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Startup development models and methodologies | What is a product development model and why is it needed?
A product development model covers all the phases of product creation and involves everything that happens at each of these stages. For example, in the case of software development, the project usually goes through six major phases. They are:
Planning . We define what we are going to do and what problems we will solve. We set goals, find out what resources we need to implement the project. We study the market and competitors, and work out alternative variants of product development.
. We define what we are going to do and what problems we will solve. We set goals, find out what resources we need to implement the project. We study the market and competitors, and work out alternative variants of product development. System analysis . We determine and document end user’s requirements. What expectations do our customers have and how can we fulfill them, if ever?
. We determine and document end user’s requirements. What expectations do our customers have and how can we fulfill them, if ever? Design . We define the system elements, its components, security level, architecture, interfaces, data types. We design and discuss.
. We define the system elements, its components, security level, architecture, interfaces, data types. We design and discuss. Development and implementation . By the beginning of this stage, the design has been already agreed, the development stage is coming. We complete coding, configure the system according to the requirements and functions. The system is ready to be installed and launched by the end of this phase.
. By the beginning of this stage, the design has been already agreed, the development stage is coming. We complete coding, configure the system according to the requirements and functions. The system is ready to be installed and launched by the end of this phase. Testing . In the end we determine whether the product functions as designed or the results turned out to be different. System testing is performed automatically, as well as is undertaken by a team of experts. We also offer potential users to test the software. We identify defects and detect bugs in the program and eventually rectify them.
. In the end we determine whether the product functions as designed or the results turned out to be different. System testing is performed automatically, as well as is undertaken by a team of experts. We also offer potential users to test the software. We identify defects and detect bugs in the program and eventually rectify them. System maintenance. We prepare and release system upgrades, evaluate system performance, remove/deactivate obsolete components.
This scheme is typical and varies depending on the way the development goes, on the specifics of teamwork, budget and product features. It is here where you should choose the suitable development approach, which is generally divided into classical and flexible.
Here is the list of traditional development models:
Code and Fix often known as Cowboy coding (coding, checking and fixing errors),
often known as Cowboy coding (coding, checking and fixing errors), Waterfall (the project flows through all phases consistently),
(the project flows through all phases consistently), V-Model (system testing is conducted simultaneously with a development stage),
(system testing is conducted simultaneously with a development stage), Incremental model (the project is broken down into multiple components, the team prepares each of them successively and produces a final total system),
(the project is broken down into multiple components, the team prepares each of them successively and produces a final total system), Spiral model (implies a thorough study of risks),
(implies a thorough study of risks), Iterative model (first the core model of the project is implemented, then iterations on its improvement follow),
(first the core model of the project is implemented, then iterations on its improvement follow), RAD-Model is Rapid Application Development model (high-speed product development).
Traditional models assume an emphasis on sequence, timing, and final product requirements.
The Startup Jedi media is supported by Rocket DAO
As for flexible models, we use the well-known Agile methodology. When we prepare a product using a flexible model, our project and requirements can change during each iteration (flexible model, when the project adapts to each iteration), and there are no timelines, the work can be carried out endlessly — you have an opportunity to constantly improve the product and add new functionality to it.
Finally, development methodology is applying a model in practice. Thus, Agile has a range of widespread methodologies: from nimble Kanban (when a team works with a task board) to rough Scrum and XP.
Now let’s look at more detailed characteristics of each of the above mentioned models. | https://medium.com/startup-jedi/startup-development-models-and-methodologies-2b3c263626c6 | ['Rocket Dao'] | 2020-04-06 11:31:10.382000+00:00 | ['Venture Capital', 'Rocketdao Education', 'Methodology', 'Development', 'Startup'] |
Announcing SSK Token Airdrop for October 2020 | First of all, we’re sorry to announce that the first SSK airdrop has been postponed to 00:00 (UTC) on Oct 15th, 2020, 5 days later than originally planned.
Details of the SSK token airdrop for October 2020:
Snapshot time: 00:00 UTC, 15th October, 2020
Airdrop reward: 41,666 SSK
Referral rate: 80%
We’ve recently published our airdrop smart contract which you can review now on GitHub, where test cases are also available. However, we’re still in the process of finalizing the front-end user interface for participating in the airdrop, so no URL for now, but we’ll make sure to open it up to the public at least 24 hours before the snapshot time specified above.
[Update] Front-end interface is now available.
Since this is the first airdrop, we’ll share more about the rules here.
How to Get Airdrop?
To get the airdrop SSK tokens you’ll need to have SUN tokens staked in the airdrop contract at the snapshot timestamp. The amount of time you’ve staked before snapshot time is reached is not a factor for calculating reward. All that matters is to have tokens staked at the snapshot time. You may stake just seconds before snapshot and unstake immediately afterwards if you like.
The amount of SSK tokens you’ll receive is calculated as:
Airdrop Reward = Total Airdrop Reward * Your SUN Tokens Staked / Total SUN Token Supply
Note that the denominator here is the total SUN token supply, not the total staked amount. This is by design. If the total staked amount is used instead, we’d be creating an incentive for stakers to not tell others about the airdrop, effectively defeating the very purpose of holding these airdrops.
More about Referrals
One of the major differences with SSK airdrops compared to traditional counterparts is the addition of referrals. The team has invested a lot of effort into building a robust referral program, which will hopefully help promote the SunStake platform.
Referrals are Permanent
As mentioned in a previous post, referral relationships are permanent, and automatically apply to all future airdrops.
For example, if you invite someone and he/she stakes for the October airdrop, then you’ll receive referral rewards for this airdrop for sure. But what’s really cool about the referral program is that this referral is recorded globally, and if the referred stakes again in future airdrops, you’ll receive rewards as well, as long as they use the same address, even if they use a different device without your referral link.
Referrals are also permanent in the sense that they cannot be overwritten. That is, once a referral relationship is established, even if the referred stakes again with a different referrer, that new referrer will be automatically ignored.
Browser only Remembers the First Referrer
In the last subsection above, we talked about how referrals are non-overwritable once established, but there’s actually more we’re doing to protect referrers’ interest.
Our airdrop webpage only stores the first referrer it sees, and automatically discards future referral links. Therefore, even if your audience attempts to change referrer by visiting their own referral link, it won’t work and you’ll still be the referrer.
Of course, if the user is determined enough, he/she can always clear browser data or even use a different device to get rid of the stored referrer. But we expect most users to not go this far. | https://medium.com/@sunstake/announcing-ssk-token-airdrop-for-october-2020-bba60e13452 | ['Sunstake Network'] | 2020-10-12 21:15:21.772000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Airdrop', 'Sunstake', 'Smart Contracts', 'Referral Program'] |
What Would You Rather Do? | I like to use my thoughts as topics when I write because, in case you‘ve not noticed, 90% of the content I put out on Medium are conversations I have with myself.
The question: what would you rather do? Comes to my mind when I feel like quitting, and somehow it keeps me going.
I’m really thankful that I write here because it’s like a public accountability buddy for me. Because when I talk about being consistent and trying to stray away from being consistent, it reminds me not to be a scam and actually put in the work, and trust me; it has helped me a lot.
What would you rather do?
Let’s say you’ve been into that particular craft of yours for months, and because you do not see any results, you try to quit to do something else. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/what-would-you-rather-do-a6906136578e | ['Tochukwu Okoro E.'] | 2020-12-28 18:02:42.663000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Life', 'Success', 'Mindset', 'Growth'] |
Elizabeth Kagimbi: Stepping out of myself. | By Mwaniki Nyaga, KamiLimu Management Committee Member
Design provides us with choices to define ourselves. It is often hidden in places, within services and in business innovation. Nowadays, people are finding a deeper sense of identity, purpose and gratification through creating and maintaining connections, memories and experiences. Oftentimes, this cannot be derived only from material product purchases. Therefore, we have come from the idea that designers simply make appealing and usable components and products, to an appreciation that their work impacts the perception of entire brand and customer experiences, and beyond that — to making those experiences meaningful.
In this interview, Elizabeth Kagimbi, a User Experience (UX) Researcher and Product Designer specializing in Human Experience and Interface Design, shares her encounters with self-doubt, and lessons she has learnt as a researcher, multifaceted designer and mentor. At KamiLimu, Elizabeth is the UX Track professional mentor.
Elizabeth Kagimbi, Cohort 5.0 Professional Mentor.
Who is Elizabeth?
I’m a conceptualizer, a wannabe Disney director, and a low-key adrenaline junkie. I’m a creative at heart.
How do you feel this creativity expresses itself?
I draw and paint a lot, but for myself. Maybe one day when I’m retiring I’ll have a gallery showcase for my art. I animate too in my spare time. As a creative, there are times when I feel pressured or I have a lot of self-doubt. The painting and animating are primarily for my mental health: they relieve the pressure I experience whenever I have a bloated workload.
How did you arrive at experience design as your field of specialization?
Growing up, I wanted to study Medicine, not art. Disappointingly, I did not qualify to pursue Medicine after my final secondary school exams. A friend suggested that I should try out a course at Nairobits, a Digital Design School. Going in, I was looking forward to learning computer programming but this desire was not to be met immediately as I first had to learn about the fundamental principles of design. I enjoyed my time in the program tremendously, and during our final project presentations two years later, my first employer spotted my portfolio and invited me to interview for an internship. At the time, I had not settled on a particular aspect of design and you’d find me doing animation, graphic design, as well as coding web pages. During the internship, I was advised to combine my graphic design and animation skills to support the marketing team. Three years later, as a Junior Designer with the product and marketing team, I worked on a project to improve a brand’s product experience to include accessibility by the visually-impaired. The experience was quite eye-opening, and it made me question the authenticity of my designs and the reasoning behind them. It triggered my decision to move to a more user-centric design process where every design I did would be geared towards improving a situation faced by real people.
Did you need to learn what it means to design for people at that point?
It’s a continuous process. I’m grateful that throughout my career I’ve been surrounded by people who have allowed me to learn by making mistakes. I’ve come to realise that designing for people is a never-ending learning process: I started as an animator, realized that I needed to create usable products, which led me to take a human-centred design course with IDEO, after which I started to create impactful designs for actual people, and I began to both ask good questions that trigger emotions and hold conversations that give the right answers to the design challenge at hand. That’s how the process of learning and becoming has manifested itself in me.
What do you wish you knew about design when you started that you know now?
Three things. One, understanding the people I’m designing for is crucial. I need to learn their hopes, their fears and their needs. Two, my preferences and tastes are not always similar to those for whom I am designing. Three, I won’t always get it right on the first try. Initially, I thought I needed to be perfect and that I should get everything in the right place all at once. But I’ve come to see the good that comes out of iterating, seeing whether something works, asking for feedback and re-presenting the design in a new way.
On the second point, how are you able to separate your preferences from the design?
My first three years working were all about creating fancy designs that would please my ego. Six to seven years down the line, I saw that it wasn’t about me. Through respecting the process of being human-centred, I gradually grew out of the need to fulfil my ego.
Why did you want to be a mentor with KamiLimu?
When this opportunity landed on my table, I was a bit hesitant. The impostor syndrome kicked in: “I don’t think I’m there yet.” I didn’t believe I had enough experience to give proper advice or mentor. Through conversations with a lot of people, including some of my friends in design who have been mentors at KamiLimu, I realized that they believed I could do it. My mentor walked me through my previous work and achievements and the impact they have had over time, and, with that, I saw the need to share my experience with the mentees at KamiLImu.
What did you hope to achieve with your UX Track mentees?
I wanted them to know what it takes to be a designer; not only about the planning that goes into a look and feel but also the impact of a designed solution on both the people and the business. I also wanted to create awareness on why we should be empathetic as designers. I like to show designers that they are indeed talented, but also help them ask the why’s behind what they are doing; to create an environment where they are in-sync with their audience. I also hoped that they would have fun while doing their research!
What was your approach to their personal projects?
I decided to use IDEO’s Human Centred Design ideology, a creative approach for hands-on problem solving, as well as some aspects from The Design Council’s Double Diamond. Both methods entail building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for, generating tonnes of ideas, building and sharing prototypes with the audience in order to learn from them and refine your concept for an eventual launch.
Were the mentees’ achievements in line with your hopes?
The process of becoming a good designer is a marathon, not a sprint. All my mentees have developed a certain level of confidence, enough to even apply for UX jobs. Their case studies had a level of detail that was incredibly humbling. I even shared them with my workmates and they were really impressed! They have all become more curious and more confident in their design skills and putting their design work out there. I attribute the positive mindset and attitude that the mentees have to KamiLimu. It was very evident in the ease with which they did their research and asked questions when in doubt. I can’t wait to see what they come up with in the group project!
How is your overall experience being an ICT Track mentor?
I’m so elated to have been picked to mentor. My experience has enabled me to do a lot of learning, especially in getting to know my mentees’ characters and capabilities. I have also relearnt ways of teaching, like dumping resources on people without clear guidance won’t result in productivity. And understanding where my mentees are coming from. I’d definitely do this again and also recommend it to other experience designers in the community!
What are you looking forward to doing or learning in life over the next year?
I want to improve my research skills. Remember, I started from a market-led industry which steered me to where I am now, in a user-centred industry. As a designer, I need to understand the data I collect and the psychology behind it. Therefore, I’ve started going down the path of data science research. I’m curious about how to understand customer insights, the process of data visualisation, and how to use statistics and Python to support the two. | https://medium.com/@kamilimu/elizabeth-kagimbi-stepping-out-of-myself-6966ea1ca546 | [] | 2020-12-20 10:42:01.871000+00:00 | ['Human Centered Design', 'Empathy', 'Kamilimu Ict Track', 'UX', 'Kamilimu'] |
The Mandalorian is a start, but ‘Obi-Wan’ can breathe life back into Star Wars… | With the recent hit ‘The Mandalorian’ proving there is still so much creative potential left in Star Wars, diehard fans and casual watchers alike have plenty to look forward to with the return of both Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor coming to fruition for the development of the new ‘Obi-Wan’ series set to start filming early into the new year.
There are so many reasons why this is such a big deal for both the Star Wars franchise as well as its fans…
A chance to bring back the classic lightsaber duels which brought the franchise global fans in the beginning.
‘Obi-Wan’ has a fantastic opportunity given its throw-backish nature to bring about the return of some lightsaber usage and duels that diehard star wars fans haven’t seen for years. Before the modern era of films Star Wars had a quality plotline which was backed up by some jaw-droppingly intense and impressive lightsaber duels that put people in seats time and time again all around the world.
This isn’t to say that the modern film don’t have the same level of creative integrity, which is debatable but a separate issue. It just means that as a star wars fan you’ve surely have missed some of the classic duels that made the franchise what it was, and that is exactly what this new Kenobi series can bring you if given the right creative pushes from Disney and the cast.
The opportunity for the resurfacing of beloved characters from times gone by.
With the series supposedly exploring in more depth the character ark of Kenobi there surely is room for some fan pleasing moments with the return of iconic characters such as Darth Maul, Qui-Gon, Commander Cody and even the potential entering of Ahsoka Tano.
Obviously there can be no expectations as to which characters we may see pop up along the timeline of the new series but without doubt fans should hope to see at least a few along the journey, something which could bring back the spark from older viewers returning to see characters that made their childhood. The return of older characters and concepts also gives the new generation of star wars watchers the chance for a taster of why the serious is still so popular so many years after its initial release.
A potential landmark in the future of the franchise and it’s direction with both films and series works.
Finally, whilst we know so little about how the series will turn out we can only hope that it will serve as a creative landmark for disney as they tackle how to push the franchise forward going into the future. Following the success of Disney’s ‘The Mandalorian’ series there has been a standard undoubtedly set for Star Wars fans who want to see like it both in the form of series work and films going into the future.
There really is so much to look forward to with the upcoming filming of ‘Obi-Wan’ and without doubt Star Wars fans should feel in safe hands with the return of franchise legends who surely will do nothing but good for what stands as one of the most passionately followed stories of all time… | https://medium.com/@screenpopped/the-mandalorian-was-a-start-but-obi-wan-can-breathe-life-back-into-star-wars-a3325582b066 | [] | 2020-12-22 10:58:05.542000+00:00 | ['Star Wars', 'Movies', 'News'] |
What I learned about the Corona vaccine in an interview with a mRNA researcher | Corona is already a very controversial topic, with the approval of the vaccine, it has become even more itchy to talk about it. Aside from the ethical and moral questions, there are facts. BioNTech and Pfizer have launched one of the vaccines that has overcome clinical trials in several countries. The vaccine is based on mRNA technology. With the approval suddenly came a lot of concerns about this technology, questions like; “Does it now interfere with my DNA and can I become infertile with a vaccination?”. As anybody would I also asked myself how much truth is there to these rumours, after all that vaccine will be injected into my body. So I’ve decided to to an interview with an expert, from the University of Zurich, Steve Pascolo. And what I can tell you in advance: There is practically nothing to the rumours.
Steve Pascolo specialises in molecular biology as a tool for improving health. He has been researching RNA and the technology since 1996. He was kind enough to tell me honestly and openly about his experiences with the technology.
As he told me how mRNA works I’ve got to know how complicated and hard it is to understand the technology. The CDC explained it so everybody understands it. Here a snipped of their explanation.
mRNA vaccines have strands of genetic material called mRNA inside a special coating. That coating protects the mRNA from enzymes in the body that would otherwise break it down. It also helps the mRNA enter the dendritic cells and macrophages in the lymph node near the vaccination site. mRNA can most easily be described as instructions for the cell on how to make a piece of the “spike protein” that is unique to SARS-CoV-2. Since only part of the protein is made, it does not do any harm to the person vaccinated but it is antigenic(….)
My two main questions were, does it affect the DNA and could it make me infertile. His answer was a clear “NO”. He explained to me that the mRNA, which is in the vaccine, does not affect the DNA. In contrast to DNA viruses, this could be the case. By the way, rubella, mumps and measles are a kind of mRNA vaccine, they are attenuated viruses, but they are still alive. They release their RNA into our cells. The cells then release a protein and trigger an immune response. The synthetic mRNA vaccine triggers the exact same response.
He assured me that the mRNA vaccine is very safe. But it is true every vaccine triggers some kind of immune reaction, the reaction of the body can lead to symptoms like fatigue and fever, in some rare cases the immune reaction can also lead to problems. The risk exists with every vaccination.
He explained to me that there is no reason to believe that the vaccine is problematic during pregnancy. On the contrary, he suspects that the viral infection could be a problem during pregnancy. However, pregnant women who want to be vaccinated, should wait for the approval of the authorities.
When asked if he would vaccinate himself and his family, a quick and direct answer came; “Yes, of course.”
He wants his family and friends to be vaccinated with the very safe vaccine. The vaccine contains only 30 micrograms of mRNA, which is a miracle, he explained to me. He is convinced that thanks to the vaccination the pandemic will be over and we can return to a normal life.
It is also amazing that he already received mRNA injections 15 years ago. He wanted to try out for himself the mRNA he used for the vaccine he was working on. He did not have any problems with it and did not suffer any sequelae. So he also tells me “I can say for sure that the technology works and is safe, I mean I have tried it out myself and I still alive.” | https://medium.com/@sara-aurora/what-i-learned-about-the-corona-vaccine-in-an-interview-with-an-mrna-researcher-115ea98e3631 | ['Sara Aurora'] | 2021-02-10 09:20:02.595000+00:00 | ['Interview', 'Expert', 'Coronavirus', 'Vaccine', 'Coronavirus Covid19'] |
7 Summer House Cleaning Tips You Don’t Know Yet! | The summer season is hot and humid. This means that it can be difficult to keep your home clean and healthy as the school year winds down. These simple tips will help you keep your home looking great throughout the summer.
Summer Cleaning Tips — Majestic Cleaning Pros., Perth
These simple tips will help you keep your home clean and tidy throughout the summer.
Clear out your gutters
Make sure you are ready for summer storms by clearing out your gutters. This is also a good time to stock up on emergency supplies if your area is susceptible to flooding or severe storms.
2. Keep Odors Away
Although trash is never pleasant to the nose, it can become very unpleasant in summer. Because heat and humidity provide the ideal environment for bacteria growth, this is why trash cans can smell unpleasant. This problem is made worse by the humidity in summer, which traps bad odors and keeps them around longer than normal.
Baking soda can be used to prevent this from happening. Baking soda absorbs bad odors before spreading throughout your home, causing you to have a miserable summer.
3. Dust more often
Let the sunshine through your windows bring natural light into your home. It can also cause dusty omissions in your home. Dust can cause an allergic reaction that can make it difficult to enjoy the summer. This problem can be avoided by making an effort to dust less frequently during the summer.
4. Enjoy a cleaner ventilation system
All the dirt, dust, pollen, and animal hair that gets tracked into your home eventually make their way to your air ducts. They can build up over time and become a breeding ground for mold and mildew that is recirculated in the air you inhale. Dirt and dust can also clog your AC system’s filter, making it more difficult to cool your home. This will increase your energy bills. While you can clean your filter by yourself, COIT professionals will come to clean your air ducts every 2–3 years.
5. Clean the Mattress
You should take out all bedding and vacuum the top of your mattress twice a year, once in winter and once in summer. Flip it over and vacuum the top. This along with regular washing of linens in hot water reduces the likelihood of getting dust mites.
6. Prevent Mold Growth
In humid summer temperatures, mold and mildew can grow more quickly, particularly in areas like the washing machine. When the washing machine is not in use, leave it open to keep mold and mildew away. This will dry the machine and reduce humidity so mold and mildew don’t grow.
7. Fix Stains
Summer foods can cause damage to carpets and upholstery, from grass stains to Popsicle drips to melting ice cream. For tips on how to get summer foods off furniture, check out our previous blog. | https://medium.com/@majesticcleaningpros/7-summer-house-cleaning-tips-you-dont-know-yet-e1c20ead9a7e | ['Sujan Shrestha'] | 2021-12-14 15:41:22.826000+00:00 | ['Cleaning Company', 'Cleaning', 'Summer Cleaning', 'Cleaning Services', 'Cleaning Tips'] |
SaltStack State Files Written In Python | Generally in SaltStack, state file are written in the YAML + Jinja2 format. However, other options are available. One of these options is Python.
In this post, we will display how a simple state written in YAML + Jinja2 can be written in Python instead. In the example, the function of the state is to take data in a pillar, and serialize it as YAML into a file.
The pillar data used in this example is:
breakfast:
egg: scrambled
meats:
- sausage
- bacon
sides:
spam: gross
beans: baked
dinner:
egg: poached
seafood: lobster
other:
- truffle pate
- mornay sauce
sides:
spam: delicious
egg: over easy
meats:
- steak
The Salt State as written in YAML + Jinja2:
{% set application_pillar = ['breakfast', 'dinner'] %}
{%- for app_pillar in application_pillar %}
serialize key { }:
file.serialize:
- name: /tmp/serialize_test.txt
- user: root
- group: root
- mode: 400
- formatter: yaml
- dataset_pillar: {{ app_pillar }}
- merge_if_exists: True
{% endfor %}
The Salt State as written in Python:
#!py
def _get_data():
keys = ['breakfast', 'dinner']
return keys
def run():
config = {}
for key in _get_data():
config['serialize key '.format(key)] = {
'file.serialize': [
{'name': '/tmp/serialize_test.txt'},
{'user': 'root'},
{'group': 'root'},
{'mode': '400'},
{'formatter': 'yaml'},
{'dataset_pillar': key}
]
}
return config
A few notes on the python version.
The function name run is required.
is required. The run function must return a dictionary.
function must return a dictionary. The shebang, must be !py
Bonus
In SaltStack, the shebang really just specifies the order of renderers to use for the particular file. By default, the shebang is #!jinja|yaml
So… does that mean it’s possible to do #!jinja|py ? Well, it seems like it should be, but I had no luck actually getting this to work. The jinja renderer would output what looked like a clean python file but then the py renderer would choke and spit out a syntax error due to a jinja line. For reference, I'll leave the code that was used. Maybe this is a bug that will get patched at some point.
#!jinja|py
{% set application_pillar = ['breakfast', 'dinner'] %}
def run():
config = {}
{% for key in application_pillar %}
config['serialize key { }'] = {
'file.serialize': [
{'name': '/tmp/serialize_test.txt'},
{'user': 'root'},
{'group': 'root'},
{'mode': '400'},
{'formatter': 'yaml'},
{'dataset_pillar': '{ }' }
]
}
{% endfor %}
return config
Update
I reached out to the salt community and was informed that any render pipelines that includes #!py only get evaluated with the py renderer. So that answers that.
Bonus Bonus
So… what about json?
Well if you’re a psychopath hell bent on squeezing out all the speed possible…yes
#!jinja|json
{% set application_pillar = ['breakfast', 'dinner'] %}
{
{%- for app_pillar in application_pillar %}
"serialize key { }": {
"file.serialize": [
{"name": "/tmp/serialize_test.txt"},
{"user": "root"},
{"group": "root"},
{"mode": 400},
{"formatter": "yaml"},
{"dataset_pillar": "{ }" },
{"merge_if_exists": "True"}
]
}{% if not loop.last %},{% endif %}
{%- endfor %}
}
All render times are taken from the Salt Minion which is running as a single core vagrant instance on my laptop. YMMV.
jinja|yaml render time: 0.00130581855774
py render time: 0.000488996505737
jinja|json render time: 5.69820404053e-05 or 0.0000569 | https://medium.com/@smrtalek/saltstack-state-files-written-in-python-632181853aac | ['Alek Tant'] | 2021-08-17 16:03:26.084000+00:00 | ['Saltstack', 'Yaml', 'Python', 'DevOps', 'Json'] |
How a Bad LMS Made Me Drop Out of Grad School | (and Advice for Universities)
I’ve always been organized. I love spontaneity and the thrill of the unknown, but when it comes to staying on top of my “life” to do list, I’ve got it covered. Planned. Scheduled. Politely requesting a reminder from Siri. And maybe even written on the calendar in my kitchen for good measure.
Staying organized as a K-12 student and then as an undergrad had its challenges. Multiple courses and assignments, shifting due dates and agile syllabi were a lot to juggle. But, I got by like most of my peers. We were used to the paper-shuffle hustle because we hadn’t yet experienced how mobile technology would make staying organized and connected easier. We were accustomed to physically sitting in a classroom with our classmates and a teacher instructing, interacting and reminding us of upcoming assignments.
Following college, I worked as a journalist and public relations professional. My career path shifted to a marketing and business focus after I began working at a digital marketing agency in 2007.
At this point, you may have deduced that I’m an older millennial. Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook during my junior year of college in 2004. Three years later, the iPhone hit the market. :)
In 2008, I began working at a large corporation as a digital marketing manager. I knew that in order for me to have a better shot at a leadership position in the future, a master’s degree was in order. I thought having a marketing-focused MBA coupled with a bachelor’s in journalism would be a solid combination — especially for the content marketing path I wanted to eventually explore.
Thinking about going back to school felt overwhelming. I was working well over 40 hours a week at the time, and the thought of driving to a campus and having to be somewhere at a certain time wasn’t appealing. After some research, online graduate school sounded easier to manage — even though I never experienced an online learning environment.
Back to School
I enrolled in an online university (that shall go unnamed). During the admissions process, I received a high-level overview of the learning management system (LMS) or “virtual classroom” environment that I would be working in. The user interface seemed old school, but I was determined to get started on my master’s program.
Oh, how I wished I would have asked the admissions representative to do a “deeper dive” on the LMS. Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say.
My first class was Business Accounting. I had to purchase a book for the class, but it wasn’t a physical paper or hardback. It was an e-Book — and a terrible one at that. It was clunky, didn’t allow you to highlight, copy or paste text and the bookmarking feature didn’t work. Now math has always been something I’ve had to work especially hard at, and I was already feeling anxiety about this course. But then layer on top of that a clunky book that took more time trying to navigate than actually read, and an online learning environment that looked like it was straight out of 1993. Not to mention never meeting or even seeing a photo online of my classmates or my professor. I felt totally alone and disengaged.
I hung in there, though. Over the next two months, I logged into the archaic LMS during the assigned times for group discussions and assignment submissions. Staying organized was difficult. Nothing flowed. Nothing was easy. I felt bad emailing my professor if I didn’t understand something or couldn’t locate a document I was supposed to read or reference. I didn’t want my professor to feel like a customer service agent.
If only the LMS were mobile friendly and mimicked the experience of a social media platform. Things would have been so much better…
Peace Out
I gave it the ol’ college try, but online learning wasn’t for me. After some self reflection, I decided I needed some time to reevaluate my pursuit of a graduate degree.
My time management skills were solid, but I just couldn’t get over how terrible the LMS was. I probably spent nearly as much time trying to navigate that platform as I did actually reading and working on assignments. I dropped out of the Business Accounting course, and completely withdrew from the university.
A Few Years Later
Skip ahead a few years, and I found myself working on the marketing and communications team at an online graduate school. One of the perks in the benefits package was employees could earn a degree from the university tuition free! I still wanted to go back to school for my MBA, but my previous online learning experience scarred me. But, FREE.
I thought it would be silly to pass up an opportunity to get a free master’s degree (though I still had to pay for books and taxes). So I decided to give it the ol’ college try again. Surely LMS technology would’ve advanced by 2013 considering Facebook and other social media had gone mainstream. Um, yeah. Nope.
I found myself back in the 90s. I had to check to make sure my iPhone hadn’t turned into a Zack Morris-style-Saved By the Bell phone. “How were colleges so behind the times?” I thought. But, this time, I was determined to finish my degree. Because, FREE. And because, future leadership role.
The unfriendly LMS didn’t make it easy, though. I begrudgingly logged into that clunky LMS each week, each time mentally noting recommendations on how to improve the experience for students and faculty.
I’m happy to say I persisted. I received a conferred master’s in business administration degree November 2014 (and a new appreciation for beautiful customer-focused design). Because of both of these experiences, I have several recommendations on how an LMS can go from dreadful to delightful.
Advice for University Administrators, CIOs and Other LMS Decision Makers
Get With the Times
It’s 2017. If your LMS even remotely brings back memories of Windows 95, you better check yo self before you wreck yo self. Not only does an archaic LMS negatively impact student success and satisfaction, it also poorly reflects on your university’s brand.
Make the Investment
EBITDA, profits and revenues, oh my! If you’re a university administrator or CIO, you’ve got financial goals and KPIs you need to hit each year. While a large upfront investment (depending on your model) could potentially hinder you from hitting your financial targets for a fiscal year, don’t think short term. Make the case for change and the investment now with a long-term vision for student success, satisfaction, retention and completion rates.
Explore Outside of the LMS Industry Vets
There are no doubt a few gorillas in the learning management world with a large share of the market and brand recognition. But before you narrow your next RFP to these “big names,” explore some of the new solutions on the market today. Many of the newer LMS platforms are disrupting the old regime with user-friendly interfaces that feel more like social media than a learning management system.
Engage Students and Faculty in the Decision Making Process
Talk to the people who are actually using your learning technology. Set up focus groups and survey current students, ask your alumni and do user testing. It can be easy for administrators to make decisions in a vacuum when time is of the essence, but slow down and poll the people who are or were actual users. Having your own primary research data on your LMS will be even more compelling to make your case for change.
Get Social
Sure there are discussion forums on most LMS platforms. But don’t confuse that as being social. Today, students demand modern, simplistic and interactive social learning platforms that feel like the social channels they’ve been using for more than a decade.
University administrators should hop on Insta and Facebook. Explore the social media sites students (and faculty) are using. A social learning platform with customizable features, personalized photos and a Facebook-like experience is what students demand today. Especially in a 100 percent online program, it’s important for students to feel a sense of community. “Seeing” their peers and faculty connects them and facilitates engagement.
Email is Old School
If you’re a faculty member and feel like it’s pulling teeth getting your students to respond to emails, don’t worry. It’s not you; it’s them. Students barely check email! Today, they retrieve information from social news feeds, push notifications and messenger platforms.
Reduce email communication when possible, and check with your IT team to see what technology may exist to help you transform how you communicate with students.
Mobile First
Mobile is life as the Gen Z’ers and Millennials would say. If your LMS isn’t mobile responsive or you don’t have an app your students and faculty can log into, you are falling behind. Students want the ability to check assignment due dates, respond to an email, engage in a discussion and get push notification reminders whether they’re on the go or on the couch. Mobile first is the mantra for technology providers today, and it should be yours, too.
