping to build it but the question is, will it be able to match JARVIS? Whenever Tony Stark asks a question to JARVIS its not just the question that the NLVA analyses but the subsequent relation to the question and its past occurrences. It remembers what a human is saying and empathize and understands to give a relevant and correct answer.
Human Interaction and Voice
In the TED talk by Don Norman, he talks about how emotion is all about acting. Condition is about understanding the world, emotion is about interpreting it — saying good, bad, safe, dangerous, and getting us ready to act. he also talks about behavioral design which is all about feeling in control, which includes usability, understanding — but also the feel and heft.
This is the reason why Voice assistance lacks the human touch. NLVA shouldn’t react to the question that we ask instead it should understand and then prepare a response so that it becomes a conversation.
Have you at any point truly attempted to separate the steps? So consider sitting with your friend at a bistro and simply having a casual talk. How would you realize when to go ahead? How would you realize when to move on to the next topics? Furthermore, how would you even know what subjects to talk about? It’s just plain obvious, the greater part of us don’t generally consider it since it’s practically natural. What’s more, when we find a good pace, we get familiar with what matters to them, and afterward, we realize what points we can explore. Be that as it may, with regards to showing AI frameworks how to communicate with individuals, we need to show them bit by bit what to do. What’s more, at present, it feels inconvenient.
If you’ve at any point attempted to converse with Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant, you can tell that it or they can, in any case, sound cold. Also, have you at any point get irritated when they didn’t comprehend what you were stating and you needed to rethink what you needed multiple times just to play a song? Okay, to the credit of the designers, realistic conversation is extremely hard. What’s more, there’s an entire part of humanism, called conversational analysis, that attempts to make blueprints for various kinds of discussion. Types like customer care or advising, instructing, and others.
Conversation Analysis
If you want to know more about conversation analysis there is an interesting concept introduced by philosopher H. Paul Grice in his 1975 article “Logic and Conversation” in which he suggested that meaningful exchange is defined by cooperation.
“Each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction.
Best practice to build a conversation in Voice UI
Conversation design is a pretty new approach which came into popularity due to worldwide advancement in voice assistance technology. But no matter there is always a point which might turn into an awkward conversation. Accordingly, to be a great conversation designer you need to be a great conversationalist. Here are ways to design a VUI that talks more naturally.
Purpose gives direction: Have you tried to have a selfless conversation and felt completely lost?. To make sure this doesn’t happen you have to know what is the purpose, which in turn provides direction that leads to more engaging conversation.
People like being heard: Every healthy relationship is built upon trust. If we make VUI’s listen to users carefully and acknowledge that they have been heard by confirmation it gives the user an emotional satisfaction that someone is listening and builds the connection.
Both parties should be cooperating to push the conversation: Sometimes users say the answer prior to the predictable question that the bot is gonna ask.
Check for Conversation Errors: As a human, we make mistakes while talking but when we talk to another person we also throwout facial cues that helps repair the conversation from being awkward. But in the case of VUIs, it doesn’t receive any visual cues so it is the job of designers to create conversational repairs. For instance.
Did you mean,______________?
And also Rapid Re-prompts, asking a short immediate question for instance:
Sorry, what was that?
Words carry emotions, So Design VUIs that convey a personality that seems more human.
How do you design for Voice?
First off, different platforms have different names to their AI Assistance, For instance, Amazon calls them ‘Skills’ whereas Google chooses to call them ‘Actions’. Every platform has its own way of programming these skills and also various in-built features. Alexa is more blessed in this case cause Amazon allows developers to integrate third-party skills easily when compared to Google.
Building on Amazon Alexa
You can either use the Alexa kit or you can use VoiceFlow. A little bit about VoiceFlow, it is a SAAS platform which allows user to create VUI’s without coding also allows you to integrate the conversation to Alexa and google home. This makes it much easier to create a sample VUI within few minutes. Users can just drag and drop the components on to the board and connect this component to create a conversation flow.
Recently I was a part of a team where we aimed to explore how a technology-based solution can help people search for dining buddies.
During this process, we thought what if we can do the same thing by asking Alexa or Google to search for your dining buddies. How would the experience change? Here is an example.
Voice UI for Dining Buddies
Putting it all together
Conversations and to a bigger degree, language, is intricate and loaded up with subtleties. Be that as it may, this isn’t to imply that we can’t improve our capacity to take part in better discussions.
The objective isn’t to reproduce human collaboration. The objective is to inspire a connection with a discussion that feels less computerized and helps users with what’s proposed.
The best discussions cause individuals to feel great, adjusting to the meek changes immediately and dialogue flow normally. Soon individuals will consider voice a characteristic method for interfacing with products and services. Simply envision that in ten years, you’ll stroll into the house and control a wide range of machines using voice. By concentrating on building trust, designers will make frameworks that will be utilized to respond to the most significant questions, for example, “What would my health condition be after 5 years based on my current food consumption?”.
Check out my portfolio.
P.S. If you have any feedback hit me on my website. If you like this, make sure to share and recommend (by clap👏👏👏 ). | https://medium.com/nyc-design/why-conversation-is-important-in-voice-ui-design-c8a1fae8d93b | ['Rittam Debnath'] | 2020-04-09 21:56:32.105000+00:00 | ['Interaction Design', 'Voice Assistant', 'New York', 'Conversational UI', 'UX'] |
Microsolidarity Part 3: The Reciprocity Game | This is part 3 of a 4 part series about ‘microsolidarity’: a plan for people supporting each other to do more meaningful work. The other parts are here: 1, 2, 4
Cartoon characters from “Captain Planet & The Planeteers”
Crews: when they’re good they’re really very good
Around ~5–8 people is a sweet spot of high impact and low coordination cost. Our little Loomio co-op is one example: we’ve raised more than $1M in ethical financing and supported 1000s of groups to be more inclusive and more effective in their governance. This is a scale of impact that I cannot possibly have on my own.
A good Crew is not only super efficient. It can also be a potent site for personal development. In a Crew you can experience human difference as a resource, which is our best antidote to bigoted tribalism. It’s a place to practice multiple Partnerships simultaneously, a rich source of belonging, acceptance, recognition, and accountability, a place to start coming out of my traumatised patterns of behaviour. My Crew is where my values gain nuance and complexity. One example: I only learned the crucial distinction between fairness and sameness by practicing a tonne of collective decision making around money.
In my original design criteria I said I want to work in a way that produces courage and meaning. You begin to see how Crews play such an important role when you view courage and meaning as social phenomena.
Simply, I believe courage is developed when we encourage each other, with our enthusiastic listening, praising, challenging, cuddling, gazing, regarding, acknowledging and reminding. It’s a fucking discouraging world out there! I need almost constant deposits of encouragement to maintain a positive balance in the courage account.
Meaning, too. I make sense of a phenomenon by considering how my peers respond to it. If I know them very well, and I know myself well, I can interpolate the meaning of an event from the scattered data of my peers’ reactions. My stable membership in a few Crews gives me great confidence in my ability to make sense of this chaotic world.
Unfortunately, Crews are often dysfunctional
Because we’re infected with individualism, we lack the techniques, behaviours, language, beliefs, ideas, tools, and nuanced values required to thrive in multiplicity. As a result, many small groups suffer common ailments: mini dictatorship, hidden hierarchy, too much consensus, not enough consensus, toxic culture, unresolved conflict, repetitive trauma, equal power dogma… We can easily get stuck in the triangular domination patterns, or the circular design-by-committee patterns.
Nati and I have spent the past 2 years helping groups to recover from some of these dysfunctions. I’m writing a book of practical solutions for the common failure patterns of collaborative groups. Hopefully these ideas can help a little, but what’s needed most of all is practice.
I’m curious what happens when we start new groups, already inoculated against the most common strains of the individualism virus. So in 2019 I plan to start a bunch more Crews so I can learn how to start them well. Here’s the first draft of the experiment I intend to run. I’m already looking forward to coming back here in a year to discover which ideas were totally misguided. Yay, practice! 🏋🏾
A Sequence to Crystallise new Crews
The first step is to start a Congregation localised to one geographic region (I’m starting in Western Europe). Nati and I will invite about 20 or 30 trusted people to a first gathering where we can co-design the minimum viable structure to govern our community.
As a starting point I suggest our purpose could be something like “people supporting each other to do more meaningful work”. That is, peers mobilising our diverse strengths to look after our peers, not institutional, paternalistic, or condescending support. “Meaningful work” is intentionally subjective, inviting a complicated amalgam of different purposes: planting trees, raising kids, writing software; if it is truly meaningful to you, it’s probably worth doing. And “more” is ambiguous in a good way: maybe you need more meaning in your work, or you’ve already found your meaningful work but you want to do more of it, or maybe you want to shift the whole global system of work to be more meaningful. All the options are good!
If the 20–30 people subsequently invite 1 or 2 more, we’ll have a first cohort of up to 90 people, which should be a big enough dating pool for complementary Crew-mates to find each other. Hopefully we can immediately launch a handful of new Crews and run many micro-experiments in parallel.
I suspect the first thing to do within a Crew is to establish psychological safety, a space where all the parts of your networked Self are welcome to show up. From there, the job is just to respond to the needs in the group.
Most of the people we plan to invite have already got a sense of what work is most meaningful to them, but almost all of us are financially precarious. So I’m interested in moving quite rapidly from emotional intimacy to economics. An easy place to start would be to disrupt the money taboo and expose our financial parts to each other: how much income do you earn? Where does it come from? What lifestyle would support you to be at your best? How much does that cost? If you need to earn more, are there some creative new tactics you can try? If you already earn enough, are there opportunities for you to get the same money with less compromise in your values, or more freedom in your time, or with more social impact? If you have a surplus, what needs to be true for you to want to share it with your crewmates?
Personally I’m interested in building economic solidarity, because I think we can do more good when we’re in a position to be generous. But maybe the rest of the Congregation will have different priorities. Mostly I’m interested in experiments that produce deep deep trust.
The Reciprocity Game
Building trust is not rocket science. It’s mostly about reciprocity i.e. building a track record of doing each other favours. Here are some versions of the reciprocity game I’ve tried. If you know some more, please share ‘em!
Level 1: Listening
Sit in a circle. One at a time, someone says something that is true for them right now, e.g. “I’m excited about x” or “I feel sad because Y”. All you have to do is pay attention, listen to each person in turn, then eventually you say something that is true for you. If everyone listens to everyone, congratulations, you all just earned 1 reciprocity point.
Level 2: Money
One person talks about (A) the work they do for money, and (B) the work that is most meaningful to them. Discuss together how they might bring A and B into closer alignment. Now, anyone can make a small gesture to help make this happen, e.g. share a new perspective, offer a design process or productivity improvement, make an introduction, encourage them to keep trying even though it is hard. If you offer something: hooray, 5 points for you. If you asked for something you need, hey! 5 points for you too! And BONUS! you both get an extra point for talking and listening with mutual respect and positive regard.
Level 3: Consistency
It’s pretty easy to do something nice one time and have a momentary surge of good feelings. If you really want to excel at the reciprocity game though, focus on consistency.
Either in a Partnership (2 people) or in a Crew (up to 8), practice meeting once a month (virtually or in person). Reflect on where you’ve been and envision where you might go next. (You can do this during or before the meeting.) Take turns to share your reflections.
Everyone gets 1 point for the first meeting, 3 for the second, and 5 points for every meeting after that. 5 points deducted for missing a meeting.
If you want a little more structure, here are some documented processes you can try:
Feelz Circle (3 processes for sharing emotional care between friends/ comrades/ lovers)
Care Pod (personal-and-professional development in small groups, a new practice in development at Enspiral, based on Intentional Change Theory)
Stewardship (peer support system for Partnerships)
The Elephants (long term personal development for Crews)
Level 4: Conflict
Now we’re getting into the harder levels. Conflict is a great way to strengthen ties. It goes like this: you do something thoughtless, or miscommunicate in a way that upsets somebody you care about. They get hurt. Then you apologise, take responsibility, and attempt to make amends. They listen and forgive. Woohoo! You transformed your conflict into greater connection: 10 reciprocity points each! Careful with this one though, because you lose 20 points each if you don’t find a mutually agreeable resolution.
Level 5: Co-owners
After you’ve played a few rounds of the earlier levels, you might be ready to play Co-owners. Start with an idea, maybe it’s a new tech platform or a community project or a commune. Maybe it’s a savings pool or lending circle or livelihood pod for sharing credit, income or savings with your trusted peers. Whatever the idea, find some people who want to work on it with you. Now, when you formally incorporate as a company or an association or co-op, whatever, share the legal ownership with a few people. Congratulations, 100 reciprocity points! Whatever happens, this relationship is going to form a part of your life story. | https://medium.com/microsolidarity/microsolidarity-part-3-the-reciprocity-game-4109e702a07d | ['Richard D. Bartlett'] | 2018-12-02 08:41:43.064000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Sharing Economy', 'Leadership', 'Trust', 'Microsolidarity'] |
How to Generate Multiple Sources of Income | The only way to truly find work supporting your lifestyle is by trying several different career paths and side hustles.
I would not be making strides towards achieving my financial goals and doing work; I genuinely enjoy it if I always played it safe. As kids, we were taught to be safe. We were taught not to color outside the lines.
We were told we could do anything we wanted.
But life and the system tells us we need to find something stable. We need to go to school, get a degree, work at a job, climb the ladder, get promoted, and then we’ll be happy.
As someone who didn’t finish college and follow the crowd, I’m here to tell you that there are other ways to make a living besides doing what everyone else does. | https://medium.com/makingofamillionaire/how-to-generate-multiple-sources-of-income-7dec8089b6d4 | ['Jordan Mendiola'] | 2020-11-25 02:10:29.653000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Finance', 'Money', 'Work', 'Inspiration'] |
The Moral-Mirror Journal | Photo by Min An from Pexels, modified by author
Many have learned the value of habitually asking themselves, on seeing the behavior of others, “What does that tell me?” That is useful because actions speak louder (and, we feel, more truly) than words. Patterns of behavior are particularly telling.
Get some perspective
It is also good to look at one’s behavior from the outside, as an objective onlooker would see it, rather than through the distorting shimmer of one’s intentions and motivations: one’s actions by themselves, standing nakedly alone. People always have good and sufficient reason (in their eyes) for doing what they do, and they view their actions in the light of those reasons, which makes it difficult for them to see how their actions appear to others.
Writers, for example, generally know what they’re trying to communicate, so when they read what they’ve written, they read it in the light of that knowledge. Indeed, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge titled their (superb) book on writing The Reader Over Your Shoulder because the book’s goal is to help the writer become that (third-party) reader, able to read what they wrote from the view of someone else. (This post includes a link to a PDF of the book’s examples to use as exercises.)
But for a writer to read his output objectively is extremely difficult, so you often encounter writing of the COIK variety: Clear Only If (already) Known. It’s not unusual to see a writer trying to convince someone who is puzzled or confused by some passage that it is, in fact, clear, even though the evidence that it’s not is right at hand.
Perspective is difficult
Even with a sincere desire to view one’s actions as others see it, it’s difficult and thus rare, which is why people treasure an honest friend or relative who will “lay it on the line.” But our social conventions and personal psychology make it challenging to be forthright. Most cannot offer honest criticism because it goes against our training, social conventions, and our desire to avoid confrontation. See, for example, the Abilene Paradox, a situation that would not have occurred if any of the people involved had been able to be honest and forthright.
But even though the stakes in that situation were very low — nothing was seriously at risk in terms of relationships or things of value — none of the group could bring themselves to speak up. We have a strong drive to “go along,” conforming to group judgment and perceptions even when those don’t match the reality that is in front of us — and worse, we don’t consciously choose to do it. It happens when the unconscious mind is in control and managing what we perceive.
It is, after all, the job of the unconscious mind to translate nerve impulses from the eyes into the “picture” the conscious mind sees: because the unconscious controls that process, it is in a position to make alterations. For example, we can get a sense that someone we’ve just met is creepy or untrustworthy for no reason we can name or interpret, or we (unconsciously) attribute motives to accompany actions we observe. (Indeed, sometimes our adaptive unconscious is running the show, our conscious selves just along for the ride. See Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, by Timothy Wilson for a fascinating account of the unconscious and of how you study something not available to your conscious mind.)
Treasure honest feedback
Because honest feedback is rare, one treasures any friend or relative who will provide it. A good counselor can help because they are a third-party observer as we describe our behavior. The counselor’s questions can peel away our interpretations and our stated intentions to show us our actions and words unadorned, as others see them. A counselor is trained (and paid) to be honest — and has the advantage of not having a dog in the fight.
The same honest and objective view of our actions can also occur in well-run group therapy. Moreover, when we hear from several people at once how our behavior looks to others, it’s hard to dismiss their observations — harder than when hearing it from one person. One person’s comments, we can all too quickly decide, come from some idiosyncratic point of view — a rationalization harder to make when four or five agree.
An excellent example of this group feedback can be found in Chris Argyris’s Increasing Leadership Effectiveness, in which a group of young CEOs tell each other how their behavior in leading their companies looks when viewed by an outside observer. (Naturally enough, CEOs have trouble getting honest feedback from within their company because subordinates are reluctant to point out to their boss behavior that contradicts the boss’s stated values. Thus the boss’s view of her or his behavior can drift far from how others see it.)
As an aside: all of Argyris’s works are interesting and worth reading: he studied how a learning organization works and why such organizations are rare, and why so many organizations actively resist learning and severely punish those who try to make changes that would benefit the organization.
Our view of ourselves is clouded
Though it’s easy to say “look at your actions as a third party would see them,” we are so enmeshed in our intentions and motivations that those generally shape how we see our actions whether we want them to or not. We observe our behavior through the lens of our intentions. When others don’t interpret our behavior as we expect, our impulse is to blame them for not grasping our intentions, because our intentions are so palpably present to ourselves.
We are familiar with how groupthink arises when a small group isolates itself, getting no outside scrutiny and input. Group psychology overwhelms individual perception so that the group arrives at decisions that the group would quickly dismiss had the group been operating openly, accepting input and critiques from outside.
When we observe our actions through introspection, we are in the same isolated situation and liable to the same sort of distortions. In this case, “group pressure” comes from our unconscious, which adjusts our conscious view to accommodate our unconscious inclinations: groupthink of one.
The answer here, as for groups making a decision, is to open up the process and seek outside views. Otherwise, our view of our behavior can become skewed and distorted. For example, many who commit immoral/unethical acts view their acts from the context of an internal monologue that portrays themselves as victims of powerful forces. They adopt the view that they deserve this, perhaps adding that it’s only temporary and will be corrected before people find out—the typical excuse embezzlers offer.
Another example: people who are controlling tend to view their actions as “being helpful” (and are puzzled when their helpfulness prompts negative reactions).
Another example: the person who often interrupts may well be thinking that he is helping move the conversation along (because he’s sure he knows what the other person’s going to say).
Those who must acknowledge misdeeds and missteps often feel shock, surprise, and dismay when they say what they did and, in saying it, recognize how their actions look when viewed by others. “It wasn’t like that!” is unconvincing when it was indeed like that. The only thing missing from the picture is the siren song of that internal monologue the lured the perpetrator to act as they did.
Step back to get a new perspective
Many homes, hotels, and apartment buildings have a mirror beside the door or elevator so people can see their appearance as others will see it. Even when they feel confident in how they present themselves, the mirror can show them a splash of powder on their coat, a bit of food on their teeth, or a clash of color in their clothing. Seeing themselves as others will see them allows a comfortable, non-judgmental way for them to take stock of their appearance and make any needed corrective adjustments.
I’ve already mentioned the benefits of having an honest and frank friend and relative, or of having a good therapist or participating in a well-run group devoted to feedback. But what can you do on your own, without the benefit of an outside observer? It would be handy to have a mirror that would reflect not our appearance but our actions, so we could view them objectively, as others will see them, just as we view our appearance in the hallway mirror.
The journal as mirror
A good third-person journal can be such a mirror. It’s a journal in which you record your behavior but not your thoughts, writing only what an onlooker would observe. It helps if you write in third person. For example, suppose I ate the last piece of cake. I would record only the fact that I ate it and would omit “because I felt like eating something sweet, and there was only a little left, and I’ve been quite good on my diet, and it seemed pointless to put it away, and I didn’t think anyone else would want it” and so on. And rather than writing “I ate the piece of cake,” I would write “Mike ate the piece of cake and then put the dish into the sink without washing it.” Record just the facts and describe yourself and your actions in third person. Then let some time pass before you read it.
This method seems to work best when you use the moral mirror to reflect a single aspect of your behavior:
a food journal (as in the example), recording your observed behavior when food is involved; or
(as in the example), recording your observed behavior when food is involved; or a work journal , recording your observed interactions with co-workers; or
, recording your observed interactions with co-workers; or a study journal , recording your observed behavior when you study (recording after the fact, not while studying); or
, recording your observed behavior when you study (recording after the fact, not while studying); or a relationship journal, recording your interactions with your partner (omitting reasons and rationalizations and attributed motives, recording just what an observer would see).
In this context, morality and ethics apply only to your behavior, not your private thoughts, desires, or proclivities, nor your sense of success or failure in what you did. Your inner desires and your feelings about what you did are irrelevant. When doing this moral-mirror exercise, look only at your actions. (Those actions include what you say or write, since those too are actions that a third person can observe.) What you record should be a purely objective description. (For an extended example of such writing, see Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Glass Key.)
Ignore intentions — record only actions
Intention can indeed be significant (as in deciding whether a person will be charged with murder or manslaughter), but in this journal, record observed acts and ignore intentions. You can deduce the intentions of others, but they are not directly observable by an onlooker. And as noted above, your own intentions are an unreliable lens through which to view your behavior.
The Moral-Mirror Journal functions as a third-person account of your actions.
By looking at your actions from the outside, you remove from the equation all rationalizations and justifications. By referring to yourself in third person, it’s easier to adopt the mindset of an onlooker, a neutral witness giving an objective account. Similarly, the journal avoids mind-reading others whose actions you describe, not guessing at their motivations.
Then look into the mirror
After you have collected several entries and after some time has passed (a few days is enough so that you can put aside the thoughts and feelings involved in the events), read the record of what you and others did and said. As you read, ask yourself, “What does this tell me?” Look at the behavior — both your own and that of others — and see what messages the behavior conveys. Actions speak louder than words (and certainly more truly than words: actions are not false — they are what one actually does). And look for patterns: the same message being conveyed again and again at different times in different actions.
If you find that you dislike what your actions say, consider how you can act in the future to send a better message. Just as you examine your image in a regular mirror to adjust your appearance (straighten your tie or scarf, or remove a bit of spinach from your teeth), you can look at your behavior in the journal and decide what adjustments you can make.. A regular mirror helps you see how to improve your appearance; a moral mirror can help you see how to improve your behavior.
And at the same time, you may well discover that the actions of others become quite illuminating when viewed as messages. In some instances, the scales will fall from your eyes, and you will realize (for example) that a “friend” is actually quite selfish and manipulative, and an “enemy” is only trying to get you to do your best.
It’s worth pointing out that those who don’t care about their appearance (or don’t like their appearance) tend to avoid looking into a mirror. The mirror helps those who do care about their appearance. Similarly, the moral-mirror journal will be of little interest to those who don’t care how their actions affect others. If you want to understand more about your behavior and how it affects relationships with others, you will find this journal useful.
Focus on what you can control
One final note: you can control your behavior but not the behavior of others. In Stephen Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Successful People: Restoring the Character Ethic, as he discusses Habit 1 (“Be Proactive”), he points out the importance of where you focus your attention and energy. (You can read this brief — and thus incomplete — outline of the book (PDF).)
Your circle of concern consists of those situations and events over which you have no control. If you focus your attention and energy on things in your circle of concern, you gradually become reactive rather than proactive (because you have no control over these things, you can only react to what happens).
Your circle of influence consists of those situations and events that you do control or influence, and here you can be proactive. Your actions and how you respond to situations are, of course, squarely in the center of your circle of influence. By focusing your attention and energy on things in the circle of influence, your actions and choices can be effective — highly effective.
Evaluating your actions allows you to change those actions, and such changes will also change how people respond. A Moral-Mirror Journal makes this evaluation easier. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-moral-mirror-journal-671a425f73da | ['Michael Ham'] | 2020-12-26 22:11:51.622000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Lessons Learned', 'Journaling', 'Writing', 'Self Improvement'] |
Call for Submissions to New Promposity Challenge — July /August -Write a Transcendental Piece | Perhaps, like me, you are a fan of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While some find his poetry harsh, I often find it to be beautiful. He frequently turns to nature to display his views of life, the spiritual self, independence, and loss. One of my favorites, Threnody, written about the son he lost to Scarlet Fever when he was just five years old, is filled with the rudiments of New England hills, gardens, and scrub forest which reminds me of the time I spend in Rhode Island and Connecticut. In the grief-stricken language is described the perfectly distinct New England winterscape.
The following passage taken from the essay, “The Poet”, is for me, the epitome of the creative process and what results. It is inspiration, life experience, expression and the outcome not just for ourselves but for others. While it speaks specifically of the poet, I think it can just as easily apply to any type of creative expression:
The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you read the essay, you will likely see why Emerson was known more for his prose than for his poetry. His poetry formed the basis for a new type of poetry and his prose explained the principles of it.
This was the beginning of the Transcendental Movement. Emerson’s essay “Nature,” published in 1836, presented the Transcendentalist philosophy. In this essay, he expressed the belief that the natural and material world exists to reveal universal meaning to the individual soul through subjective experiences. He promoted the poet’s role as seer, a “transparent eyeball” that received insight intuitively through their perception of nature.