It Doesn’t Have to Be as Daunting as You May Think
Change is tough. We get used to things being a certain way and resist change even if we know the payoff will be worth it in the end. Thinking about implementing a new LMS for one course let alone an entire university can seem daunting. But, good news! There are several solutions on the market today with implementation that can be as simple as flipping on a switch. And, because many new platforms have fresh, intuitive interfaces, learning a new system doesn’t have to be scary.
The old LMS platform is being disrupted. With the proliferation of online universities and more traditional schools offering 100 percent online programs, it’s imperative to have a social learning platform that aligns with the technology trends and advancements of today. Those who invest in the student experience now will reap the rewards of increased student engagement, better student outcomes and a happy alumni community ripe for referrals. | https://medium.com/notebowl/how-a-bad-lms-made-me-drop-out-of-grad-school-48eea14715b3 | ['Alexis Castorina'] | 2017-02-24 21:54:30.328000+00:00 | ['Edtech', 'Social Learning', 'Education', 'Learning', 'Lms'] |
How to close binance account? | How To close Binance Account? you must perceive that the binance doesn’t enable users to shut their account. However, there’s how which might build your account disabled. Binance is that the cryptocurrency exchange that is growing incessantly.
How to close binance account?
This is the explanation it’s turning into one in every of the most important cryptocurrency exchange supported the commerce volume. it’s incessantly adding the new currency beneath its belt that has created it one in every of the foremost used web site and attracting a lot of users. However, their area unit some those that wish to shut their Binance account. There may be numerous reasons for that.
How to shut Binance account?
Currently, Binance isn’t permitting its users to delete the account however you’ll be able to go in our own way around by disabling your account. this will be a good thanks to shutting your account.
You can try this by implementing these straightforward steps:
1. You have to use another laptop to log in than the standard one you utilize.
2. When you log in your account from another laptop you’ll be obtaining the notification. during this notification, you’ll be asked if you have got logged in or not.
3. You have to click thereon notification and easily click on the Disable your account choice.
After this, your account is disabled and you’ll not be ready to log therein an account | https://medium.com/@danjane0101/how-to-close-binance-account-221ce93b28d1 | ['Dan Jane'] | 2019-02-25 05:17:50.190000+00:00 | ['Binance'] |
The Secret to a Smart Strategy: Clear Objectives and Courageous Choices | EVP of Hattaway Communications Carrie Schum on using strategy to make unexpected choices to connect with your audiences.
When the American Lung Association asked Carrie Schum and her team at Porter Novelli to develop a campaign to encourage smokers to make another attempt to quit smoking, they never expected to end up with the headline “You’re not a failure. You’re a seven-time learner.” Although the campaign headline was different from anything that the American Lung Association had done before, the campaign tested strongly because of one key reason — Carrie and her team developed a strong understanding of their audience.
As Hattaway’s Executive Vice President, Carrie brings a long history of using research and audience insights to produce smart, strategic, and successful communications campaigns for organizations such as the American Lung Association, the Truth Initiative, and the Internal Revenue Service. She believes that having a clear strategy along with the courage to try something new is essential for achieving desired outcomes.
“[For effective communications, you need to] know where you want to end up, know what your objective is, be very clear about why that’s the right objective, and then be open to the way you get there…. because it might be unexpected.”
For successful campaigns, Carrie believes that it’s important to trust what your audiences are telling you and not merely your assumptions about them. By understanding the unique characteristics of your audiences — such as the isolation felt by people who are trying to quit smoking or the ability for teenagers to make their own decisions about smoking — you will be able to reach your audiences in new and different ways.
On this episode of Achieve Great Things, Carrie gives us a crash course on how to combine audience insights, smart strategy, and courageous choices to drive meaningful behavior change.
Thank you for listening and reading! Please reach out to us on Twitter, visit us on Facebook, or email us at [email protected]. | https://medium.com/aspirational/the-secret-to-a-smart-strategy-clear-objectives-and-courageous-choices-a233d6a5a537 | ['Hattaway Communications'] | 2020-02-12 21:57:52.906000+00:00 | ['Audience', 'Behavior Change', 'Marketing Strategies', 'Communications Strategy', 'Podcast'] |
Introduction to Gradient Descent Algorithm | Imagine that you are standing at the top of a mountain,blindfolded. You are asked to move the down the mountain and find the valley. What would you do? Since you are unsure of where and in which direction you need to move to reach the the ground, you would probably take little baby steps in some direction of the higher incline and try to figure out if that path leads to your destination. You would repeat this process until you reach the ground. This is exactly how Gradient Descent algorithm works.
Gradient Descent is an optimisation algorithm which is widely used in machine learning problems to minimise the cost function. So wait! what exactly is cost function?
Cost Function
Cost function is something which you want to minimise. For example, in case of linear regression, when you try to fit a line to your data-points, it may not fit exactly to each and every point in the data-set. Cost function helps us to measure how close the predicted values are to their corresponding real values. If x is the input variable and y is the output variable and h(hypothesis) is the predicted output of our learning algorithm.
hθ(x) = θ0 + θ1x , where θ0 is the intercept and θ1 is the gradient or slope.
Our aim here is to minimise the error between output y and the predicted output hθ(x). i.e. to minimise (hθ(x) — y)**2. This also called sum of the square error. Mathematically this cost function can be written as
Cost function of Linear Regression
Our aim here is to determine values for θ which make the hypothesis as accurate as possible. In other words, minimise J(θ0,θ1) as much as possible.
So now that we have some idea about the cost function, let us try to understand how exactly Gradient Descent helps us to reduce this cost function.
Gradient Descent
Gradient Descent (Image Source : Coursera)
We run our algorithm with some initial weights (θ0 and θ1) and gradient descent keeps updating these weights until it finds the optimal value for these weights which result in minimising the cost function.
In simple terms our aim to move from the red region to blue region as shown in the above picture. Initially we start at any random values of θ0 and θ1 (say 0,0). In every step we keep updating the values of θ0 and θ1 by small amount to try and reduce J(θ0,θ1). We need to keep updating these values until we reach a local minimum.
It is also interesting to see that there can be multiple local minima’s for a given problem as seen in the above picture. Our starting point determines which local minima we end up on.
Gradient Descent Objective & Update rules
Here we take partial derivative of cost function with respect to each of the weights. Here alpha symbol indicates Learning Rate.
Learning Rate
It is important to set learning rate at an optimal level. If the learning rate is too high then it results in too big steps which in-turn results in overshooting the minima and the gradient descent never converges to local minima. If the learning rate is too low, steps will be very small and gradient descent will take a lot of time to converge to local minima.
Another important thing to note is that we don’t have to change the value of alpha in each step. Since as the gradient decent approaches the global minimum, the derivative term gets smaller, so even the update gets smaller and algorithm takes smaller steps as it approach the minimum.
Learning Rate (Image source : GitHub)
In case of Linear Regression cost function is always a convex function (bowl shaped) and always has a single minimum. So gradient descent will always converge to global optima.
Cost function of Linear Regression
Conclusion
Gradient Descent helps us to reduce the cost function which results in increasing the accuracy of our machine learning model. Due to its ability to reduce error and since it can be applied to large data-sets with many variables, it is used in most of the machine learning algorithms.
This is my first post on Medium. Please do share and clap if you like it!! | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/introduction-to-gradient-descent-algorithm-55e60f53680b | ['Liston Tellis'] | 2020-06-08 16:31:01.020000+00:00 | ['Cost Function', 'Linear Regression', 'Gradient Descent', 'Machine Learning'] |
- Mr Right | Arrangement of a birthday party
Today I arranged a birthday party for my cousin shakeel ahmad who is also my best friend. in this arrangement I worked in the team of my whole family...while working in a team I have applied all the rules which I have learned from the leadership course of #AmalAcademy
By using these rules I worked with my team in a very beautiful manner. It was a really great experience for me and we all enjoy the party a lot. | https://medium.com/@rightmr880/arrangement-of-a-birthday-party-today-i-arranged-a-birthday-party-for-my-cousin-shakeel-ahmad-who-a709ad9cf558 | ['Mr Right'] | 2020-12-18 17:00:28.629000+00:00 | ['Celebration', 'Leadership Development', 'Birthday', 'Team Workflow'] |
Code Club Australia looks to break its own record of kids coding with return of Moonhack | Code Club Australia looks to break its own record of kids coding with return of Moonhack James Follow Aug 4, 2017 · 3 min read
Aiming to break its own world record for the most number of kids coding at one time, Code Club Australia has announced the return of Moonhack for 2017, a campaign to see thousands of kids come together to code online.
This year’s Moonhack is set to spread globally, planned to kick off on August 15th in a number of cities around the globe.
The date will mark the 20th anniversary of National Science Week, Australia’s annual celebration of tech and science, following on from last year’s event which celebrated the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
Kids and schools that sign up for Moonhack will be tasked with creating projects within several moon-related themes, using a choice of either the Scratch, Scratch Jr or Python programming languages.
Once a coding project is completed, they can be uploaded onto the Moonhack platform to be shared with others. Kids receive a digital certificate for their work, and are encouraged to continue exercising their coding skills through Moonhack.
Last year’s campaign saw 10,207 kids take their coding skills online in Australia, breaking the previous world record for the number of kids coding on the same day.
With over 20,000 kids already registered for this year’s event, Code Club Australia said they are expecting to at least double the world record from last year.
This number falls in line with Code Club Australia growing its local impact across the country. Currently, the non-for-profit has helped establish roughly 1950 Code Clubs in Australia which cater to 65,000 kids, more than doubling the number of Code Clubs in the country last year.
While this year’s campaign is set to stick to its coding roots, Kelly Tagalan, Code Club Australia’s General Manager, said the campaign will be able to do so much to educate kids, beyond teaching them how to code.
“We are reading kids’ statements along with their registrations telling us why this kind of education is so important. One girl said, she’s planning to be an engineer, like her dad, and wants to learn to code early, because it’s helpful to her in solving problems,” she said.
“We also want kids to spark a love for learning through computational thinking, because it will be required in more than 70 percent of jobs of the future. Complex problem solving and a basic understanding of how technology is built is already an in-demand skill set in Australia’s job market.”
Jackie Coates, Head of the Telstra Foundation, Code Club Australia’s founding funding body, said the campaign also presents a strong opportunity for parents to interact with their kids and get them excited about problem solving.
“The best thing about Code Club is that it breaks down the myth that computer coding is hard and complex [plus] it’s actually fun, and through Moonhack something parents can do with their kids. As a mum of tweens, I’ve been able to get involved in coding with my kids through Code Club’s unique approach and we’ve had a blast doing it,” she said.
You can find more about participating in Moonhack here. | https://medium.com/startup-daily/code-club-australia-looks-to-break-its-own-record-of-kids-coding-with-return-of-moonhack-5b1e2d051b0a | [] | 2017-08-08 06:15:11.922000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Coding', 'Startup', 'Business', 'Australia'] |
Watson, Crick, Franklin, Zen | #30DAYSOFSCIKUCHALLENGE
Watson, Crick, Franklin, Zen
Peppers on Patrol, by John Levin
DNA, pretty,
four bases and sugar rope,
trees, frogs, whales, and you.
_________________________
A note: James Watson and Francis Crick got credit for finding the structure of DNA. The third member of the team, Rosalind Franklin, was not acknowledged in the Nobel Prize they earned because she was a woman. It took many years for her essential contributions to be recognized.
**For more on the #30DAYSOFSCIKUCHALLENGE — science-inspired haiku ( so #sciku?) prompts, check this out :
What’s next from John Levin : | https://medium.com/science-soul/watson-crick-franklin-zen-ebe7de7ddff0 | ['John Levin'] | 2021-01-16 00:10:37.861000+00:00 | ['Biology', 'Haiku', 'Dna', '30daysofscikuchallenge', 'Sciku'] |
How to Align SEO and PPC for Better Ecommerce Results | Aligning SEO and PPC will help drive more traffic and conversions. Use these tips to enhance your marketing efforts
If you run an eCommerce business, you know how important it is to stay on top of other marketers. With a strong online presence, you have a huge opportunity to attract leads and increase your revenue.
Although people have been shopping online for years now, the COVID-19 pandemic opened a new window for the eCommerce sector. More than ever, more customers are shopping online, and many eCommerce businesses have been set up.
As a marketer, you need to derive strategies to boost your online presence and stay on top of other marketers. SEO and PPC can help generate more leads, traffic and increase conversions. Many marketers claim to have obtained online success via SEO optimization. On the other hand, other markers have achieved higher traffic for their eCommerce via PPC ads. That means you can attract more traffic and increase sales by combining the two strategies. Continue reading to learn how to align SEO and PPC for better eCommerce results.
What is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your site for terms related to your business in search engines like Google and Bing. Google and other search engines use bots to crawl pages on the web, collect information and put them in an index. It then uses its algorithm to determine where a page will rank in the search results for a specific query.
The best part is that you will not pay anything to rank your online store higher on search results. You only need to dedicate your time and effort to create a winning SEO strategy and be patient.
Understanding PPC in eCommerce
Unlike SEO, PPC (Pay-per-Click) is a paid advertising model to help drive traffic to a website. In other words, PPC involves paying an ad publisher every time a person clicks an ad on their advertisements.
PPC ads include search ads, display ads, programmatic ads, social media ads, local search ads, Google shopping ads, and much more.
Combining SEO and PPC for Better eCommerce Results
Both SEO and PPC depend on keyword optimization to appear in related searches. Keywords play a critical role in Google search and Google Search Campaigns. Both PPC and SEO will not attract traffic or convert without using the most relevant keywords. That said, here are the best SEO and PPC eCommerce tips:
Analyze the Most Relevant Search Queries
As earlier stated, both PPC and SEO heavily rely on keywords to drive traffic and generate leads. As such, analyzing the latest search trends is a great tip when combining both strategies. Since you can get real-time data from organic searches, you may want to make it the center of your marketing strategy to get the most of your eCommerce product marketing strategy.
Test the Keywords
PPC can help choose the most accurate phrases for SEO that you can use to update the semantic kernel (the list of keywords that clearly define your site’s subject and are mostly used in search queries). Besides, you can use PPC to test your keywords and choose those with a huge impact on your SEO strategy.
You can also launch contextual advertising and make a list of negative keywords. Ignoring these keywords (which many SEOs do) can lead to a higher bounce rate and decreased conversions. Luckily, PPC provides an excellent way to work with negative keywords, which helps improve SEO and the position of the site on search engine results pages.
Combine Your Shopping Strategies
Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, Google shopping has reintroduced free listings, providing more opportunities to combine PPC and SEO. You can get to the non-promotional listings by registering in the Merchant Center and uploading your products from there. You may also want to combine organic and paid activities to increase your sales.
The idea is to use SEO in areas where organic traffic can lead to a high click-through rate and use PPC spend on channels where paid listing provides the highest results.
Create and Publish Fresh and Relevant Content
SEO analysis helps you create fresh content to show your readers you understand and care for them. This helps develop trust with your readers and ultimately increase conversions. You can then use PPC to fill any gaps. Since informational queries are always cheaper per click, this provides a great way to extend your advertising budget.
Play to Each Strength
Depending on the user’s interests, Google search queries will vary significantly. For instance, you are likely to quickly spend your PPC budget promoting products during peak season as the PPC rates are high. You can avoid this by studying where to get organic traffic. Targeting long-tail keywords via SEO offers an excellent way to reduce your advertising spend and bypass strong competitors.
On the other hand, obtaining Google’s trust, let alone getting organic traffic for a new website can be daunting. Among other things, excessive SEO efforts and over-engagement can hurt your rankings. In such a case, running ads offers a great way to gain enough targeted traffic for a new website.
Test Your Content with PPC
Testing and learning form a critical part of paid advertising. PPC helps test new content to determine what works and what does not work for your audience and use the results you get to enhance your SEO efforts. Whether images or advertisement messages, PPC lets you test new things and select the more effective ones.
Utilize Automation
Automation will help keep up with the growing number of PPC tools. You can use machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to select the best price for advertisements and notify of changes from the required indicators. In short, automation helps you have control for PPC campaigns.
Besides, you can automate various SEO tasks, including competitor analysis, technical auditing, reporting, etc. More specifically, automation helps get real-time market insights to fill gaps in your PPC and SEO strategy.
Use Expanded Text Ad Option to Give More Details about a Product
Potential customers will want more information about a product before buying it. Providing more information about a product using an expanded text ad option will help increase the CTR of ads. This can include links to the site, contact details, geolocation data, and any other description of the product. Adding this information will make your ad more visible on search results and improve click-through rates.
Expand Your Funnel
Many people turn to Google before making a purchase. Acquaintance and product consideration is at the forefront of the sales funnel. You can use this information when creating your promotional strategy.
More specifically, consider setting up your promotional strategy for product familiarization to catch new interest. After that, adjust your PPC and SEO efforts for better results.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, there are various scenarios where combining SEO and PPC can help improve eCommerce results. Among other things, combining SEO and PPC can help get more accurate ad targeting, maintain brand reputation, find more accurate keywords, and check the effectiveness of website changes. By following the above PPC and SEO tips, you will be in a better place to improve your online presence and increase revenue.
SEO and PPC will help drive more traffic and conversions. Use these tips to enhance your marketing efforts | https://medium.com/seo-services-in-los-angeles/how-to-align-seo-and-ppc-for-better-ecommerce-results-433f87c6fdf9 | ['Sean Chaudhary'] | 2021-12-22 08:08:24.228000+00:00 | ['Marketing Strategies', 'Ecommerce', 'PPC', 'PPC Marketing', 'Seo Tips'] |
Carbon capture: who’s in the space? | With the effects of climate change coming more rapidly than predicted, and global emissions still rising, humankind has reached the point where simply cutting pollution levels won’t be enough to avoid catastrophic impacts. We’ll need to suck carbon directly from the sky. Fortunately, an entirely new arsenal is emerging in the fight against climate change: negative emission technologies, or NETs. NETs are different from conventional approaches to climate mitigation in that they seek not to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere but to remove carbon dioxide that’s already there.
As an article by By Fred Krupp , Nathaniel Keohane and Eric Pooley states a new system “would also reward the inventors and entrepreneurs who developed new, better technologies to capture carbon from the air and the investors and businesses that took them to scale. Without these incentives, those players will stay on the sidelines. By spurring innovation in lower-cost NETs, incentives would also ease the way politically for an ambitious pollution limit — which, ultimately, is necessary for ensuring that the world meets it climate goals. Simply put, humanity’s best hope is to promise that the next crop of billionaires will be those who figure out low-cost ways to remove carbon from the sky.”
Here’s a few of the players.
(Content pulled from company websites and not independently verified. Environmental Defense Fund does not endorse companies or products.)
Climeworks captures CO2 from air with the world’s first commercial carbon removal technology. The direct air capture plants remove CO2 from the atmosphere to supply to customers and to unlock a negative emissions future. The plants capture atmospheric carbon with a filter. Air is drawn into the plant and the CO2 within the air is chemically bound to the filter. Once the filter is saturated with CO2 it is heated (using mainly low-grade heat as an energy source) to around 100 °C (212 °F). The CO2is then released from the filter and collected as concentrated CO2 gas to supply to customers or for negative emissions technologies.
CO2-free air is released back into the atmosphere. This continuous cycle is then ready to start again. The filter is reused many times and lasts for several thousand cycles.
Global Thermostat (GT) uses custom equipment and proprietary (dry) amine-based chemical “sorbents” that are bonded to porous, honeycomb ceramic “monoliths” which act together as carbon sponges. These carbon sponges efficiently adsorb CO2 directly from the atmosphere, smokestacks, or a combination of both. The captured CO2 is then stripped off and collected using low-temperature steam (85–100° C), ideally sourced from residual/process heat at little or no-cost. The output results in 98% pure CO2 at standard temperature and pressure. During the process only steam and electricity are consumed, without the creation of emissions or other effluents. This entire process is mild, safe, and carbon negative.
Global Thermostat’s Carbon Capture & Utilization Plants can reliably produce unlimited amounts of CO2 at a low cost, and on-site as needed. This results in commercial-use ready CO2, eliminating the need for long pipelines and/or transportation costs. GT Plants also have a small footprint.
Plants can be Stand-Alone (Pure Air) or Co-Located with large emitters — both new & existing. In fact, integrating GT’s post-combustion process with an existing power plant is quite simple, and has been done with just a single day of power plant down-time. GT enables a true Carbon Negative electricity generation: a GT plant utilizes the residual heat of an adjacent fossil fueled power plant, while simultaneously capturing the CO2-rich flue gases it produces. This process allows the plant to capture substantially more CO2 than it emits. Similarly, GT can utilize the “harmful” heat byproduct of PV solar farms to power its plants, turning the farms into giant carbon sinks, while increasing their profitability through CO2 sales.
Unlike some other green initiatives, GT requires no government subsidies or Carbon Credits to be economical and profitable.
Founded in 2009, CE is a Canadian-based clean energy company leading the commercialization of groundbreaking technology that captures CO₂ directly from the atmosphere, and a second technology that synthesizes it into clean, affordable transportation fuels. From a pilot plant in Squamish, B.C., CE has been removing CO₂ from the atmosphere since 2015 and converting it into fuels since 2017.
CE is privately owned and is funded by investment or commitments from private investors and government agencies. CE’s investors include Bill Gates, Murray Edwards, Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, LLC, Chevron Technology Ventures, and BHP. CE has been well supported within the clean-tech innovation system and has led projects funded by top-tier government agencies in both Canada and the USA.
Direct Air Capture (DAC) is a technology that captures CO2 from atmospheric air, and provides it in purified form for use or storage. CE’s DAC technology does this in a closed loop where the only major inputs are water and energy, and the output is a stream of pure, compressed CO₂. This captured, compressed CO₂ then offers a range of opportunities to create products and environmental benefits, including CE’s main focus, production of clean-burning liquid fuels with ultra-low carbon intensity.
We are entering a new era of environmental innovation that is driving better alignment between technology and environmental goals — and results. #FourthWave | https://medium.com/the-fourth-wave/carbon-capture-whos-in-the-space-95e5435b4b9c | ['Environmental Defense Fund'] | 2019-06-25 11:36:01.231000+00:00 | ['Carbon Emissions', 'Climate Change'] |
Book Review: Mistletoe Movie Star | Mistletoe Movie Star
Christmas Extravaganza
by Stacey Weeks
Pelican Book Group
Christian | Romance
Pub Date 01 Dec 2020
I am reviewing a copy of Mistetoe Movie through Pelican Book Group and Netgalley:
The town of Mistletoe Meadows is a place built around the magic of Christmas. As jingling sleighs cart rosy cheeked lovers around the Mistletoe Mile, Charlene’s holiday dream is more complicated than photo-edited perfection. After proposing compassion ministry initiative called the Gingerbread House, but she struggles to convince the town that their need for a homeless shelter is real.
Jonas, famous for his made for his made for T.V holiday movies, is longing for his own happily ever after, one that isn’t as neat and tidy as his scripted films. He decides to partner with Char to champion her ministry invigorates him with a new purpose and provides an excuse to spend time with the girl he never forgot. But after they embrace three young sisters fighting to stay together while living on the streets, their project becomes deeply personal.
Jonas and Charlene must prove to a town reluctant to see anything other than holiday perfection that the greatest gift of the season isn’t found under a tree.
If you are looking for a heartwarming Christmas read, I recommend Mistletoe Movie Star.
I give Mistletoe Movie Star five out of five stars!
Happy Reading! | https://medium.com/@michellereneekidwell-95261/book-review-mistletoe-movie-star-905373d76813 | ['Michelle Renee Kidwell'] | 2020-12-16 19:23:44.427000+00:00 | ['Christian', 'Christmas', 'Fiction', 'Book Review'] |
Best Treadmill for Home Use | PowerMax Fitness TDA-350 3HP (6HP Peak) Motorized Treadmill with Free Installation Assistance, Home Use & Automatic Incline
About this item
Lifetime Frame Warranty, 3-Year Motor Warranty, And 1-Year Parts & Labor Warranty
3.0HP DC Motor
18-Level Auto Incline for intense workout
7" Blue LCD display with 400m track UI — Speed, Time, Distance, Calories and Heart Rate
Max User Weight: 120KG
Speed: 0.8–18.0km/hr with Speed Select Hot Keys
Treadmill Reviews Find Best Treadmill By Our team for home use in India.
Cockatoo CTM-04 Series Home Use 1.5 HP — 2 HP Peak Motorised Multi-Function Treadmill for Home with Massager
About this item
Warranty Details: 3 Year Motor Warranty, 1 Year Parts Warranty & LifeTime Frame Warranty
Technical Feature:Time, Speed,Distance, Calorie, Pulse, Fat Measure
Running Surface(LxB): 390–1100 mm(15.3" x 43.3")
Motor Power: 2 HP
Maximum User Weight: 90 Kg, Running 70 Kg & Walking 90 Kg
Compare the best treadmills on the market to find your perfect match. From the top incline trainer to the best budget-friendly machine with reviews. | https://medium.com/@treadmillre/best-treadmill-for-home-use-b645c00454f | ['Ajay G'] | 2021-12-31 06:30:35.223000+00:00 | ['Workout', 'Cardio', 'Fitness', 'Treadmill', 'Treadmill Reviews'] |
Different Modes Of Wearing The Hair for Zoom Meeting Online, Why Not? | Creativity is needed. An alternative guide to hair styling, from the 19th Century and beyond.
“The right hairstyle can make a plain woman beautiful & a beautiful woman unforgettable.”
The Hair, And Styles Of Wearing It.
The Hair, And Styles Of Wearing It. 1700s.
Long hair styled was the way most women, especially upper class women, wore their hair during the 19th century.
Women in the 1830s usually get their hair tied back in a neat bun, braids, or twist. Sometimes they curled the sides.
And Bangs weren’t in fashion.
Front page of the Harper’s Bazar magazine showing more hairstyles. 1868.
Cover of the Harper’s Bazar magazine. 1868.
Hairdressing art.
French hairdresser at the Académie de Coiffure, working on a large hairstyle, fashionable of the time, in the 18th century.
French hairdresser at the Académie de Coiffure. 18th century.
More art of hairdressing.
A hairdresser cutting a child’s hair, March 26, 1866. Look at his hairstyle!
Hairdresser cutting a child’s hair. 1866
An early hair tongs.
A tool or something similar to make your hair beautiful for your Zoom meeting in 2020?
I’m very sure you can find other and better tools to get the same result.
Early hair tongs.
But in 2020 for more easy hairstyle…
Boys, forget the scissors. And have your laptop ready for your next meeting online.
Photo by vahid kanani on Unsplash
For Ladies. Put some blue color on your hair.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Or make these if have a long hair.
A French Braid
A High Bun
A Braided Ponytail
Half-Up, Half-Down
A French Twist Punch Clip Bun
For a bad hair day or lazy day use a Twisted Turban. And have you iPad ready for the next Google Meeting.
“Messy hair, uncombed, gel-free, un-styled and perfectly imperfect.”
― Jasinda Wilder, Stripped
An idea for a great hairstyle?
Leave a message idea below and help people that really need hairstyle ideas.
Thank you and stay safe!
_Regia Marinho
November 21, 2020 | https://medium.com/@regia-marinho/different-modes-of-wearing-the-hair-for-meeting-online-why-not-d242efadccdb | ['Regia Marinho'] | 2020-11-22 23:32:10.531000+00:00 | ['Zoom', 'Hairdressers', 'Meetings', 'Hairstyle', 'Art'] |
My Biggest Running Expense Is One I Never Expected | If you had asked me before I started running what the most expensive part of the hobby would be, I never would have guessed correctly. I might have thought that the cost of shoes would add up, or maybe that I would splurge on a fancy watch. I wouldn’t have even considered the thing that I’ve actually spent the most money on.
It turns out that the most expensive part of running is the food.
It’s not that I’m buying tons of running gels or shelling out for energy tablets. I’m just literally eating more than ever to make up for the calorie deficit that running creates.
How Many Calories Does Running Burn?
There’s a common saying that weight loss happens in the kitchen, not in the gym. Although there’s certainly some truth to this, from my experience it’s too black and white. Running actually burns a tremendous amount of calories.
The exact number of calories that you burn per mile depends on a variety of factors, including your weight and how fast you’re going. In my case, my heart rate monitor/GPS watch estimates that I burn about 110 calories per mile.
When I was a new runner, and only going 5 or 6 miles a week, this was a fairly negligible amount of calories. As I got more experienced though, my miles began to build and so did the calorie count.
For the past couple of years, my baseline has been 25 to 30 miles a week, with some weeks reaching as high as 40 miles. This means I’m burning anywhere from 2750 to 4400 calories a week just from running!
When I first started running, I was trying to lose weight, so I celebrated this calorie deficit. I was happy to have an excuse to eat a little bit more while staying within my diet.
These days though, I’m happy with my weight, and my only goal is to maintain. Unfortunately, that means I have to eat a ton to compensate for my running.
Eating, Then Eating Some More
When I go on a long run, I sometimes feel like I spend the entire rest of the day eating. My hunger can be nearly insatiable.
With an average of 3000 extra calories burned each week from running, I have to eat about 25% more than I otherwise would just to avoid losing weight. This means that my grocery bill ends up being quite a bit higher.
Think about how much you’ve spent on groceries over the past year, and then add 25%. The cost is much greater than I’d even spend on shoes in a year.
It helps that I like to cook most of my meals. I also benefit from my years of experience being a broke warehouse worker and student — I know how to keep food costs down.
Cheap staples like rice, lentils, and beans provide plenty of calories and nutrition while costing barely anything. I also load up on a 5-pound bag of potatoes every week.
Even with these cost-cutting measures, food is a very important expense to take into account when I consider how much I’m spending on running. It easily adds up to hundreds each year, but it’s easy to miss because it’s hidden in my grocery bill.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from running, because it’s absolutely worth it, but I do hope that new runners will know to expect this cost. As you ramp up your mileage, be prepared to ramp up your grocery shopping too! | https://medium.com/runners-life/my-biggest-running-expense-is-one-i-never-expected-116820e3903d | ['Benya Clark'] | 2020-11-20 15:18:07.885000+00:00 | ['Running', 'Health', 'Exercise', 'Finance', 'Fitness'] |
Instagram Story Viewer Algorithm: What Does It Mean for Business Accounts? | Instagram (IG) is a great medium for businesses to reach out to their potential customers. Over the years, the platform has emerged as a magnificent marketing tool for brands with various features that can be used to increase interaction between the users and the viewers. One such tool is Instagram stories — upload quick, snackable content and in a short span of 15 seconds, brands can engage the audiences in a number of interactive content that remains up and running for 24 hours and the select few can be placed in the ‘Highlights’ section in the profile for audiences to discover later. Whether it is a standalone image or a short video, or combined with features like quizzes, polls, and emoji sliders, IG stories engage the viewers wonderfully. The platform also generates a list of story viewers, a set of information that can be very useful for brands and businesses. Read on to know how the Instagram story viewer algorithm works.
Organic Reach of Instagram Stories
Creator and business accounts are also powered by the capability to boost or run ads on stories, which means they have the choice to decide what content reaches which segment of target audiences. But, when it comes to the organic reach of content, Instagram’s story viewer algorithm plays a substantial role.
We will start with the technicalities. Instagram’s algorithm as a whole prioritises relevant and recent content for the users to view. That remains for stories as well. The stories users see first are based on their past consumption behaviour, which means the accounts that they frequently visit will show up first in line, in the horizontal story listing on the app. On the other side of the screen, the one that brands are in, the platform provides a list of users who have viewed your content. While it is great to know that a has performed well, and has organically reached a number of accounts, the question arises if the list is just a random consolidation of people who have viewed the content or are they constant followers who have interacted most with the brand’s content. Is the name that one sees at the top of the list the ultimate follower? To find the answer, let us elaborate on how Instagram story viewer rankings work.
Instagram Stories Viewer Rankings
Instagram’s algorithm uses a number of data points to identify the best content for the users. The platform’s story viewer algorithm is no different in that manner and story views ranking is majorly based on three elements — the interest of the story viewer, the recency of the posts, and the regularity of your interaction with the viewer. Of course, the first two are tackled by maintaining a healthy frequency of posting stories. But the third one needs more attention for businesses to make the most out of Instagram Stories. Let us help understand how it works.
A user who has been ranked higher on the list of your story viewer list doesn’t necessarily be your ultimate follower or the one who has viewed your story first! Instagram’s algorithm becomes a little tricky here. Before a story reaches 50 viewers, the algorithm organises the list chronologically. But once the viewership crosses that mark, the whole game changes. The algorithm shows results based on the user’s past behaviour instead of the viewer’s. It prioritizes the relationship that a user shares with the viewer. If a user has engaged with a particular account more, chances are that profile will be ranked higher in the views lists. These are the accounts that users interact with the most. The vice-versa may also be true but Instagram has not claimed any such thing officially.