In other words, the most important reality is what is sensed or what is intuitive even if it can’t be explained in words, rather than what is thought and analyzed, such as scientific knowledge. This is the basis of transcendentalism. There are five primary characteristics that are embodied in the movement. These are nonconformity, self-reliance, free thought, confidence, and the importance of nature. | https://medium.com/promposity/call-for-submissions-to-new-promposity-challenge-july-august-write-a-transcendental-piece-70bab4277d25 | ['Natalie Frank'] | 2020-07-14 13:24:03.253000+00:00 | ['Essay', 'Writing Prompts', 'Poetry', 'Promposity', 'Writing'] |
Working For Someone Or Working For Yourself | “So… How does it feel to work for yourself?” — this is something I get asked too often since I started to venture into my startup. So I thought to myself, let me do a roundup of all the feelings that catch me now and then.
After completing my MBA and working for a couple of years, the first few months were nothing less than a blessing. There was so much — these so-called “Good Vibes” — peace, positivity, fresh perspective, zeal and the will to change the world, the industry and to top it all — become a better person and professional. One year into the journey, the landscape has changed a lot. The reality has seeped in from all the corners and cracks. The good vibes are now only visible on my coffee mug, and as I sip my morning coffee, I wonder where the rest of the big words have vanished.
Are you scared, as yet? Well, don’t worry, the above paragraph is the best and the most honest introduction that someone will ever give to you. Ask any of the founders about the days when they were working from their dining room. There are days that I feel that I can conquer the world, but then there are when I feel like packing my stuff, take off for the Himalayas and crush my laptop with one of the rocks there.
I guess I have strayed from the original question. Let me put the answer in a way that it is relatable. Here goes:
1. Monday Blues Are A Thing Of Past
When I was working, the only blues I ever felt was a Monday one, and my Instagram is full of stories with the hashtag — #mondayblues. But now the scene is a little different. The first thing is, that for me to attach blues to a particular day, I should remember the days of the week and second of all, every night brings blues for me. The simple reason is being the fact that the next morning will present me with the same problems that I nicely shoved under the rug when I shut down my laptop and called it a day. But at the same time, here is an upside, I take Monday as an off. It is my revenge against all those Mondays that made my Sunday night a cribbing session.
2. I Am No More An Introvert
When I was working, I used to look forward to the weekends. And for the people who know me, I am not big about going out. I loved my cosy nook and Zomato, or Swiggy was the only friend that I needed. But now, times have changed. I go out to see people. Sometimes at around 2 am, I go out, have roadside tea and observe people while sipping my Masala Chai. But in all honesty, that is the moment of realisation for me. I realise that I can do this and soak at this moment because I don’t have to wake up at 7 am to get ready to go to the office.
3. Pyjamas Are My New Best Friends
Every Saturday night, when I used to do my laundry, I used to take out six pair of clothes for the next week, and that used to be a therapeutic moment. In that flow, I could also shop for something new for a simple reason that I was wearing the same colour for two days in a row. Earlier I had “clothes for home” and “clothes for going out”. But now it has come down to “decent clothes for home” and “torn clothes for sleeping” and of course — a hoody for taking emergency work calls. Now I can always wear my clothes for going out, but then the laziness asks me a question — Is it worth all the effort? And there — I have an epiphany. Now the bright side to all of this is that I don’t have to pay for ironing anymore. I wash the clothes, dry them, fold (sometimes I skip this step too) and wear them.
4. My Phone Doesn’t Ring Anymore
When I used to go home even on leave, my phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I couldn’t complete one conversation with my family without getting at least one ping. I felt wanted, and that made me happy. I always used to carry a power bank with me because my iPhone’s battery would discharge every 7–8 hours. And I would blame Apple for looting me — almost sold my kidney to buy one iPhone but they can’t even give a proper battery that could last a day. But now, the only calls I receive as from various customer support executives. There are days when even they don’t call me — probably because they know I don’t spend as much now and I am no more a valuable customer. Here is a bright side to it, I speak a lot more to my parents now, I get a lot of time to read and be at peace. The most important thing is that I came to know that my iPhone has a decent battery backup and my phone can last for up to two days without charging.
5. Home Remedies Are The New Normal
Early in days when I had some human interaction, I cared about my looks. I would get manicure and pedicure done every 15 days. I would pamper myself to a full-body spa and let the steam off with some head massage. I would get my eyebrows done almost every week, but now I only visit the salon when my face lock faces trouble recognising me. I am sure a lot of you must be thinking “you should care for yourself for your own sake and not for others!”. Well, let me save you some trouble. When you are living off your savings, it becomes a luxury to go out to the salon. I now prefer to buy some paid illustrations for my website over the OPI Nail paint. But here is the upside to all this — I have discovered a lot of homemade ways to take care of my skin and hair. And of course, this has improved my skin quality and also has improved the quality of my website.
6. I Can Only Blame Myself Now
Now the point I am going to talk about is the one I miss the most about working for someone else. Earlier, when we used to have our review meetings, there always used to be someone who messed up alongside you. And at that moment, the feeling of mutual admiration seeps in, and you imagine all those moments when you and the other person will be the best friends for life. But then your imagination also goes a little further, and you realise that your boss is going to make your life a living hell. In that very moment, you see to your right and then to your left and find that weak link in your team to blame. Or if you are a team leader, you just humbly say “As the team lead, I take this one for the team”, and you become a hero. Well, I don’t get to live these moments anymore. When something goes wrong, I don’t have anyone else to blame. I can’t talk my colleagues and my boss. I can’t blame my seniors or the leadership for the mess. The only person I can blame now is — ME. The upside of this that I don’t need to care about office politics. I get more time to self-introspect, and that has made me better than what I do. I have become my most prominent critic, and that has somewhere improved the quality of my work.
7. Money Management Is My New Skill
Here comes one of our basic needs — Money. When I was working, one dream that I had from an economic front was — “One day I will be paid higher than this”. I would have long conversations with my dad about investment so that I can get some income tax exemption. The only time I cared about my rent was the time when I used to file my income tax and used to wonder if I really pay so much money as rent. The weekends used to be about exploring new restaurants and long weekends used to about those short getaway trips. The fact that the salary will get credited to my account every month was such a comfort. That security acts as a padding, and sometimes we are not able to feel the reality that lies beneath that cushioning. Now, it has been a year that any salary has credited to my account, and now I have one dream — “There would come a day when I would be able to pay myself”. But it isn’t as bad as it sounds. This past year has made me so much better at money management. I have started asking the right questions before spending the money. I have realised that money is not what makes us happy. It is the people around us. You can have fun even at your home; there is nothing like home-cooked meals; and this past year has taught me the real sense of ‘Netflix and Chill’.
8. Diets Are Overrated
When I was working for someone else, to stay fit, I used to try all those fad diets. I used to buy all those expensive superfoods — flax seeds, chia seeds, quinoa, organic millets, avocados, so on and so forth. I had all those fancy memberships for swimming clubs, stadium, high-end gyms, etc. And of course, the most exciting part was buying outfits all those activities. That was a good time! And now, the only thing I rely upon is walking and cross trainer (this is one of my old days buy)! And before you ask me, no more superfoods. Just regular available food. Again, it is not the time to indulge in the luxury right now. The upside? I have never been fitter. I have realised that all I needed to do was walk regularly and eat home-cooked meals. That was the diet that was required.
9. I Am My Own Boss
When I was working, the one thing I didn’t have to worry about was generating work. Got confused? I mean, I had a defined role, and there was a job description. I exactly knew what I had to do, and there was a boundary. I had some numbers to achieve and some tasks to complete. You do that, and you are good to go. Yes, of course, I had to think of innovative ways to do my work, but I knew what I had to do. If something was not working, I could go to someone for help. There used to a definitive vision board, and everyone knew what we had to achieve. And the best part, we didn’t have to create the vision board. But now things are so different. I have to create my vision board, decide my numbers, and there is no defined job description. There are days when I lose my path, and it is all dark. There are days that I doubt my vision, and I question everything that I have been working for so long. But the upsides are the days when I fall in love with the work that I do. And I feel free because I get my creative freedom. I have the power to choose my vision and my path.
So, the bottom line is that there are days when I feel the urge to go back to days when I was working for someone else, but then there are days when I wouldn’t want to have it any other way. Like right now I am feeling blessed that I don’t have to write the 10th point to complete this blog because I do not have to get it approved from someone and I am my own boss! But there is this small doubt, what if this is a mistake and I wish I had someone to approve it so that I can be sure! | https://medium.com/wonderquill/working-for-someone-or-working-for-yourself-998dd2d42a45 | ['Astha Singh'] | 2020-10-01 19:02:11.342000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Women In Business', 'Freelancing', 'Startup Lessons', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
WFH is now SOP. Design leaders share creative ideas to make it work. | With the renewed and heightened anxiety caused by a resurgence of COVID-19 cases, remote workers enter a new — and possibly worse — phase of working from home. Already facing burnout caused by isolation or the overwhelming responsibility of caring for kids and loved ones, the uncertainty of this next wave seems unfathomable.
Leaders of design teams face the challenge of reassuring staff, while simultaneously keeping them engaged amid predictions of more economic pressures on the way. The prospect of more homeschooling ahead adds yet another layer of complexity.
Notoriously collaborative problem-solvers, design leaders are coming together to find solutions. In July, our InsideOut Design Leader Community gathered to tackle this very real challenge. Below are some tips we hope will help meet these new leadership demands with insights from senior leaders at high-profile brands.
Start by Assessing What’s Happening
There’s a lot of focus on the downsides of this pandemic, and there are many. From endless video calls to the creation of silos that stall progress to the sheer monotony of these endless days, it’s easy to get lost in the negatives. And if these are the roadblocks that prevent the team from hitting goals, they’re certainly worth addressing. But first, leaders have to dig in to determine which issues will have the greatest impact on success.
Several leaders suggest hosting an open discussion with teams, allowing them to both identify the highest priority problems to solve and engaging them in uncovering solutions. One leader shared the experience of discovering that a mission critical part of their hiring process was crippled — in-person coding exercises just aren’t feasible right now. By determining the real benefits of being in the room with candidates, they were able to reimagine their system to not only reap the positives but also broaden their recruiting options and reduce hiring costs in the long term!
On the bright side of this global health crisis, change can be accelerated, providing a springboard for previously unbelievable progress. Companies are adopting new technologies for communication and transparency in record time, which will yield improvements for years to come. In addition, many leaders are reporting that decision-making processes that took weeks to complete can now be moved into production within days, as time pressures remove unnecessary layers and steps. Leaders who haven’t yet reviewed their own communication and decision-making systems should take the time to do so.
Bottom line, bringing together design teams and stakeholders to identify hurdles, opportunities, and innovations should be the first step in moving forward. | https://medium.com/aquent-off-hours/wfh-is-now-sop-design-leaders-share-creative-ideas-to-make-it-work-7534b310cfc6 | ['Susie Hall'] | 2020-07-23 17:51:10.185000+00:00 | ['Design Leadership', 'Remote Work', 'Aquentinsideout', 'Design', 'Leadership'] |
Facebook ReAgent its a Reinforcement Learning Framework you Need to Know About | Facebook ReAgent its a Reinforcement Learning Framework you Need to Know About
ReAgent is a new framework that streamlines the implementation of reasoning systems.
I recently started a new newsletter focus on AI education. TheSequence is a no-BS( meaning no hype, no news etc) AI-focused newsletter that takes 5 minutes to read. The goal is to keep you up to date with machine learning projects, research papers and concepts. Please give it a try by subscribing below:
Building deep reinforcement learning(DRL) systems remains an incredibly challenging. As a nascent discipline in the deep learning space, the frameworks and tools for implementing DRL models remain incredibly basic. Furthermore, the core innovation in DRL is coming from the big corporate AI labs like DeepMind, Facebook or Google. Almost a year ago, Facebook open sourced Horizon a framework focused on streamlining the implementation of DRL solutions. After a year using Horizon and implementing large scale DRL systems, Facebook open sourced ReAgent, a new framework that expands the original vision of Horizon to the implementation of end-to-end reasoning systems.
From a product standpoint, ReAgent is the next version of Horizon but, practically speaking is much more. ReAgent expands the original capabilities of Horizon with new models and tools that simplify the implementation of reasoning systems. Conceptually, reasoning systems refers to artificial intelligence(AI) agents that are able to learn by trial and error. DRL is certainly the most prominent type of reasoning systems but the class can include other techniques such as simulations. Before diving into ReAgent, let’s do a quick walkthrough the capabilities of its predecessor.
A Quick Recap of Horizon
Horizon was initially designed to work efficiently across deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and Caffe2 which are actively used within Facebook. Specifically, Horizon streamlines the use of PyTorch for model experimentation and training while Caffe2 is reserved for production workflows. A typically Horizon reinforcement learning workflow includes a Spark pipeline for time generation, followed by a feature extraction and normalization module based on Scipy followed by the model preprocessing-training and optimization module. Horizon leverages Facebook’s ONNX as the internal model representation and integrates with popular reinforcement learning environments such as OpenAI Gym.
The first released of Horizon abstracted capabilities such as data pre-processing, multi-GP training, a rich DRL algorithm portfolio, feature normalization among other key building blocks of DRL architectures.
One of the biggest contributions of Horizon is the feedback loop between experimentation and production. The training pipeline is responsible for pre-processing data logged by the existing model. That results of the pre-processing are used to train and analyze the counterfactual policy results in an offline setting. Finally, the models are deployed to a group of people and measure the true policy which results are used to feeds back into the next iteration.
After the first released of Horizon, Facebook discovered new improvements and capabilities that were needed to streamline the implementation of reasoning systems even further.
Enter ReAgent
One of the lessons learned after using Horizon in large scale DRL solutions, was that the framework was more effective when evaluating DRL models that have been previously trained instead of implementing new models. To address that limitation, ReAgent was implemented as a lightweight C++ library that can be embedded into any DRL model that is starting the process of collecting new data.
The core architecture of ReAgent is based on three fundamental components: models, evaluators and the serving platform. A ReAgent-enabled model will process the actions from external users or systems and route them to a set of training models whose scores help determine the next best action( like recommending a product). ReAgent can also send suggested model changes to an offline evaluator, which tests updated decision plans before they’re incorporated into the deployed model.
The main principle behind ReAgent’s architecture is to turn inputs into training resources. Let’s take the example of the training of an agent that plays different board games. When a user selects an action of specific move, ReAgent serving platform(RSP) responds by generating scores that rank a given set of related actions, according to preexisting decision plans. These plans are based on a collection of parameters determined by the models provided as part of ReAgent. This approach addresses the cold-start problem, where it is difficult or impossible to personalize actions without already having sufficient feedback.
In addition to simplifying and training of DRL systems, ReAgent excels on its ability of turning feedback into model rewards. This can be done by either modifying the online training models that optimize the RSP’s performance in real time or for offline training, which can lead to more substantial optimizations over longer periods of time.
ReAgent proposes a modular design that covers most elements of the lifecycle of DRL systems. Let’s assume that DRL models start with little to no data and, therefore, must make decisions using handwritten rules, which can be updated across many machines in real time using ReAgent’s serving platform. With feedback, multi-armed bandits, which share a parameter store, can adapt to make better decisions over time. Finally, contextual feedback enables ReAgent to train contextual bandits and RL models, and deploy them using the TorchScript library in PyTorch, to produce more personalized actions.
In the absence of a framework like ReAgent, developers would need to build different projects to address each one of the phases of the model lifecycle. Being a lightweight, easy to embed, C++ library, ReAgent allows developers to build different aspects of the DRL systems using their favorite technique while relying on the framework for cutting-edge, feedback-based policy optimization.
No DRL framework is complete without a deep algorithm portfolio. In the case of ReAgent, the framework supports several state-of-the-art DRL models including the following:
Facebook is already using ReAgent at scale in several mission critical systems. ReAgent models are used to determine the relevance of Instagram notifications and also provided more personalized news recommendations. As Facebook continues experimenting with ReAgent, we should see some of their learnings being incorporated into the framework.
DRL remains one of the most difficult deep learning architectures to implement with modern technologies. Releases like ReAgent provide some of the fundamental building blocks of DRL architectures and an extensible programming model that allow researchers and machine learning engineers to regularly experiment with different ideas. The current release of ReAgent is available on GitHub and also includes a basic interactive tutorial that will help you get started playing with DRL systems. | https://medium.com/dataseries/facebook-reagent-its-a-reinforcement-learning-framework-you-need-to-know-about-bf5e30dba77e | ['Jesus Rodriguez'] | 2020-12-16 15:38:09.797000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Deep Learning', 'Data Science', 'Thesequence'] |
This Is What Happened When I Reduced My Screen Time | This Is What Happened When I Reduced My Screen Time
The impact of the continual news cycle and social media on mental & emotional health
Photo by Rami Al-zayat on Unsplash
I saw the text come through and upon opening was met with a blaze of commentary about a political figure. The text was a screenshot followed by “Dangerous idiot. Malevolently incompetent”. This is one of many texts I have received from friends, in addition to numerous Facebook and Twitter posts. And lest you think I am judging, I have been guilty of doing the same . . . until recently.
Over the last few weeks, I have taken the steps to remove myself from the cesspool of continual negative stimulation that is social media and news applications — a 28% reduction according to my Screen Time app. Not bad considering my mobile device also serves as my office phone and many of the apps I use for my business.
I have turned off all alerts, I have deleted the news apps from my phone, I do not watch the nightly shows, read no opinion pieces and over the last three weeks have posted only one picture on my Facebook and Instagram. I have even greatly curtailed my use of LinkedIn.
Since I have made that choice I have noticed big changes and was able to share these with my friend who sent me the text. Here is what has happened since I have reduced my screen time.
I Am Less Stressed
My wife and my therapist remind me from time to time that the body keeps the score. Since becoming attuned to this, I have certain physical cues that tell me I am stressed long before I am mentally aware of being so.
I carry my stress in my neck and shoulders and there have been times where my stress level has been so high, it causes pain and numbness. During the course of my social media and news fast, I have had none of these issues. I am not feeling the stress or anxiety that would often follow after reading numerous news stories, polling data, or engaging in fruitless conversations about politics and philosophy of life on various platforms.
My body and its physical reaction are telling me that my stress level has severely decreased and the only major change I have made over these three weeks is eliminating the toxicity that are often found on these platforms.
I Am More Mellow
The other morning over coffee, my wife commented that over the last few weeks I have been more mellow, I had to agree as it has not escaped my notice either. I have found that since I have largely disconnected I am more thoughtful, more purposeful in my day-to-day actions and even my driving has become less aggressive; rarely exceeding 5 miles over the speed limit, a first for me.
I have enjoyed that my life and my mind have slowed down and been able to focus on things that are more valuable and life-giving. I am beginning to think that mellow suits me quite well.
I Don’t Miss It
My nightly routine used to consist of having a news show on as I would make dinner. The binge would continue after a brief hiatus and would often be one of the things I would watch until I fell asleep. My excuse was I did not want to be ill-informed; it was the best one I could think of.
I can tell you that during these three weeks, I hardly feel ill-informed and even more so I do not miss it. I am keeping up with my friends and close relationships and I have removed myself from what is often continual negativity and strife, which is better for me emotionally and mentally.
Nothing
As I told my friend yesterday over text, no matter what happens between now and November 3rd, it is not going to change his mind on what he does with his ballot. And this is what I have discovered, the biggest change has been; nothing. The world is still a broken place, we have talking heads and people on both sides of the political aisle claiming they are right and damning those who disagree. We have erratic weather patterns, mask mandates, those who oppose mask mandates, religious zealots and the list goes on. It has not changed and it is doubtful that it will any time soon.
Drive down any interstate for any length of time and you begin to see how angry our society has become. It is easy to say the apocalyptic events of 2020 are to blame but the anger problem in America has been documented for quite some time.
Regardless of the reasons why we all have a choice in how we respond to certain situations and people. Additionally, we can also choose to remove ourselves from those things which cause mental anxiety and stress. Perhaps taking a break from your screen is what you need — try it, you may realize some benefits of your own. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/this-is-what-happened-when-i-reduced-my-screen-time-46cd5e2b1ff | ['Carlos Hidalgo'] | 2020-09-18 18:43:06.401000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Social Media', 'Emotions', 'Screentime', 'Anger'] |
Should Designers Lead At All? | As a writer of the Design Leadership Notebook, I was triggered by this article on FastCompany about how John Maeda critically dissects the idea of design leadership. The title of the article is “In reality, design is not that important.” In the article, the author reports on how John Maeda, a long time hero of mine, told his audience at SXWS this year that if designers get into a leadership position, things can go terribly wrong. If designers get too much power or, even worse, start playing the boss, a company runs the risk of making wrong decisions. This is totally correct. Because beautiful design means nothing when paired with poor engineering or poor business strategy.
Because designers did not have much power in businesses up until recently, they run the risk of abusing the position of power they are given today. Because design is good for business and being design-led seems the best road to success, designers have more power in organizations today. Couple that with the fact that most designers today still only care about making things beautiful and you have a recipe for disaster.
So far, I totally agree with Maeda. But I don’t really agree with the conclusion Katharine Schwab, the author, presents on FastCompany. She concludes that designers should not be in leadership positions but be good team players. In Maeda’s own words:
“Closing Advice: Earning Best Supporting Actor/Actress is the goal.” — John Maeda
From this Schwab concludes:
“Maeda, who is the head of inclusion and computational design at WordPress parent company Automattic, thinks that design should play a secondary role in tech companies rather than a leadership role.” — Katherine Schwab
I think this is a wrong conclusion and comes from old school ideas about leadership. The traditional idea about leadership is that of the boss who tells people what to do, who has the biggest say in discussions. In a Taylorian Scientific Management world this works, but today these ideas about leadership are outdated and don’t work anymore. Modern leadership is much more about support, enabling and vision. So a supporting actor/actress can be a leader much more than a traditional hierarchical boss would. And designers are ideally positioned to lead with their design tool-, mind- and skillset. The idea that the designer should be the boss is totally out of tune with the workplace of the future which is much more agile, self-steering, lean and in which people have much more autonomy. Leadership in that context will come from people who can connect, who can develop a vision, can create energy. Designers can do these things and can lead from their supporting actor role.
I think it is typical that authors like Schwab jump on this occasion to put designers down. Saying that they should be limited to secondary roles is demeaning. On the other hand, I think it’s good to be critical when it comes to giving designers more power in organizations because designers need to up their game considerably if they want to fulfill leadership roles. Leaders should lead and designers should be considered for leadership positions as much as MBA educated people. But in the world as I see it emerging, everybody can lead and leadership should be distributed. I think it is far more productive for everybody if designers think about how they can lead from any position and if business people don’t jump on every occasion to put designers or design thinking down.
I have been following John Maeda for many years and the way I read his #designintech report this year is that it’s good to be critical and that we are arriving at a more mature vision of how design can lead. Once we get past the peak of inflated expectations, I think it is good to be more critical as we become more mature but we should not try to dismiss the immanent leading role of design. | https://medium.com/design-leadership-notebook/should-designers-lead-at-all-bb91e2142826 | ['Dennis Hambeukers'] | 2019-03-17 15:53:08.506000+00:00 | ['Design Leadership', 'Design Thinking', 'Design', 'Leadership', 'John Maeda'] |
How to Create Amazing Videos for Social Media | Make Your Office into A DIY Studio
There are a number of factors that come with creating a successful video. Your environment is crucial for creating a high-quality video for social media.
Offices are often crowded, noisy, and poorly lit — certainly not the ideal setting to have a video recorded. For this reason, we recommend recording in an isolated environment, or better yet — your own DIY video studio!
Get the Lighting Right
Without proper lighting, your video quality will suffer. Lighting, though often overlooked, is a crucial aspect in creating your video. Here are two options for great lighting:
Mother Nature is an amazing source of light. If you have a space with big windows, let the sun do all the hard work. Set up your camera near the window and facing away from it. On sunny days, your videos will light up like the fourth of July! Studio lighting isn’t as expensive as you may think. This guide will show you how to create an effective lighting kit for under $100. If you’re going all-out, we recommend a ring camera from Stellar Lighting Systems.
Be Conscious of the Sound
You want your message to be clear and concise. The last thing you want is to hear one of your co-workers talking about The Bachelor in the background of your video. Not only is it distracting, but it also makes your video come across as unprofessional.
Film in an unoccupied room to prevent unwanted background noise. You want your message to come through crystal clear.
You want your message to come through crystal clear. Set up some sound-dampening panels to prevent echo and reverb. When you are in an empty room, your microphone will often pick up everything and echo; making you sound like you’re filming in a closet.
When you are in an empty room, your microphone will often pick up everything and echo; making you sound like you’re filming in a closet. Cover vents while your filming. Heating and cooling vents often make terrible sounds. Simply cover them up with something like a blanket while you’re filming.
Heating and cooling vents often make terrible sounds. Simply cover them up with something like a blanket while you’re filming. Get your microphone close to the subject. If you don’t it will sound like you are trying to shout from across the room.
If you don’t it will sound like you are trying to shout from across the room. Invest in an external microphone. You can’t go wrong with any of the video microphones from Rode. If you don’t want to spend the money, position a second phone directly above the subject’s head to record the audio.
Set the Perfect Backdrop
Did you know Zach Galifianakis made a spoof series called, ‘Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis’ because of how ridiculous people look when they have a terrible backdrop? Instead of filming with a lame plant in the background, film in front of a solid colored backdrop.
Try to avoid filming behind an off-white wall. The color tends to look tacky and usually has a terrible glare. Instead use rolls of paper for your backdrop. You can order one or a few colors from Savage and then hold it up with a stand like this. If you don’t want to buy they stand, no worries; just tape it to the wall!
Make It Permanent
You will put a lot of effort into creating your DIY studio. Leave it up to prevent the headache of setting it up and tearing it down every time you need to record a video (which should be daily.)
By leaving your DIY studio up, it will allow you to record spontaneous video as soon as you get the inspiration. Instead of thinking about going and setting up everything, you can just walk in, turn your gear on, and record!
While you could do all of this, or you could easily create amazing social media videos with RendrFX!