Business Account Instagram Stories View Ranking
While it is understood that Instagram story viewer rankings are based on the user affinity of content, what does it mean when it is a business account? The accounts showing up in the views lists may or may not be the ones that the brand had searched for, interacted with, or followed. Instead, these are the ones who tapped, shared, replied, visited the profile, followed, or simply viewed the entire story instead of navigating away from it. Instagram’s algorithm kicks right in, recognizes this, and organises the news list accordingly. For a brand running a business account on Instagram, this means, that these are the people who are interested in what the brand has to say. The views list can be the cue for brands to create future content — it gives an understanding of what’s working and what’s not. It will also help in identifying the content consumption pattern of the target audience and brands can develop strategies that can help their business grow.
Originally published at https://www.digitalgpoint.com on December 22, 2021. | https://medium.com/@digitalmarketingagencyinindia/instagram-story-viewer-algorithm-what-does-it-mean-for-business-accounts-99e1393cec75 | ['Digital Marketing Agency Delhi Ncr'] | 2022-01-27 10:04:46.989000+00:00 | ['Instagram Stories', 'Social Media Marketing', 'Social Media', 'Instagram Marketing'] |
Polygon Vs Dogecoin Vs Buyshitcoin | DogTipBot is a cryptocurrency transaction service used on popular sites such as Reddit and Twitch. DogTipBot allows users to send Dogecoin to other users via commands in Reddit comments.
https://www.buyshitcoin.com/
It initially had no real benefit, but when people used it to share little tips on social media it developed a growing following that pushed the price of dogecoin from less than a cent a few months ago to today $0.61, making it one of the leading cryptocurrency providers by market capitalization. The cryptocurrency bears the logo and namesake of a Shiba Inu dog, the “DOGE” meme. What started as a joke is now one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies.
With that caveat in mind, here are the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization from May 8 and the stories behind them. We will stick to the market cap in this guide for the leading cryptocurrency providers.
Bitcoin has the largest market capitalization, highest coin value, and largest user network. Cardano is a promising technology, but like the others, it still has a long way to go in terms of network size compared to Ethereum-like.
Polygon aims to offer rapid and inexpensive transactions on Ethereum using a layer 2 side chain blockchain that runs on the main Ethereum chain. Polygon has tenfold increased its market capitalization due to growing user acceptance for gaming Polygon tokens are distributed on Binance, which had an initial exchange offer in 2019 which raised $5 million. The Polygon network aims to be a hub for various blockchains that connect to its main chain, Ethereum. Prominent cryptocurrency exchanges have said as the currency since it is not covered by a state.Several exchanges advertise cryptocurrencies.
High transaction fees are one of the biggest problems with Ethereum blockchain. Users should be aware of the fees incurred for investing in cryptocurrencies such as trading, deposits and withdrawals.
Recently, demand for layer-2 scaling solutions has attracted capital inflows, which in turn has fueled the rise of Matic Token, Polygon’s native cryptocurrency. With a market capitalization of more than $1.1 billion, India’s Matic cryptocurrency is among the top 15 cryptocurrencies in the world. Polygon and Matic have performed well among the major cryptocurrencies this year, outperforming Dogecoin as the race for Ethereum scaling solutions intensifies.
The price of Polygon (also known as Matic) on the cryptocurrency market has risen by 9 percent in the last 24 hours. Polygon currently ranks 14th among the world’s largest cryptocurrencies based on market capitalization. The price of polygon hit a record high of $246 on Wednesday morning.
In 2017 and early 2018, during the cryptocurrency bubble, Dogecoin briefly peaked at $0.017 per coin on January 7, 2018, reaching a total market capitalization of $2 billion. In July 2020, the price of the cryptocurrency soared following a TikTok trend aimed at coins below one dollar. The high of $246 surpassed the all-time high set the previous day, when the value of the pound hit $218 in just six hours after a 25 per cent rise in prices.
In January 2014, Dogecoin’s trading volume briefly surpassed that of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies combined, but its market capitalization remains well below that of Bitcoin. On the second day, $36,000 worth of dogecoins were donated, and Bitcoin’s price soared by 50%. Despite its modest goal, the cryptocurrency has done a lot of good to people around the world.
For this reason, Dogecoin, like Bitcoin, is considered indispensable for the further introduction of cryptocurrencies. Its impressive market performance is driven by its community and general goodwill. Combining this fact with the overwhelming support for both coins, it is hard to imagine that it will leave the market any time soon.
Now that you have your investment strategy, understanding the differences between Bitcoin and Dogecoin is crucial. If you are ready to make a purchase, you can visit our Buy Bitcoin and Buy DogeCoin pages.
Experts say that while some cryptocurrencies are more harmful, some have less impact than others, as statistics from TRG Datacenter show. The company says XRP is the most harmful, at 0.0079 kilowatt hours (kWh) per transaction. But Dogecoin, a favorite of Mr. Musk when he plugged his Tesla during a recent Saturday Night Live appearance, is rated 0.12 by the company.
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency at the bottom of the list, at 7.07pc. According to CoinDesk, the Crypto Fear and Greed Index measures the emotions and feelings surrounding Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies, as well as a variety of alternative prices and obscure research findings. We receive a small commission from some of the listed companies, but this has never affected our ranking.
The biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation did not fare so well this week, with BTC down 2.66%, ETH down 2.132% and Doge down 7.74% over the seven-day period. In terms of profits, BTC and ETH are up 3.818 and 3.314 percent respectively.
Given the state of the market, one can assume that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are on the edge of mass adoption. The cryptocurrency Ethereum itself is the largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization, value, total market value and circulating supply. The chances that Dogecoin will one day reach the astronomical value of Bitcoin are far from being reached.
Polygon is a digital network of the three Indian software engineers Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun founded in 2017. Between January and May 2021, the number of applications based on polygon increased eight-fold to 400.
https://www.buyshitcoin.com/ | https://medium.com/@buyshitcoin/polygon-vs-dogecoin-vs-buyshitcoin-373b18bdd8b3 | ['Buy Shitcoin'] | 2021-06-22 11:05:49.879000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Bitcoin Mining'] |
Thanks a lot fo the article. | Thanks a lot fo the article. I have been a short story writer for more than five years, but I had not been able to find a good platform for my short stories. I hope people on medium will like it. | https://medium.com/@k-thoughts/thanks-a-lot-fo-the-article-dc0610615338 | ['Kamal Imam'] | 2020-12-26 10:31:27.183000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Fiction Writing', 'Short Stories And Poems'] |
How Writing Has Destroyed My Day Job Satisfaction, And Why I Couldn’t Be Happier | How Writing Has Destroyed My Day Job Satisfaction, And Why I Couldn’t Be Happier
How writing transformed my day job from something I loved, into something that I do.
job satisfaction
noun
1. the feeling of pleasure and achievement that you experience in your job when you know that your work is worth doing, or the degree to which your work gives you this feeling.
If you’d asked me a year ago whether or not my job gave me a sense of pleasure and achievement, I would have said yes. Resoundingly and unequivocally, yes. I’d been in my new job role for about a month and was still finding my feet, but god damn did I enjoy it. It was different to anything I’d ever done before and it was a fantastic opportunity to challenge myself, develop new skills to help with progression opportunities in the future.
My wife and I separated shortly before I changed jobs. Desperate to distract myself from the upheaval in my personal life, I threw myself into my work, completely and utterly. If I wasn’t at work then I was eating, sleeping, or at home wasting time until I had to go to work again. If I had to describe it in one word, it would be existing. I was merely drifting through the motions of life without really living and feeling much joy. I wasn’t eating properly, I slept more than was good for me and I generally neglected my well-being, both physical and mental. The only real positive I had in my life was work, so that’s where my efforts went. It was the only thing that was keeping my mind occupied, but I knew that I needed to find something to keep me busy for the 128 hours a week that I didn’t spend at work:
I tried running. Turns out, Mo Farah I am not.
I tried the gym. No luck here either. I’m not about that gain life, apparently.
I tried learning Spanish. Lo siento. No hablo español.
I tried learning new skills. I learned to cook, but nothing else really engaged me.
I tried what felt like everything.
Everything except writing, which is something I had stopped a few years ago after a failed attempt at starting a gaming blog. I had spent hours creating what I thought was really good content, designing my own website, coming up with a catchy name, I thought it had all the ingredients of success. But as it turns out, the internet is saturated with gaming blogs, and trying to get mine noticed seemed like a futile effort. There’s something so demotivating about putting your heart and soul into something, only for to be smacked in the face by the realisation that nobody is reading it. I wasn’t mentally prepared for the failure at the time, it hit me hard and eventually I stopped posting.
Looking back I understand that all the reasons I’ve just listed that stopped me writing my blog, weren’t reasons. They were excuses. I was too busy making excuses to cover up my lack of determination to succeed. At the time I thought that the feeling of failure would be worse than the feeling of never having really tried, so I stopped writing entirely.
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default. — J. K. Rowling
Until a week ago that is. This post, an article I’ve written where I question whether having children is morally right given the state of the world, is my first attempt at writing in two years. It took around four or five hours to write, and I loved every second of it. I’d forgotten how liberating it is, the feeling of having words flow from your fingertips, the page a blank canvas for my words, my story. I wrote that article, not for claps or for follows, but for me. I wrote it knowing that nobody may ever read it, and that it may end up on the rubbish pile of the internet, with the click-bait articles and lists of “13 Potatoes that look like Channing Tatum”(yes, unfortunately that is a real article).I wrote it anyway, and whether it or any of my writing in the future gets 1 view or 10,000, I will continue to write, because I have rediscovered what it is I love to do, and the reason I do it.
Two out of three posts I have published in the past week have been distributed by Medium curators, and both have reached 200 views. Now that may not sound like a lot to some of you, but for someone’s whose expectations were lower than low, I feel like I’ve just won an Olympic Gold. 200 views on a single post is more than my blog had in the first month of writing. Scrap that, I’ve just won three Olympic Golds. A post on my personal experiences with social media addiction caught the attention of an editor at The Startup, the second largest publication on Medium which has over 450,000 followers. Move over Michael Phelps. The Startup asked if I’d like to submit my article for publication. Here’s a photo of me as I read that particular message: | https://medium.com/the-ascent/how-writing-has-destroyed-my-day-job-satisfaction-and-why-i-couldnt-be-happier-49fb412373f8 | ['Jon Peters'] | 2019-05-30 13:23:27.503000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Self Improvement', 'Happiness', 'Work'] |
The 15-Minute City in a New York Minute | These maps inspired me to look at if and where the 15-Minute City concept could be done in New York City. For this, I used data found in the Neighborhood Data Portal collected by the Pratt Center for Community Development (whose data has been tremendously valuable, and I cannot thank them enough for sharing this tool with the public) to find certain points of interest in the city. Then, using QGIS and the TravelTime plug-in, I mapped out those points amongst the two layers created with the plug-in: a 15-minute radius by walking and a 15-minute radius by public transit (I used travel time data from November 18th, 2020 at 12PM) to see how far one could go in 15 minutes and how many points they could reach. The points of interest analyzed are:
Day Care Centers and Public Schools (K-12)
MTA Subway Stations
Hospitals
Large Supermarkets (4,000 sq. feet or larger)
These maps show some interesting data (and raise some issues that this project could better address, which I will discuss at the end), but areas that are more affluent tend to have more crucial services. There are areas with less services but have extensive transit options, but it is essential that New York address economic and racial inequality if it wants to create 15-Minute neighborhoods. | https://chc9813.medium.com/the-15-minute-city-in-a-new-york-minute-e3d7ea0a0bda | ['Charley Cohen'] | 2020-12-02 18:45:47.046000+00:00 | ['Neighborhoods', 'Urban Planning', 'Cities', 'GIS', 'Transit'] |
Learning To Focus Your Developer Brain | Learning to focus the developer part of your brain can be a challenge. Are you like me, where you end up tinkering with the software products you have built, instead of focusing on the tough work of marketing and promotion?
The problem is, I have 3 side hustles on the go at the minute. I can’t seem to leave them alone. Then I’m trying to learn how to market each one, run a podcast, launch a YouTube channel. All while have a 9–5 and a life.
I recently wrote a guest post titled My New Side Hustle Mantra: Progress Over Perfection, you can check it out here. In which I talk about everything that I’m working on and trying to avoid overwhelming myself.
Learning To Focus By Asking For Help
Well I didn’t ask for help, help kind of found me. We connected through a Facebook group but I can’t remember which one.
Anyway, long story short. I ended jumping on a call online with a gentleman who is a personal coach and business consultant.
We had a great chat and spent around an hour talking about the 3 software products I have built and what my short term goals are.
It was interesting to hear someone else’s opinion too. I don’t lack ambition, skill, drive, motivation, willingness to learn. What I do lack is the focus.
Great news, that is fixable, and my goals are easily achievable. However, there are things that I need to change.
Trying And Failing At Learning To Focus
This isn’t the first time someone has said to me “you need to focus on one thing”. It’s also not the first time I’ve said it to myself.
I tried to focus back in March/April of 2020. At the time I had two software products on the go.
One called Elementary Analytics which I hadn’t managed to find any customers for and it still needed a bit of work before it was in an MVP state.
I have a second project, an add-in for Outlook called Outflash. I had managed to find about 20 customers for the free version and was tinkering with it. My main focus was the marketing and sales side of Outflash.
When the pandemic hit, my wife and I decided we need to cut our expenses. I looked at the hosting costs for both products. I decided to switch off Elementary Analytics as I didn’t have any customers, yet.
This allowed me to focus on Outflash and use any spare time to improve Elementary Analytics, and get feedback from potential customers too.
However, the developer in me had other ideas.
Switch One Side Hustle Off Then Instantly Start Another Project
It must have been all of 4 week since I switched off Elementary Analytics when I came up with another side hustle idea.
One afternoon I was just scrolling through Twitter, aimlessly. I saw a tweet from someone I follow. The guy builds and runs a cool one page website builder called Carrd.
He said something along the lines of “DM me and I will give you business/side project idea”. I dropped him a message, see what he suggested.
It was very clever what he did. He didn’t give me an idea, instead, started asking me a lot of questions about my interests and skills.
After a few messages back and forth. I ended up with two ideas of my own, without going into the details of how I validated each idea. Yet another side hustle was born.
I called this mobile app for anglers called BAITCAMP.
I had switched off one side hustle and within 4/5 weeks I had replaced it with another one. So much for focusing on one project.
Inability To Leave Things Alone
I couldn’t leave BAITCAMP alone. After 5 months of work, I managed to launch BAITCAMP on both the Apple App Store and Google Play.
It wasn’t that I had gone all-in on BAITCAMP, my main focus was still Outflash. To get better at promoting the add-in for Outlook. I had signed up for a 30 days challenge on how to learn and build your first sales funnel. As well as reading books and taking online courses about marketing and copywriting.
I used my spare time during the week and at weekends to improve Outflash and to get version 1 of BAITCAMP done and dusted.
On top of that I was still making improvements to get Elementary Analytics into the MVP state that I wanted.
I’m a glutton for punishment I know. In one way the lock-down that the pandemic has forced on the UK was good for me. We couldn’t do all the things we wanted and were at home all the time.
Working on my side hustles and learning loads was a great way to use the time. I’m at a point now, writing this post mid December, 2020, I’m happy with all 3 products and in a good place to focus.
Adding More Things Onto My Plate
Something that I learned from the 30-day challenge and about marketing in general. Is that no one knows more about your products than you. No one is more passionate, determined and motivated about the side projects than you.
You need to get the word out there and be active in your blatant self-promotion, on a consistent basis. This was a scary thought for me and something that took me a couple of months to convince myself that I needed to start doing this.
An excellent tip I heard is to use a medium or platform that you enjoy and consume a lot. I’m an avid podcast listener and listen to one podcast or another on a daily basis.
I don’t listen to loads of different podcasts, only a select few. However, I do go deep into these podcasts and end up binge listening to them (Is that even a saying?)
Find Your Side Hustle
Yet another project was born. I launched my very own podcast called “Find Your Side Hustle”. Where I talk about my journey of working on and launching multiple side projects over the years.
Starting this podcast has been great as it has led to me being a guest on other podcasts. Learning loads of things from other hosts and gathering loads of tips, tricks, and hacks.
One thing that was suggested to me was to document my journey. Not just on the podcast and social media, but on YouTube.
Great idea.
My YouTube Channel
Yet another thing to focus on. I was up and down with the idea of starting a YouTube channel. Again, a tweet that I saw changed my mind.
Another guy I follow tweeted along the lines of “YouTube is amazing. Where else can you upload videos where you chat and record whatever you want to. These videos are then easily discovered by people over and over again. You can even get paid for advertising, all for free”.
Again, it took me a while to build up the courage to do this. Already, even after publishing one or two videos. I have got loads of great feedback.
On top of everything else it is yet another thing to distract me, or take up some mental space that I am trying to open up not clutter.
Learning To Focus My Plan Of Attack
OK. What’s clear is that I need a plan and a way of learning to focus on one thing. Get that thing to a level that I’m happy with, which will ultimately be where the income for a side hustle replaces my monthly salary.
I’m not doing this on my own. I mentioned the personal/business coach who I have connected with. Something he suggested and is going to work with me on. Is to work out what I want, my short-term goals. Then create a plan around that goal and start to execute on that plan.
It’s exciting to hear that what I want is achievable in such a short space of time. This missing piece of the jigsaw for me is learning to focus on one project, so that everything I am doing. Whether that be develop, marketing, podcasting, recording YouTube videos works towards that goal.
Your Mission If You Chose To Accept It
So, what I am going to do to help me focus and achieve my target?
One thing is clear, these 3 side hustles are competing, fighting against each other for my attention.
In my head, these projects are like 3 needy, scary ex-girlfriends all screaming for my attention and want us to get back together.
I just need to pick one and go all in.
That is scary and makes me nervous. I know it’s what needs to be done. The developer side of me and the part of me that has FOMO is scared about learning to focus on a single project.
Automation
On thing that my new mentor suggested was to automate one of the projects. Outflash is the perfect candidate for this.
Just this week I spent a day or two finishing some development work on Outflash. The user interface I was happy with. There was just a bit of work that needed doing in the back end processing to make it more stable and scalable.
What I need to work out now with Outflash is to see if I can find a way to automate the onboarding of new users and customers. Outflash isn’t an expensive tool, just £10 for the standard subscription.
It doesn’t make sense for me to focus a lot of my energy on this. I’ve calculatedd I would need around 350 paying customers for Outflash to quit my job.
If I could work out how to automate a sales funnel to do this, that means I could spend less and less time on Outflash, while still having it put money in my pocket each month.
This is what one of my YouTube channel video series is about.
Putting A Pin In It
Now, this is the last thing I want to do. However, it is probably the most important thing I need to do.
BAITCAMP is a brilliant little side project for me. It’s around my first love of fishing, and combines my technology and developer skills, as well as learning new programming languages and platforms, with my love of fishing.
You can see why the developer in my is screaming “NOOOOO, DON’T STOP WORKING ON THAT ONE”.
The more analytical and logical side of me is saying this is a must. I haven’t worked out the best way to monetise BAITCAMP at the moment. I’ve got ads in the app which is one way to go about it. Although I’m not a fan of ads.
Marketing and getting people to install an app is also a tough task. That’s why BAITCAMP is the perfect candidate to put a pin in.
Again there are a few things I want to finalize with BAITCAMP before I take it off the table. I’m not entirely happy with version 1 of the app. What I had done worked perfectly, however, from a user’s point of view it was a bit clunky.
In the run-up to Christmas 2020, I will get these issues sorted and a new version uploaded onto the app stores.
BAITCAMP needs to be viewed as a labour of love project and something I can revisit once my goal of working for myself has been achieved.
Learning To Focus On One Side Hustle
That leaves Elementary Analytics. In terms of development and marketing this is the hardest one to work on.
In terms of the rewards, I’ve priced Elementary Analytics at £29 a month. This means if I can get around 125 paying customer for the SaaS service, I can quit my job.
When you say it like that it sounds so achievable. Recently, I’ve managed to get around 3 or 4 people onto the service. Which, after 3+ years is incredible.
As with the other two projects. I’ve been focusing on some development work to iron out a few issues and get some improvements in there from feedback from the new users.
Learning to focus on the sales and marketing of Elementary Analytics will be a tough ask, but I’m really excited by the prospect of focusing on Elementary Analytics.
After feedback from two of the users, what I want to achieve with the product is exactly the benefit users are finding.
Learning To Focus: The Takeaways
Learning to focus is extremely hard, especially if you are like me with a lot going on. Most of it self inflicted because I can’t leave things alone.
For me, I think chatting with a coach has been huge. Being able to view yourself through someone else’s eyes has been of huge benefit.
Working with the coach has helped me to align my goals with a particular side hustle. I’ve managed to find a few people that find Elementary Analytics valuable and that the project should be my main focus.
All the other projects have been distracting. Not knowing which hustle will take off, with all of them having the potential to help me achieve my goals has been a huge distraction.
The biggest takeaway for me then is to pick your goal, review what you are doing on how that can contribute to your goal. Then just go deep with the tasks to turn your goal into reality.
This is something I haven’t done. Every day I’m trying to ‘move the needle’, the problem is I have too many needles. I need to move the same needle day after day.
I would love to know your thoughts on learning to focus. More specifically what are you doing to make sure you are focused on one thing to move in the direction you want to? | https://medium.com/dev-genius/learning-to-focus-your-developer-brain-1be40d11b062 | ['Phillip Hughes'] | 2020-12-21 09:25:19.868000+00:00 | ['Side Hustle', 'Side Project', 'Developer', 'Personal Development'] |
20 Articles That Will Get Your Writing Career Started | You want to learn how to become a writer, but all the writing courses you’ve seen are expensive. Is it really worth handing over thousands that you may never get back? What if you do a course and discover writing isn’t for you after all?
I know it’s not easy breaking into the writing world. After over a decade in this business as both a writer and editor, I’ve discovered a few tricks of the trade that I’ve shared here on Medium over the past year. I decided to collect them all together for you as a kind of free writing course. Bookmark it and work your way through in your own time.
If you have questions, feel free to leave a comment. No questions are stupid ones! I’m sure if you’re wondering it, someone else is too.
If you’re ready for a more in depth course, with individual feedback on your writing, check out my Creative Nonfiction Academy, or email me about mentoring on [email protected]. I’m happy to answer any questions.
If you are looking into copywriting, my recommendation is the Comprehensive Copywriting Academy. This is an affiliate link, but I have tested out this copywriting course, including their monthly mentoring calls and Facebook group, myself and feel 100% confident recommending it. I wish this had been around when I was copywriting!
Here’s your DIY Writing Course:
Getting Started in Writing | https://medium.com/inspired-writer/my-top-20-articles-for-new-writers-254157064c9f | ['Kelly Eden'] | 2020-11-28 06:09:16.569000+00:00 | ['Freelance', 'Writing Tips', 'Creativity', 'Life Lessons', 'Writing'] |
The Alt-Right Aren’t All Gone Just Because Trump Lost | Like most of the world and slightly over half of the United States, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Biden was announced as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Even with Trump’s ongoing and unfounded allegations of voter fraud and a stolen election, there’s really not much he can do to stop the inevitable.
Come January 2021, we’re going to have an adult in the White House again.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Biden wasn’t my first choice for U.S. president. Heck, I can’t even argue that he will be a good president. But in the choice between potentially bad and arguably evil, evil lost. And that’s something to celebrate.
Trump losing is a victory, that’s sure, but it doesn’t mean we’ve won the war. The Alt-right movement is still growing, and it still poses a tremendous threat both to society and to safety.
Who are the Alt-right?
Photo from shorturl.at/oAUW3
The Alt-right, as I discuss in my article “Social Media and the Rise of the Alt-Right” have existed on the fringes for several years, and really gained momentum with the candidacy and Presidential term of Donald Trump. The Alt-right movement is primarily characterized as an effort to unify various elements of the American far right and push them into the mainstream, particularly when it comes to issues of race, gender, sexuality and class.
The movement is predominantly young, white and male, and is reflective of a broader push under American conservatism to cater to a sense of a helpless hegemony under attack by scapegoat groups. This group is also credited with radicalizing members into violent acts, with a large spike in far-right extremism in recent years.
Why are they dangerous?
Though this movement grew with the rise of Donald Trump, it’s important to note that the goals of the Republican Party often align with the goals of the Alt-right. The Republican Party will be around a lot longer than Donald Trump, and the Alt-right will find new individuals to champion their cause within the GOP.
The Alt-right is one of the factions that have helped push the Republican Party further to the right, all but taking over mainstream conservatism, and we are going to have to deal with the threat of the Alt-right for years to come.
Photo by Specna Arms on Unsplash
That threat should not be taken lightly. Just this past month, several Alt-right supporters were arrested after they planned to kidnap, and possibly murder, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. This is a high profile example of the all-too-present threat of ultra-conservative violence. In 2020, white supremacists were behind more domestic terror attacks than any other group, contributing to far right terrorism is one of, if not the biggest security threat that the United States is currently facing.
The Alt-right is not just a threat to safety, but their preferred policy stances (many championed by the Republican Party) threaten to harm almost everyone — but particularly women, gender and racial minorities and poorer people.
The 2020 election saw elected Republicans shift even more towards the Alt-right with extremist candidates putting their name forward, and some even winning. Extremist QAnon promoter Marjorie Taylor Greene won a seat in congress even after promoting hateful and bigoted conspiracy theories. Donald Trump even referred to her as a “future Republican star.”
Donald Trump was an easily identifiable figurehead to everything bad about the Alt-right, both the regressive social and economic policy and the flippant or favourable attitude towards violence against political opponents. Now that he won’t be President, America is faced with two options:
Americans can forget about the Alt-right and the damage of ultra-conservative policies because the President doesn’t remind them of the damage with every tweet, or Americans can continue to fight the Alt-right. If we ignore the Alt-right just because they aren’t in the White House, they will continue to recruit new members, grow their ranks, and push ultra-conservative policy into mainstream politics.
And with a potential Republican controlled Senate, and a whopping 22 states where Republicans hold unified control over the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature, The Republican Party is still able to push their policy agenda.
What do we do now?
So how does the United States continue to make sure the Alt-right have little influence on policy? Support progressive activists.
Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash
Joe Biden is heading to the White House because of progressive, and often racialized activists who have put in the ground work with those who were hurt most by Donald Trump and the Alt-right. Organizers like Stacey Abrams registered new voters, and convinced them why their vote mattered. Ms. Abrams and a network of organizations had registered more than 800,000 voters in Georgia alone.
Progressive policies are popular with voters. Policies like public healthcare and gun control are popular among Democrats, Republicans and independents, yet there is little action from either major party. Progressive organizers use these policy proposals to convince people who may not have voted, that it’s important to vote. Large social movements like Black Lives Matter take anger at racial injustice and funnel it to social action and protests. Progressive organizers have helped to take that energy and aim it at electoral change as well.
Progressive organizers can’t do it alone. They aren’t even universally supported by Democrats. But they get results in key areas that keep Republicans and the Alt-right out of power.
Every win that is delivered by a progressive organizer is a loss for the Alt-right. Every loss for the Alt-right is a win for political discourse, social progress and healthy democracy. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/the-alt-right-arent-all-gone-just-because-trump-lost-8d11e0274c0d | ['Justin Draper'] | 2020-11-22 20:31:53+00:00 | ['Politics', 'America', 'Alt Right', 'Elections', 'Trump'] |
Ta dose crypto du jeudi 15 mars — Coinbase reçoit la licence E-Money | BitGrail Denies Responsibility for Hack, But Will Refund Coins "Voluntarily" | Finance Magnates
A Telegram group for victims of the recent BitGrail hack has revealed that the exchange does not consider itself to be… | https://medium.com/la-bulle-crypto/ta-dose-crypto-du-jeudi-15-mars-coinbase-re%C3%A7oit-la-licence-e-money-508a7f8385e7 | [] | 2018-03-15 08:01:01.402000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Coinbase', 'Bitcoin', 'Litecoin'] |
5 Financial Habits I Learned from Dating an Accountant | Habit 1: Share accountability with someone
Ultimately, an accountant’s job is to work with people and businesses to manage their money.
As personal money-management expert, radio host, author, and businessman Dave Ramsay says, “everyone needs a budget. Because a budget helps you get ahead of your money, take control of your money goals, punch debt in the teeth and knock it out of your life forever, and so much more.”
However, I have always found that the issue with budgeting is that it relies on consistent, individual accountability; and none of us is infallible.
Ever since we moved in together, my partner and I have had regular personal finance meetings to set, work towards and achieve our financial goals together (and send each other half of the weekly food bill).
Making a commitment to dual accountability with someone you trust who understands your financial goals can give you an external voice of support.
It’s like having a running partner. You’re more likely to get out of bed at 6 am to go on a run because you don’t want to let your running partner down. Afterward, you’re always glad that you did it because the endorphins have made you happy, and the exercise has made you that little bit healthier.
You are more likely not to buy that expensive item of clothing or another unnecessary candle with an accountability partner. When you go through your finances, and what you have saved against your goal, you want to be celebrating meeting that goal, rather than missing it.
Sharing the excitement of getting closer to your financial goals with someone you are reciprocally supporting to reach theirs is an incredible motivation to keep going.
Habit 2: Treat yourself like you would treat someone else
The way my partner manages his money is straightforward. He projects the costs ahead for the next month and commits to saving a certain amount of his paycheck. He treats it like a commitment to someone else because when he’s doing it professionally, that‘s exactly what it is.
If you commit to doing something for a colleague or a friend, would you let them down?
Of course not (except in the most exceptional of circumstances).
But think about the last time you committed to doing something for yourself. Perhaps it was related to your finances, or maybe your health. When was the last time you told yourself you would go on a diet or pick up a new form of exercise?
How quickly did you let yourself down?
Reframing my commitments to myself to be as non-negotiable as those I make to my partner and my friends has meant that I stick to them far more consistently. It’s a simple but efficient way to shift your mindset about the little expenses that add up.
It makes me think about how I will feel later before I buy that overpriced, pre-packaged salad I could make at home.
Habit 3: Sleep on it. Twice.
An accountant is always cautious about expenditure that wasn’t budgeted for.
Occasionally, I want to blow my budget, and occasionally, it’s okay. I want to treat myself, and I’ve earned it.
Before I go ahead and book those flights to Rome or order that pricey new lamp, though, I now allow myself 48 hours to think about it.
Giving myself time to mull over these decisions means that I’m less likely to make a splurge I will regret.
This technique has saved me so much money. Sometimes I go ahead and buy the item, and sometimes I’ll end up buying a slightly cheaper alternative. But often, I completely forget about it. As exciting as a purchase can feel in the moment, it can frequently turn out to not be all that important after all.
Habit 4: Build a spreadsheet that will get you out of bed every morning
You should see what my partner can do with a spreadsheet; it’s like watching Picasso paint.
What I’ve learned from dating an accountant, who looks at money management systems all day, is that there are a million ways to uncover interesting things from the data in your budget.
I’m most definitely not an Excel prodigy, but consistently building and developing my budgeting spreadsheet has helped me stay far better engaged with it than I ever did previously.
Once the novelty of Every Dollar or Mint.com wore off, my enthusiasm for budgeting would always wear down. Going out to dinner at that expensive new sushi restaurant would start to look increasingly appealing.
Now that I have built my own Excel spreadsheet that I can keep adding to and updating, with pivot tables and pie charts and auto-entry forms, it has helped keep me excited about saving.
Doing this has also offered me new insights about where and when I save, spend and make money, which I have used to break unhelpful habits, project my expenditure and budget better.
For example, I now have empirical evidence that it’s ultimately cheaper for me to buy the snacks I want during my Sunday run to Aldi. Because otherwise, I will invariably pay a premium for them at my local convenience store later in the week.
Habit 5: Be proactive with your money
Finally, Accountants are fundamentally proactive in the way they manage money, day in and day out. My partner is the same with his own finances.
When we met, I had a high-interest savings account and a checking account. That was it.
But let’s face it, especially right now, even the highest-interest saving accounts on the market aren’t offering very high rates. The way my partner manages his own money made me realize that there are still several ways to get your money working for you. You need to be a little more proactive.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I now also have:
Investments in index funds and dividend-paying shares through a share dealing account with monthly transaction-fee-free days (investing as little as I do, this makes a noticeable difference to my profits);
A new saving account with a preferential rate for first-year customers;
A higher yield limited-access account for the money I’m saving towards longer goals; and
An additional checking account with exactly two direct debits and automatic payments going between it and my primary checking account, which I regularly move between banks to take advantage of their bonus schemes.
Dating someone so proactive with their money made me realize that banks will pay you to join them, and they’ll do all the heavy lifting for you.
In the UK, a March 2020 update to the government’s market study on current accounts revealed that the current (or checking) account switching rate is only around 3%.
In many countries, because of similar issues, to try and increase competition, regulatory authorities have made ridiculously simple to switch checking accounts. In the UK, most banks and building societies are signed up to the Current Account Switching Service (CASS).
Therefore, when you want to switch to a new account, the new bank will switch your automatic payments and transfer your balance, and your old bank will take care of closing your old account. Basically, they’ll do the work for you.
The government’s market study shows that the CASS has helped increase switching somewhat since its inception in September 2013, but people still rarely switch, citing inertia as the primary reason why.
But banks want new current account holders. So much so, at least in the UK, they will pay bonuses to new customers making the switch. For example, HSBC is currently offering new customers £125 (c.$160) to make the move to their Advance Account.
Opening and closing bank accounts, you should always remain conscious of your credit score. However, dating an accountant has taught me that doing your research and putting in a tiny bit of logistical work pays off. I now have half a dozen accounts and keep track of the money I move around in my budget and my Google calendar. Cumulatively, I earn double the interest rate I did previously. | https://medium.com/the-post-grad-survival-guide/5-financial-habits-i-learned-from-dating-an-accountant-5f4c4450ce49 | ['Emily Stubbs'] | 2020-10-08 09:23:40.632000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Money', 'Relationships', 'Life Lessons', 'Finance'] |
Head of Integrations at commercetools Talks Composable Commerce & Tech Tools for the CX of the Future | commercetools, the world’s leading next-generation commerce software company that helps retailers create unique and engaging digital commerce experiences everywhere, offers its customers a wide selection of supported third-party integrations. Cappasity has recently joined this list of technology providers to allow clients of the platform to demonstrate their products in 3D and enhance the customer experience.
Today, Ivo Bronsveld, Head of Integrations at commercetools, will share his vision for the customer experience of the future and talk about the tech tools that will help retailers get there. Without further ado, let’s get started.
commercetools has shot up the ranks from Visionary to Leader in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. Congratulations! To what do you attribute this success?
I would say the success of commercetools is a combination of a couple of things. First of all, the market matured. commercetools has always been an API first, completely headless solution and, at first, headless was mostly seen as a developer thing. It was not always clear what the direct benefits of headless were. But if you compare that to today, the benefits of such a composable architecture are way more apparent and the adoption of that is skyrocketing.
In addition, we obviously have worked really hard to make sure our platform is the best one out there. Our product teams have done incredible work to make our vision a reality and I really believe this is a crucial part of our success. I think that our dedication to performance, security, and the developer experience are what make commercetools unique.
Composable Commerce is something that you mention a lot in your blog. Could you give a brief rundown of what it is and why it is important?
I think Composable Commerce is basically a much better name for the Best of Breed solutions of the past. What many companies have noticed over time is that the traditional commerce platforms do not really provide the flexibility that is required nowadays.
Customer expectations change all the time and, generally speaking, companies that can adapt to these changes tend to do better than the ones who can’t.
Composable Commerce provides a model to introduce agility to your commerce environment. By building your architecture using more modular solutions, it becomes easier to add or replace certain components over time.
commercetools has an impressive list of technology partners. Could you give us an example of how your clients leverage the tech solutions offered by your partners?
Sure thing! Our technology partnerships are quite important to us, as commercetools is typically just one piece of the puzzle. This is why we invested heavily in our third-party ecosystem and launched our Integration Marketplace.
At the start of a project, there are always challenges that every customer has to figure out. For example, because the commercetools platform is fully headless and does not provide a front-end, our customers will have to figure out how they want to approach this. Luckily, we have strategic partnerships with almost all of the key CMS vendors, so customers can find their solution of choice quite easily.
There is also a category of third party solutions that I would consider a bit more “optional”. For example, I would put third party search solutions that provide all sorts of fancy AI/Machine Learning in that category. While it provides a lot of benefits, it is certainly not required when you are just starting your project. But, then again, at a later stage, it might become crucial.
I might be biased, but I really believe our technology partnerships are crucial to all our customers because they help create that Composable Commerce architecture.
Why is it necessary for retailers to embrace the importance of customer experience and the tools that enhance it?
Honestly, I don’t think there is anyone out there who would disagree with the fact that customer experience is important. However, I do believe that people don’t always realize that they need the right tools to provide that great customer experience.
Like I mentioned before, the customer expectation is always changing. So even if you implemented the perfect experience at one point in time, the way customers interact and shop will change. Whether that is due to technological improvements or a global pandemic, change is the one constant.
So that means you will need technology that enables you to change. A two-year-old commerce platform that is 3 major updates behind is not going to be of much use if you first need to do a bunch of expensive upgrades to the system.
Retailers are realizing that their ability to adapt is one of the crucial factors that determine whether or not they can keep the customer happy.
Thank you!
You can find more information about commercetools at commercetools.com.
commercetools’ software has been implemented by Fortune 500 companies across many industries. Retail clients of the platform can now draw on the capabilities of the Cappasity solution for fast production, easy embedding, and powerful analysis of 3D content. The Cappasity integration allows merchants to automatically embed 3D images into their online store. Those who choose to take advantage of the Cappasity integration will benefit from increased engagement that comes with interactive 3D imagery.
Cappasity integration demo
Cappasity at commercetools’ Integration Marketplace
How to integrate Cappasity with commercetools | https://medium.com/cappasity-blog/head-of-integrations-at-commercetools-talks-composable-commerce-tech-tools-for-the-cx-of-the-38f0bac4eb51 | [] | 2020-11-27 09:00:19.541000+00:00 | ['Cappasity', 'AR', 'Luxury Tech', 'Ecommerce', 'Product Photography'] |
3 Things I’ve Learned by Building My Business This Year | One of the most enlightening things that I have ever done is starting and managing my own business. Taking control of my livelihood and taking responsibility for the livelihood of others has forced me to grow up in ways that I never thought possible. In February of this year, 2020, I started up a consulting company focused on providing honest service to merchants around America. Not necessarily something that no one has ever thought of, but certainly something that not many have done well.
First Impressions Really are Everything
Joining into an industry with a stigma of corruption, sneaky tactics and immoral operations forced me to analyze brand from a top down perspective and to figure out why people think the way they do. Changing the way someone perceives something is no easy task and requires rapport, integrity and honesty. I’ve come to realize that diverting focus to consumer level trust building and brand image optimization is one of the best ROI’s possible for a new business. Build social proof, keep company presentation consistent and always keep your morality at the front of your mind.
Business is not all about money
A fantastic analogy from Simon Sinek helps to summarize this idea well so I would like to share something very similar.
Money is only the fuel for business in the same way that gasoline is the fuel for cars. You do not own a car to buy fuel, you own a car to get from one place to another. The fuel is only there to help you make your journey. In the same way, business is not created to generate money, business is created to progress towards a specific cause and drive change in the world around us, money just helps us get there.
As a business owner one of the greatest things you can do for yourself and your employees is to always be auditing your mission. Make sure you keep metrics that clearly demonstrate your business moving towards a greater cause. When you see a shift in metrics, adjust and continue forward on the right path.
A business can grow outside of initial limits
When I first started my company, I only imagined having a team of sales consultants and a single office worker handling underwriting and application processing. Over the last 12 months, as we have evaluated our strengths and weaknesses we have come to realize that there is much more fruit to be had. We are in the process of transitioning into multiple spaces outside of what we thought possible. Our software as a service branch debuts in two weeks, our business to business sales coaching department now has 5 year round clients driving well over six figures in revenue yearly and our sales team has grown from three consultants to 15 forcing us to start subdividing team responsibilities and incorporating sales managers into our company hierarchy.
The message here is that while you need to maintain course to advance towards a specific cause, you need to be able to sit back and see other roads that lead to the same place. In this case, a three lane road allows us to transport much more than our original one way street. We also have the ability to support sagging branches with alternative revenues, keeping our business model more viable in intense or extreme circumstances.
Thank you for reading,
I also enjoy sharing my business experience and advice on Quora, you can find me there at /jaice-de-celis-3 to read more about businesses I have started and sold in the past as well as simple insight into my life. | https://medium.com/@jaice/3-things-ive-learned-by-building-my-business-this-year-9900e0045800 | ['Jaice De Celis'] | 2020-12-22 17:47:30.623000+00:00 | ['Business Strategy', 'Business Advice', 'Business', 'Business Development'] |
Newsletter 21: I wrote Cam a note that said, “Cam, you’re a rat.” | Hello everyone! That reminds of me of a story: Once when I was waiting for the subway, an announcement came on over the loudspeaker. Usually in these moments, subway officials will say something like, “a train is being held a few stations away,” but this time a man just said, after a few beats, “Hello, everybody.” And that was it. Hello, everybody. Anyway, hello and welcome again to the Spiralbound newsletter, in which we link to the stories we published this past week. See if anything catches your eye! | https://medium.com/spiralbound/newsletter-21-i-wrote-cam-a-note-that-said-cam-youre-a-rat-a69d5303f516 | ['Edith Zimmerman'] | 2018-10-21 11:46:12.414000+00:00 | ['Spiralbound', 'Comics'] |
Why hyper-growth can be a huge detriment to the success of your startup | Originally published on JOTFORM.COM
“The way [that] failures die is they run out of money.”
It’s probably no surprise that these words were spoken by Paul Graham during an interview.
What is even more interesting is what Graham says next:
“If a place has really good food, it can be in an obscure location, charge a lot, and have really bad service, and it will still be popular. If it has bad food, boy, it better do something really special to get anybody in there. If you die, it’s probably because you didn’t make something people wanted.”
The startup legend famous for saying “the only essential thing is growth” didn’t say some startups flop because they don’t grow fast enough.
He didn’t even say they flop because their investments dry up.
What he said was they fail because they run out of money.
That’s why I focused on profit, not hyper-growth, when I started my company JotForm as a side project over 13 years ago.
I didn’t quit my day job. I didn’t follow my dreams. Vanity metrics meant nothing to me.
That isn’t to say growth isn’t good for business.
Growth, along with profit, is absolutely vital to every startup’s success.
What is not vital are 80-hour work weeks and the enormous pressure to focus on insane growth instead of improving your product. Hyper-growth isn’t only unrealistic, it can be a huge detriment to your startup.
The good news is, there’s another way to grow.
It’s for the patient. It’s for the brave.
It’s for the founders who want to spend time with their families, create a healthy culture for their employees, and develop a product with loyal users.
It’s by growing organically and slowly.
It’s that simple. But simple isn’t always easy.
It isn’t easy to ignore the glittery startup unicorns that seem to achieve overnight success.
I’ve certainly caught myself experiencing FOMO as competitors suddenly sprouted 20 new employees and raised millions in their series A B C rounds.
Focusing on building a great product outweighed everything else, though. As Sam Altman, Paul Graham’s friend and his first choice to take the reins at Y Combinator when he stepped down, put it:
“No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don’t have a sufficiently good product.”
That’s why we made a decision at JotForm to focus on the customer, not the competition.
Sure, we’ve been tempted by trends, but we haven’t given in. The best part is we don’t have to. We answer only to ourselves.
As a bootstrapped company, we write our own destiny. We don’t have time to worry about our competitors or woo VCs — focusing intensely on our customer base, not growth hacks, helped us grow to 140 employees and 5 million users in the past decade.
Healthy, bootstrapped growth…
…gives you not only the resources but the knowledge to hire employees who elevate your whole team. And you’ll recognize a good fit because you’ve sat in every seat from developer to housekeeper during your startup journey.
hire employees who elevate your whole team. And you’ll recognize a good fit because you’ve sat in every seat from developer to housekeeper during your startup journey. …means you get to develop a strong company culture. Or, core values. Those can be whatever you want them to be, as long as you uphold them as a team. It takes time, but I believe developing your core values is one of the most important elements for lasting success.
develop a strong company culture. Or, core values. Those can be whatever you want them to be, as long as you uphold them as a team. It takes time, but I believe developing your core values is one of the most important elements for lasting success. …enables you to take time to develop an effective onboarding program, fall into a natural team workflow, and all those other little things that take companies from good to great when they aren’t burned up in the flash fire of VC funding.
You’ll know you’re on the right path when customers start voting with their dollars.
Getting to that level of trust takes time. But once you’re there, that trust is worth more than a thousand unpaid subscribers or hundreds of Twitter followers.
VCs need to invest in startups. It’s literally their business model. We don’t need them as much as they need us.
The minute a founder gets a cash infusion, it’s easy to confuse building what customers want with what investors want.
If you believe that the only essential is rapid growth, then rapid growth can easily become your sole focus. Each hit has to be more intense than the last. It can be an addiction.
You won’t have time to monitor whether your slew of new hires elevates or destroys your company’s culture. You won’t have time to make sure that what you’re building is something your customers actually want.
Focusing on hyper-growth leaves out important parts of the story.
Even Gabriel Weinberg, two-time successful CEO and author of the best-seller Traction, knows traction alone does not make a successful startup:
“Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction.”
Time and again we are shown that growth is essential, but it isn’t the only essential.
I had a dream of enjoying both my work and my life. The way I achieved that turned out to be by growing organically and slowly. It didn’t get me to the top of TechCrunch and it was never easy, but it paid off.
Even Paul Graham goes on to say about growth:
“A profitable startup could if it wanted just grow on its own revenues. Growing slower might be slightly dangerous, but chances are it wouldn’t kill them.”
Growth is not a bad thing. Actually, it’s a great thing when done slowly and organically.
However, unrealistic and unhealthy hyper-growth can be a huge detriment to the success of your startup. | https://medium.com/swlh/why-hyper-growth-can-be-a-huge-detriment-to-the-success-of-your-startup-d97bb8c9afc | ['Aytekin Tank'] | 2020-01-13 15:33:32.344000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Business', 'Life Lessons', 'Psychology', 'Technology'] |
Fuck You Startup World | Fuck You Startup World
That’s right, I said it.
Fuck your startup scene with your 30 minute morning routines of reading TechCrunch, TNW, Wired, Gizmodo, Mashable, The Verge and ProductHunt- all so you don’t feel ‘left out’. Fuck your weird fucking conversations, things like “OMG did you see Snapchat’s new feature? OMG Instagram is totally copying Snapchat? Did you see Zuck’s live townhall? OMG did you see what Elon Musk tweeted? OMG Uber raised another round!” Fuck that. Nobody cares.
Fuck your crazy work hours. Nobody gives a fuck that Elon musk is working 100 hours a week, and that Marissa Mayer pulling in a 130 hour work week while still breastfeeding her newborns. You’re not Elon Musk- you ain’t Marissa Mayer, you’re not going to get to space, and you won’t build the next Space X. Do me a favor, put your fucking Mac away and go play with your kids.
Fuck your drinking culture too. Please stop celebrating every fucking imaginary milestone with whisky, beer, or pizza and beer. Like, every ‘cool’ company has a bar now? Oh, OK, I’ll come work for you because you have the Glenlivet 17 and not the 15. That’s why I show up to work every day.
Fuck your eating disorders, why the fuck does everything have to be so extreme with you? On one end of the scale you’ve got the pizza-guzzling, office-snack hoarding monster, and on the other end you have the ‘I-must-optimize-every-living-second’ douche that only drinks fucking Soylent. Seriously, what the fuck?
And fuck all those parties after raising money. Don’t you get it? You just dug your grave a little bit deeper. You should celebrate any day that you don’t have to sell off another part of your company.
Fuck your open space floor plans- You really think Zucks builds Facebook’s 2017 roadmap while a nerf war is raging outside? Fuck your standing desk, exercise ball desk, laying desk, and treadmill desk. It ain’t gonna mitigate all those fucking doritos you just munched on, so just shut the fuck up and sit in a normal chair like normal people.
Fuck reading a book a week. No one can read that fast. Let me repeat that -NO ONE CAN FUCKING READ THAT FAST. How about actually reading that god damn book?! Fuck your references to Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, and stop fucking quoting Lean Startup, for Christs sake. We’ve all fucking read it.
Fuck “entrepreneurs” nowadays, seriously- Everybody is a fucking entrepreneur now. Especially all those straight-out-of-college-entrepreneurs. Just so you know- it’s called “unemployed”. Fuck your bootstrapping, too. Fuck working out of garages and fuck your 2.5 square meters “workspace”. “But hey! At least I can bring my dog to work!”. Fuck you, seriously.
Fuck you productivity freaks. You try to make me feel bad because I woke up “only” at 6AM. Shit, you woke up at 4:30, meditated for 30 minutes, reviewed your quarterly and yearly “goals” for another 30 minutes, and slurped on a delicious Soylent shake while checking daily retention trends. Fuck your noise cancelling headphones and Pomodoro timers, your fucking to-do lists, apps, notes, sticky notes, and God knows what else.
Fuck you for telling me that TV is a waste of time but you’re all about the Netflix and chill. You all fucking watch the same TV shows. Stop fucking talking about how Mr. Robot is kind of like you, because you like to geek out on that shit. You’re just a fucking robot, that’s different. Keep laughing about how HBO’s Silicon Valley is sooooo realistic instead of asking why. But stop fucking telling me to “Always ask Why”.
Fuck you and your stupid interview questions. Who the fuck thinks of these stupid fucking questions? I never had to shift a bit in a C array in my life! And I never got a compilation error on a white board, when I need a hash set in Java I just use HashSet- I don’t fucking care about the complexity of this code block because I can afford another EC2 instance! So fuck you.
Fuck your fucking jargon and acronyms. Fucking DAU’s, WAU’s, MAU’s, ARPU, LTV, CPM, CPI, CPC, PPC, CPA, CTR, SEO, ASO, YoY, WoW, Fuck over Fuck. Who the fuck can keep track of all this shit? And the fucking networking events, my fucking lord. Everyone there is the CEO of something-something and they’re all building a MVP to disrupt the who gives a fuck market and that hockey-stick growth is guaranteed.
Fuck the transparency trend, the post mortem and the 5 whys. We can fucking see right through you. Fuck having a Design sprint in EVERY sprint, pushing to production 100 times a day, using no staging environment and building a micro services architecture. Fuck your feature flags and endless variants in your A/B testing. I want to get the same version of your site every time I refresh it, stop fucking changing it up on me.
Fuck you startups with your extravagant parties and crazy off-site events that cost way too much money, you’re supposed to buy some fucking servers instead! Fuck spending money on ping pong tables that no one ever uses, fucking music rooms, nap rooms, meditation rooms, stress-free rooms, and pilates rooms. Fuck the ridiculous incentives that you give, too. Fuck your unlimited vacation policy, it’s fucking bullshit. We all know that your employees will take less time off. | https://medium.com/startup-grind/fuck-you-startup-world-ab6cc72fad0e | ['Shem Magnezi'] | 2016-12-23 14:52:32.104000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Startups', 'Life', 'Startup Lessons'] |
Calgary Council Agrees to Reintroduce Fluoride: What Impact Will It Have? | The city of Calgary will see fluoride return to the public water supply after the Council approved the results of the October 2021 plebiscite. As a result, the implementation of water fluoridation will take place. Consequently, oral health is expected to improve for residents.
The Calgary City Council have ratified the decision to reintroduce fluoride to the public water supply. This was the final hurdle to overcome following the results of an October plebiscite that showed Calgary residents wanted to see fluoride return to the public water supply.
Now that water fluoridation has been approved, the implementation of the system will begin. As a result, there are hopes for an improvement in oral health across Calgary.
Water fluoridation refers to the practice of adding the natural mineral fluoride to the public water supply. The main benefit of water fluoridation is an improvement in dental health. Furthermore, fluoride is a mineral that has proven benefits for dental health.
Water fluoridation is popular in many nations. However, many countries have outright banned the practice. Concerns over fluoridation include potential over-exposure, the ethics behind its use, and the costs involved [1].
Calgary has a complex history with water fluoridation. On Monday 18th October, Calgary residents voted on water fluoridation, which was the seventh vote on the issue in history [2].
Calgarians voted in favour of water fluoridation. The vote resulted in a 62%-38% split [2]. Furthermore, voter turnout was just under 47% of the electorate, equating to 333,888 valid votes [2].
Votes in 1957, 1961, 1966 and 1971 rejected water fluoridation. In 1989, Calgarians voted to add fluoride to the water supply. Moreover, this was upheld in 1999.
In 2011, the Calgary City Council stopped water fluoridation due to economic concerns [3]. Therefore, the 2021 decision has been heralded as a landmark moment for residents.
A plebiscite is not legally binding. Therefore, the final decision over the matter was referred to the Calgary City Council. The Council were expected to ratify this plebiscite. However, there had been concerns over whether or not they would.
In the end, the Council approved the motion 13–2, with only counselors Andre Chabot and Dan McLean dissenting [4]. Therefore, the Council ruled in favor of water fluoridation for Calgary.
Councillor Chabot had complained that the public had not been informed enough on the matter. Subsequently, Chabot has gone as far to say he will be installing a system to block fluoride from entering his water supply [4].
But other counselors cited a mass information drive, frequent news stories and past familiarity with fluoride as reasons to reject Chabot’s concerns.
Councillor Gian-Carlo Carra had originally been against water fluoridation, having been in favor of ending fluoridation in 2011. However, he changed his mind in 2021, due to his belief that the data clearly showed fluoride’s effectiveness [4].
News of the Council’s approval was welcomed by many. Calgary’s Mayor Jyoni Gondek praised the decision. She remarked that “oral health is public health”, and that this decision was an example of Calgary’s commitment to public health [4].
Juliet Guichon, a medical bioethicist at the University of Calgary, was among those to support the campaign to reintroduce fluoride. She thanked the council for their decision.
Guichon said that the decision “demonstrated an acceptance of the scientific consensus opinion based on over 75 years of peer-reviewed research that fluoridation is effective in reducing dental decay” [4].
However, the decision was not met with universal joy. For example, some declared they would seek filtration devices to avoid fluoride. Others took to social media to declare a hope that another plebiscite will be held soon.
Now that the decision has been made, attention has turned towards the implementation of water fluoride. The Council have stated that it will take 18–24 months to set up water fluoridation [4].
There will be an initial cost of $10.1million, with further maintenance costs of $1million per year for the next 20 years [4]. This equates to just $1.32 per resident, per year.
The biggest positive is that Calgary residents should see an improvement in their oral health. Fluoride is consistently praised by dentists. It is an important ingredient in toothpaste too.
Past studies into water fluoride have shown its effectiveness. For example, one study compared the dental health of children in Calgary and Edmonton, where water fluoridation exists [5].
The study found that tooth decay had increased significantly since Calgary stopped water fluoridation, whilst Edmonton’s tooth decay rate had largely remained the same [5]. Therefore, this shows the impact of fluoride.
Guichon has cautioned that it will take “not months, but years” to see a benefit [4]. However, these benefits will surely prove worthwhile. Calgary residents can look forward to improved oral health. This is a milestone moment for Calgary that will be remembered for many years to come.
is a Calgary Dental Clinic that offer many services, including regular check-ups, cavity fillings, and .
Any dental problem should be addressed early, and can be identified at check-ups. This helps to prevent the problem getting worse. So, when further treatment is needed after a check-up, we provide our patients with a clear treatment plan.
The best way of avoiding extra treatment is to have strong oral hygiene. This includes brushing our teeth at least twice a day, flossing regularly, and getting a dental check-up at least twice a year. Avoiding sugary foods and drink and not smoking also helps.
Our Calgary-based dental clinic also follows the . This means our prices are competitive, transparent and affordable. Alberta Dental Fee Guide
We would love you to visit us here at soon! You can see more about us by visiting our website . https://taradaledental.ca
[1] Robbins, O. (2018). Is Fluoride Bad for You? Or Is Adding Fluoride to Water A Good Thing?. Available: https://foodrevolution.org/blog/fluoride-in-water-dangers/. Last accessed: 20 thNovember 2021.
[2] Elections Calgary. (2021). 2021 Results — Calgary General Election. Available: https://www.calgary.ca/election/results/2021-results.html. Last accessed: 20 thNovember 2021.
[3] O’Neill, B., Kapoor, T., & McLaren, L. (2018). Politics, Science, and Termination: A Case Study of Water Fluoridation Policy in Calgary in 2011. Review of Policy Research. 36(1), p99–120.
[4] Toy, A. (2021). Calgary to reintroduce fluoride to water following city council vote. Available: https://globalnews.ca/news/8374757/calgary-reintroduce-fluoride-water-city-council-vote/. Last accessed: 20 thNovember 2021.
[5] McLaren, L., Patterson, S. K., Faris, P., Chen, G., Thawer, S., Figueiredo, R., Weijs, C., McNeil, D., Waye, A., & Potestio, M. (2021). Fluoridation cessation and children’s dental caries: A 7-year follow-up evaluation of Grade 2 schoolchildren in Calgary and Edmonton, Canada. Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology. (Pre-publication issue): https://doi.org/10.1111/cdoe.12685. | https://medium.com/@taradaledentalgl/calgary-council-agrees-to-reintroduce-fluoride-what-impact-will-it-have-e2a4abba693 | ['Taradale Dental'] | 2021-11-23 04:17:42.791000+00:00 | ['Dental Care', 'Dentistry', 'Oral Health', 'Dental'] |
Debt And Equity Mutual Fund: Which One Will Be The Best For You? | Mutual funds investment always provides diversification. A new investor always feels puzzled about whether he/she will invest in debt or equity mutual fund. As an investor, one should know about the difference between either debt or equity mutual fund before investing. While both the fund seeks to deliver a potential return to the investor, but a comparative analysis will help you to understand, what suits best for you.
A debt mutual fund is a type of mutual fund that invests in shareholder’s money in fixed income securities such as bonds, treasury bills, money market instruments and liquid assets, whereas equity funds mainly invest in companies of different market capitalization, to generate higher returns. Let’s look at some of the major differences between them:
Nature of the Fund:
The most common difference between debt and equity is the way they invest in funds. Debt funds take money from the investor and invest mainly in fixed instruments like government securities, corporate bonds, non-convertible debentures and other highly related instruments. Equity Fund pooled money from the investor and then invest in equity shares of the company.
Risk Factor:
In terms of risk, equity funds are riskier as compared to debt funds. The debt funds are much safer as a major portion of their portfolio in government bonds, securities, and money market instruments.
Return:
Risk is always associated with returns. Higher the risk better will be the returns. Equity funds mainly invest in shares of different companies, hence carry bigger risk as well as better returns. On the contrary, a debt fund carries less risk, hence carry lesser returns. But the benefit of investing in debt fund is that one always gets the stable return and their capital is protected. In the period of the bear market, debt funds performed better compared to the equity fund. But debt funds are sensitive to the interest rate change.
Tax Liabilities:
Mutual Funds are taxed according to the time period of the investment. There are mainly two types of tax based on the time period, one is Long Term Capital Gains Tax and other is Short Term Capital Gains Tax.
Debt Fund: In the case of debt funds, if the gains on the debt mutual fund held for less than 36 months are taxed as short-term capital gains tax, whereas if the gains on the debt mutual fund held for more than 36 months are taxed as Long-Term Capital Gains Tax. In the case of short-term debt fund, the gains are taxed as per the income tax slab, whereas in the case of long-term debt fund, the gains are taxed at the rate of 20% after indexation.
Equity Fund: In the case of equity funds, if an investor sells his/her equity mutual funds before a year, then it is treated as short term capital gains tax. In that case, the gains are taxed at a flat rate of 15 percent. But if an investor sells his/her equity mutual fund after a year, then the returns are treated as long term capital gain. If the gains are less than Rs 1 lakh in a financial year, then there is no tax, but in case if the gains are more than Rs 1 lakh in the financial year, then it will be taxed around 10 percent.
“Are you looking to invest? How about opening your account with Gulaq & start investing in Direct Mutual Funds? Get in touch.”
*Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks. Please read the scheme information and other related documents carefully before investing.
Source: https://www.gulaq.com/debt-and-equity-mutual-fund/ | https://medium.com/@gulaqfintech/debt-and-equity-mutual-fund-which-one-will-be-the-best-for-you-62ad68b79b7b | [] | 2020-02-20 05:12:08.929000+00:00 | ['Investors', 'Finance', 'Invest', 'Education', 'Investing'] |
Facebook and Crypto: what you need to know for 2018 | Facebook has noticed blockchain
Tencent, the Chinese internet giant behind QQ and WeChat, has partnered with Intel and detailed their plans for blockchain. They’re taking steps and now we can expect Facebook to push back.
Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg published a Facebook post on January 4th outlining his personal goals for 2018. Top of the list was fixing issues of people misusing Facebook. He offered encryption and cryptocurrency as an antidote, saying
“I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how to best use them in our services.”
If Facebook decides to get involved, how would they go about it? Looking at Facebook’s track record can provide some insight.
Facebook likes to acquire their way into new technology
Historically, Facebook has found success doing strategic acquisitions. Spending tens of billions to acquire 50+ startups and jump-start key areas of the Facebook platform. This behavior dates way back to 2009 when they bought Friendfeed to improve their aggregated feeds. And it’s continuing to this day, with their recent acquisition of Ozlo to build out their artificial intelligence product.
They also have a successful history of purchasing rocket-ship products to run alongside Facebook and expand into new markets. Some examples nobody will forget are Instagram, Whatsapp, and Oculus Rift.
The million dollar question here becomes, which companies are they going to acquire when they make their debut in crypto?
We analyzed 50 coins already on the market to create a short-list. Here are 3 areas and acquisitions that Facebook could consider.
1. Financial identity with Bloom
Since the beginning, Facebook has served as your online identity. From the content you share to the “login with Facebook” buttons strewn across the internet — Facebook is you on the internet.
In fact, the strength of Facebook as a verified identity is one of the things that led to the success of Tinder, a dating app, which required users log in through Facebook. By being tied to Facebook, it showed these were “real people”, and not people impersonating or catfishing.
With blockchain, Facebook could expand the scope of your online identity to include financial areas as well. This would introduce new opportunities for Facebook and the services they offer.
A key acquisition for this could be Bloom (BLT).
Bloom was created by Stanford engineers and launched their ICO in December of 2017. Bloom does identity attestation (proving that you are you), reporting and tracking debt obligations, and issuing credit scores. They also help individuals grow their credit scores by using the Bloom credit card.
This could enable Facebook to push into the financial sector. They could begin issuing credit cards and doing identity attestation and credit scoring.
The result: more user financial data (which advertisers will love) and new ways to make money. Plus it would further cement Facebook as an unshakable portion of our lives.
In the future, when you have a Facebook credit card, bank account, and car lease — you may find yourself in a situation where you “will quit using Facebook… as soon as you repay this mortgage”.
2. Paying Users for content with Steem
Facebook could pay users for their content. With the success of platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and Medium that offer monetary incentives to their top creators, it’s amazing that Facebook creators still only make money outside the Facebook ecosystem.
Other businesses might get caught in their ways, but Facebook has proven that they will flip their business model on its head if they have to. A recent example of this is their shift to video. Turns out, less people scrolling the feed, and instead watching longer video content, means lower margins and less revenue per user.
Zuckerberg explained in early 2017 that,
“the margin structure will be different, [video] almost certainly will be a lower margin source of revenue than what we currently do”.
This could be the same — a major change to their core business model that is essential to keeping up. A strategic takeover on this front is Steem (SMT).
Steem is a platform for rewarding publishers and allowing them to monetize their content. The first major application built using Steem was Steemit, a blog-style social network similar to Medium. On Steemit, users can receive money instead of upvotes and until now, over $22 million has been paid out to publishers.
Building on Steem would be a huge move for Facebook.
Right off the bat, they could add a “super like” button. Now when you see amazing content, instead of just liking, you can let them know you care. Or donations. Like if your friend gets married or has a baby — you can send a few dollars their way just to say congrats!
Step 2 is bigger. Now users have “money” saved on their accounts. Facebook already has marketplaces where users can buy/sell products. With tokens, now users can easily buy products right inside of Facebook. With products just a tap away, Facebook could steal market share from Amazon and become the most convenient place to shop online.