Your Phone Is All You Need to Get Started
You may think you need to buy a big fancy camera to get started with video, but that just isn’t the case. The phone you already have is perfect for almost all the video you need to record.
(If you have an endless budget and want to go all out, we would recommend the Canon Mark IV DSLR Camera to take your game to the next level.)
Though this is a great camera, we still feel like your phone has all it takes to get the job done. Here are some tips to get the most out of video on your phone!
Pick Your Orientation Based on the Platform
Today, you need to record videos with the platform you’re going to post to in mind. The majority of video is consumed on mobile, so you need to consider that as well.
If you are posting to any ‘stories’ platform (Snapchat or Instagram Stories,) then you will want to record your video in vertically (portrait orientation.)
Other social media platforms will vary depending on your goal. With the rise of ‘stories’ features, vertical (portrait orientation) video has become more popular than horizontal (landscape.) It is easier to consume on mobile, so if your video’s target audience is on mobile; film vertical (portrait orientation) video. If your target audience is on desktop, then it would make sense to film horizontal video (landscape orientation.)
When you record for Instagram, you want to record in a square. Choose to record either horizontally or vertically, but make sure everything is in the middle section of the frame. Afterward, you will need to edit the video into a square, or Instagram will crop out the sides of your video to make it a square. (You can post a full sized with on Instagram, but it isn’t recommended.)
Hold It Steady
Keeping your video steady is crucial. No one likes watching a shaky video where they can’t make sense of what’s going on. There are two options to keeping your video stable depending on what you are doing.
When you are going to be stationary, use a tripod. This one right here should get the job done. If you are going to be moving around, use a stabilizer. These can get pricey pretty quick, but they are well worth it. While you are walking around, your videos will stay buttery smooth and your audience will appreciate it. This is a pretty new product in the market, but we would recommend this one on Amazon.
Don’t Use Zoom
You may be tempted to use the zoom function to get the perfect shot. Don’t make this mistake! Using the zoom function on phones reduces the quality dramatically. Since the lens isn’t zooming optically, you’re just enlarging the picture digitally, which means you will quickly enter the world of unsightly pixels.
Instead of zooming in, just move the camera closer to the subject you are filming.
Upgrade with an App
The Apple Camera app is great, but it’s not designed to record at the maximum quality which your phone can. For this reason, we recommend not using your phone’s native camera app, but rather use a premium video recording app like Filmic Pro.
One of the top features in Filmic Pro is the option to select a higher ‘Video Bitrate’. The highest quality bitrate is 50.0 Mbit/Sec, which is a huge improvement over the standard 24.0 Mbit/Sec bitrate found in the iOS Camera app. Just by participating in the simple task of not using the Apple Camera app — you’ll produce a substantially higher quality video.
Not to mention, you’ll also have the options to record video using different frame rates. It’s also great to have full control over focus, exposure, and other video features that are important if you want your video to have a PRO quality.
Use The ‘Exposure Lock’
This is a great way to bring your subject into focus. Your camera will automatically focus and expose your shot by default.
To use the exposure lock, simply Go to Settings -> Camera -> Reticle and choose DUAL.
Once enabled, both tools will appear on the main screen. The blue square icon (sets the focus) and the green circle icon (sets the exposure). To lock the tools, tap the matching button at the bottom left. A red icon indicates that the tool is locked.
Limit Distractions (Airplane Mode)
The last thing you want when you are recording is your phone ringing off the hook. To prevent this, all you need to do is put your phone in ‘Airplane Mode.’ Even if you are live streaming, as long as you are connected to the Wi-Fi — you can still stream from airplane mode.
Edit Before Distribution
You have the option of editing on your phone, but you’ll want to edit your videos on a computer. This will allow you to see the full video on a larger screen and pick up on more. You can either plug your phone into your computer or transfer the files via Bluetooth.
Even if you don’t have any fancy video editing skills, you can still do everything you need to in programs like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.
For A Wider Shot, Use A Clip-On Lens
Your phone will likely limit the width of your shot. To solves for this, simply get a clip-on lens to give your video more width. Olloclip offers a great clip-on lens!
If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of shooting with a camera, you can use RendrFX to create beautiful videos from our professionally designed motion graphics template!
Summary
When you first start using video for social media, it can be quite intimidating. It’s perceived as a mountain to overcome when it’s more like a mole hill. Getting started is the hardest part, but once you do that — it’s a breeze.
By following these tips and tricks, you will be well on your way to becoming a social media video master in no time!
Also, if you are looking for an even simpler way to get started with video, check out RendrFX! With hundreds of templates, over half a million stock media files (video, photos, and royalty free audio), and unlimited video creation! | https://medium.com/rendrfx/how-to-create-amazing-videos-for-social-media-44435ae431f2 | ['Peter Schroeder'] | 2017-03-20 16:59:13.130000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Social Media', 'Video Marketing', 'Video', 'Social Media Marketing'] |
Gaslighting, The Political Tactic of our Time | Gaslighting, The Political Tactic of our Time
Not Just An Interpersonal Dynamic
Photo by Philippe Mignot on Unsplash
Gaslighting. Most of us know what it means. And many of us have been its victim. Gaslighting is most often associated with personal relationships, but its insidious nature is also evident in the social and political realms.
Wikipedia defines gaslighting as a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes, including low self-esteem.” It is important to note that the definition includes both individuals and groups; both can be targets of gaslighting.
That may be why the term gaslighting is now being applied to the tactics of politicians like Donald Trump. A particularly effective, albeit opaque, aspect of gaslighting used by our president is that of projection, a psychological defense mechanism, and therefore unconscious, which involves projecting one’s rejected, undesirable feelings, thoughts or personality qualities onto someone else. Examples include calling people “nasty,” “liars,” “not very smart,” “ weak,” and even “racist.” Such comments distract people from recognizing those same qualities in him. Projecting weakness, incompetence and inferiority is especially effective with people or groups who may already be vulnerable to self doubt or prone to being scapegoats.
The term gaslighting has its origins in a 1938 play, Angel Street, by Patrick Hamilton, which was adapted into a movie, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. The film chronicles the descent of a young woman (Ingrid Bergman) into a severe state of self doubt at the hands of her husband, who works tenaciously and systematically, for his own purposes, to erode her sanity. He does so by making subtle changes in the environment (dimming the gaslights, for example) and then denying that anything has changed. Since its opening in 1944, the term has entered the public lexicon as a real thing.
G aslighting and Intimate Relationships
Psychologists were the first to define gaslighting as an interpersonal dynamic between two people, often a romantic couple, in which one partner is manipulated into doubting their sense of reality. The term has since expanded to include other kinds of relationships.
As a psychological concept, it was analyzed in several professional journals and finally popularized in Robin Stern’s 2007 book, The Gaslight Effect, which describes gaslighting as a phenomenon of “mutual participation” between “gaslighter” (perpetrator) and“gaslightee”(victim). However, Stern placed responsibility on the“gaslightee” to fix or get out of the relationship. This, of course, ignored the existing power differential in relationships between men and women.
More recently, Dr. Jennifer Sweeton, a Stanford- and Harvard-trained trauma specialist, defined Gaslighting as “a ‘sneaky, difficult-to-identify form of manipulation (and in severe cases, emotional abuse)’ that results in the gaslightee questioning his or her own perception, experiences, and even reality. In severe cases, this psychological warfare can result in the victim becoming dependent on the gaslighter for his or her own sense of reality.” This is essentially what happens in the movie Gaslight, when Ingrid Bergman’s character begins to question what she sees and to depend instead on her husband’s sense of reality.
A 2017 article in Psychology Today says, “Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity. Over time, a gaslighter’s manipulations can grow more complex and potent, making it increasingly difficult for the victim to see the truth.” Victims of gaslighting often describe feeling “crazy” during this time. Some have no idea, even afterwards, what to believe since their ability to trust their own judgment has been severely damaged in the process.
Who Are Gaslighters?
So what kinds of people tend to be gaslighters? Psychologists say narcissists are likely candidates because they are more invested in getting what they want, regardless of the needs of other people, and then feeling no remorse. According to Sweeton, the gaslighter generally holds the following beliefs, either consciously or unconsciously:
It is acceptable to override another person’s reality
2. People can be controlled and possessed
3. Being challenged is unacceptable
In recent years, the phenomenon of gaslighting has been evident in cases where certain groups lack social or political power. According to Sweeton, the following examples fall into this category: the genocide of Native Americans, the watering down or erasing of aspects of slavery, the invisibility of bisexuality, and what she calls “The Matilda Effect,” wherein women’s scientific accomplishments are erased from history books. The term is taken from a book by Ellie Irving about a young girl who undeservingly loses a science competition and learns that her grandmother, an astrophysicist, had her discovery of a planet stolen from her by her boss fifty years before. Matilda sets out to set the record straight.
Early on, it was believed that women were almost always the victims of gaslighting because they lacked the power held by men in relationships and in society a a whole.
Gaslighting as a Social and Political Construct
Paige L. Sweeta, a postdoctoral fellow with the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University, claims that gaslighting is primarily a sociological rather than a psychological phenomenon and should be “understood as rooted in social inequalities, including gender, and executed in power-laden intimate relationships.” She argues that abusers mobilize gendered stereotypes to win over their victims and says gaslighting could not exist “without inequities in the distribution of social, political and economic power.”
For gaslighting to be effective, the victim must hold the gaslighter in high regard (as is often the case in romantic relationships) or project power onto them. The gaslighter takes advantage of this power inequity. For example, politicians, like Trump, feel they can attack others with impunity because of the enormous power of their position. In Trump’s case citizens, as well as other governmental officials, are fearful of fighting back. Disagreement can result in being fired, publicly attacked, ridiculed or threatened.
A 2017 Medium article by Xanj noted that gaslighting is fueled by any attempts at confrontation or dismissal of the gaslighter. “In response to being called out, a gaslighter will try to weave an even more intricate web, sometimes a nonsensical one,” says Xanj. “As their sense of control slips, the attempts to regain it might reveal a desperate, fearful individual grasping at straws.” We recently witnessed this after Trump’s tax returns were revealed and he was then diagnosed with Coronavirus. Instead of backing off, he amped up his diminution of the effects of Covid, despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Beating Down the Opponent
Tenacity and repetition are critical components of gaslighting, particularly in politics. Lying, denying and twisting reality to deceive and gain control is a classic characteristic of gaslighters. The idea is to wear down the victim by constantly challenging what they believe to be true. Repeated claims that news is fake, science is fake, the coronavirus is a hoax (nothing to worry about here folks!) are typical examples of undermining people’s judgment and encouraging them to doubt what they can clearly see and hear for themselves.
Two related tactics are perpetual lying and denial, overt or implied. Recently, Vice President Pence, in a televised debate with Senator Kamala Harris, claimed that the Trump Administration going forward would be making policy on the basis of science, yet refused to acknowledge that the state of the environment posed an existential threat or that decisions about the coronavirus were currently adhering to the dictates of medical experts (which clearly they were not). He then blamed Presidential hopeful Joe Biden for being anti-science. Such comments can feel crazy-making.
A certain amount of truth-twisting is not uncommon in politics. Most politicians inflate or bend the truth at times, but we have never seen the degree of serial lying that we are witnessing today. Remember that gaslighting is defined as a form of psychological manipulation in which a person covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group. It involves consistent lying, denial, projection and obfuscation.
Collective Gaslighting
The ultimate danger of gaslighting is not just insanity but death. In the modern era we have seen cult leaders skillfully guide their followers into collective death. In the same way, we are being asked today to tempt death by ignoring warnings to wear masks at rallies for the purpose of lauding a leader who cares little about the effects on his fans. For some, that may indeed be a death sentence. In personal gaslighting relationships, victims of gaslighting have been known to commit both literal and figurative suicide as they slip into deeper and deeper levels of perceived insanity. The willingness to put one’s life at risk was highlighted in a recent interview with a Trump supporter who, when told about the dangers of not wearing a mask, said, “If I die, I die.” She was willing to go to her death in support of Donald Trump, claiming she was free to do so.
Sometimes, if lucky, the victim of gaslighting may be rescued by a loved one and encouraged to seek treatment. But who can rescue an entire group of people, let alone a deeply polarized nation, from mass self destruction? How do we wake a collective willing to go to their deaths (or force death upon others through irresponsible acts) rather than awaken to the spell of gaslighting? This November we will know if help is on its way. | https://christitjones.medium.com/gaslighting-c9146ea4997b | ['Christi Taylor-Jones'] | 2020-10-27 00:01:59.378000+00:00 | ['Trump', 'Social Change', 'Culture', 'Psychology', 'Politics'] |
Is Redux necessary for React & when to use it? | Redux is a state management tool and can be used with React application for managing states. Getting started with React can be overwhelming because we see a lot of state management tools are available on the internet today. Before getting started let’s understand what is state management.
State management & its need
In simple words, we can say a state is a JavaScript object which represents data associated with the component and it can change depending on the user’s action. Now, while writing the React application we might run into a situation where we need to store the data on the client-side and here we need states & its management.