This is a challenge though. Since Steem is an open-source community, Facebook can’t just acquire it in the traditional sense. They could, however, “adopt” the community — ensuring a large amount of resources being put into the community are Facebook controlled.
These moves would put Facebook on the frontline of blockchain, improve their user-generated content, and give them influence over other content driven websites.
3. Increasing trust and transparency with MetaX
Facebook has had a really tough time with trust in 2017. Zuckerberg even said it was his focus for 2018.
Facebook is seeking to repair trust by:
Increasing requirements for authenticity, and Making advertising more transparent
The cool thing is that blockchain is often celebrated for fixing these exact same kinds of problems.
A company which might be able to help out with this is MetaX (ADT).
MetaX is a company using blockchain to increase transparency and expose fraud in the advertising industry. They are based out of LA and have partnerships with Consensys and DMA (Data & Marketing Association). Their product works by whitelisting domains, but this process could be used in reverse for Facebook’s application.
By using blockchain to crowdsource which advertisers are good and which are bad, it could make it harder for the bad guys to slip through. Like a game of whack-a-mole — except there are 100 people with sticks waiting and ready.
Also, MetaX can solve problems surrounding impression tracking.
This means less fake news, less scams, fewer bots, AND you have a better idea of what information Facebook is sending to advertisers. Seems like a win, win, win.
Conclusion
Blockchain is an exciting technology with the potential to solve problems that were previously very difficult. It is likely that Facebook will use it in some capacity, but difficult to predict exactly how.
They could use blockchain to improve areas like trust and content generation for their existing platform, or they could use it to expand into new markets and solidify their iron grip on everyone’s lives.
If you know any blockchain companies that could have an interesting synergy with Facebook — leave a message in the comment section below!
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👉 https://t.me/coinandcrypto | https://medium.com/hackernoon/facebook-and-crypto-what-you-need-to-know-for-2018-6bcd71794853 | ['Coin'] | 2018-06-12 13:38:03.350000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Investing', 'Bitcoin', 'ICO', 'Blockchain'] |
Understanding Bamboo Integration for CI/CD Pipeline | Do you know 23.9 million software developers code and build programs for businesses? Do you know as you read, millions of program code lines get written for a better living? Wondering how? The ownership goes to testing and deployment technologies. It includes Automation, CI/CD, & DevOps. While DevOps is a part of Continuous Testing’s broader framework, the CI/CD is a pie of this big piece.
What is CI/CD?
CI/ CD technologies help to speed up the testing & deployment processes. It also ensures efficient & effective results.
CI implies Continuous Integration. It shows the continuous generations of build and test sequences for any program or software package you build using code. It constantly monitors the code for changes /modifications. Last but not least, it auto-generates the build and test sequence for developing a project. CD implies Continuous Delivery. It ensures the administration of the builds of automatic infrastructure deployment.
CI/CD pipeline is an easy-to-use framework. Many tools use it to ensure the faster release of their software application. Bamboo is one such application that implements a CI/CD framework.
What is Bamboo CI Server?
Bamboo CI server helps:
To automate the testing of any software program/ application for a quicker release. How? By creating a CD pipeline.
To automate builds, document logs, and execute tests to assess different program parameters and code functionality.
To create automated build and test processes for the program.
Provide a platform to separate builds that have varying targets & requirements.
To auto-deploy the program into the server for release.
Key Features of Bamboo CI Server
Bamboo uses a code repository shared by developers. It helps to schedule and coordinate the build & test application processes.
Advantages of Bamboo Integration
Businesses can assess and make changes quickly via analytical test data.
Ensures end-to-end quality, release management, build status in one place.
Make modules deployment ready.
Ensures seamless integration with products like Bitbucket and Jira
Includes pre-built functionalities with minimal to no need for plugins
The intuitive user interface makes it easy to navigate through tools or options.
Ensures easy and fast functionality
Different staging environment to deploy environments on-demand without any hindrance
Bamboo CI Server Workflow
The workflow of Bamboo is direct when it comes to builds and test suites coordination. The actions order configuration includes different segments of sections: Plans, Jobs, & Tasks.
Plans:
It is a single-stage by default.
Focus: Ensures you have everything in one place.
It groups jobs into multiple stages to execute the job efficiently.
It uses the same repository to run series stages sequentially for quick execution.
Jobs:
It includes sequentially running tasks on the same agent.
It delivers you control of the order of the tasks that you need to execute for your builds.
It collects task requirements to map the capabilities needed to understand the Bamboo CI server.
Tasks:
It is the smallest discrete working unit.
It executes the commands given to the system.
It includes parsing test results, running scripts, executing Maven goals, or source code checkouts.
It runs sequentially within a job. Where? In the working Bamboo directory.
Bamboo CI server integration for testing will help you scale builds and deployments. The Bamboo supported integrations allow you to gather requirements at one location for execution & implantation. To know more about integration or for any technical assistance, feel free to connect. We have a team of skilled professionals who have years of knowledge about integration and CI/CD tools. | https://medium.com/successivetech/understanding-bamboo-integration-for-ci-cd-pipeline-94022415a294 | ['Chetna Kapoor'] | 2020-12-02 10:04:40.565000+00:00 | ['Continuous Integration', 'Ci Cd Pipeline', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Cicd Tools', 'Bamboo'] |
2021 Marketing Trends: Financial Services. | It almost goes without saying that 2020 has placed a lot of economic pressure on businesses of all kinds. Customer acquisition and retention strategies have been revisited with long term plans being substituted for short term tactical initiatives.
In this blog post, we’ll focus on the key trends affecting marketing strategies for Financial Services companies as they look towards a different kind of landscape in 2021.
Personalisation and privacy.
According to an article published in the Drum in 2020, personalisation is a key battleground in financial sector marketing. Building better, more personalised relationships with customers is key to the industry’s success but remains one of its biggest challenges.
Customers want personalised, helpful guidance and content yet they have trust issues with financial institutions as a whole. The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer: Financial Services report revealed that trust in the sector is at its highest level since 2012, yet at 57% of the general population, it remains the least-trusted sector measured.
Further, personalised content needs to be dynamically generated to fulfil the promise of hitting the needs of individuals and this presents a real privacy challenge. To provide individually tailored landing pages, customers and prospects need to accept third party cookies and share personal data with the likes of Google.
Changes on the horizon with third party cookie usage add to the challenge as opt-in is likely to require an extra stage at least to remain compliant.
However, firms can update their cookie control to use the new Google Consent Mode. Find out more in this article.
So the key here is to get the balance right. You need to provide enough personalisation that the content remains relevant but not so much that you fall foul of breaching personal privacy.
A refocus on user experience on your site or app to ensure that you are meeting different user types needs efficiently will also be a prudent move.
Marketing to Millennials, through to Generation Z.
Research group Gartner points out that Millennials through to Generation Zs are a challenge for financial institutions to market to. They distrust financial institutions, are relatively low adopters of various banking, investing and insurance products and have very specific values — like equality, adventure and belonging — that need to be aligned with.
It’s about creating emotional appeal, developing trust, and making the right services available in the right way.
Peer influence is key to gaining trust so traditional outbound marketing methods like publication ads or direct mail campaigns are relatively irrelevant to this notoriously hard to reach group.
The value of careful personalisation, segmentation and positioning are critical when setting any marketing strategy in 2021 and particularly for reaching these audiences. Gathering demographic and geographic data has always been key to digital marketing success but now psychographic profiling (segmenting by culture, lifestyle, typified buying behaviours etc) will be all the more important.
This gives rise to even more granular segmentation. Whilst this can be aided by having well-researched buyer personas, greater emphasis should be placed on reaching out to younger consumers in a genuinely helpful way.
Great examples of this include Natwest’s Money Sense campaign that takes an educational slant and Barclays’ LifeSkills initiative with tips on getting a job, going to university or staying safe online. They even offer virtual work experience.
The end of the office? Digital transformation.
With customers and clients increasingly moving towards online interactions with Financial Services, the temptation is to move to a purely digital experience. COVID has accelerated this trend.
Customers want personalised, helpful guidance and content yet they have trust issues with financial institutions as a whole. The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer: Financial Services report revealed that trust in the sector is at its highest level since 2012, yet at 57% of the general population, it remains the least-trusted sector measured.
Millions have been invested in call deflection strategies as banks seek to move customers away from costly call centres and push them towards “self-solve” automated routes.
Whatever the view, there’s no doubt that customers and service providers need to fully embrace the much-discussed “new normal” of people working from home and with it higher expectations on the digital service offering.
Financial Services providers that invest in bridging the gap between an “in-person” service and personalised online services (taking account of the privacy battleground) will be ahead of the curve.
Marketing automation solutions like HubSpot, Marketo and Intercom should be at the forefront of any tech spend. Artificial intelligence-based solutions that learn from user behaviour and enhance Customer Experience (CX) will reap the greatest rewards.
Inbound Marketing over Outbound.
The value of a good inbound marketing strategy — producing user-centric marketing campaigns — has proven itself many times over in terms of ROI. It is also much easier to measure. The use of tried and tested attribution models can prove more accurately which touchpoints in a buyer’s journey have resulted in a conversion.
This should lead to much lower cost per acquisition figures than some traditional outbound marketing methods. For more discussion on this check out my earlier post.
Value adds in Financial Services.
With an increasingly competitive online market, financial services firms will need to look for other ways of adding value to their customers and clients. Price comparison site MoneySuperMarket does this by offering free expert advice in the form of MoneySavingsExpert, capitalising on the celebrity status of Martin Lewis.
Whilst the site claims editorial independence, there is no doubt that MoneySuperMarket gains some brand equity from the association. This works much like above the line sponsorship but has a more subtle approach. It positions the price comparison site as an expert in its field and doubtless helps with search rankings.
Even small steps forward like keeping a well maintained Frequently Asked Questions section on your website, helpful newsletters or content bulletins, a blog, explainer videos or other useful content will go a long way to adding value to your customer’s experience.
Getting back to basics.
As already mentioned, those firms that invest more heavily in customer-centric marketing are likely to do best.
There are a number of ways this can be achieved but understanding your users wants and needs and how you are meeting them is now more important than ever.
Journey mapping
2020 has given industries of all kinds pause for thought about how to better meet customer needs and provide a better service. Margins are being squeezed as the economic slowdown has meant that consumers have become less brand loyal and expect more for less.
This applies to Financial Services too. Not only will firms need to look at more cost-efficient practices but they should look towards a better customer journey.
A key to the success of any change is a more thorough understanding of user or buyer journeys. Ask questions like, how did the buyer find us? What services did they use? What part of our product or service did they enjoy using? What were the key touchpoints in their buying or repeat business decision? Did they refer us on to someone else?
The result for Financial Services providers that make this investment should be shorter-term gains, greater stabilisation and long-term growth.
Campaign and service evaluation.
Firms should audit their current metrics and survey their customers on what is working well for them, Useful and easily accessible data to look at could include:
Number of site visitors (increased traffic is always a good start)
Site visitor bounce rates- which pages are people leaving on and why
Conversion rate statistics (Google Analytics, Hotjar)
Results of tracked campaigns against referrals
Results of customer surveys (particularly Net Promoter Score stats and feedback. Remember — the most useful part of the NPS survey is the qualitative question rather than the quantitative one and avoid using incentives as these typically skew results
Number of meetings arranged
Number of meetings against new business wins
Number of touches with a prospective customer before they convert
Cancellation feedback — understanding why your customers stopped using you — often this will be about price or perceived value but are there other factors that have become trends? Maybe a human interaction
All of this information should be housed in a centralised database where possible — again tools like Hubspot or Salesforce are a fantastic place to note and track what’s working and what needs attention.
Core competencies vs diversification.
Services that have diversified their product offer may do better to refocus on core competencies in the marketing message. Going back to the roots about why you exist and what your service is “bought to do” will likely mean some important decisions about what you actively market and what you leave behind.
Messaging needs to be crystal clear at the moment so in 2021 it will be crucial to ensure all channels are aligned and all customer touchpoints genuinely move them towards their desired goals.
Having said that, if your product or service is in decline, now might be a good time to consider some strategic partnerships or mutual marketing agreements.
Higher reporting cadence and marketing agility.
Financial Services marketers and sales teams typically report in monthly and quarterly periods. With the volatility of the marketplace, it will make sense to have shorter reporting periods. Marketing efforts will need to be more closely monitored and a strategic approach may have to be broken down into a greater number of tactical “sprints”.
Agile marketing will need to be backed up by fast responding tech development partnerships.
Conclusion.
It almost goes without saying that 2020 has been a crazy year for industries of all types. It has placed increased pressure on Financial Services providers to prove their worth. Key to the success of 2021 will be: | https://medium.com/contra-agency/2021-marketing-trends-financial-services-e296cfc11917 | ['Matthew Johnson'] | 2021-01-04 12:14:53.612000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Digital Transformation', 'Financial Services', 'Inbound Marketing', 'Brand Strategy'] |
Why I Still Collect My Change in an Old Peanut Butter Jar | Why I Still Collect My Change in an Old Peanut Butter Jar
Wealth has many forms.
Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash
This may come as a shock, but peanut butter jars have changed over the years. They weren’t made of plastic some time ago, and this is just one item on a long list of disappointments for me.
When I was a boy, and even when I grew to become a legal age adult, I could buy peanut butter at the store in a glass jar with a tin top. No matter the brand, peanut butter came in a very useful container that I often used for something special once the peanut butter was gone.
The tin-top made it especially important
Another item on my growing list of disappointments is the absence of cash in the world. I don’t mean the lack of money. I have plenty of money. I mean the absence of cash in transactions. I understand that this is a growing trend, and the acolytes of technology can’t say no. Perhaps much of who I am is still analog, and money has become digital.
I try to use cash whenever possible. Doing so is just simpler; it makes the transaction final somehow, and in a child-like way, I really like the consequence of getting the change back at the end of it. My hand is open to receive the coins long before the cashier totals the purchase and prints a receipt.
Photo by Michael Longmire on Unsplash
Those coins that many people see as an inconvenience, and are the consequence of using cash, taught me valuable lessons about money.
I’m old now. I’m not a boy or even a couple of years into legal adult status. I’m 59 years old, chronologically speaking. I still use cash, and I still cherish the pennies, nickels, dimes, and a few quarters the cashier hands back to me before I leave the store, even if it is a computer-controlled change machine that spits the coins out into a small plastic tray. I collect them and drop them into my pocket all the same.
And because I’m old now, I still cling to some of the habits I developed as a boy. I still have a peanut butter jar that holds all of the coins I collect. The problem, a few years ago, was finding a jar that wasn’t made of plastic.
I found one at a garage sale that is still a prized possession of mine.
It is a big jar, much bigger than the plastic jars on grocery shelves today. This jar is made of glass, and the paper label that once declared the brand of peanut butter is long gone. Even the strips of glue that held the label to the glass has washed away.
When I was a boy, my mom made a piggy bank out of a used peanut butter jar for me. She cut a slit in the top so I could drop coins into the jar just like any piggy bank in the world. This is why a tin top is so necessary. You can’t cut a slit in a plastic top.
Each time I would drop coins into this piggy bank, I would hear the tink, tink of metal coin against glass. That sound made it real for me.
That sound made the act of saving a real thing for me
Years ago, I found an old “antique” peanut butter jar at a garage sale. When my wife saw what I was clutching in my arms, she rolled her eyes out of impatience but also from some admitted amusement. The woman who was selling it to me focused her greedy eyes on me, intent on selling me this glass jar with a tin top for far more than it was really worth. I think I paid 4 bucks for it.
I didn’t stop clutching the glass jar until I got home, found a screwdriver and a hammer, and punched a slit in the tin-top just like my mother did for me years before.
Like I said, I’m old now, but I still have the glass jar with its tin top. I still use it as a piggy bank. I drop all of my change into the jar every evening, no matter if it's only a few pennies or if there are quarters and dimes involved.
Photo by Eduardo Soares on Unsplash
An item that is not on my list of disappointments is a resource my bank provides to me for free. I bring in my peanut butter jar full of coins, they drop the coins into a coin counter and then credit my bank account with the added amount.
I’m an old guy, and I can’t imagine losing the tangible feature of money that I grew up with and what became so intertwined with the concepts of saving money, collecting it, and investing it. Having this physical sensation of money makes it real for me. Money is not just an idea. Money is a tangible thing in this world.
My brokerage account statement, the 401(K) statement, and even the mortgage statement are all printed on paper and arrive in the mail each month because of this same requirement. Just like the coins I collected as boy, these account statements have to be touched, have to be a physical thing, in order for me to feel the sense of wealth they represent.
Money has always been an idea, an agreement, or a social convention, and it has always had a physical token that represented it as well. Whether money was seashells or gold coins, wealth was counted by what was in your hands or at the end of rope in the case of sheep or livestock counting as wealth.
Photo by Dmitry Demidko on Unsplash
When money becomes only an idea, a computer tally, a distant horn blowing and declaring one more dollar is added to some “virtual” register somewhere, money and the wealth it can represent loses the basis it has for being wealth. It can no longer be seen as a store of value but only a number or a subtotal.
I can’t imagine having any innate knowledge of my wealth without this sensation of coins or bills being the end result. If I can’t create these coins or bills from an account at some bank, the wealth loses its physicality, and this is what registers as wealth for me.
I know what money feels like, even if it is only quarters, dimes, and nickels on a bed of pennies in a glass jar with a tin top and slit cut in it. I can touch it. I can feel it. It has weight, and it is something that exists in the world.
I’m an old guy, and I’ve learned how to manage money that appears to me on account statements without my ability to touch it, but I still need the glass jar with the tin-top to remind me what it feels like even if the wealth it represents is only a fraction of the virtual total. | https://medium.com/makingofamillionaire/why-i-still-collect-my-change-in-an-old-peanut-butter-jar-8ec62db7cfd1 | ['G M Potter'] | 2020-12-23 20:42:23.267000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Money', 'Personal Finance', 'Saving', 'Coins'] |
The Rise And Fall Of Gator Rogowski | Gator was born in Brooklyn, New York, but moved with his mother and older brother to San Diego, California at the age of three after his parents’ divorce. The family ended up in Escondido a sun-baked, middle-class suburb in northern San Diego County. It was there Gator began skateboarding.
As a child, Gator was considered to be a social outcast among his friends, because his family didn’t have a lot of money. Gator started skateboarding at the age of seven and, while most of his friends were hyped on trends concerning surfing, Gator was practicing at a local skate park. At the age of twelve, he was picked up by local skateboarding teams to compete in amateur tournaments.
He began winning local tournaments, attracting bigger sponsors, endorsement deals, fame and wealth, and at the age of fourteen he became known as a professional skateboarder. In 1982, he won the Canadian Amateur Skateboarding Championships in Vancouver, Canada, his first major title. He made $4,000 to $8,000 a month from selling clothing and skateboard equipment. By 1987, Gator had secured a deal with Visions to use his name on their merchandise. The company was selling around 7,000 decks each month including clothing, shirt, videos, and stickers — earning Gator around $14,000.
Gator enjoyed significant fame in the 1980s. Whenever he was on tour, he’d be greeted by a long line of adoring fans waiting to see him. On one of those tours, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1987, Gator met two seventeen-year-old blondes, Brandi McClain and her good friend Jessica Bergsten. Gator and Brandi partied an entire weekend and fell in love with each other.
Gator would always call or send Brandi love letters from San Diego to Arizona every single day. Few months later he asked Brandi to move in with him and she agreed.
Gator bought a ranch in the mountains and both of them moved into the ranch. But Brandi became bored of the place, so Gator decided that they move to Carlsbad by the beach. Gator sold the ranch months later.
Gator and his girlfriend were inseparable. They both attended every kind of party in Carlsbad together, drank and enjoyed each other’s company. They were the hottest couple in the beach at the time.
Gator would take Brandi everywhere he went, from competitions, to filming for advertisements and promotional videos for Vision. They appeared in Tom Petty’s music video Free Fallin’.
Gator was known to have anger issues and a drinking problem. It was said by his friends that he drank to control his anger, but Gator was known to have anger issues and a drinking problem. On one of his tour in Australia in 1989, Gator had spent the day making demos. When he was done, he was completely worn out and frustrated. A child came up to him, asking him for an autograph but Gator wasn’t in the mood and tried to avoid him. The child kept on asking and this enraged Gator, causing him to hit the child in front of many people. Due to the assault, his sales around Australia dropped.
Around that time a new type of skateboarding was challenging the dominance of Gator’s genre. It was called street skating, where skaters choose urban obstacles likes curbs, garbage cans and stairways over traditional skateboard parks. Gator found it difficult transitioning from his genre to the new generational skateboarding and his career began to sink.
Gator wasn’t the only one affected by the new trend. Vision, the company that he had spent majority of his career with, began to file for bankruptcy.
In 1990, during a world cup event in Germany that Gator and the Vision skateboarding team attended, Gator attended a party and got so drunk that he went missing. His team Vision manager recalled looking out his window seeing Gator climb what looked like a construction crane and then diving down from a two story hotel. He landed on a wrought iron fence, impaling his neck, face and thumb. Gator showed up at his manager’s hotel room, drenched in his blood.
On the way to the hospital, Gator was in serious pain and was so drunk that he couldn’t be controlled. The next day, he couldn’t remember the reason why he was on the hospital bed or how he got all the stitches he had.
After the incident, seeking to reinvent himself, Gator changed his name from Rogowski to Gator. He explained that Rogowski was his father’s name whom he had never really known. Gator later made friends with Augie Constantino, an ex-surfer turned born-again christian, who preached the word of God to him.
Gator gave his life to Christ and began preaching the word of God to his friends. Though his friends thought that this was a faze for him that he would get over it soon. But Gator, looking back at how messed up his life was, really wanted to find direction. He tried to get Brandi to convert with him, but she wasn’t ready to drop the fun life she was having.
When Brandi couldn’t deal with the new ways Gator wanted them to live, Gator broke up with saying she should fine someone like her. After they broke up Brandi moved to her parents’ house in San Diego.
The break-up frustrated Gator a lot more than the accident in Germany. He began drink a lot more than usual. Things became worse when Brandi found a new boyfriend, a young surfer. Despite his newfound faith, Gator’s reaction was un-Christian. He became obsessively jealous and he began stalking Brandi. He would call her mother’s house incessantly and leave messages on the answering machine, calling her all sorts of names.
One night, Brandi returned home to find that someone had broken in. The thief had taken everything that Gator had bought for her, including her car. She and the police suspected Gator.
The last thing Gator said to Brandi was that he would take her somewhere, commit every sexual act with her and dumb her body somewhere in the dessert. Brandi became scared of him and moved to New York telling no one except her parents, she didn’t even tell her best friend Jessica who was moving to San Diego at the time.
Jessica called Gator on the phone asking him if he could show her around San Diego. They spent the day together on March 21st, 1991, after having lunch outside they picked up some movies, few bottles of wine and went to Gator’s home. After drinking and getting drunk, it was finally time for her to leave, Gator left her alone in the living room to go check up on something in his car.
He came back to see Jessica staring at a picture of him plastered on his living room wall. Gator grabbed a metal steering-wheel lock, snuck behind her and hit her two to three times on the head. When she fell to the floor, she bled so much that it soaked the carpet.
After knocking her semi-unconscious, he handcuffed her and dragged her to his bedroom on the second floor. He shackled her onto the bed, and raped her for two to three hours. Committing every sexual act he could think of.
Jessica, still conscious begged for Gator to stop. She screamed as loud as she could, hoping the neighbours would hear her. In an attempt to shut her up, he pulled a surfboard bag from his closet and stuffed her head into it. She screamed that she couldn’t breathe. He placed his hands around her neck and strangled her to death.
A photo of Jessica Bergsten
Gator drove out to the desert and dumped her body there. When he came back he rented a carpet steamer to clean up every spot of blood he could from the carpet and flipped over the mattress to hide the blood that was there as well.
Few weeks later, the police came to question him about her disappearance. They couldn’t find anything suspicious from him. Jessica’s father was unsatisfied of how the police were handling the issue of his daughter’s disappearance and decided to fly to San Diego to look for her himself. He plastered the entire county with posters of his missing daughter. He asked Jessica’s friends about her whereabouts, he even met with Gator asking him about his daughter. But he shook his head and told him he hadn’t seen her.
Gator would have gotten away with murder if it wasn’t for his guilt, he went on to talk to his friend Augie Constantino, and told him everything that had happened. His friend convinced him that he needed to turn himself to the police. The police were surprised that someone was turning himself in for a murder that they had no idea had happened.
The next morning Gator took the police detectives to the desert to where he had buried the body. They found the body in the desert, decomposed and barely recognisable. Gator went on to tell the police what he did to her in his room. The police investigated his home and found evidence of blood in places Gator had missed cleaning.
In his confession, Gator said he killed Jessica Bergsten to get a misplaced sense of revenge towards Brandi, calling Jessica the ‘mold Brandi was made out of’.
March 6th 1992, Gator pled guilty to a first-degree murder and rape, thus avoiding the death penalty or life without the chance of parole. He later wrote a four page statement apologizing to Jessica’s family saying he was sure he was only seeing a glimpse of their pain and that no family deserve to have their loved ones taken from them.
He also acknowledged that, at first, he wanted to pin the responsibility of what he had done, on God and Jessica. But by the end of his statement he said that “God has changed me, and it was no typical jailhouse conversion. I sincerely hope that they can accept my apology for my carelessness.”
Gator was sentenced to thirty-one years in prison in California for the death and rape of Jessica Bergsten.
Gator was denied parole on the 7th of February, 2011, and would be eligible for a parole again in March 2023. | https://medium.com/the-true-crime-edition/the-rise-and-fall-of-gator-rogowski-b46b9bcb212c | ['Reginald Ben-Halliday'] | 2020-12-17 16:04:55.978000+00:00 | ['Justice', 'True Crime', 'Crime', 'Murder', 'History'] |
Italy and the new antisemitism | Few weeks ago it was the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I read a study that proof how antisemitism raised in Italy: in 2004 there were 2,5% of deniers (people who do believe Holocaust never existed). In 2020 there are in Italy over 15% of deniers.
Something really scary. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
I know lot of people in Italy and I was just curious about that.
What I learned it scared me even more. Italy is at 41st place in the world for freedom of the press. Basically, most of the newspapers and mass media are aligned with government, sometimes they pretend to argue just for the sake to fake a contradictory that doesn’t exist. They discuss about politics, but anything else is under control and censorship.
It’s hard to believe but 41st place speaks for itself.
What do you not read on newspaper are the crimes of carabinieri, a kind of police that most of my contacts described as “italian Gestapo”. Actually looking at their uniforms I have to say that remember me more the nazis than police, but I do my research: that corp was born before nazis.
Doing some historically researches I found that their motto “for ever loyal” it’s not something to be proud of. As a matter of fact they were “loyal” to every regime and they have committed atrocities since their birth. In 1864 they open the fire against civilian population protesting peacefully. It was a slaughter and they were the only responsible for that. After being loyal to the king, as soon as Mussolini took power in Italy they immediately swore allegiance to the fascism. They made their fundamental contribution in the deportation of many Jews in the nazi extermination camps (lager).
After the fall of fascism they immediately swore obedience to the newborn republic.
But as many people testify, they never change their bloodthirsty nature.
Lately the covid lockdown and the closure of the courts in Italy have led to an exponential increase in reports of crime and abuse made by carabinieri.
I asked myself how is it possible and why there’s no italian media coverage.
My Italian contacts explain me very well how it’s possible.
Few years ago there was a case that caused a scandal: the assassination of Stefano Cucchi. Mr Cucchi was a drug addict that was arrested, tortured and beaten for days by sadistic carabinieri and finally killed. In order to cover these crimes, the carabinieri were covered by their own superiors, they threatened the doctors who were not complacent, they falsified documents and they forced the doctors under threat to fill out a false autopsy.
Only the sister of Mr. Cucchi strong political connections helped uncover the truth. And despite this, the carabinieri assassins received favorable treatment from the magistracy.
How’s that possible? Recently a magistrate belonging to the highest ranks of magistracy (Palamara) exposed how the justice works in Italy: it is completely rotten from top to bottom. You can Google his name, it’s unbelievable how many things you will find. The entire justice system is rigged, corrupted, associated with the mafia and so on. In the courtrooms what really matters is to be a fake hero on tv and mass media, not the search for truth. And Italian journalists are always happy to please judges and carabinieri. You will never hear stories about the true heroes: EMS volunteers, volunteers from associations of free assistance to the elderly, the disabled and so on.
You will only hear about stories that even Hollywood don’t buy.
Back to racism, another case you probabily remember: two american students are in Florence, Italy. One night they hang out with friends. One of the two girls get drunk, the friend assist her, wait a little. Meanwhile all the other people left, only a car of carabinieri remains, hidden in the shadows. The carabinieri approach the girls, asking them if they want a ride by car to home (it’s illegal to ride someone if tis’ not arrested). Of course the girls trust the uniform and say yes. Big mistake. They were both repeatedly raped. After the shock the girls went to the hospital, where the doctors note the violence suffered by the girls and documented it. Result? Italian press defend “the poor carabinieri, one married” and call the students “sluts”. Of course foreign press rise up against this violent and cowardly crime, the US embassy puts pressure, but at the end of the day these two rapers were never incriminated, just an admonition to have used improperly the car.
Many said they hate Americans and the rape of foreigners is something not so unusual.
There’s more that this.
In the past months many carabinieri were arrested and an entire station was closed. The accusations: drug trafficking, torture and much more. They were arrested only because another carabiniere accused them, otherwise they would still be on the loose. Drug trafficking. Torture. Can you imagine that? Now you understand why lot of Italian people is really worried and call them italian Gestapo.
The scheme it’s always the same, they follow a precise pattern: they frame someone (often completely innocent), they falsify reports, they threaten witnesses, doctors, family members of the victim, they choose a complacent magistrate, they appear as fake heroes on mass media.
They put in jail a man for thirty years for murder with fake proofs. They are dangerous criminals organized in mafia gang and people fear them. That’s also why no journalist want to write against them: they fear for their freedom, for their lives, for their families.
My Italian contacts openly spoken to me about a rise of crimes and abuses from carabinieri in the last year. Many testify a delusional and dangerous anti-Semitic surge. They hate Africans, North-Africans, Jews, Muslims, Americans.
The most dangeours aspect is the anti-Semitism against italian Jews.
People start to feel insecure, they live in fear.
They choose their victims with predatory ferocity, choosing the weakest and most isolated ones.
My friends told me stories I will verify and told me to be their voice. I will honor that.
More to come very soon.
Stay tuned. | https://medium.com/@danaturner758493/italy-and-the-new-antisemitism-6c646534397e | [] | 2021-02-12 17:08:48.192000+00:00 | ['Police Violence', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Italy', 'Anti Semitism', 'Racism'] |
extremists in the GOP…..working hard to destroy the GOP AND the nation? | I am not going to call these people Republicans, because, despite the fact that the republican party has never had my support because they don’t believe as I do about civil liberty and equality in my opinion, they seemed to have at least a smidgen of sense. These people that are yelling and screaming that trump was cheated are NOT republicans, they can only be called Trumpians. It seems to me that they are entirely willing to destroy the democratic republic in order to get their own way.
Once again, like the last time, I am linking to a post by Amodpovw because some of my position has been influenced by my reading of his last blog. Now, I am not putting words in his mouth. I have no idea if he would agree, or at least would say it the way I am going to. However, my discussion with him indicates two things. One is that people often damage themselves in being naive enough to fall for the wrong leader or ally. The other is that sedition is a thing that might just apply to some of what the Trumpians are trying to pull.
One of the frighteningly funny things about conspiracy theories and the people that buy into them is that evidence doesn’t enter into it. In fact, lack of evidence is somehow considered a validation of the conspiracy. Apparently, in this current situation, we are being asked, once more, to believe that numberless persons in both parties and across state lines, but only in Democratic or swing states, not in heavily Republican states, are involved in a huge conspiracy to steal the election. The courts have ruled, over and over again, that there is no evidence that anybody stole the election.
Now, if this was just Democratically appointed judges, it might be a lot easier to understand why they continue to believe this conspiracy theory. However, that is not the case. We have had not one, but three Supreme Court Justices refuse to buy into it that I was concerned might just be amenable to doing so. Those are the three that trump appointed to the SC. But even THEY rejected the claim that Texas was presenting. And that is not all, in Wisconsin, a trump appointed judge was the one that rejected a state bid.
trump spouting this, I almost understand. He is the man who demands personal loyalty, while giving none, regardless of what it does to the country. He, I understand. But there are too many other naive brainwashed (??) persons screaming the same destructive crap. It makes me wonder if they WANT to destroy the nation.
What is the current situation? We have a “stop the steal” movement, although there has been no evidence presented to any court that proves such happened. They gathered, led by Alex Jones, rabble-rouser extra-ordinary, and chanted “burn the GOP down”. Then Alex Jones gave a stirring speech. And what did he suggest, you might very well ask? He maintained that they would not back down. In fact, he swore that “Biden will be taken out one way or another”. If Biden happens to get killed before taking office, we will certainly know where part of the impetus for that murder came from, won’t we?!!
Going back to the discussion I had with Amodpovw, the word Sedition came up. Sedition has, despite the “freedom of speech clause” been in existence for over 200 years. It was the result of the first test of that freedom. The rule is that people can be punished up to exportation for issuing untrue and missing statements about the nation. These Trumpians are getting dangerously close to that line in the eyes of some. In fact, there is a probably fairly small, for now, movement, to refuse to seat anybody that signed that Texas lawsuit from being seated in Congress under the Sedition rule.
In continuing to spread conspiracy theories about huge failings of our electoral process, without evidence, as ruled by many different court cases, they are not just attempting to “burn the GOP down”, they are in effect attacking our very system of government, which could probably be called “burning the nation down”. That seems to me to be very close to treason.
http://www.blogster.com/amodpovw/amod-admitting-that-you-are-nave-as-it-relates-to-something-does-not-absolve-you-from-responsibility-for-your-actions | https://medium.com/@jwgarman2/extremists-in-the-gop-working-hard-to-destroy-the-gop-and-the-nation-d7e1bb09f042 | ['Left Wisdom'] | 2020-12-13 23:30:23.220000+00:00 | ['Biden', 'Sedition', 'Conspiracy Theories', 'Trụ', '2020 Presidential Race'] |
Sharath Siddanur | This Indian Entrepreneur Flipped the Marketing in Online Gambling Industry | The Best way to predict the future is to invent it — Sharath Siddanur who believes the same, is a well-known Indian entrepreneur today. Sharath tells that he never thought about that he would become an Indian entrepreneur at a gambling market of SEO & Digital marketing. Just as time went on, he dedicated towards development of self through experience. He values learning through experience, reading, by traveling, seeing new place and meeting new people.
All this began after drop out from collage, while the he started his career at International call center then, he and his friends from Bangalore, India get together for a startup, As the season goes he started predicting his future by inventing it which required a great dedication, hard work, nevertheless smart work. He had to see a lot of trouble in the meantime.
Sharath named his organization as Shachpro Technologies Pvt Ltd. Today Sharath’s name has been taken abroad in the country. Sharath says that even today he keeps learning something.
Sharath has his own team building web applications, portals, customizing profile websites, handling celebrity social media accounts (Domestic | International clients), SEO, Digital Marketing, SMM, Google knowledge graph, press release, and rich content writing. He has established himself as a force to be reckoned. With a vast knowledge in field of digital marketing by providing valuable services to startups and established business organizations to have a strong digital presence, which paved way for smooth overall progress. | https://medium.com/@keshavaraya/sharath-siddanur-this-indian-entrepreneur-flipped-the-marketing-in-online-gambling-industry-c63ac06f37ad | ['Keshava Raya'] | 2020-12-11 06:31:07.122000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'Entrepreneur', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Indian Entrepreneurs', 'Celebrity'] |
§13 The Royal Wedding: An Early Gesture of ‘Glamocratic’ Diplomacy | News began to circulate this week about the guest list for the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle next month. With Teresa May, the Obamas and Donald Trump not making the cut, emphasis was made about who will not be attending the marriage rather than who will.
The decision (taken by The Royal Household) not to have political heads of state in attendance is not just a careful strategic move in a highly divisive political time, but the first diplomatic gesture from a ‘new type’ of royal couple. As Harry Mount pointed out in The Spectator late last year, the marriage of these two marks ‘a deep shift at the top end of British society’: ‘the aristocracy has given way to the glamocracy’ he declared … ‘[t]hese days, young royalty and aristocracy are increasingly mixing with, and marrying, international money, beauty and fame.’ Indeed. One cannot help but think the Obamas would have been invited if the wedding took place this time two years ago and there wasn’t the same risk of mass protest that there is if Trump was to step foot onto British soil.
The decision of who not to invite is a sign that this new ‘glamocracy’ is starting to explore its remit and spread its glamorous wings. The important thing, it seems, is that it doesn’t spread them too far, often, or flap them too vigorously. We Brits are a fickle bunch, especially when it comes to the one family we all keep in common (whatever our opinions on the legitimacy of the institution).
If anyone is likely to flap too hard, it is Miss Markle who is being scrutinized by the British public ever since they were introduced to her in the couple’s first shared interview following their engagement.
When Channel 4 Gogglebox’s resident hairdressers “Stephen and Christopher” heard that she was looking forward to visiting the Commonwealth as our future princess, they had the following exchange:*
Stephen: ‘”Oh, I’d like to go round the Commonwealth”, well don’t think we’re going to fucking pay for it! Bloody cheek! Yeah, I’d just like to have a cruise round the Commonwealth myself love, but I’ve got a business to run!
I’ve gone right off her. How pushy is she? Sit there and be a little bit demure and a bit quiet. Remember Katherine and Wills? Katherine spoke but she was very soft and kept it to a minimum.’
Christopher: She’s got too much of a voice. Give it time though, he’ll whip her into shape. You know what Americans are like, they like giving it a bit of that.
Stephen: I’ve gone off her … I reckon she’s trouble.
Between them, these two are as perceptive as Alex de Tocqueville in this brief armchair analysis. The Americans are, after all, said to be ‘shallower, freer with their money, friendlier, more uncertain of themselves and their values, and more demanding of approval than the Europeans.’** What is more, as A.N. Wilson put it to another Spectator writer last year, Markle has to make the British people comfortable ‘bowing or curtseying to her’. This is no small feat, and as this ‘new type’ of Royal couple are brought together in front of us on the 19thMay, they are glamocratic guinea pigs with no blueprint for how to conduct themselves in this highly turbulent time.
/Pete Watt
* Quoted in full due to copyright on the clip restricting viewing outside the UK https://twitter.com/Channel4/status/936706441762578432
** Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, Reuel Denney, and Todd Gitlin. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press., p. 19. | https://medium.com/anowmedia/13-the-royal-wedding-an-early-gesture-of-glamocratic-diplomacy-45d9a00a2869 | [] | 2018-10-28 14:33:14.147000+00:00 | ['History', 'The Spectator', 'Glamocracy', 'Royal Wedding'] |
How Do I Stop Being Lazy and Procrastinating ? | Photo of Person Holding Alarm Clock
So you wake up in the morning, have your morning coffee, sit down on your desk, determined to work, slug it out, switch on your computer, and just as you are about to sort out your day’s activities, your mind wanders to Twitter, Facebook or Youtube.
Today is the morning after the elections for the President of the United States, and the entire day, I had multiple tabs open in my computer browser of various News outlets, multiple YouTube videos who are live streaming the possible results of the presidential elections, simultaneously checking out the trends in Twitter and Facebook like a maniac, I literally got “ZERO WORK DONE”.
How did I go from “Just gonna quickly check out what’s going on with the elections and then get back to work” to spending hours of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter!?
Brain
Dopamine, its the hormone that is released when we check out our notifications in Facebook or Twitter. Its these little bursts of dopamine which gets released in our brain, which makes us feel good. It’s the same hormone which is released every time we have sex, eat fast food or play video games. Our brain has several prominent dopamine pathways, that light up the moment we indulge in such activities. These pathways are called reward centers. Our brain constantly craves this “Feel Good” hormone, to the point it becomes an obsession. Dopamine is also released by taking drugs like amphetamines, cocaine, heroine etc. The obsession for this feel good hormone is so extreme, that a habitual drug user literally finds it difficult to stop taking these harmful drugs, the reward centers which gets activated(The HIGH) is far too great, that the individual is willing to go homeless in his pursuit to get that high using drugs. The reward behavior pattern where the dopamine pathways light up every time a drug user uses drugs compels the user to seek those drugs without any consequences whatsoever. This is the same hormone which makes us constantly crave for sex, drugs, fast food, indulging in gambling, basically any Instant gratification activity that leads to the release of this hormone.
Researchers were surprised when they studied the brains of drug addicts and social media users, to find out that the same reward centers which were activated in social media users also gets activated in the drug addicts. This need for “Quick fix” or “instant gratification” is one of the reasons why we frequently check out Facebook and Twitter, the moment we get up in the morning. If left unchecked, this could also lead to a significant change in human behavior where there is a constant need to get that quick burst of dopamine, thus hampering your productivity. In my case, I found myself checking out Twitter and Youtube every 5 minutes. This is not a unique phenomenon at all. A colleague of mine literally had to uninstall his Instagram App every day, before coming to the office(Those were the days when we didn’t have covid or “work from home” policy) because he found out that he was constantly checking his Instagram at work, leading to a precipitous fall in his performance. He says he uninstalls the app in the morning before coming to the office and installs it as he leaves the office. It’s really fascinating and harrowing at the same time to see how this simple hormone called dopamine literally has such control in our lives.
So How do you self control ?
Identify the problem:
It’s really important to understand why you are procrastinating in the first place. Not every one has the same “social media” problem as I do. It maybe as mundane as “Today’s weather is not good, I don’t feel like working” to “I want everything PERFECT, but I don’t have my lucky pen, so I will work on it tomorrow”. This happens especially in jobs that requires “creativity”. Especially if you are a composer, painter, copywriter, artist etc. Identify the problem, actively recognize that you are procrastinating and work on it.
2. Incentives:
Train your brain in such a way that if you complete a certain portion of your work within a given deadline or work continuously for 2 hours(Set a timer) then you are going to reward yourself. The reward can be as benign as eating a chocolate chip cookie or playing a quick game of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This acts similarly to the reward centers which lights up when we check our notifications in Facebook or Twitter. This trains the brain and your mind to delay the urge for “Instant Gratification” and instead work for it and get the sweet cookie at the end of the day/work. This technique works great especially if you have something that needs to be done quickly. This reward incentivized behavior is how exactly companies motivate their employees to work harder for increase in their salaries or bonuses.
3. Con Your Brain:
This technique worked wonders for me. So how do you lie to your own brain? I found that as soon as I started my project, I somehow didn’t lose my concentration and really focused on the job till it got completed. Upon introspection, I realized the trigger point was doing an “easy” part of the project first.
You see, I am a programmer, and I was working on a certain app that I wanted to build. I was stuck somewhere (I won’t bore you with the details). I literally procrastinated for a week, every time I sat on the desk, my mind literally built obstacles, imagining how it would take me days before I could solve that particular problem. And then one day, as I was going through the code, I simply came across a function that I wanted to improve in the app, and Voilà , suddenly I am typing away and actually doing my work. Our minds are notorious for building and propping up obstacles, we delay starting that blog or that YouTube channel simply because we look at the end result(where we want to be) and focus on that instead of taking the first baby step. We are too engrossed on that 1 million subscriber channel and awed by the guy with six packs to realize that it all began with that one random video you shot in your iPhone or that first pushup. We look at the peak of the Himalayas and instantly begin building up obstacles and delaying instead of taking that one small step in front of you.
Take the first baby step, work on that one simple part of the problem or take that one simple step, and before you even realize, you’d be working on that project that you delayed for days.
4. Take a break:
Research recommends that people who took a 5 min break every 2 hours are more productive than people who continuously worked for 5/10 hours. Taking a break or a simple stroll really releases your creative juices. Steve Jobs would often take a stroll in the park every time he felt he was stuck in a problem. It cleared up his mind. Going out, taking a simple break and tuning off would do wonders to your productivity. Every time you feel like procrastinating, I would recommend you go outside, breathe in some fresh air or just simply close your eyes and meditate, it frees your mind and rejuvenates your brain to take on those obstacles that you were finding difficult to overcome.
5. Tune everything off:
If you feel you are wasting too much time checking out what Sam is up to in his vacation in Maldives or you catch yourself browsing Cat videos in the middle of day for no reason whatsoever then switch off your phone. Eliminate every distraction that puts you off course. Set a timer, it may be a three hour interval or two hour, and reserve that time exclusively for “Work”, where you are not distracted by the sounds of those pesky notifications from your mobile phone. Switch off all your electronic gadgets during that interval and just focus on your work.
I just want to end by saying its ultimately your attitude that plays a critical role, if you are uninterested in your work or not passionate about it, no amount of tips or techniques is going to work for you.
Finally I just wanna sign off by quoting a prominent ancient Indian philosopher, economist and strategist called Chanakya, | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/how-do-i-stop-being-lazy-and-procrastinating-f47ec0765253 | ['Jacob Daniel'] | 2020-12-17 16:58:40.916000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Procrastination', 'Productivity', 'Motivation', 'Techniques'] |
How Local Government Can Benefit From a ‘Digital-by-Default’ Agenda | As we inch closer and closer to our departure from the EU, government and Members of Parliament are intensifying their focus on this single most pressing issue which our country is facing.
While our departure from the EU and the associated opportunities and pressures are taking their proportion of government attention, the pressures faced by local councils must not go unaddressed.
Since Labour’s spending spree — and the subsequent recession in 2008 — the Treasury is rightly committed to reducing the public deficit as a matter of moral duty towards future generations who would otherwise pay the price.
Although growth in government revenue is continuing to build momentum, local councils are likely to face continued budgetary constraints in the medium term and the need for efficient council services is likely to continue. In addition, increasing demand on council services is compounding these effects and councils need to develop innovative ways for digital transformation to improve services and reduce overheads.
Efficiency savings through use of technology
As it often the case with innovation, the private sector is quite a considerable way ahead of local government in terms of its effective exploitation of technology.
Councils are continuing to invest in smart technology through procurement, such as using smart bins to improve waste collection; digital boards to provide access to local information; and electric vehicles…
However, there are already examples of councils across the United Kingdom which are re-imagining service provision to remove redundancy and allocate resources where they have the greatest impact. These include providing scalable online services which can be licenced by other councils and integrated with existing platforms; using large data sets to extract behavioural insights in order to identify more targeted policies; and investing in IT infrastructure to facilitate flexible working patterns.
In addition to organisational and process reforms, councils are continuing to invest in smart technology through procurement, such as using smart bins to improve waste collection; digital boards to provide access to local information; and electric vehicles to reduce running costs and improve air quality.
A move towards technological solutions will usually require some level of investment. Councils have considerable capital budgets which should be far more targeted at digital solutions rather than traditional methods.
When the delivery and administration of local government services is provided in a way that optimises the leverage which technology can provide, councils can alleviate ongoing budgetary pressures and free up employees’ time to focus on more people focused activities.
Service quality enhancements through use of technology
Not only can technological solutions drive efficiency savings, many of these solutions can also deliver service quality enhancements, such as improving the accessibility, capability and longevity of local services. For example, by proving a richer set of features through a secure online dashboard, many councils are giving residents greater control and flexibility over the services they access, as well as reducing demand on customer services and administrative teams inside the council.
In a climate in which the government budget for local government is kept under control and local councils have considerable budgetary pressure, the need — and opportunity — to exploit technology effectively is as great as it has ever been, and council leaders must adopt a ‘digital-by-default’ approach.
However, there is also the need for central government to provide reforms to support and incentivise this approach. Government Digital Service (GDS) provides an excellent and growing resource for the civil service by promoting consistent and quality digital design.
Moving forward, GDS needs to be working with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government to extend its arms out to local councils. The ‘Local Digital’ movement provided by MHCLG is a good start at creating the right conditions for councils to deliver excellent digital services, but more work is needed to generate consistent standards, establish best-practice, and provide procurement guidance to accelerate the transition to digital.
Rewarding innovation in local government
In addition, the funding process for local government too often incentivises failure and inhibits excellence. Councils which lack technological foresight are given extra funding to compensate, while those who are able to deliver more for less fail to be recognised.
The funding process for local government too often incentivises failure and inhibits excellence
Leaders in local government need the kinds of incentives that motivate the private sector to drive technological progress. Those Councillors who excel in this regard must be able to see the ways in which their leadership has made an impact, rather than just provide the opportunity for government to further reduce investment in them.
Why don’t we send a powerful message to those in local government by embracing a new approach to funding based on incentivising growth and digital transformation — one which rewards those who are able to deliver efficiency gains through smart use of technology?
We have some fantastic Councillors all across the country with the skill and vision to make intelligent investments in our future.
Let’s make the most of them!
This article was originally published at ConservativeHome. | https://medium.com/ideas-that-matter/how-local-government-can-benefit-from-a-digital-by-default-agenda-12fa13ed8b68 | ['Tom Bell'] | 2019-10-23 10:38:23.413000+00:00 | ['Southampton', 'Uk Government', 'Local Government', 'Digital Policy', 'Technology'] |
Rimm Associates Coupon Wave! | Darlene Lavoy-Eddington
Due to health issue’s, I found I couldn’t help in the public any longer. I truly found out how all the people I was helping felt. I have always worked in some kind of advertising, couponing area in my career choices. Why not do the same thing, but at home!
For 20 years, I worked with the veterans, disabled, charities and homeless. Watching so many suffer, and being sent from agency to agency for so many reasons. No homes, not the proper paperwork, no jobs. Most not knowing where to turn next! That’s how Coupon Unlimited was created.
Coupons Unlimited!!!!!! –https://www.facebook.com/groups/loveabledee1954/on Facebook came about and it grew fast, into 25 pages and groups. Then, Rimm Associates website– http://rimmassociates.com was born.
Rimm Associates website is the “Best of the Best” coupons, codes, freebies, sales, jobs, education and so much more. There are over 20 separate pages, each a different category. My goal is to bring everything a consumer needs in one place. Helping everyone to save money.
Pinterest — RimmAssociates/Darlene’sCouponsUnlimited/ https://www.pinterest.com/loveabledee1954 started with one board now is 54 boards.
NOW! Let’s see, if I can show you how to save money! When buying material items, people will research for the best product, looking for the lowest cost. Why not do the same with groceries? Most people will make a list of groceries that are needed, go to the store, not even checking what’s on sale. WHY? I have been told several times that using coupons are a waste of time. To some of you maybe this is true. I will do my best to show you this is not the case. Do you know I’ve seen coupons sit on desks, tables, and counters, to be shuffled through a couple of times and put back! Never to be touched again, till there in the trash. Throwing away money!
Coupons are the same as money. Coupons have a value from $.25 to $5.00 depending on the product. They can be higher depending on the service. It does take a little work and I will do my best to show you how! | https://medium.com/@loveabledee1954/rimm-associates-coupon-wave-d2ab9a8364e7 | ['Darlene Lavoy-Eddington'] | 2019-07-27 11:38:37.831000+00:00 | ['Coupon', 'Coupon Codes'] |
What Can Be Pardoned? | What Pardons Are
Before we talk politics, let’s briefly look at what pardons are, and how they apply to the current (very unusual) situation.
(Here the usual disclaimers apply: I am not a lawyer, and even more so, I am not your lawyer. If pardons, criminal conspiracy charges, or any of the other things we’re talking about below are in your personal future, then you seriously need to be hiring a lawyer of your own and not reading articles about politics.)
The President’s pardon power comes from Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution, which is characteristically brief:
“[The President] shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
On its face, this power is almost unlimited: no other branch of government has an obvious ability to review this. But its vagueness also works against it; for example, the question of whether the President has the power to pardon himself is based not on the text of this power, but of whether that power would go against some more fundamental aspect of the Constitution. And like many legal questions around the limits of pardons, it’s never actually been tested in court: in fact, nearly the only limit that the courts have agreed upon is that, while you can pardon someone for an act they’ve been accused but not yet convicted of (like Ford did for Nixon), you can’t pardon someone for a crime they haven’t committed yet.
The impeachment restriction is not primarily about the President: it mostly comes into play when Congress impeaches some other public official. Since the penalty for impeachment is limited to removing someone from office and never letting them hold office again, this simply bars the President from immediately reinstating someone that Congress removed.
In fact, impeachment — especially of the President — has almost nothing to do with law, a common (and dangerous) misconception. There is a very simple legal definition of an “impeachable offense:” “Whatever Congress wants to impeach you for.” Impeachment is a purely political process, and its only requirement is a majority vote in the House, followed by a “trial” by the Senate and requiring a two-thirds vote there. The quotes are because this bears little resemblance to an ordinary trial; the question is not whether any specific law was broken, but whether the Senate believes this person should be removed, end of message and off.
The entire question of criminal charges against a sitting President is surprisingly unsettled: it’s not even clear whether a sitting President can be criminally charged at all, or whether this would violate the separation of powers. Trump certainly seems to believe that the answer is “no,” including for crimes committed before taking office; but as far as I know, no court has ever ruled on this. (Interestingly, the question of civil suits has been settled, in Clinton v. Jones: the President can be sued for actions unrelated to their official duties. That case would no doubt be an important precedent if the question of criminal charges ever came up.)
These facts are the crucial context to understand Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s coterie. While he can certainly criminally charge them, the President has the power to pardon them the moment they’re charged. It’s not clear whether he can charge the President himself, and such a matter would almost certainly go to the Supreme Court; knowing the Court, they would very much prefer if Congress were to deal with the matter via impeachment and trial. But Congress is under no obligation to act, and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, however much they may despise the man personally, continue to find him useful enough that they have no urge to rock the boat or potentially harm their party. Just to make it more complicated, Mueller technically reports to Jeff Sessions, one of the men under investigation, and depends on Congress for his budget — the same Congress that may have reason to want to avoid scandal.
So Mueller is facing an extremely subtle legal and political situation, and the pardon power falls smack in the middle of this. If he does find that Trump is smack in the middle of criminal conduct (something we can’t know yet, of course, but something you would be a fool to bet against), he could try to file criminal charges and rely on top lawyers to argue whether he even can do so; but his most effective tool will probably be to publish a report of his findings. That report would almost certainly be classified and sent only to Congress, and Congress would print its own highly redacted version for the public, likely some time later; so the strategic use of leaks (much like Trump himself does) may be crucial in how the investigation progresses. Because ultimately, if things play out in the political arena, what really matters is public opinion, not the law.
But here’s where the pardon power gets powerful: the most common method an investigator has for dealing with a conspiracy is to find one person, maybe some low- or mid-level crook that screwed up enough to leave behind evidence, let’s call him Baul Canafort, and bring him in and say: “Baul, we have enough evidence stacked up here to send you to prison for the next hundred and twenty years. You are completely, utterly, boned. But if you are willing to make a deal and testify, tell us everything you know about this conspiracy, maybe you can be out of prison before the final fall of human civilization.” And by putting the screws to this hypothetical Mr. Canafort, they get testimony and evidence that lets them put the screws to the next higher-level player, and so on and so forth, until there’s finally enough evidence to go after the big fish.
But if a member of the conspiracy has pardon power, this all breaks down. Baul could just sit and smile, knowing that the evidence means nothing if his partner in crime can and will just sign a piece of paper and make it all go away. He has nothing to lose, and so no reason to testify — and the facts which could make a case never come out.
So now it becomes very important to ask: What kinds of things can’t the President pardon away for his minions? There are three interesting legal limits: one that we know about for sure, and two even more interesting ones that the courts may test.
The Federal Limitation
The first limit is the federal limitation. The pardon power is for “Offenses against the United States;” that is, it applies to federal crimes only. State crimes (which are the majority of criminal law) can be pardoned only by the respective governors. This makes it particularly interesting that, in the past few days, Mueller’s team has started meeting with New York Attorney-General Eric Schneiderman about its investigation into the finances of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. (No relation, of course, to our previous and purely hypothetical Mr. Canafort)
Mr. Can—I mean Manafort. By DonkeyHotey. CC-BY-2.0
Before working for Trump, Manafort worked for a fascinating array of dictators and kleptocrats, including such luminaries as Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi, Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and most recently, liaised between Putin’s government and the pro-Russian Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych, for which he is currently under investigation by the Ukrainian government for money laundering. In the United States, he appears to be under investigation for a wide range of financial crimes as well, and just a few weeks ago federal agents searched his home and left with box after box of papers.
It’s important to note that the crimes with which Manafort may be charged may well have nothing to do with the present affair; but if a US Attorney comes across evidence of other crimes in the course of a legal investigation, he’s perfectly within his rights to charge them as well, or (if they’re state crimes), hand them to the appropriate state attorney.
Mueller’s discussions with Schneiderman seem to suggest that he is taking this path, and as it is the most well-established and uncontroversial limit to the pardon power, it’s pretty clear why.
The Power of the Courts
Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio has raised another interesting question about the limits of pardon power. Arpaio has a twenty-year record of brutality and lawlessness, one of the most violent criminals ever to wear a badge. In 2007, he became the subject of a class-action lawsuit over his department’s systematic practice of arresting people for looking Hispanic, and running an illegal “anti-immigration posse.” Despite Arpaio’s efforts to destroy the evidence, the courts ruled soundly against him, and in 2011 placed him under a court order sharply restricting his behavior in this space. Arpaio largely ignored the court order, and was charged with criminal contempt, being convicted in federal court on July 31st, 2017. A few weeks later, Trump pardoned him.
This pardon is now being challenged in court as being unconstitutional. The argument is clearly outlined in a letter sent by a group of lawyers to the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, quoted by the Washington Post:
“[F]or due process and judicial review to function, courts must be able to restrain government officials. Due process requires that, when a government official is found by a court to be violating individuals’ constitutional rights, the court can issue effective relief… ordering the official to cease this unconstitutional conduct. And for an injunction to be effective, there must be a penalty for violation of the injunction — principally, contempt of court.”
That is, they argue that contempt of court is not like an ordinary criminal charge: it is the mechanism by which court orders are actually enforced. This is the same issue raised by the “Trial Balloon” case, where Customs and Border Patrol (acting on Trump’s orders) refused to obey court orders: if the courts have no method to enforce their orders that doesn’t rely on the Executive Branch’s assistance and cooperation, then the Executive Branch is above the law, and neither the President nor anyone acting on his behalf can be stopped by any law.
If Trump can legally pardon Arpaio, then he has the power not just to pardon criminal offenses, but to render any court order null and void — civil orders, discovery orders, restraining orders — simply by removing any penalty for violating them. He would have a completely unrestrained power over the courts.
The question of whether this is legal or not will probably take several years to play out; it’s very likely that the case will outlive the Trump regime, and possibly even Arpaio himself. But if there is still a legal system by the time it’s settled, this will have tremendous impact on the long-term meaning of pardons.
The Pinkerton Limit
There is a third limit, though, one even more untested than the Arpaio Limit, which may prove extremely relevant in the near future. It’s a little-noticed aspect of the law recently noted by attorney Andreas Schou, and — if it holds up in court — it essentially means that you can’t pardon members of a conspiracy that you’re a member of.
Because the legal argument is rather technical, let me try to boil it down to plain English. The “Pinkerton Limit” is all about the crime of conspiracy. The exact definition is this:
“If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy…”
That is, if a group of people conspire to commit a crime, and then one of them does something to actually achieve the objectives of the plan, the entire group has committed conspiracy. Conspiracy is a crime separate from the underlying crime you’re conspiring to do, so you can be charged with conspiring to do something whether or not you succeed. It’s also a crime separate from the specific “act to effect the object of the conspiracy,” which doesn’t even have to be a crime in its own right; if you go out to buy the guns for a bank robbery, or the fertilizer to build a bomb, the conspiracy is still illegal even if the purchases were otherwise 100% above-board.
This is tied to another important aspect of the law, which is that if you do something otherwise legal for an illegal purpose, that can still be a crime. That doesn’t void the action — in the example above, you still own the guns you bought — but it also doesn’t mean you aren’t going to jail for it. That’s also true when the actions have to do with official corruption: as Schou points out, “if you pay a bribe to get a building permit, you get a building permit, and you also go to prison.”
While a conspiracy charge is relatively small potatoes on its own (it carries a maximum five-year sentence per count), it becomes much more serious because of “Pinkerton Liability” — named after Pinkerton v. United States, a 1946 Supreme Court case which established that all members of a criminal conspiracy are legally liable for the illegal acts committed by their co-conspirators in furtherance of the conspiracy, whether or not they personally participated in each individual act. This means that, like racketeering charges, conspiracy charges can get very serious very fast.
(If you want to learn more about how conspiracy law works, Nathaniel Burney’s “Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law” has an excellent explanation.) | https://medium.com/newco/what-can-be-pardoned-bd113749898a | ['Yonatan Zunger'] | 2017-09-08 17:41:52.870000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Leadership', 'Law', 'Criminal Justice', 'Trump'] |
UPDATE: Mother Who Mysteriously Vanished at Zion National Park Found Alive | Holly Courtier with her daughter Kailey Chambers prior to Holly’s disappearance on October 6, 2020, in Zion National Park.
Utah authorities were desperately searching for missing mother Holly Courtier, 38, who vanished in Zion National Park. She was last seen at approximately 1:30 p.m., on October 6, 2020.
Holly Courtier went missing while hiking to the Emerald Pools at Zion National Park in Utah.
Holly rode a private shuttle to the Grotto parking area and intended to hike the Kayenta Trail, headed to Emerald Pools, and was scheduled to be picked up at 4:40 p.m. She never showed.
Holly’s family reported her missing two days later. Authorities began their search on October 9, 2020, and found her vehicle in a neighboring town.
Her survival looked dim after 12 days, but the miraculous happened. Search and rescue crews found Holly on Sunday after a visitor at the park told rangers that they saw her in the park.
Kailey Chambers, Holly’s daughter, told CBS Los Angeles that her mom had lost her job as a nanny due to the pandemic and had planned on traveling the country in a van she converted into a camper.
Holly left her phone in California and she left no itinerary or mention of her travel plans.
“I just want to bring her home because I feel she is hurt and can’t get the help she needs,” her daughter Kailey told Inside Edition while sobbing.
To keep the public updated, Kailey Chambers posted a picture on Facebook of them at Zion National Park a few weeks before her mother’s disappearance
With frequent posts on Facebook, and talking to news reporters, Kailey Chambers kept the public updated about her mother’s disappearance in Zion.
“I refuse to give up on her because I know she wouldn’t give up on me,” Kailey told People. “If this were reversed, I know she would give everything to save me. I’m willing to the same.”
Kailey had her prayers answered on Sunday, October 18, 2020, when her mother emerged from the park, along with family.
An official at Zion told the Salt Lake Tribune that Holly was able to leave the park, but no made no other comments about where she was found or her condition.
Photo of Holly Courtier. Courtesy of FindHolly.com.
A statement from the family on HelpFindHolly.com was released on their website.
“We are overjoyed that she was found safe today. We would like to thank the rangers and search terms who relentlessly looked for her day and night and never gave up hope. We are also grateful to the countless volunteers who were generous with their time, resources, and support. This would have been possible without the network of people who came together.”
Zion park officials had partnered with K-9 Units from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and rescue crews from Washington County and Washington County Sheriff’s Office, using canine, aerial searches, and drones.
Officials had held a press conference on October 13 and said the good weather increases the odds of survival.
Searchers out in Zion National Park searching for Holly Courtier who vanished on October 6, 2020. Photo courtesy of Forest Service.
One of Holly’s four sisters, Jillian Courier-Oliver, told ABC’s Good Morning America that Holly remains hospitalized Monday morning. “She had lost a lot of weight and had bruises all over her body, “ said Jillian. “She hasn’t [eaten] since then at all. She’s had very little water, we found out.”
Jillian told the news show that bringing Holly home was her “only goal,” since her sister went missing — but she had started to lose hope in the past several days.
“Basically they [park officials] said today or Monday was going to be the last that rangers could be involved and help us,” said Jillian.
Jillian went out searching for her sister over the weekend and seeing the rough terrain, thought, “How could she be alive through this?”
“It wasn’t until two days ago I actually said, ‘I’m starting to lose hope,’” Jillian said to the ABC reporter. “They had a lot of cadaver dogs out and I knew what they were looking for was a body, not a person. It was the first time I actually started losing hope. And I went with up with so much help knowing that we needed to find her.”
A GoFundMe page was updated indicating over $10,800 has been raised but to continue sharing to help with medical costs in the days moving forward as Holly has no medical insurance.