Let’s come to the point, Is Redux necessary for React & when to use it?
No, a Redux is not necessary for react application. Managing application states especially in React can be done using its own state management systems like React hooks and Context. We can also use external tools like Redux, Flux, etc. Below factors can be considered whether you should stick to React hooks, Context, or go for Redux, Flux.
App size
If the application size is small like 10 to 15 pages/screens and have fewer data to store and handle at the client-side then React hooks / Context will be enough, but if the application size is bigger like 100+ pages/screens and have a lot of data to store at client-side then Redux/Flux can be used.
2. App Complexity
If the application has so many parent-child components and uses React hooks / Context then it might become difficult for a developer to understand the data flow between the components, so in such cases, Redux/Flux can be used.
Let’s see the examples of React hooks and Context
React hooks
import React, { useState } from 'react';
function Foo() {
// Declare a new state variable, which we will call "count" const [count, increment Count] = useState(0);
return (
<div>
<p>Count: {count}</p>
<button onClick={() => increment Count(count + 1)}>
I ncrement count
</button>
</div>
);
}
Context
// Context lets us pass a value deep into the component tree
// without explicitly threading it through every component.
// Create a context for the current locale (with "en" as the default). const LocaleContext = React.createContext('en') // english class App extends React.Component {
render() {
// Use a Provider to pass the current locale to the tree below.
// Any component can read it, no matter how deep it is.
// In this example, we're passing "mr" (marathi) as the current value.
return (
<LocaleContext.Provider value="mr">
<Toolbar />
</LocaleContext.Provider>
)
}
} // A component in the middle doesn't have to
// pass the locale down explicitly anymore. function Toolbar() {
return (
<div>
<LocaleButton />
</div>
)
} class LocaleButton extends React.Component {
// Assign a contextType to read the current locale context.
// React will find the closest locale Provider above and use its value.
// In this example, the current locale is "mr". static contextType = LocaleContext
render() {
return <Button locale={this.context} />
}
}
Conclusion
We have seen that Redux is not necessary for React application and React’s own state management systems can be used depending on size and complexity.
However, Redux is more powerful than React’s own state management systems and can be used if size and complexity are large. | https://medium.com/ever-blogs/is-redux-necessary-for-react-application-1a00c6adfad | ['Navanath Jadhav'] | 2020-11-14 09:41:28.936000+00:00 | ['Redux', 'React Hook', 'React', 'React Context', 'Flux'] |
Liderazgo y Innovación hacia la sostenibilidad | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/el-blog-de-imfusio/liderazgo-y-innovaci%C3%B3n-hacia-la-sostenibilidad-3c98e8475ce6 | [] | 2018-02-19 20:42:32.730000+00:00 | ['Fssd The Natural Step', 'Sustainable Development', 'Leadership', 'Formación', 'Sustainability'] |
DIY: A Web Version of the Fluent Design System’s Acrylic Material | DIY: A Web Version of the Fluent Design System’s Acrylic Material
Using backdrop-filter on Microsoft Edge and other modern browsers
“It’s the dark arts.”
That’s what a colleague of mine said one day as we were walking to lunch talking about people with CSS expertise. He went on to compare it to the more traditional forms of computer science (math) and visual design (art). “But people with CSS skills, man…” he sighed, “it’s the dark arts.”
This has been especially true for those of us who make web sites work across browsers and operating systems. All the cross browser hacks, CSS feature detection, positioning tricks, etc… a front-end dev must collect and manage a library of spells to be successful at their work.
Well, here’s another one for your book of incantations. I’m going to show you how to use backdrop-filter today. Grab your pointy hat.
What is backdrop-filter?
Light theme acrylic
Dark theme acrylic
Here’s what caniuse.com says:
“Method of applying filter effects (like blur, grayscale or hue) to content/elements below the target element.”
You’ve seen this effect in the Fluent Design System’s Acrylic Material as well as in iOS. If you wanted to bring this effect into your designs on the web, well, you had to hex your users into using only Safari, and of course you didn’t because you’re a good wizard, we know. This is because Safari was the only browser that supported backdrop-filter out of the box. Until now, anyways. With the April 2018 release of Windows, Edge 17 supports backdrop-filter using the -webkit prefix.
The how-to part
backdrop-filter is still very new and if it had widespread browser adoption, this article would be a very short one consisting of the following:
Put this on your CSS element if you want to blur whatever is behind it
backdrop-filter: blur(20px);
Of course, if your element has a solid color background, you won’t see any difference, so make sure you’re using a color formula (RGBA, HSLA, etc…) where you can control the opacity like so:
backdrop-filter: blur(20px);
background-color: rgba(255,255,255,.3);
But this only works in Safari. To get that goodness in Edge, use the -webkit prefix:
-webkit-backdrop-filter: blur(20px);
backdrop-filter: blur(20px);
background-color: rgba(255,255,255,.3);
Of course, a quick trip to caniuse.com confirms something we might already know: this only works in Edge and Safari (and iOS). What about the others? Firefox and Chrome don’t support it yet, so we’ll have to use a fallback for that. | https://medium.com/microsoft-design/diy-a-web-version-the-fluent-design-systems-acrylic-material-fe2eac2a40bb | ['Joe Day'] | 2019-08-27 17:57:44.262000+00:00 | ['Fluent Design System', 'Design', 'Web Development', 'Microsoft'] |
A Layman’s Guide for Data Scientists to create APIs in minutes | How to write an API with FastAPI?
One of the most common use cases for Data Science is how to create an API for getting a model’s prediction? Let us assume that we have a Titanic Survival model in place that predicts if a person will survive or not. And, it needs a person’s age and sex as input params to predict. We will create this API using FastAPI in two ways: GET and PUT. Don’t worry; I will explain each as we go.
What is GET? — In a GET request, we usually try to retrieve data using query parameters that are embedded in the query string itself. For example, in the OMDB API, we use the GET request to specify the movie id and access key as part of the query itself.
What is PUT? — An alternative to the GET request is the PUT request, where we send parameters using a payload, as we will see in the second method. The payload is not part of the query string, and thus PUT is more secure. It will become more clear when you see the second part.
But before we go any further, we need to install FastAPI and uvicorn ASGI server with:
pip install fastapi
pip install uvicorn
1. The GET Way:
A simple FastAPI method to writing a GET API for our titanic model use case is as follows:
from fastapi import FastAPI app = FastAPI() @app.get("/predict")
def predict_complex_model(age: int,sex:str):
# Assume a big and complex model here. For this test I am using a simple rule based model
if age<10 or sex=='F':
return {'survived':1}
else:
return {'survived':0}
Save the above code in a file named fastapiapp.py and then you can run it using the below command on terminal.
$ uvicorn fastapiapp:app --reload
The above means that your API is now running on your server, and the --reload flag indicates that the API gets updated automatically when you change the fastapiapp.py file. This is very helpful while developing and testing, but you should remove this --reload flag when you put the API in production. Now you can visit the below path in your browser, and you will get the prediction results:
What happens is as you hit the command in your browser, it calls the http://127.0.0.1:8000/predict endpoint which in turn calls the associated method predict_complex_model with the with params age=10 and sex='M'
So, it allows us to use our function from a browser, but that’s still not very helpful. Your developer friend needs to use your predict function to show output on a frontend website. How can you provide him with access to this function?
It is pretty simple. If your developer friend also uses Python, for example, he can use the requests module like below:
import requests age = 15
sex = "F"
output = response.json() response = requests.get(f" http://127.0.0.1:8000/predict?age={age}&sex={ sex}")output = response.json()
So we can get the output from the running API(on the server) into our Python Program. A Javascript user would use Javascript Request Library, and a nodeJS developer will use something similar to do this in nodeJS. We will just need to provide them with the endpoint and parameters required.
To test your API, you could also go to the:
Where you will find a GUI way to test your API.
But as we said earlier, THIS IS NOT SECURE as GET parameters are passed via URL. This means that parameters get stored in server logs and browser history. This is not intended. Further, this toy example just had two input parameters, so we were able to do it this way, think of a case where we need to provide many parameters to our predict function.
In such a case or I dare say in most of the cases, we use the PUT API.
2. The PUT Way
Using the PUT API, we can call any function by providing a payload to the function. A payload is nothing but a JSON dictionary of input parameters that doesn’t get appended to the query string and is thus much more secure than GET.
Here is the minimal example where we do that same thing as before using PUT. We just change the content of fastapiapp.py to:
from fastapi import FastAPI
from pydantic import BaseModel class Input(BaseModel):
age : int
sex : str app = FastAPI()
def predict_complex_model(d:Input):
if d.age<10 or d.sex=='F':
return {'survived':1}
else:
return {'survived':0} @app .put("/predict")def predict_complex_model(d:Input):if d.age<10 or d.sex=='F':return {'survived':1}else:return {'survived':0}
note that we use app.put here in place of app.get previously. We also needed to provide a new class Input , which uses a library called pydantic to validate the input data types that we will get from the API end-user while previously in GET, we validated the inputs using the function parameter list. Also, this time you won’t be able to see your content using a URL on the web. For example, using the browser to point to the endpoint location gives:
So, we can check using the programmatic way using requests in Python again:
payload = json.dumps({
"age": 10,
"sex": "F"
})
response = requests.put("
response.json() import requests,jsonpayload = json.dumps({"age": 10,"sex": "F"})response = requests.put(" http://127.0.0.1:8000/predict ",data = payload)response.json()
Notice that we use requests.put here and we provide the payload using the data param in the requests.put function and we also make use of json library to convert our payload to JSON from a dict object.
We could also have used the GUI way as before using:
And, we are done with creating our API. It was simple for a change.
FastAPI makes the API creation, which used to be one of the dreaded parts of the Data Science process, much more intuitive, easy, and Fast.
You can find the code for this post as well as all my posts at my GitHub repository.
Also as a lot of people asked me in the comments “how to deploy the FastAPI API on ec2 and how to use images data rather than simple strings, integers, and floats as input to the API?” , I wrote a successor to this post. Do take a look if you find it interesting, | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-layman-guide-for-data-scientists-to-create-apis-in-minutes-31e6f451cd2f | ['Rahul Agarwal'] | 2020-06-28 08:30:33.729000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Editors Pick', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Programming'] |
the interview: Stephanie Sher | the interview: Stephanie Sher
December 2020
Stephanie started her tech career in software, as an early employee at NYC-based infrastructure monitoring company Datadog. She has been a product manager in robotics/manufacturing automation as well as led growth in the ML devtool space, and now serves as GM at a stealth startup. She enjoys organizing communities of founders, executives, ML engineers/data engineers/data scientists at some of the world’s leading deeptech companies, and also advises and invests in applied AI/ML companies.
What do you view as the main challenges to continued progress in AI/ML?
The biggest challenges I see can be loosely classified as technical and organizational. Technically speaking, there is a lack of education and experience around successfully deploying models in production — things around data quality, monitoring health of models in production, bugs in the ETL pipeline, drift in data distribution, outlier identification. Companies — to the detriment of their bottom line and with the consequence of missed opportunity — keep degraded models up and running. Organizationally, it’s the willingness and capacity of existing teams to support the ML function — and for ML teams to understand what success looks like in an industry context.
As co-organizer of Full Stack Deep Learning, what do you see as the biggest impediments to broader adoption of ML within organizations? What trends do you see that are encouraging?
Teams will face timeboxed opportunities to reach a common understanding of potential, urgency, and scope of their ML needs. To really answer the question of how pursuing a methodology could impact their bottom line, and what the tradeoffs are, and getting everyone on board with that. ML is slightly less straightforward than say, traditional software engineering, and so there will be a tricky bit of having comprehensive organizational alignment around what it takes to have a model succeed in production, and how much of that is worth investing in alongside legacy systems.
An encouraging trend: Tooling is a hot space right now, and I believe the competition will yield a few winners that can really accelerate and improve the process of deploying in production in a way that aligns with business incentives.
Which part of the ML toolchain do you think is the most painful or most lacking in supporting infrastructure?
At the moment, most blockers still lie in data preparation. 90% of what is preventing people from successfully deploying ML in production is related to data management. The next part of the chain is training tools, but those are pretty good already; the space is nearly saturated. But pretty soon we’ll see a shift towards the rest of the ML toolchain: monitoring the health and integrity of models in production; understanding why we’re getting the results we’re getting; being able to identify issues early and react to them in a timely manner.
What lessons did you learn during your time at Datadog that you think are transferable to the ML Ops ecosystem? What similarities and differences do you see between APM and monitoring of ML workflows?
So much, and nothing at all. There are of course similarities in the sense of knowing how a SaaS B2B tool comes into being, how to guide product development alongside initial market research, how to distribute effectively. But while we do see a lot of the same terminology being thrown around, ie monitoring and observability — at the same time, I think it is a very different technology that looks more like the discipline of software engineering integrated with the art of machine learning rather than just SWE, which on its own is a bit more straightforward.
In terms of the market, something I learned at Datadog is that you can’t guess based on first principles how the ecosystem will evolve. For example, people like to write about Datadog’s “strategy” in the beginning but it was much less intrinsically directed, and perhaps had more to do with landscape and positioning, than people like to think. So I suppose the “lesson” here is mostly an excitement to see how the different players in the ecosystem approach the MLOps challenge, and how users react to different tools that surface.
One thing I’ll call out here: Datadog has a world-class solutions engineering team that has been crucial to the company’s success. I expect to see more of this from companies, whether APM or ML offerings — diligent investment into highly competent onboarding and implementation support.
Where do you think we are in the development of the ML Ops market? What is holding back growth, if anything?
I moved to the bay area in 2017, at a time when hundreds of millions of dollars were being poured into moonshot ideas. It just didn’t make sense to me. People who *were* talking sense, in my opinion, like Rodney Brooks and such, were demonized and classified as pessimists. Recently, with more tangible proof points in the form of companies getting funding and succeeding or failing, and then layering on recent things like instability in global markets and politics, the tech industry has had to face reality a bit and focus on pragmatic aspects like “hey, how are we going to actually make these things work? Will this add value to our customers in a tangible way that inspires them to pay us money?” And so I’m glad to have witnessed what has been great progress in a more practical direction, especially in the devtools space. One perhaps obvious thing holding back growth is talent — as always there is a dearth of technical talent to effectively utilize the tools that we’re starting to build. I’m encouraged by trends of researchers leveling up to become functioning SWEs, and engineers with domain expertise learning more about the machine learning side of things — it will take this sort of interdisciplinary thinking for machine learning to grow healthily. I’ll give a shoutout to Full Stack Deep Learning here — we have alumni across verticals like healthcare, insurance, robotics, education, all enriching their skillsets to both specialize in a focus area and solidify their knowledge of machine learning.
You have been involved at the forefront of several emerging industries. What research or technical developments in the industry are you the most excited about as you think about the next 2–5 years?
I’m intrigued by this new area of augmented intelligence, defined by Gartner as “a design pattern for a human-centered partnership model of people and AI working together to enhance cognitive performance, including learning, decision-making, and new experiences.” It sounds.. magical, almost. But there are little tangible improvements that we can make to how we consume, store, and process information, and we’re starting to see companies try to wrangle that. I’m interested to see where that goes.
In the MLOps world, ideally we’ll one day be able to see models in production that are updating in real-time. We’re not quite there just yet due to ramped up operational infrastructure needs (more computing power, better monitoring/alerting, attention to failover responsibility) that most companies aren’t operationally prepared for yet, but as with APM monitoring and alerting, I hope we’ll soon see latency improvements across the board, driving towards more timely and effective decision-making.
I must add here that I’m equally excited about applications of data and machine learning outside the tech industry. I’m seeing a shift of interest towards more effective utilization of data with the goal of better and more timely decision-making in industries that have traditionally been less technical or commercially viable, in arenas like the environment and food supply and microfinances and such. Hopefully the money follows the momentum.
What work are you most proud of?
I’m proud of every student that has come through the Full Stack Deep Learning program. I think it takes a special kind of chutzpah to explore the boundaries of your field, and to do that outside of your normal delineated work hours. In the FSDL community, I’ve seen people complete our curriculum while taking on full time jobs, internalize and leverage our curriculum to land jobs at, for example, NASA’s Frontier Development Lab, and push each other within the community to work through both tactical and strategic, organizational and technical problems while trying to deploy machine learning in production at an industry level.
For myself, I’m not sure “proud” is the word I want to use, but there are two experiences that I’m especially grateful for. First, being the second marketing hire at Datadog and demoing our product across the United States and Europe alongside AWS as it scaled up, back in 2014 — that was an incredible opportunity and something I learned a lot from. It was very exciting to be showing the world what was coming their way — this incredibly pragmatic tool that would streamline their workflows — I remember telling people it’d give them more time to spend with their friends and family, haha. Second, because I care a lot about advancement in software/AI/tech in general and even moreso in conjunction with community and education — I’m grateful to Josh and Sergey and Pieter to have brought me onto the Full Stack Deep Learning team, to push forward a curriculum that teaches ML practitioners how to deploy machine learning in production. Again I’m not sure “proud” is the right word, but working with them on this community has definitely been, and continues to be, a most rewarding and worthwhile endeavor, full stop.
There is a third piece of work that’s very exciting to me: I’m working with some friends in the space on an initiative to make hands-on experience with robotics and machine learning more accessible. It is still in early stages, but I’m very excited for its potential to put research into practice. Troubleshooting, debugging, monitoring live progress.. For me that’s where the fun begins.
What advice would you give to women building their careers in AI/ML?
Eat well, exercise regularly, put in the work. Flywheel effects will occur with an accumulation of good bits in place, and it’d serve us all well to be prepared when the Cambrian explosion hits. Exciting things are happening in our field, so keep learning, keep pushing. And reach out; I’d be excited to meet you. :) | https://medium.com/the-table-tech/the-interview-stephanie-sher-8490af8f912c | ['Justine Humenansky'] | 2020-12-02 16:02:00.932000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Deep Learning', 'Technology', 'DevOps'] |
COVID-19 Impact on Early vs Late Stage Funding: A Data-Driven Analysis | COVID-19 has had unforeseen and unpredictable impacts on many industries, including Venture Capital. VC, an industry predicated on personal relationships and accessibility, now needed to operate virtually. Did early stage companies shift their focus from their next funding round to staying afloat? Did late stage companies take a second look at potential sales cycle disruption and employee safety? Here at A-Level Capital, we wanted to quantify COVID-19’s impact on the VC space. We wanted to answer questions like how has VC funding changed since the onset of COVID? Has it changed at all? And perhaps most importantly, is the VC space resilient?
To answer these questions, we conducted a high-level, data-driven analysis of VC activity from Q4 2019 all the way through the present, Q2 2020. Venture funding history data was obtained from whogotfunded.com, a free online service that aggregates data through mass web text scraping. The data was then verified and supplemented via Crunchbase. All deals were based in the US. The data and code can be found here.
To start, let’s look at the frequency of venture funding over time.
These three figures show the number of rounds raised per day, from Q4 2019 through Q2 2020. Daily, weekly, and monthly frequency windows are shown.
Here are some key observations:
There’s a clear decrease in the number of rounds raised in Q1/Q2 2020 as compared to Q4 2019.
This decrease in rounds raised appears to line up with increased COVID awareness in the US, which started around March (blue shaded region).
This decrease appears to start around when the WHO declared COVID a global public health emergency (orange shaded region).
The decline doesn’t continue into Q2 2020 — round frequency plateaus instead.
We can see that number of rounds raised has decreased into 2020, presumably due to lock-down procedures, quarantine across the US, and the general disruption of VC daily activities.
Let’s now look at trends in the size of these rounds.
Here’s a graph of the average daily round size over this time frame. The line shown is the average round size and the shaded regions represent one standard deviation of a Gaussian distribution of the other rounds that day. Basically, the shaded distributions give us a good idea of the diversity of round type raised that day. Q4 2019 has a pretty wide range of round sizes, whereas in Q1/Q2 2020 round sizes are much more uniform.
When we compare these trends in average round size to our earlier graphs of monthly deal frequency, we see a really interesting pattern.
Average round size is much higher in Q1/Q2 2020 than Q4 2019. However, 2020 has seen a clear decline in rounds per week.
than Q4 2019. However, So less deals are happening in 2020, but the round average is getting significantly higher??
Here’s the earlier two graphs on top of each other. Keep in mind that the y axis units here are non-important, but you can see pretty clearly that deal volume is going down as round average goes up.
We can hypothesize that this either means (1) not many late stage companies raised venture funding in Q4 2019, or more likely (2) COVID onset has really impacted early-stage startups raising rounds. The first option’s unlikely because the shading on the Q4 portion of the graph means there’s actually a lot of round diversity in Q4 2019!
The first option’s unlikely because the shading on the Q4 portion of the graph means there’s actually a lot of round diversity in Q4 2019! We can speculate large companies generally have the resources in place to weather out COVID’s impact, at least enough to complete their scheduled fundraising rounds. Smaller companies however might be having a harder time adapting to these changes and as a result, be pushing off their funding rounds to focus on more immediate priorities.
From these trends in the data, our standing hypothesis is that COVID-19 has had the most disruptive impact on early stage companies, causing them to push their funding and as a result, raise the observed average round size in Q1/Q2 2020.
Let’s see if this is reflected on a state level as well.
The top 3 states with the most VC investment are New York, California, and Massachusetts.
Taking a closer look at New York: | https://medium.com/a-level-capital/covid-19-impact-on-early-vs-late-stage-funding-a-data-driven-analysis-48290c46828d | ['Shreya Singh'] | 2020-06-27 00:11:04.501000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Visualization', 'Covid 19', 'Venture Capital'] |
The Tao Of Bear | After several requests for an interview, with no response, we were elated to finally see a response from Bear (or from Bear’s ‘people’), in our inbox. Bear is an older gent and a hyper-local NJ celebrity, so it is a feat to score an interview. As well, Bear’s social calendar is always full. Two boys who live a block away often walk Bear to the park, where they play, and Bear naps. A gaggle of little girls sometimes stops by to take Bear on some type of arranged furry-playdate. This more often ends in Bear’s sullen return, and the girls’ complaints of Bear being too boring. A surfer who lives next door takes Bear to the beach almost everyday. The surfer surfs, and Bear naps.. while keeping an eye on anything of great value that the surfer might bring to the beach, like a towel. Always, as Bear naps on the front porch, there is a steady stream of visitors.. The Deacon who lives near by, for one, who during every visit is overheard saying: “Oh for God sake Bear, why are you looking at me like that, you’ve known me forever.”, as he rubs Bear’s belly, and Bear looks at him from the corner of his eye, from a head too big and too content to lift off the porch.
Nine years ago Bear arrived at Newark Liberty International, from his homeland of British Columbia Canada. He arrived with a green dot spray painted on the top of his head, which was an easy way to identify a little boy picked from within a litter of 8 other little boys & girls. [sidebar: Before Bear left for America, it was noted that he loved naps more than all of his brothers and sisters, and was slowest getting to the food bowl.. but always ate the most. Naps usually started flat on his back with legs flailed to the side.. and then Bear would slow-motion fall over to one side or the other.] Upon arrival in the U.S., as Bear’s safety crate exited the immigration holding area, Airline personnel were heard mentioning that they thought there was a bear cub being shipped. So the name Bear, if not the personality, stuck.
Bear, far more a ‘people person’, than than any other person we know. Here, beauty and the beast.. Bear is about two years old.
Bear is now 11 years old, (that’s about 75 is people years). He’s long on charm, but a bit on the curmudgeonly side, (as a result of bodily aches and pains). Bear’s demeanor is set within a backdrop of great humor. Bear is young in mind and spirit. ‘Wisdom and humor, the only known antidote to old age.’ as Bear says. The truth is that while Bear’s spirit is sprite, his body is showing the wear of a long life.. albeit a charmed life. So, there was sadly, some onus to score this interview sooner than later. We were drawn to Bear because happiness, or contentment.. is a magnet. It attracts people and moments and tends to create out in front, what is internal. The universe often goes out of it’s way to reward such spirit. That’s what Bear has always been.. content. And indeed a magnet for good people and goodness in general. We hoped some of that might rub off during the interview. Maybe there was a bit of wisdom we could capture and let the world know about. We felt a little like seekers of knowledge waiting for the Dalai Lama to impart a great ‘Truth” to enlighten the rest of our days, that we might reveal to the world at large.
Not really sure why.. but Bear takes seriously the ‘one piece per kid’ rule at Halloween. Even more strange, the bowl never needed a re-fill despite heavy Halloween foot traffic every year.
That enlightenment came days after the interview had taken place. In fact, it happened as this piece was being written. In going over notes, thinking about stories that friends of Bear had shared.. meditating on the way that Bear lives his life.. The Tao of Bear revealed itself — ‘Be good’… and ‘Be kind’. That’s about it. Bear never has time for small minds or small people. He is never harsh toward either.. he just doesn’t have interest. And now, after spending time with people that love Bear, and seeing what the universe gathered for Bear.. We’re going to try always, to be good, and to be kind.
Only now, in the Fall of his years, is Bear reluctant to join the neighborhood girls on an adventure. This photo is how everyone one we spoke to about Bear will remember him. Always a part of their best memories.