“We are all just overwhelmed and grateful,” friend Kelly Kaufman told CNN. | https://kympasqualini.medium.com/daughter-searches-for-missing-mother-who-mysteriously-vanished-at-zion-national-park-932e9e80b775 | ['Kym L Pasqualini'] | 2020-10-27 21:12:50.490000+00:00 | ['Mystery', 'True Story', 'True Crime', 'Crime', 'Missing Persons'] |
Week 17–2021: Passive income with Crypto | Each week I am sharing my experience on my journey of making passive income with crypto. Well there is nothing “passive” about it :-) But I really enjoy the journey and hopefully you too!
In this week’s newsletter:
The status of the “Moon” coins (MoonRate, SafeMoon, Octans and some more… ) The status of the DRIP community Celsius and Nexo Yield Farming Finished projects Status of the coins in my portfolio What else …
1 - The “Moon” coins
The Moon coins as I call them, because a lot of them have the word “moon” in them. Of course this refers to the fact that the teams hopes that these coin prices go to the moon. The basic model of these coins is the same, just HOLD them and earn more.
The fact is that the value has somewhat decreased and the momentum is a little bit gone. But this may come back of course. I have took profit in most of the coins, so I have earned back my initial deposits already. Now I am holding and sell whenever the value is above 100$.
I have the following coins:
https://medium.com/crypto-and-defi/passive-income-with-moonrat-and-octans-70b1d8a730d8
2 - Status of DRIP Community
Last week I joined the DRIP community project.
https://medium.com/crypto-and-defi/the-drip-network-5bbf0a5c8668
I compounded twice and the current amount of DRIP is 83 and already 1 person joined my team. You can still join my team.
The price of DRIP dropped to $5.70. Hopefully it will stay there for a while
3 - Nexo and Celsius
Just keep earning my interest on both Nexo and Celsius platforms. The interesting fact is that both coin prices ($NEXO and $CEL) have risen considerable the last weeks, which makes the interest earnings even higher.
NEXO
CEL
The most interesting coin that I am staking on Celsius is $MATIC. I receive 15% interest and this coin is doing better each week.
MATIC
4 - Other Yield Farming projects
I am still doing some yield farming. Some better than other, but that is common in this volatile crypto world.
Neonic.Finance
The price of $NEON has dropped this week from $2.90 to $0.46 currently. This is a little disappointment, so my daily earnings also drop considerably. See how this one goes the coming days.
Total Value Locked: $ 2,143,067
Market Cap: $ 531,477
ValueDeFi
I stepped out of my wBNB vault on ValueDeFi. I bought some extra “moon” coins from it. I guess I am to impatient and I have AD(H)D and this makes it sometimes difficult to choose :-) Well quitting something is also making a choice of course.
PeakDeFi
PeakDeFi is locked for another 16 days against a APY of 55%.
Global staked: 13,004,351 PEAK
There is also a PeakDeFi Wallet App available.
The Market Cap and the price of $PEAK are still rising, so I will go on staking and compounding this one.
Alpaca Finance
I invested again in this project because it is getting more and more attention and momentum I think. The price and the market cap has risen.
I deposited 0.77 ALPACA-wBNB LP tokens with a APY of 288% (APR 134%).
PancakeSwap and PancakeBunny
I think that these are one of the best known and biggest DeFi projects I know. I do not know why but I stepped out a while ago, but when I looked back this week the prices of $CAKE ($42) and especially of $BUNNY ($440) increased a lot ! I therefore bought some CAKE and deposited it into the CAKE Auto-Compounding Pool. Plan to buy some more CAKE and/or BUNNY.
Tosdis Finance
In the Tosdis project I do some farming and staking of the $SFUND token.
The price of $SFUND keeps around $1 and market cap is rising.
And good news too:
https://seedifyfund.medium.com/hotbit-seedify-fund-ecosystem-partnership-listing-announcement-7fe2e9a742d9
Dripping Finance
Another dripping finance with a Drip coin is Dripper.Finance. I stepped in on the 21th of April when the price of $Drip was around $4.62
Currently the price is $1.88.
There are only a total of 100,000 tokens available.
Soda.DeFi
The SODA.DeFi is the only BNB staking project I am still in. The balance is 518 BNB, so hopefully it will hold a while, but you will never know with these kind of projects (as I wrote here).
Each day I harvest some earned SODA from the BNB-SODA Pool, which is around 2 $SODA ($SODA = $6.5).
Unfortunately also some projects ended this week.
5 - Finished Projects
Some projects finished unexpectedly this week.
Binanex
BNBCapital
I still had some active loans which I cannot withdraw anymore. Those loans ended tomorrow.
6 - Status of my coins
On my Celsius and Nexo I have the “big” coins: BTC, ETH, MATIC.
On Nexo I also have EUR because I get an interest of 12%.
Current portfolio:
XRP: 60 (Staking on Nexo)
BNB: 4 (Staking on Binance, 15%)
ADA: 321 (Staking on Binance, 1.45%)
CRO: 1809 (Crypto.com)
AAVE: 0,39
Last words
As always this is not financial advice! But just some crypto investment platforms I currently use and have experience with. Do your own research before investing and never deposit money you cannot afford to lose.
Feel free to ask me questions.
To sponsor / support me you can use my BNB wallet address: 0x20eC2b85a776551FF492218ed7badcE4FB9f16Fc
Join my Telegram group: https://t.me/crypto_and_defi
or Telegram channel shoutout: https://t.me/crypto_and_defi_shout
Other interesting links: https://linktr.ee/rvdkimmenade
Thanks, happy weekend and be safe ! | https://medium.com/crypto-and-defi/week-17-2021-passive-income-with-crypto-38bb8e773a05 | ['Rjh Van De Kimmenade'] | 2021-05-14 17:55:08.518000+00:00 | ['Passive Income', 'Earn Money Online', 'Defi', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Binance Smart Chain'] |
Online Booking System for Travel Companies : Hotel APIs — Expedia, Hotelspro, DOTW and Travco | Online Booking System for Travel Companies : Hotel APIs — Expedia, Hotelspro, DOTW and Travco
Source: http://www.provab.com
Travel Mobility Solutions
Much has changed in travel technology over a decade. Traditional way of search and booking the travel deals are no more in fashion. Online booking system has become the keyword of travel domain across the globe. At present, online booking systems are most widely used for used for airline reservations, hotel & motel reservation, cab reservations and custom holiday packages. More and more booking systems are also connecting the event booking XMLs as well. In a nutshell, online booking system is internet based booking system software, which can be accessed by users through the unique URL, services can be searched and bookings could do done.
Get a Project Quote — http://www.provab.com/get_quote.html
There are many web services / hotel APIs, which can be seamlessly integrated to bring the best inventory at best price.
Hotel APIs
GTA
Hotelbeds
Hotelspro
DOTW
Travco
Tourico
Restel
Miki
Jac Travel
Expedia
Priceline
Bonotel
GDS
Amadeus
Galileo
Sabre
A GDS system will also provide the data for hotels, cars and cruise apart from flights. It also provides the information to various distributors and travel agencies working simultaneously round the world.
Regarding Author:
Author is a travel technology expert and has been involved in several online booking systems. | https://medium.com/@provabtech/online-booking-system-for-travel-companies-hotel-apis-expedia-hotelspro-dotw-and-travco-af5f4a04f576 | ['Provab Technosoft'] | 2016-12-27 10:13:00.239000+00:00 | ['Galileo', 'Gds', 'Hotel', 'APIs'] |
Outrageous 2020 | This picture is just for attention or maybe it is representing how I am looking forward to in the future. I had a terrific 2019, I had achieved some of the goals that I had planned originally, I missed some and there are some I did not even try. I am gonna do a quick recap of last year here. I know it is a bit late, January is almost over. I was preoccupied with procrastination. Moreover, I think it is better to put it out on the internet. It is more like shouting from the top of the tallest building of your city. Everyone will think you are crazy, a nut job but once you have done it, your ideas will not sound that crazy to you.
2019 was good for me. I had some major “first-time” experiences. I am going to skip the professional ones because I want to. On a less professional scene, my friend ynk cooked up a small python script for League of Legends, which download player data using league API and show how many games a player has played with a champion. It is a neat little script, I coded the web view of it and pretty-up the ynk’s code a little more. So, now it’s called https://lookup.gg/ and gathered probably 200k hits. Most of them were in December. I started parkour in April, made huge progress on it. My body became more flexible and I can run now! I had climbed some mountains, experienced rock climbing, and bouldering and fell in love with it. More importantly, I have made some truly remarkable friends. People I truly trust and someone I can look up to. These people push me beyond my limits, they are my leap of faith. I have also cut ties with toxic people. I experienced some amazing works, listened to some crazy music and most importantly,
I LIVED!
Now, let me tell you what my 2020 will look like. There is no particular order here and I will probably add more stuff here later on.
I am head over heels in love with bouldering and rock climbing now. I am going to keep going. I have made plans to visit India again, for climbing in February. I will probably do it again in March/April and later in years. For rock climbing and bouldering, I would have to make my body lean and fit. Thus, a new fitness program, designed by me for now. Let’s see where that end. I have bought a night lamp and started reading at least one page at night, before sleeping. So far, I have finished Hippie by Paulo Coelho. This is my favorite quote from the book — “Humanity has committed its greatest crimes in the name of the Truth. Men and women were burned alive, entire civilizations were destroyed, those who committed sins of the flesh were sent away, those who pursued a different path were cast out. One of them, in the name of ‘truth,’ was crucified. But before dying, he clarified Truth’s ultimate definition. It is not that which gives us certainty. It is not that which gives us profound thoughts. It is not that which makes us better than others. It is not that which makes us prisoners to our prejudices. ‘The Truth is what makes us free. You will know the Truth and the Truth shall set you free,’ Jesus said.” I loved it so much that I have put it in the first paragraph of my motivation letter for the master’s admission application. I started the letter with this paraphrase. I have a huge stockpile of unread books, I have to finish reading all of them by this year. I forgot I had bought a guitar for my sister and she left it to me. I always fancied myself learning to play guitar. This sounds like a good time. A musician friend is helping me with this project. Swimming — Always want to, never buckled in. I have planned to start in March. Running — Now I need to, I will probably not go in Jia Uddan just to run for half an hour and come back. It is gonna cost me 200 Tk minimum. I will just run in my neighborhood. I have also bought a skateboard and roller skates shoes. I am gonna start skateboarding from March, in sha Allah and roller skates will roll in from April/May, depending on my progress on skateboarding. I have started a micro master’s course on EdX. Right now, I am enrolled in four courses, Cyber Security Fundamentals, Computer Forensics, Cyber Security Risk Management and Introduction to programming using Python. Apart from the python course, others are part of a micro master’s program from RITx, Rochester Institute of Technology. There are five courses and I have already mentioned three. From March 04, I will start Network Security and from June/July, I will start the last course, CyberSecurity Capstone. Python course is also part of the XSeries program of MITx, Computational Thinking using Python. The next course and the last course of this series is Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science, which will finish in June/July. I am going to have a tough time in the first quarter of this year, considering I have to complete four courses in due time. However, after March, my schedule will open up a bit. I am highly interested in learning cryptography and Stanford has this fabulous course online, Cryptography I. I am going to pursue it from March. Then, there is PenTesting. I don’t know how or where, but I will find a way and I will learn it. I love the work of Jimmy Chin. He is this amazing climber and adventure photographer. He has a course in the masterclass on Adventure Photography, I am going to do this course. It's a whopping $80 course. Money is not necessarily that big of a problem. The main problem is I don't know how I am going to practice. But I am definitely going to take this course in April/May I have applied for masters in Cyber Security in different Finnish universities. Hopefully, I will be admitted or else, I will be more prepared for next year. I literally cannot do anything other than writing these sentences. Although, I would have to take the IELTS again. It is going to expire in February. Learning digital art drawing and animation. I have some comic ideas that I would love to try. I will start prepping from March/April and will be full-on mode from May/June in sha Allah. I am going to summit two mountains in Bangladesh in March/April and probably one last Nepal trip in May/June. I am going to plan it later. I always want to write a little bit, about something I truly love and support on Medium or my personal site. I am going to start doing it. Once a week. It is gonna be good music, book, movie, codes or life. Starting from this week.
As you can see, there is no plan after June. As my experiences say, these will drag on to July/August to fully achieve. If I am admitted to a master's in Finland, then I will be leaving Bangladesh in August and start a new life in Finland. I can't predict anything there except these —
I will join a climbing gym and start practicing indoor climbing and bouldering. I will try to visit Iceland during Christmas break and surf in Icelandic cold water, summit a volcano, walk on the black beach. A good old fashioned road trip.
Now, I have finished writing my dreams and plans for 2020. As I have stated before, it does not look that outrageous. It is really possible to finish everything I have planned. It does not look that impossible to me anymore. Funny thing is, the first thing I did before writing this post is finding a good cover photo for it. That's all. That's everything I want to achieve in 2020. | https://medium.com/mischief-managed/outrageous-2020-24d59970af0a | ['Mr Anderson'] | 2020-01-24 17:34:41.295000+00:00 | ['Diary', 'Year Plan', 'Motivation', 'Mischief Managed', 'Personal Story'] |
Complacent Mind | Complacent Mind
Ecstasy Cover Art
Lost again, look outside the city limits
Bound again, stopped by the architect
Sold out, left to be derelict
Formed by religion they’re all lies
See the spoilt cry when being rejected
See the loyalty die when we’re expected
I’ve sold my, I fold my last disgrace
Lies told and I fault it’s my mistake
I don’t remember a time when all was well
I don’t remember a time when all was well
Leave the place of mind, silent confession
Scream and fight resigned, lost my question
I’ve sold my, I fold my last disgrace
Lies told and I fault it’s my mistake | https://medium.com/@joshbills/complacent-mind-94633ed793f8 | ['Josh Bills'] | 2020-10-05 02:31:38.776000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Ecstasy', 'Complacency', 'Mind', 'Lyrics'] |
GARDENING: TIPS AND TOOLS FOR BEGINNERS | It is of no secret that now-a-days gardening is the most preferable hobby of people. Not only it beautifies your place but also gives an internal bliss.
Even at the time of COVID-19, when people are locked up in their houses, they prefer gardening as a hobby. According to a July 2020 survey conducted in the United Kingdom, consumers spent 88 British pounds on average on garden furniture and it was followed by garden DIY equipment and BBQ equipment.
It is also true that it demands lots of time and patience. It makes you wonder: what tips should I use to set my garden up? Here are some garden saving tips for beginners.
1. Know your zone well:
Most of the plants do not grow in a particular zone because of climatic factors. You should learn that what plant species are best for the area where you live or where you are planting your garden.
“You need to know your zone and you need to know what plants will grow where you live so that you’re not planting…a peach tree that needs 500 to 600 chill hours in Houston, where we get 150 chill hours,” Hammond says.
2. Area for gardening:
photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
It is preferred for beginners not to depend on a perfect backyard for gardening. You can go for a container garden where you can plant with more efficiency by keeping a check on weeds and soil quality.
3. Leaves are much better than fruits:
Many plant species like legumes give you product in a very less time but you have to wait for a seed to develop into a tree and then to flower and then to fruit if you planted for apples.
4.Proper compost:
Your soil must have plenty of compost. Rotten egg shells, coffee grinds, apple covers can be a good compost. You should also have a knowledge of shade loving plants. Without a proper compost it is impossible to develop a garden.
It is always suggested to use organic and high quality compost if not your garden can suffer some serious diseases that can also ruin the integrity of soil.
photo by cjoudrey on Unsplash
5. Tools for gardening:
Then need for tools actually depends upon how an a person wants his garden to look.
Here I am listing some basic tools essential for gardening: Trowel, Spade, Bow rake, Hand rake, Hoe, Weed puller, Dandelion digger, Pruning or garden shear, Loppers and Bow saw.
Shop for these tools on Amazon | https://medium.com/@shifakhan1246/gardening-tips-and-tools-for-beginners-3529d3abdc52 | [] | 2020-12-03 22:23:27.782000+00:00 | ['Gardening Tools', 'Gardening For Beginners', 'Gardening', 'Gardening Tips'] |
An Open and Honest Letter to All Who Have Hurt Me. | This is raw, real and necessary. This is the kind of shit you need to do when it’s time to dump toxic energy that has been swimming around inside of you for far too long. It had come time for me to sit down and write an open letter to all who have hurt me.
This is the letter anyone who has been hurt, needs to write to free themselves, not only from the anger and the pain, but from the toxic person who still lives in their head, rent free.
This is an open letter to all who have hurt me.
This isn’t to anyone in particular. It’s just going out to all of them. The ex, family, my old friend who I thought was my friend, the guy who stole $500 from me, former bosses, landlords, etc.
Yup, this is for all of you, any of you and none of you. If you recognize yourself in here, well, ya.
The reason why I write this out and share it is in hopes that it helps you. We’ve all been hurt at some point in our lives and holding on to that hurt is not good for you. I hope this open letter inspires and motivates you to write your own letter, truth letters I like to call them, to free yourself from whatever pain and anger you are still holding on to.
Without further ado…..
Dear You.
I know we never talk about the pain and that’s ok. We don’t need to. There is no point in rehashing all the shit that happened or what you did. How I felt then is very different from how I feel now.
I come from a place of peace, love and forgiveness now. Every now and then I do still think about what you did but I simply let it go. I don’t have room, time, desire or energy to think about the hurt.
You know what you did was shitty. I know it was too. There is no way in hell that when you were laying in bed that night, that you didn’t feel the teeniest bit like a asshole for what you did. Maybe you even felt like that the next night too.
Of course you did.
Maybe to this day you still feel kinda bad for what you did. Maybe you don’t. I don’t really care. I really don’t give a fuck how you feel today. Know why?
Because I’m too busy feeling good and being happy and doing good and being a good person. I don’t really have room in my head any more to wonder why and how you could be so mean, such an ass, a thief, a liar, etc. You need to live with that, I don’t.
You did what you did because of where you were in your life at the moment. Maybe you were sad or angry or full of hate or resentment or whatever! I have no clue. Maybe you really don’t like me. Maybe you never did.
Maybe you being mean to me was your way of showing me you don’t like me and I just didn’t catch on. Maybe I didn’t catch on because I desperately wanted you to like me, love me, be my friend, be nice to me. You continued your mean behaviour to me because I let you.
I wanted you to like me so bad that I offered up my self worth in replace of your approval.
Well, time has passed. Days, months, years even and I found something. Actually I found quite a few things.
self worth
self love
self respect
forgiveness
kindness
and peace.
The top 3 in that list will never be compromised again. Ever. The last 3 took time to find.
For the longest time I hated you. Wished horrible things on you. Called you very bad names. I spewed out your name. After a while, a long while of doing that, I realized it wasn’t hurting you. It wasn’t hurting you at all. You didn’t feel a thing.
BUT it was destroying me. Eating me. Tormenting me. Every time I heard your name or thought of the horrible thing you did, my blood would boil and I would get angry, so angry, sometimes even scream and cry.
Life is short. Too short. And it’s going by so fast. I only have room in my life now for joy, love, happiness and peace. I forgive you for me, not for you. I send you love for you, not for me.
What’s done is done. What’s happened is behind us now. Yes, every now and then I do still think about what happened but it comes and goes in two seconds. I don’t let it stay in my head any more. Got no time for that.
I do sincerely hope you find happiness, peace, joy and love. I send you forgiveness and love. You, my friend, need it the most. No one who comes from a good loving place treats people the way you do. I feel sad for you but there is hope for you. People change. I did.
I’m sorry, I forgive you, I love you.
Peace and Love
Iva | https://ivaursano.medium.com/an-open-and-honest-letter-to-all-who-have-hurt-me-eb6dbef26661 | ['Iva Ursano'] | 2018-07-31 17:09:35.332000+00:00 | ['Healing', 'Open Letter', 'Forgiveness', 'Life Lessons', 'Abuse'] |
Healthy Homes for Healthy Cities: Harnessing the Potential of Africa’s Urban Growth | Building Better Neighborhoods
It’s important to consider not only individual housing units, but also the structure of neighborhoods. Sometimes, government programs seek to move people out of slums and into concrete apartment buildings. While these buildings may have access to electricity and running water, some residents feel less safe in the new housing because the sense of community is not as strong as in the slum or informal settlement where they lived before.
Less community support in formal neighborhoods can also make life more expensive for those moving out of slums or informal settlements. Many people living in slums are not used to paying utility bills, for example, which can also make the transition difficult.
Factors like these mean that in some cases, people may not actually want to leave slums. Sometimes, it may be more practical to upgrade informal neighborhoods than to try to relocate residents.
Sustainability and Education
Engineer Africa is also committed to supporting educational efforts for residents of affordable housing units. It’s important for residents to have a sense of ownership over their properties and to be equipped with the knowledge and skills to maintain the properties.
Part of caring effectively for a home means understanding a different lifestyle than many may be used to. Some Africans, particularly those moving to the city from villages, may not be familiar with the electrical, plumbing, and waste management systems in new homes and neighborhoods. Some knowledge of these systems is required to effectively care for a home and keep it in good condition over the long term.
Unfortunately, not all development initiatives are able to maintain a long-term presence on the ground. This highlights the benefits of having more participation by Africans in African development projects.
Africans are often more familiar with local needs and conditions, and in many cases are better able to communicate with participants in programs to transfer important concepts and understanding. Empowering the beneficiaries of development programs with the knowledge they need to take ownership of development efforts can greatly enhance the sustainability of projects. This is particularly true when it comes to affordable housing.
Affordable housing should be a stepping stone on the way to better living conditions. It can provide families with the stability they need to pursue education and employment opportunities which can empower them and foster independence. As families move out of affordable units and into higher end accommodation, these units will be freed up for other families in need. For this reason, it’s important to take care to extend the lifespan of units as long as possible.
Providing the Tools for Success
There are many diverse actors who need to collaborate to steer Africa’s urban development in the right direction. The role of governments in developing effective urban development and housing policy is key, and so are the efforts of the private sector in producing appropriate products to meet local needs. NGOs can play an important support role in this process as well. Engineer Africa is there to make sure that all of these diverse actors have access to all the engineering resources they need to succeed in these efforts.
While we are also working on establishing some affordable housing projects ourselves, we hope that the designs and programs developed in the course of this work will provide an inspiration for others all across Africa. You can learn more about this project as well as others in a book we recently released: The African Diaspora as a Force for Social and Economic Transformation. It is available for free here.
Join The Movement!
Learn more about us on our Website: https://engineerafrica.org
Contact us via Email: [email protected]
Like us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/engineerafrica
Tweet us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/engineerafrica
Connect with us on Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/company/engineerafrica
Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/engineerafrica | https://medium.com/engineerafrica/healthy-homes-for-healthy-cities-harnessing-the-potential-of-africas-urban-growth-68d5ccfbfbdd | ['Kevin Kissi'] | 2020-12-17 01:51:44.003000+00:00 | ['Nonprofit', 'Africa', 'Engineering', 'Housing', 'Slums'] |
Medical ultrasound technology | Medical ultrasound technology
Advances in medical imaging are enabling faster, more accurate diagnosis, writes Antoinette Price
Woman holding ultra sound result film (photo: Edward Cisneros on Unsplash)
Electrotechnology has transformed healthcare over the past 120 years. Following the discovery of X-ray imaging in the late 19th century, great advances have been made in the field of ultrasound — high frequency sound waves. Like X-rays, ultrasound can be used to diagnose disease and is widely used in pre-natal scans for expectant mothers.
The evolution in medical imaging used to see and examine the interior of patients’ bodies has made it clearer and safer. This in turn results in faster more accurate diagnosis and subsequent treatment of illness and traumatic injuries.
Diagnosis
Research into the use of ultrasound waves for medical diagnosis began after WWII. Ultrasonic scanning, or ultrasonography, uses high frequency sound waves to produce images on a screen, of internal organs, vessels and tissues. It is arguably the best of all ultrasonic medical applications, particularly for prenatal ultrasound scans or echographs.
Quicker, easier (and less costly) to use than CT (computerised tomography) scans and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), ultrasonic scans are therefore frequently used to monitor and diagnose the condition of organs, such as the liver, kidneys or gallbladder. Echocardiograms, or ultrasonic scans of the heart, are also used to diagnose and follow up heart conditions.
Silence is golden
Ultrasound technology is increasingly being used in surgery. USIs (ultrasonic surgical instruments) convert an ultrasonic signal into a mechanical vibration using a transducer; a waveguide then amplifies and propagates the vibration.
Highly useful in diverse medical procedures, USIs can cut bone and other tissue while simultaneously reducing bleeding by coagulating tissue. This generally reduces the average length of surgery and damage to tissue, resulting in fewer complications overall.
Non-invasive therapeutic applications
Scientific advances mean that ultrasound energy can be used as non- or minimally-invasive HIFU (high-intensity focused ultrasound), or HITU (high-intensity therapeutic ultrasound). These methods can be used to remove body tissue in the treatment of cancers and other conditions, by applying ultrasound energy to heat and destroy diseased tissues.
This technology has greatly benefited other treatments, in particular ESWL (extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy). Ultrasound (or other) imaging systems locate and target kidney, gallbladder or liver stones, which are smashed into pieces by ultrasound pulses and evacuated naturally through urination. Introduced in the early 1980s, it quickly replaced surgery to become the most widespread treatment for stones.
Some other treatments now using HIFU/HITU include:
Bone healing and physiotherapy for inflammation caused by rheumatism, tendinitis or joint injuries.
Drug distribution to treat tumours, especially in the brain, where it may be difficult to achieve.
Cosmetic applications, such as non-invasive liposuction and for a number of therapies to improve skin tone, scars and sun-based damage.
Bright smiles
One public health application of ultrasonics is in dental care as descalers to remove plaque before it hardens into tartar. Ultrasonic descalers have a tip that vibrates at high frequency to break down the bacterial matter to which plaque and calculus stick. This technology enables a smoother and less painful experience.
Hygiene safety
All medical and dental equipment must be absolutely clean before use, particularly in case of contact with a patient’s tissue (surgical instruments) or mucous membranes (endoscope), otherwise the introduction of pathogenic microbes can lead to infection. It is imperative to clean, disinfect and sterilize all multiple-use instruments and devices after use on a patient or surgery.
Ultrasonic cleaning uses a special wash solution to reach and effectively remove organic waste from difficult-to-clean areas, such as equipment or devices with joints and crevices.
Continued evolution
Ultrasound technology is continuing to evolve, specially in combination with artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning technology is already being used to diagnose scans for heart disease and lung cancer. It is also being used to create ever smaller and smarter ultrasound devices that can fit into your pocket and plug into your smartphone.
AI can also make ultrasound treatments safer and more accurate. At present, for instance, the prostatic needle biopsies used to diagnose prostate cancer yield a 30% false negative rate due to insufficient resolution.
New micro-ultrasound technology is providing scans that are up to 300% better than conventional ultrasound. AI helps to identify suspicious areas where cancer may be present. | https://medium.com/e-tech/quick-guide-medical-ultrasound-tech-4beb85d53ea3 | [] | 2018-11-15 10:58:16.779000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Medical Technology', 'Health', 'Medicine', 'Ultrasound'] |
Microphone-less Sonos Arc SL soundbar arrives exclusively at Costco | Sonos has quietly begun selling a new version of its Dolby Atmos-enabled Arc soundbar that comes without a built-in microphone, although you’ll have to venture out to Costco to snag one.
Mentioned in this article Sonos Arc Read TechHive's review$799.00MSRP $799.00See iton Sonos The Sonos Arc SL Shadow Edition is now available exclusively at “participating” Costco stores in the U.S. and Canada, and it will be available on Costco.com later this month, a Sonos rep told TechHive. The new Arc is selling for $749, versus $799 for the standard version (pictured above).
Word of the Arc SL first began spreading on the Sonos subreddit, where Reddit users posted images of the new soundbar sitting on store shelves. Sonos has yet to officially announce the Arc SL, and it’s not listed on the company’s website, but a Sonos rep confirmed its existence.
[ Further reading: The best soundbars ]Similar to the microphone-less Sonos One SLRemove non-product link, the Arc SL is identical to the standard Arc save for the lack of a built-in microphone for voice assistants. Both Alexa and Google Assistant are built into the original Arc, although you can use only one at a time. You can still use the Arc SL with a voice assistant if you pair the soundbar with a compatible smart speaker.
Besides the lack of a microphone and it’s “shadow-black” color, the Arc SL boasts the “same immersive sound experience” as the standard Arc, according to Sonos.
We praised the original Arc, which went on sale back in June, for its “exceptional” sound quality (an issue with buggy bass response was subsequently fixed via a software update). That said, we were disappointed that it only has a single HDMI input, which seems stingy for an $800 soundbar.
The new Arc SL might be a good choice for soundbar shoppers who want the sound quality of the standard Arc without voice assistants listening in, although at just $50 off the price of the original, the Arc SL isn’t a major bargain.
Updated shortly after publication to add that the Arc SL will be available on Costco.com later this month, as well as the fact that you can pair the soundbar with a smart speaker.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@rui21890003/microphone-less-sonos-arc-sl-soundbar-arrives-exclusively-at-costco-682ba3bb7438 | [] | 2020-12-26 09:20:01.060000+00:00 | ['Headphones', 'Internet', 'Connected Home', 'Home Tech'] |
Building your first Azure Blockchain Workbench Ethereum based application | When it comes to Blockchain , often developers complain about lot of time being spent in troubleshooting installation and deployment issues. What if I say with Microsoft Azure you can deploy your applications rapidly without even going into any installation or deployment hustle, with only some provisioning required.
With this devs will be able to focus upon implementing Business logic and their productivity shall increase:
Developers Reaction
Lets see the procedure step by step:
Just login into your account: portal.azure.com and search for the service of “Blockchain Workbench” => from the marketplace select Azure Blockchain Workbench.
Azure Blockchain Workbench
2.Once you have clicked upon it , you will go to another window which looks something like this, consisting of all details about this service, just press upon create :
Azure Blockchain workbench
3.Once you have pressed upon Create, you will be taken to the next page asking for all details regarding the service, you can fill them one by one:
4.Once you have filled all the details, it will go to the next level of provisioning of this service , this might take about 25 mins. Once it gets over you will get an acknowledgment as shown below in the pic stating your deployment is complete:
5.Just go into the outputs section on the Left, and you will receive one URL, for me it was “https://anubhav1-sdgfop-api.azurewebsites.net”:
6.Once you open that link, you will be required to register this application in the Active Directory link via PowerShell, just execute those instructions and you will see :
Powershell commands to be entered
7)Once you have successfully completed this integration, you will see an acknowledgement like this:
8)You can go to the link “https://anubhav1-sdgfop-api.azurewebsites.net” (link in the outputs) and the route “/applications” into it making =>”https://anubhav1-sdgfop-api.azurewebsites.net/applications”.You should be able to see the window below.
9)Go to the option of Deploying the new Application , select your Ethereum JSON file along with the Smart Contract Solidity file.
I had selected the files for my contract of Asset Transfer, for reference you can refer to the files given in the link:
10)Your application will get deployed , you can now add members via Email ID’s of people, with different roles:
I have added 3 members with 3 different role s (Buyer, Inspector and Owner)as you can see in the pic below:
11)We can now add the records and start to track them:
12)One of the records that I added , later modified of a diamond ring can be seen as below:
Tracking of records.
I will be publishing more Microsoft Azure based simple solutions. For any further Queries or anything related to this article or Golang you can DM me on Linkedin or instagram id=acanubhav94.
Also, Read | https://medium.com/coinmonks/building-your-first-azure-blockchain-workbench-application-7d7d49c0015a | ['Anubhav Chaturvedi'] | 2020-12-28 13:43:40.156000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Blockchain Development', 'DevOps', 'Azure', 'Ethereum'] |
6 Hints You Need to Improve Your Company’s Predictive Analytics Culture | You are in the middle of developing a data project. IT teams are technically clear about that and business teams understand the value impact. Good. But are you sure your IT and Business teams can work together?
Why IT And Business Teams Need To Be All Together On A Data Project
If IT and Business teams cannot work together, then the data project will not reach its fruition in terms of completeness and accuracy. Each profile has its own unique contribution to the project as a whole — business teams can contribute insights that IT teams would never have considered, and IT teams have the capability to use technology to build meaningful data products that less technical profiles may not know how to accomplish.
Business profiles need to understand what can be done (from a technical perspective) while IT profiles need to understand what needs to be done (from a business perspective).