Before the interview ended, Bear shared a detail that seemed a bit morose… and gave cause for a few tears and that tight throated feeling. Bear’s favorite book is ‘Lonesome Dove’ by Larry McMurtry. In the book there is a character named ‘Deets’ who is trusted and steady, a long-time scout, and an indispensable friend to the main characters, two Texas Rangers, Captains Gus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call. Deets, in a sudden and random turn in the novel, is killed while trying to save the life a small Indian boy. Captains McCrae & Call, and everyone in their party, are shaken to the core by Deets’ death. In sorrow and mourning Capt. Gus carved an epitaph for Deets in an old piece of wood that served as a tombstone. The epitaph read: “Cheerful in all weathers… Never shirked a task… Splendid behavior”. Bear hopes that is what is going to be written on his tombstone. We believe it will be. | https://medium.com/nowjersey-digital-magazine/the-tao-of-bear-e0e1aff5d7f5 | ['Mike Decastro'] | 2017-11-17 10:43:19.442000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Mindfulness', 'New Jersey', 'Dog', 'Best Friend'] |
Manipulation | Manipulation
A Poem
By itself, the room turns grey, turns into a manipulative shadow; the walls leak their paint like tears, the windows blink shut and stay that way; eccentric motions work their way to the language of the floor, the hardwood cobbling a story (a lie?) out of missing footsteps and absent pressures
each squeak of wood on nail lifting up the hands to the ears, the subtle vibrations, cues doomed to go unnoticed, and nothing fixes this upset right now, nothing comes close for relief. Just the closing in of neutral room, an illness that keeps you
rooted in the position of reaching for a way out, for a twist to the response to this stimulus, even if the words get older by the minute, reveal interpretations a hundred years too late. And by now you realize that just stepping out of your chair
won’t be the resounding answer to this new claustrophobia, the choking grip of fatalism, but you’re resisting one collapse, pushing back into the world of words you had just succeeded in losing yourself in the moment before. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/manipulation-e0a7df453f1a | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2020-12-09 05:32:21.967000+00:00 | ['Image', 'Reading', 'Musing', 'Poetry', 'Writing'] |
I built a startup and filmed every minute on Youtube; here’s what I learned | 1. Start with a good idea
It’s kind of impossible to tell if a startup idea will work. Lots of the really successful ideas out there seem crazy at first, and lots of sensible-sounding projects go nowhere.
I picked an idea that seemed like it had a good chance of product-market-founder fit, or an idea that:
I am uniquely qualified to work on — in my case, requires a lot of attention at the intersection between design and front-end engineering, my area of expertise) Solves a problem I already know a lot about — I run design workshops constantly as a consultant, and consistently feel the pain Shuffleboard solves Is niche enough that a big player probably won’t blow me out of the water right away Is targeted at customers that have money and a history of spending it — probably B2B, not a consumer product Is something that I could work on for years if successful
2. Make space for what you want
There’s no way I would have been able to do this if I still had a full-time job.
Luckily I’ve been building a consulting business for the past three years, which allowed me to dial down my regular working hours and make room for projects like this.
(Also, I couldn’t have been successful in consulting without years of experience at startups, and it would have been hard to get that experience without the free time to teach myself to code, the support of my family, and a whole lot of other lucky things falling into place.)
3. Book your hours in advance
I never accidentally worked on Shuffleboard. Every workday was blocked on my calendar at least one day in advance, and I did not accept any meetings before 4 p.m. on the days that worked.
When you are your own boss, you are also your own employee. You should have clear expectations about when you will work, and roughly stick to that schedule.
4. Recording yourself can slow you down…
There’s a lot of extra work and mental energy involved in working in public. I had to keep my webcam background clean, mentally prepare myself each morning before getting on camera, record my face with my phone, record my screen, transfer and backup my massive video files, edit videos together, deal with corrupt files, upload massive videos, and track my work to write timestamps in video summaries. That’s all time that I could have spent working on the product instead.
5. But it’s probably faster in the long run
The structure of having to perform live on camera, even when I was confident nobody will ever watch my videos, pushed me to make progress every day.
I was spending less time on my product — but the time I did spend was focused and rarely wasted. That means I spent fewer hours per week on code, but probably delivered more value per week than I would have.
6. It forces you to finish tasks
“No zero days” was my mantra. Because I had to title each day’s video and start a new video the next day, I had to actually complete a meaningful task every day. That means not stopping halfway through, and trying to get each task all the way to ‘done’.
There were only a few times where a task took multiple days of work. None of my videos are called “maintenance” or “miscellaneous” or “cleanup”. I did have small tasks to do, but I only do them after my main job is done for the day.
7. It helps you ship
We can all use some accountability pressure sometimes.
When you start sharing public videos of your project, the social pressure of failure forces you to show up and keep shipping. I don’t know if I would have shipped anything at all without the video series, and I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog post about launching.
My actual desk and recording setup
8. Being on camera is so weird
I never thought I’d be someone to post my face or work online. I felt an absolute truckload of anxiety before recording my first video, and my body language shows it.
But then I just got used to it. Like anything else, the 20th time you do something scary, it starts to feel normal. I just got the awkward videos out of the way.
9. Your energy will naturally ebb and flow
Most YouTubers can temporarily drum up some enthusiasm for a video shoot, but when you’re filming the entire process you can’t sustain that kind of energy. Many of my videos start out with “I’m tired and grumpy today… but whatever, let’s get started”.
The reality of work is that it’s sometimes exciting, sometimes boring and frustrating, and overwhelmingly emotionally neutral.
10. Just be yourself, quirks and all
At first I assumed I had to take on an energetic persona for an audience, but I quickly realized it’s just not practical to “put on a face” for hours at a time and still be productive.
11. Anything worth doing takes time
Even though I worked for almost 100 days, it took a year and a half to get those days in. That’s a huge investment of time, especially for one person.
A lot of smart people would say that’s way too long to work on something before launch. A lot of other smart people have gone the other direction, working full-time with multiple founders for years before launching.
I wish I had been able to work faster, but I also know this: easy-to-sell products are so freaking good that buying them is an obvious decision for customers. And really good products take time to make.
Maybe I’m wrong about this one. Maybe I’ll learn to be faster next time. But right now, I’m glad I stayed focused and patient.
12. Iterate more than you invent
Everything I made was in a constant state of change. The more closely a feature was related to value for customers, the more times I had to redesign/rebuild it based on what I learned from users.
To show you how much work went into iterating, here’s a rough breakdown of how I spent time in my videos:
Having an idea: 1 day
Designing a crappy first mockup: 4 days
Coding a crappy first version: 12 days
Iterating & adding based on feedback: 78 days
13. Build one piece at a time
Lots of people think software has to be done in one big sprint, but this is just wrapping modern jargon around the classic failed waterfall model.
Software is flexible when built correctly. You can make changes, adapt, and improve as you work, without knowing the finished product at the start.
Another way to say this is “paint in layers”: make broad strokes first, then worry about the fine details as you go.
14. You can’t see the finish line from the starting line
Precise planning for the far future is an exercise for the ego. As a founder your vision should be about what you can do for customers, not what pixels go where. Your product will evolve as it interacts with the market, so don’t worry about predicting the future.
Starting a company isn’t like baking a recipe, it’s like going on a long trip. Don’t get too attached to the outcome in the early days, have a little faith, and it’ll be worthwhile.
15. Talk to customers, early and often
Even though I didn’t do a press launch for 18 months, I was testing early versions with customers in the very first videos.
Many of my early videos are discovery conversations with customers. Many of my later videos show me processing lists of customer requests.
Launching and talking to users are very different things. Don’t wait until launch to talk to customers. By the time you do a public launch, you should already know that you’ve made something people love.
Talking to users isn’t too hard once you know how. Send some emails to a few people you know, ask them for nitpicks, then close your mouth and listen.
Shuffleboard is a tool for running simple real-time remote discussions and workshops
16. Ignore the side comments
I’ve gotten a lot of comments from friends about my apartment’s ceilings, my long messy Covid hair, my plain t-shirts, my speaking mannerisms, my posting schedule, and more.
I think people just don’t know how to react when we see something different. We default to sharing our first-take observations out loud, even if they’re not the most constructive. These comments are pretty harmless. Just be ready to have the spotlight on you.
17. Brush off the haters
The vast majority of YouTube comments I’ve gotten are short encouraging messages from random people I’ll never meet. (Thanks y’all ❤️)
But every once in a while, you’ll get a comment that comes across as pretty negative. Here’s someone on Hacker News implying that I wasn’t qualified to do this project.
My guess is that these commenters are still learning how best to communicate with other people. It’s not your job to unpack or solve this for them. As Brené Brown would say, they’re not “in the arena”, so their opinions don’t have to be interesting to you.
Smile, and keep going anyway!
18. Share even when it’s uncomfortable
When I say I put the entire process online, I mean the ENTIRE process. Theoretically, anyone could copy my whole app by watching my videos and typing what I type.
Will this have a negative consequence down the line? I don’t know! I hope not! All I know is that I made a bet that the benefits of being public would outweigh the costs. Right now, I’m glad I did.
If you’re working on a new project, peel back the curtain for people and work in public. I recommend using whatever format comes naturally. If you find yourself writing a lot, write about it. If you find yourself talking a lot, make a podcast or video. Be smart (don’t show your private keys, and consult your lawyer) but put your process out into the world.
19. Some easy things are hard, some hard things are easy
I think we all have inaccurate preconceptions about how much effort new things are going to take to learn.
For example, before this project I had never written (or even read?) a press release. But writing one didn’t take long: I Googled around a bit, took a stab at a first draft, edited it after lunch, and got a friends’ feedback within about a day.
On the other hand, I spent far, far, far more time that I thought I would wrangling tiny bugs and getting my database set up in a way that worked for. (This is the reason that agile software proponents say that estimates are worthless.)
20. Making is messy
One of the things I’m most proud of in the video series is that it shows the real-life, messy, distracted, sometimes even half-baked nature of the creative process.
Great ideas get thrown away, and mediocre ideas stick around longer than you might like. There’s no time, and yet everything takes far too long. Some things require compromise, others require a constant pursuit quality. You make a decision, you change your mind — then you change it back. You‘re questioning your decisions, reworking, massaging, and trying again and again and again — all while fighting perfectionism, laziness, fear, and boredom.
This is the inevitable side of making things that not everyone talks about. It’s also the part I’ve come to absolutely love. I know this is cheesy, but I love making things — it’s a wild wonderful weird adventure!
21. Just do it
There will always be plenty of reasons not to take a risk: wasted time, potential embarrassment, waiting for the right moment, yadda yadda yadda.
At some point, you just have to just say “screw it” and do stuff anyway.
Remember, you don’t need anyone’s permission to make something. (Especially on the internet.)
Just start, and watch what happens. | https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/i-built-a-startup-and-filmed-every-minute-on-youtube-heres-what-i-learned-4ff65c711081 | ['Sam Pierce Lolla'] | 2020-12-18 00:51:42.587000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'User Experience', 'Careers', 'Startup', 'YouTube'] |
Metaball loop ( Blender tutorial ) | If you’re looking for how to loop animated metaballs in blender, you’ve come to the right place. Since this is a procedural animation, it will be easy to control the number and size of metaballs, amplitude, speed, etc. Here you can check video version and I also added a link to the blender file containing all the nodes at the end.
Install ‘animation nodes’ add-on
First of all you need to have ‘animation nodes’ add-on installed in your blender project. You can download the latest version for your platform here. Then go to edit/preferences/add-ons. Click install in the right top corner and choose the downloaded zip file. Also, don’t forget to check the box next to the node name.
Add premade node group
Metaball movement is driven by a vector that is generated by wiggle node output. Looping a wiggle node output is not an easy task. In this topic i won’t dive into the details how to achieve it. Lucky for us there is a ready to go solution nicely provided by Razie. You can download it here. A blender file contains the node group that you can append to the project.
Also make sure to delete the additional scene that was created automatically after importing the node set.
Let’s get started! 🚀
First of all we need to add metaball object to the scene. Then for one of your views change editor type to ‘Animation nodes’.
Generate metaball instances
The node set below generates 12 metaball instances in one place. Because for now the ‘Object Transform Output’ node have the same location values for every generated metaball. | https://wannathis.medium.com/metaball-loop-animation-17975b8b0123 | [] | 2020-12-19 13:30:43.631000+00:00 | ['Animation', 'Blender', 'Design'] |
Our Story | Dialogue & Discourse seeks to provide readers with a means for developing informed opinions regarding issues of significance, aiding in the creation of a dialogue between opponents of thought at a time where our society suffers from intense tribalism and partisanship. We strive to curate empirically-centered pieces that share news and ideas truly worthy of discourse, venturing far beyond the qualitative and surface characteristics that have grown to dominate the American news cycle.
Our rigorous editorial standards enforce our core principle of weighing quality far more than quantity. We have had the opportunity of working with some truly incredible individuals, including acclaimed professors, award-winning journalists and world-class scientists.
Our content is carefully curated with the consideration of maintaining a balanced amount of coverage that accounts for all perspectives, specifically on articles regarding political or controversial topics. We are not affiliated or in support of a particular political or social organization, though we avidly strive for roughly equal volumes of liberal and conservative pieces.
We are an international publication, comprised of contributors from every continent and spanning across many of the world’s major cities. This includes the following countries of China, Japan, India, Bangladesh, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Sudan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Botswana, United Arabs Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Ukraine, Belgium, Portugal, Romania, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Estonia, Russia, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Cuba, Haiti, Panama, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. | https://medium.com/discourse/our-story-b47c7458e342 | ['D D Editorial Team'] | 2020-08-12 02:03:19.757000+00:00 | ['Publishing', 'Write', 'Editor', 'Publication', 'Writing'] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.