Don’t Know If Your Analytics Culture Is Low? Try This
http://i.giphy.com/3o6j8Ngwek6al1cYqQ.gif
Here are 6 items you need to evaluate to determine if your team’s common predictive analytics culture is low:
Communication is on an as-needed basis (e.g., initial assignment of problem to be solved);
(e.g., initial assignment of problem to be solved); Lack of flexibility in terms of both approach and project planning;
in terms of both approach and project planning; Absence of a collaborative work environment and tools;
environment and tools; Failure of leadership in terms of proactively fostering cooperation and collaboration between teams;
in terms of proactively fostering cooperation and collaboration between teams; Meetings with no concrete results ;
; Lack of strong leadership in terms of finding common ground for the project and its deadlines.
How You Can Knock Down Your Cultural Data Barriers
Does any of this sound like your company? If yes, your data projects’ success may be compromised. Your time is going to be wasted on countless meetings with little impact… and none of your people will have a clear view of the next milestone, all because your IT and business teams can’t work together.
Here are 3 concrete steps that should help your IT and business teams work together on successful data projects:
Collaborative workflow-centric tool that is accessible to all team members;
that is accessible to all team members; Evangelization of communication across teams from senior management;
across teams from senior management; Project transparency and accessibility supported by a tool that facilitates inclusion of all team members, regardless of skill-set and experience level.
[Free eBook] “The 5 Key Challenges to Building a Successful Datalab”
How to successfully implement these 3 steps? Download our white paper “Building a Successful Datalab”to find out more. | https://medium.com/it-s-a-data-world/6-hints-you-need-to-improve-your-company-s-predictive-analytics-culture-500b60b20e7e | ['Romain Doutriaux'] | 2016-03-15 08:42:04.654000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Corporate Culture', 'Startup'] |
Keptn automates release readiness validation for Austrian Online Banking Software | Raiffeisen Software has been one of the early adopters of Keptn, as the SLO-based Quality Gate capability allows them to automate the production release readiness validation of their online banking software.
To fulfill the requirement of high level of quality, Raiffeisen Software has built a continuous test tool stack allowing them to automate the quality evaluation of new software releases before releasing them to their customers. The following illustration gives an overview of that tool stack, which includes tools such as Jenkins, JMeter, Digital.ai Release and others. Keptn’s Quality Gate capability was added in 2020 to provide automated SLO-based release readiness evaluation based on application performance and infrastructure SLIs (Service Level Indicators) monitored by Dynatrace.
Raiffeisen’s Continuous Test Toolstack provides automated release readiness guidance for their online banking software
Let’s have a quick look into how Keptn integrates into that process, how it evaluates SLOs and how this data helps the responsible release managers from making their production release decisions.
Step 1: Automated Testing and SLO Scoring through Jenkins
Once a new release candidate comes out of engineering, a Jenkins pipeline automates the task of ensuring that Keptn is properly configured for the upcoming load test. Jenkins then executes the load test which simulates peak traffic conditions against the online banking software. After the test is finished, Jenkins queries Keptn’s SLO Score for the timeframe of the test execution. That score (ranging from 0 to 100) gets translated into a Jenkins pass, warning or fail (as specified in the Keptn Quality Gate), as shown in the following screenshot:
Jenkins automates test execution and Keptn Quality Gate evaluation for each release evaluation
Raiffeisen Software is using the Jenkins Shared Library for Keptn which makes it easy to integrate Keptn into existing Jenkins pipelines. Besides quality gate evaluations the Jenkins Shared Library for Keptn provides additional capabilities such as triggering any automation sequence, uploading resources to the Keptn configuration repository, creating or updating projects or services, and more.
Step 2: Detailed SLO Quality Gate Results in Keptn
Through Jenkins, Keptn gets automatically configured with a list of SLIs (Service Level Indicators) and SLOs (Service Level Objectives) that should be evaluated when Jenkins triggers Keptn’s Quality Gate. The configuration happens through YAML files that include the queries against the data source, as well as the objectives for each SLI. Those files are version controlled and Jenkins makes sure that Keptn always has the latest SLI/SLO before a new release gets evaluated.
Currently at Raiffeisen Software, Keptn is configured to pull out end user response times captured by Dynatrace while the load test is running. Dynatrace has the capability to capture these metrics per test case and Keptn is then able to pull these individual response time metrics and compares them against the objective Raiffeisen Software has, e.g.: login must complete within 100ms.
Besides the SLO comparison against absolute values, such as 100ms, Raiffeisen Software uses the capability of using relative criteria. Relative criteria means that a result from the current evaluation is compared with the baseline across previous evaluations. For Raiffeisen Software this is a timesaving feature as its not mandatory to define thresholds for every SLI as automatic baselining does a great job in detecting regressions.
The following is a screenshot showing the individual SLIs Keptn analysis for every release, how it aggregates up to a total SLO score and how there is cross-linking between the quality gate visualization in the Keptns UI back to Jenkins:
Keptn’s Quality Gate visualization makes it easy to understand which SLOs have a positive or negative impact on an evaluation triggered by tools such as Jenkins
If you want to learn more about the inner workings of SLI/SLO-based quality gates check out these resources such as the Keptn documentation or a YouTube tutorial on Quality Gates in 5 Minutes.
Step 3: Release Decisions and Error Analysis
Every performance test run and analysis makes it to the release managers, where the status of the quality gate reflects the recommendation: GREEN, YELLOW or RED. Here is an example from their Confluence page:
Quality Gate results end up becoming recommendations for the release managers which is shared through Confluence pages
In case something is not GREEN, the detailed information on which SLOs failed are also published to that Confluence page for everyone to see and analyze. Like in the following example, where Keptn detected a degradation in application performance caused by a replacement of hard drives that were significantly slower than those used before:
To improve collaboration and to make decisions transparent SLO details from Keptn are brought into Confluence
By bringing the automated SLO based analysis by Keptn not only to Jenkins but also into Confluence, decision makers can better understand why certain releases are good to go — or not good to go — to production!
Helping to improve Keptn
Raiffeisen Software has been operating Keptn on OpenShift for more than a year now. Thanks to their collaboration and active contribution within the Keptn community, Keptn is where it is today and can truly provide value to software organizations like Raiffeisen Software.
Thanks to our close collaboration, we can soon expect new capabilities for managing many SLOs or allowing multi SLI-providers in a single Quality Gate. Both are requirements from Raiffeisen Software, as they want to include more technical and business metrics into their quality gates, which require new SLI filter capabilities that the Keptn team is already working on. Raiffeisen Software also wants to pull metrics from further log and monitoring platforms as part of a single Quality Gate, which is why they are also looking forward to the summer where multi SLI-provider support is scheduled to be released. | https://medium.com/keptn/keptn-automates-release-readiness-validation-for-austrian-online-banking-software-eaaab7ad7856 | ['Andreas Grabner'] | 2021-06-14 16:03:09.202000+00:00 | ['Automation', 'Performance Management', 'Keptn', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Service Level Objectives'] |
Why customer engagement is beneficial? | Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash
What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement is the act of building a relationship with the people who are buying what you’re selling either B2C or B2B or an emotional connection between a customer and a brand. It’s the sum total of all the ways you connect with your customers: the emails, the phone calls, conversations on social media, and more. Highly engaged customers buy more, promote more, and demonstrate more loyalty. Gallup research shows that a fully-engaged customer represents 23% more revenue than average.
5 Benefits of customer engagement
Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash
1. Stronger relationships with customers and improved loyalty
An effective customer engagement strategy can be pivotal in helping brands connect better with their customers in a way that makes them want to continue to be their customers. If you put in the effort to engage your customers across various channels and touchpoints above and beyond what’s necessary to get them to make a purchase, you are likely to form stronger relationships with them. If you interact with them regularly about what’s relevant to them, keeping in mind their needs, priorities, motivations, and aspirations, you constantly remind them that you care.
2. Improved customer retention
Engaged customers will continue to build long-term relationships with the brand. In fact, research shows that businesses that focus on customer engagement strategies are more likely to make customers spend more on their products and services and convert them into loyalists of the brand. Research by Bain & Company states that a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profits. This and many other studies have concluded time and again that engaged customers are responsible for driving a significant percentage of a business’ total revenue.
3. Boosts marketing efficiency
Photo by William Iven on Unsplash
Modern marketing is all about engaging customers. In several cases, marketing efforts go down the drain as they fail to capture customer's interests. With effective customer engagement strategies in place, marketing efforts are expected to garner better results as they are more likely to capture the customers’ attention.
4. Shorter sales cycle
One of the key benefits of a customer engagement model is that it helps businesses attain a shorter sales cycle. In this system, customers and other prospects can utilize a customer engagement portal to instantly access the information they need irrespective of the stage of the buying process that they are on.
5. Better Customer Service
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
When you have a habit and a history of customer engagement, you are more likely to provide better customer service. Consumers are more likely to stick around and even tell their friends when they have a good customer service experience. Part of that experience is being accessible online. AdWeek reports that 80% of consumers use digital devices to make a connection with customer service. Plus, 71% of consumers say they have ended a relationship with a brand due to poor customer service. | https://medium.com/business-fox/why-customer-engagement-is-beneficial-c8eabdc307e5 | ['Business Fox'] | 2020-12-10 13:28:47.605000+00:00 | ['Customer Experience', 'Customer Engagement', 'Bussiness', 'Customer Service', 'Business Strategy'] |
A Strategic Approach To Becoming a Data Scientist | A Strategic Approach To Becoming a Data Scientist
Overcoming the difficulties of Breaking Into Data Science
Photo by Jaanus Jagomägi on Unsplash
Throughout this year, I’ve written many posts on becoming a Data Scientist:
For anyone aiming to become a Data Scientist, you ought to first address the elephant in the room… It is not easy to become a Data Scientist when you do not have a degree in a technical area or related work experience. Not to say that it is easy once you do have a technical degree or some-related work experience, it’s not as I’ve previously written in Getting A Data Science Job Is Harder Than Ever, but it sure is easier than someone with no technical background and a bunch of irrelevant work experience.
If you fall into this unfortunate category of “No technical degree, No related work experience” there's no need to curse the Gods or envy your past self for your decisions. However, you must be honest with yourself and identify that a CV for you, does not work in the same way it would for someone with a technical background, or experience, or both.
“A CV/Resume does not work in quite the same way as it would for someone that has a technical background and/or related experience”.
This may well be my ego, but I’ve never felt comfortable leaving my career in the hands of someone else (such as a recruiter or hiring manager). Why should someone else hold the key to what I want to become? If I want to be a Data Scientist, why must I wait for someone to approve of me? Isn’t what makes someone a Data Scientist the ability to collect, analyze, and interpret data. As far as I’m concerned, that does not require a stamp of approval from any employer.
I feel as though the job hunt has now likened itself to the failed dating experience, where one person is trying to convince the other why they are more worthy than all the other people and they should be chosen ahead of them. What on earth happened to people getting to know each other to see if they are compatible? Isn’t both the employer and candidate looking for something? Shouldn’t they be checking to see whether they are compatible with one another rather than one person auditioning? Either way, I’ve always thought that if someone is going to be doing the chasing, it sure well isn’t going to be me! — Again… this may (definitely is) be my ego.
But how do you get the job opportunities to chase you?
If we go back to the example of dating, what makes all the ladies chase the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Chris Hemsworth, Brad Pitt, etc? They are Attractive!
“Simply, if you want companies and opportunities to chase you around, you've got to become attractive to the companies and opportunities.”
There’s always the argument that some people are simply blessed with the right genetics, fair play. Nonetheless, there are still some things that you can do to become more attractive, even if you haven't got the most chiseled jawline. This same wonder works miracles when applied to the business world, hence we can use it to our advantage if we want to become more attractive and fulfill your dream to be a Data Scientist.
Play the Game
When a guy is capable of snapping up all the ladies wherever he goes, we instantly say “he’s got game”. This is to signify that the person is equipped with skill or talent which express his suave, attractive, and charming qualities, in turn making them desirable.
There are two things in here that are extremely important for how we can sneak our way into becoming a Data Scientist:
The guy can show he’s got game because there are ladies where he goes
The expression of his skills makes him desired
Note: Excuse my one-sided expression of a male having game. A lady can also have lots of game.
We are never going to be capable of attracting any company to us if we are afraid of going where they are, part of playing the game involves going to where the other players are:
Meet Up
Social Media
Slack Communities & MORE
In fact, going where they are has a double effect. Not only do we learn new techniques and new ways to think and approach problems, but we also gain deep insight into the tendencies of these players— what makes them tick, and what doesn’t.
Any great salesperson would tell you that your ability to be empathetic and to satisfy your client's needs is what is going to allow you to put food on the plate for your family. Of course, it’s no different for business… they are made up of people aren’t they?
That completes the first part, but simply being where they are, listening, and feeling empathetic isn't enough to get opportunities attracted to us isn't enough — We’ve got to do something with what we’ve got. What is going to attract the companies to you is your expression of the skills you possess. This involves creating projects that express how you think and/or approach problems, but there is a very thin line that people cross which makes their problems obsolete and unattractive (in my opinion).
I was very careful to use the word “EXPRESS” because when you express something you are ultimately squeezing out the content from within yourself. All of the knowledge, information, and empathy that has been accumulated from being in the places the people are, will be felt when you come from a place of expression. Your solutions will be meaningful and relatable to people that are willing to pay you for your services — In other words, you have become attractive.
Opposingly, people would rather “SHOW” that they are capable of doing Data Science with their projects and to me, this holds a different meaning. When you’re showing your ability, it puts you in the position of the person chasing after the other one in the relationship. Just listen carefully to the language, “I will show you I am the one for you”, “I did this project to show…”. Do you see what I mean? It is a two-way relationship.
If you need a job, a company needs someone that can fill a role and do the job required. You both have needs, hence you both must identify whether you’re compatible with one another. Back to the dating world, someone that understands this doesn't come across as needy, thence making them appear more attractive — nobody finds neediness attractive.
Be “Like” A Duck
Do you know why Job Specifications ask for 3+ years of experience? Well, it's pretty clear. They are looking for evidence that you’re the type of person they are looking for. A person with 3+ years of experience would have faced some challenges that people with less experience would have faced.
There is a famous saying…
“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck”.
They are looking for proof that you’re indeed a Duck.
A person with 3+ years of experience is expected to be someone who has skills that can be effectively applied to the work they have available. A person that can embody the type of person they want in the role they have available, which often involves the ability to produce results and work independently.
From reading this, you tell me if you think it takes 3 years to develop these traits — hopefully, you said no. Yes, It will require intense focus, drive, grit, and be results orientated. But these traits can be displayed in a number of ways of which I’ve written about in “You don’t need a Job To Get Data Science Experience”. Some examples of ways you can be more like a duck are by:
Volunteering
Pet Projects
Blogging
Networking
The key takeaway is that you don’t have to get paid to be called a Data Scientist. What makes a Data Scientist a Data Scientist is not solely down to the cheque that they are earning at the end of each month. If you are doing the things that Data Scientists do, essentially, you are a Data Scientist.
With the actions of a Data Scientist being employed on a daily basis, you would instantly begin to attract the things that come with being a Data Scientist, and one of those things include opportunities to be paid for your work since many businesses have seen the impact of data-driven decisions and artificial intelligence and are extremely keen on adopting it to develop a competitive advantage over their competition in business.
Sharpen Your Ax
It is fair to say, people whom we consider to have game didn't always have game and have faced their fair share of rejections — even to this day. Additionally, people that are Data Scientist today weren't always Data Scientist, the field isn't that old after all.
Underlying these 2 sneaky tactics is a fundamental skill that is required of every single Data Scientist no matter what… The constant desire to acquire and update your skills. Many people reading would have other responsibilities they must do to make ends meet, that’s cool. I’m not saying abandon these things. However, it’s vital that you constantly make time to develop new skills.
To learn more about how I sharpen my ax, check out:
To be a Data Scientist, you must continuously learn and update your skills. Always seek out new ways to do what you’re doing better. There are many things that help when you want to actively incorporate learning something new such as:
Allocating a dedicated hour
Getting Feedback
Learning from others experience
No matter how you go about it, if you want to be an attractive Data Scientist, you must possess this trait.
Wrap Up
I am not a dating coach (thank goodness), however, being able to relate difficult things like becoming a Data Scientist to day-to-day activities helps me break problems down and simplify them into meaningful actionable steps. I know some may argue that a human simply acting like a Dog wouldn't actually make the human a dog, but naturally, we would question their humanity.
I don’t believe being a Data Scientist is something attributed to you because you’re being paid for it, this is the reason I really despise the term “Aspiring Data Scientist”. Instead of aspiring, why not be it? Do the work a Data Scientist does, and if you don’t know, find out. Then do it! Becoming more attractive will correspond with the number of opportunities you will be given, and how you present yourself is totally in your control.
And that’s your strategic path right there!
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. The best way to stay connected with me is through LinkedIn…
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like: | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/a-strategic-approach-to-becoming-a-data-scientist-2e0f1bf65ebf | ['Kurtis Pykes'] | 2020-12-02 12:53:46.817000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Innovation', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Advice', 'Technology'] |
Data Processing In Rust With DataFusion (Arrow) | Data Processing In Rust With DataFusion (Photo By Author)
Rust is the most beloved language, according to StackOverflow, it is on the top of the list for four years! Data processing is getting simpler and faster with a framework like Apache Spark. However, the field of data processing is competitive. DataFusion (part of Arrow now) is one of the initial attempts of bringing data processing to the Rust. If you are interested in learning some aspects of data processing in Rust with DataFusion, I will show some code examples in Rust with DataFusion, as well as compare the query performance between DataFusion and Pandas.
Update: I initially wrote this article in DataFusion version 0.15.0. With release 1.0.0 of DataFusion and Arrow, I have added both the code and benchmark so we can see the improvement.
DataFusion
Andy Grove created DataFusion, and he had some great articles about building modern distributed computing, for example, How To Build A Modern Distributed Compute Platform. The DataFusion project is not for the production environment yet, as Andy mentioned,
“This project is a great way to learn about building a query engine, but this is quite early and not usable for any real-world work just yet.”
The project was donated to the Apache Arrow project in February 2019, and more people start to contribute to the Arrow version of DataFusion.
DataFusion is an in-memory query engine that uses Apache Arrow as the memory model. It supports executing SQL queries against CSV and Parquet files as well as querying directly against in-memory data.
The project description may not deliver too much excitement here, but since the entire project is done in Rust, it provides you ideas about writing your analytics SQL in Rust. Additionally, you can bring DataFusion as a library to your Cargo file for your Rust project easily.
Initial Setup
To test run some code with DataFusion, first, we need to create a new Rust package
cargo new datafusion_test --bin
Then bring DataFusion as a dependency in Cargo.toml file
[dependencies]
arrow = "1.0.0"
datafusion = "1.0.0"
Test Dataset
There are many datasets available online, Kaggle is one of the places that I usually go to and explore the new dataset. We are going to use The Movies Dataset, and the complete version of this dataset is about 676.68 MB. The movie dataset has the following schema
userId: int movieId: int rating: double timestamp: long
To work with CSV file format, DataFusion used to requires us to provide the schema here, as version 1.0.0 introduced schema infer, this is not needed any more.
let schema = Arc::new(Schema::new(vec![ Field::new(“userId”, DataType::UInt32, false), Field::new(“movieId”, DataType::UInt32, false), Field::new(“rating”, DataType::Float64, false), Field::new(“timestamp”, DataType::Int16, false) ]));
Initial Select (version 1.0.0)
As more features introduced in version 1.0.0, DataFusion API brings lots exciting enhancement. You’d see improvements like schema infer, easier to print result and more. The Code is much concise and easy to read.
Code Example for DataFusion 1.0.0
Performance Comparison Between DataFusion vs. Pandas
It won’t be a fair comparison since DataFusion is entirely new and lack lots of optimization. But it’s still interesting to see the current state of DataFusion and compare it with mature data processing package like pandas.
Disclaimer: I am running it on my personal Mac 13 (2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5) to perform the benchmark, the result could be biased. Since the initial benchmark was published in debug mode, noticed the performance is significant different in release mode.
Query 1: SELECT Top 10 Rows
Query: “SELECT userId,movieId,rating FROM ratings LIMIT 10” DataFusion: 0.7s Pandas: 6.15s
DataFusion is running very fast on random access ten rows here. On the other hand, pandas is about 6s slower.
Query 2: Get Each User’s Average Rating
Query: “SELECT userId, AVG(rating) FROM ratings GROUP BY userId” DataFusion: 18.57s Pandas: 6.24s
As Pandas uses NumPy under the hood, it is not surprising to see good performance on the Pandas side. On DataFusion side, though it is slower than Pandas, the performance is also reasonable to perform those types of aggregations.
Query 3: What is the Highest Rating Score
Query: “SELECT MAX(rating) FROM ratings” DataFusion: 15.28s Pandas: 5.97s
As the previous analytics query seems is slow, this query would also be slow on DataFusion side.
Final Thoughts
As we discussed first, DataFusion is an exciting attempt in Rust to get into the competitive data compute market. As the DataFusion project is still an early stage and requires more contributions, it is not surprising to see some slow performance on certain types of queries. Also, as described in the project README, some key features are missing, so you have to be careful about the SQL command you write and double-check to see if it is currently supported or not.
Overall, DataFusion is an attractive beginning with Rust for the data world, and especially it is part of Apache Arrow now, DataFusion can leverage features easily from the Arrow ecosystem. I’d expect to see considerable performance improvement and more supported SQL features in the future version of DataFusion. | https://towardsdatascience.com/data-processing-in-rust-with-datafusion-arrow-56df5432de68 | ['Chengzhi Zhao'] | 2020-08-04 22:25:39.313000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Data', 'Rust', 'Data Science', 'Data Engineering'] |
Five Tips for Emerging NFT Artists from Lux Expression, The Industry’s Niftiest Card Issuer | Five Tips for Emerging NFT Artists from Lux Expression, The Industry’s Niftiest Card Issuer Rarible Mar 20·5 min read
A couple of weeks ago, we had the pleasure to host a Clubhouse session featuring Lux Expression, an NFT artist whose Lux Cards collection has recently passed 310 ETH (over half a million US dollars at the time of publication) in market cap. The latest series of his glossy, mesmerising 3D cards that naturally had a chameleon sitting on top of each one — an homage to a popular cryptocurrency ranking website — sold out in about 30 seconds.
Lux Expression entered the NFT world in late 2020, settling in quickly. Combining his creative vision and marketing know-how (10 years of experience in the design industry have surely played their part), the pseudonymous creator has crafted his formidable and easily recognizable brand (alongside an active Lux community) in just a matter of months.
It only made sense, therefore, to ask Lux Expression to share his experience of creating successful NFT collections, promoting art and building meaningful relationships with collectors. So whether you’re a budding NFT artist considering going full-time, or someone who is about to mint their first work, here are five tips that might help you to get a better understanding of the burgeoning NFT market.
1. Be Unique and Memorable
“Your art must grab your audience’s attention immediately,” Lux Expression stressed at the very beginning of our Clubhouse session. “There is a lot of noise on NFT marketplaces, and even the most talented artists can get behind if their work doesn’t catch an eye right away.”
Indeed — even the most talented or technically proficient artists can go unnoticed, given that the NFT market is highly saturated. Luckily, that’s something that can be dealt with.
The building blocks of every art collection are the art pieces themselves, so make sure that they are unique. Be it through incorporating some eye-catching visual elements or even music, the important thing is to make sure your work is novel or stands out in some kind of way.
The peripheral elements of your NFT are highly important as well, as they can also make it more distinguishable from the masses. These mainly include your piece’s name and description.
“The name of your NFT, the description or any surrounding element that goes alongside when you are presenting it are incredibly important,” Lux Expression noted. “All of that can add to the collectible’s value — or, likewise, it can even decrease it.”
Finally, consistency is key. A quick scroll through Rarible would show you that artists who use similar color palettes and design elements are the ones who really stand out. While marketing does help, your work ultimately needs to be able to sell itself.
2. Engage With Your Audience
Think of each work or collection as a dialogue between you and your audience. People tend to collect art that resonates with them, so the message that runs through your works might play a crucial role, ultimately convincing your buyers to make the purchase.
“Ideally, you want to manifest an emotional response of your audience,” the artist said when asked about it. “With Lux, I put a lot of effort into the branding side of things, communicating to my collectors what I value as an artist and as a person”.
“There is something that’s called mnemonic devices where you can utilize language in a way that triggers an emotional, memorable response,” he added, stressing once again the importance of a work’s name and description.
Another way that could help trigger an emotional response from your audience is to reference real events and experiences with your art. In Lux Expression’s case, that was to reflect on major industry milestones such as PayPal entering the crypto space with some of his Lux Cards series. Embedding a piece of history into the art itself helped the artist to add to the collectability of his NFTs.
3. Know How to Market Yourself On Social Media
Social media is your friend. Using Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Discord, Reddit, Telegram (and even Clubhouse now!) can help you gain more exposure for your works.
During the Q&A session, Lux Expression remembered his early days in the industry. At the time, he studied some artists who seemed talented, but weren’t getting much traction. He soon realized that social media was their main point of failure. “It became apparent to me that there were not many people who knew how to [manage their social media] correctly,” he recalled, adding that there are many useful guides on that available online.
If you’re looking for some inspiration, you can take a leaf out of Lux Expression’s book. One of the first functionalities he built into the Lux ecosystem was a virtual gallery in CryptoVoxels, called “Lux Vault”. Members of the Lux community can send their NFT to the vault and, if approved by the community, the piece gets published on Lux Expression’s Twitter account and showcased in the gallery, which gives them a major boost and helps to secure first sales.
4. Immerse Yourself in NFT
NFTs have a steep learning curve, which is symptomatic of such a cutting edge concept. One of the best ways to learn about it is to get yourself immersed in the community — luckily, there are loads of people willing to guide you through the blockchain maze. “Being very active on communications platforms like Discord was very helpful for me early on — actually, Rarible Discord is very active and there are a lot of collectors on there,” Lux Expression said, adding:
“It’s a very interesting route we are all taking, and I think there will be a lot more utility and functionality for NFTs in the future. These are still early days. Rarible, OpenSea and such platforms are the first to open the door and show the light.”
5. Be Humble
If you are getting started in the NFT space, be humble and disciplined. You might have heard quite a few rags-to-riches stories about people making a fortune on collectibles, but remember that being a successful NFT artist or trader requires skills, knowledge and persistence above all else.
“If you’ve joined recently, don’t overprice your work,” Lux Expression said, highlighting that he released his first Lux Cards — which take a lot of artistic and rendering skills — for just five dollars per piece:
“Reward those who take a leap of faith and engage with your collectibles. As artists, we must understand that we are essentially working for people who believe in us and our collections.” | https://medium.com/@rarible/five-tips-for-emerging-nft-artists-from-lux-expression-the-industrys-niftiest-card-issuer-463a704432a4 | [] | 2021-03-20 15:07:19.264000+00:00 | ['Nft', 'Marketplaces', 'Cryptoart', 'Blockchain', 'Tips'] |
ALBUM RELEASE: FOLKLORE BY TAYLOR SWIFT | Taylor Swift’s 8th Studio album “FOLKLORE” is out today. The “surprise album” announced barely hours before release, is accompanied by a Single titled Cardigan alongside a video treatment.
The 16-track album is available now across all platforms, here.
Taylor Swift took to her socials to announce the release of her 8th studio album folklore yesterday.
“Most of the things I had planned this summer didn’t end up happening, but there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen,” she wrote in an Instagram post announcing the album.
Written in isolation; Taylor remotely teamed up with a handful of her musical heroes — and indie legends — including The National‘s Aaron Dessner (who worked on 11 of the 16 songs), Bon Iver‘s Justin Vernon (he makes the record’s only guest appearance on ‘Exile’) and long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff.
Taylor had this to say about the first single, ‘cardigan’. “The song is about a lost romance and why young love is often fixed so permanently within our memories, why it leaves such an indelible mark.”
The single is accompanied by a magical music video which Taylor wrote/directed. “A million thank you’s to my brilliant, bad ass video team — cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, producer Jil Hardin, executive producer Rebecca Skinner, AD Joe ‘Oz’ Osbourne, editor Chancler Haynes, special effects wizards David Lebensfeld & Grant Miller, and set designer Ethan Tobman. The entire shoot was overseen by a medical inspector, everyone wore masks, stayed away from each other, and I even did my own hair, makeup, and styling.”
Album tracklist
01. the 1
02. cardigan
03. the last great american dynasty
04. exile (feat. bon iver)
05. my tears ricochet
06. mirrorball
07. seven
08. august
09. this is me trying
10. illicit affairs
11. invisible string
12. mad woman
13. epiphany
14. betty
15. peace
16. hoax
NME REVIEW
‘Folklore’ feels fresh, forward-thinking and, most of all, honest. The glossy production she’s lent on for the past half-decade is cast aside for simpler, softer melodies and wistful instrumentation. It’s the sound of an artist who’s bored of calculated releases and wanted to try something different. Swift disappeared into the metaphorical woods while writing ‘Folklore’, and she’s emerged stronger than ever. | https://medium.com/urban-central/album-release-folklore-by-taylor-swift-799ef8156471 | ['Urban Central'] | 2020-07-24 10:49:02.890000+00:00 | ['New Music', 'Press', 'Pop'] |
7 Dash Apps Bringing AI & ML to Sports Analytics | 7 Dash Apps Bringing AI & ML to Sports Analytics plotly Follow Apr 1 · 18 min read
📌 To learn more about how to use Dash for AI/ML Applications in Sports Analytics, view our webinar recorded on April 21st, 2021 with Sebastian, Plotly’s Product Marketing Coordinator
Author: Sebastian Leighton Cooper
As a sports fan, can you imagine this moment?
It’s the bottom of the ninth, two outs, 3–2 count, the batter focuses as he wags his bat over the plate…
Countless hours and pure devotion by the athletes, coaches, and trainers lead up to the unfolding of these epic sports dramas.
Here’s a secret: the real heroes at the end of these contests… are often Data Scientists!
2017 Finals — Credit…Kelley L Cox Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
That secret is spreading more every year: If you want the trophy at the end of your season, you must leverage Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence in your organization’s approach — you must grow beyond the “eye-test.” The Golden State Warriors, powerhouses of the 2010’s after 40 years of futility, built a numbers strategy that is being emulated across the league. The NFL even hosts $100k-prize Kaggle competitions! From attaching harnesses to Rugby players for analyzing positioning and mitigating injury to the first ever Sports Analytics academic major, experts, enthusiasts, and educators alike are learning to use cutting-edge tools to help their teams win and follow their favorite games.
Brad Pitt in “Moneyball.” — Credit…Melinda Sue Gordon
Plotly’s Dash Enterprise data visualization platform makes it easy to build these tools. We’re arriving at the next frontier for both front-offices and practice floors. As we lean into Moneyball, let’s take a look at 7 apps covering Baseball, Soccer, Formula 1, and Basketball — all built with Dash that demonstrate just how innovative your team’s strategy can become:
⚾ MLB History Explorer
Author: @cursesincode
Link to app: https://dash-gallery.plotly.host/dash-baseball-statistics/
Reach out for the source code!
Statistics seem integrated into the (inter)national pastime. All eyes will be fixed on Hyun Jin Ryu of the Toronto Blue Jays and Gerrit Cole of the New York Yankees when they take the mound for the first game of the season — and their hits, strikeouts, and pitch counts. Many major league stadiums still hand out scorecards so fans can even keep track themselves!
Baseball features a mature (and at times dizzying) nomenclature and is likely the most mature of all sports analytics. In 2015, Major League Baseball (MLB) installed a state-of-the-art sensor and camera array called “Statcast”, collecting and analyzing a massive amount of data for front offices, broadcasters and fans. While vanguard tools like Statcast quantify the raw skills of players today, let’s take a look at baseball’s statistical history, dating back as far as the early 20th century.
Born of curiosity, this MLB history explorer uses historical statistics retrieved from Sean Lahman’s baseball database. Start by selecting between Team, Batter and Pitcher/Fielding Analysis and choosing a baseball era. Use the sliders to further focus your view dating from the first World Series in 1903 to the COVID-shortened 2020.
(Feel free to hum Take Me Out to the Ballgame to yourself.)
Team Analysis
For this example, we’ll select, arguably, the most successful sports dynasty in history, the ‘19-’41 New York Yankees who won 9 titles during the span. Each team’s championships won are listed, followed by their win/loss performance within the set time range.
The team’s batting performance is measured using the team’s Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) and Slugging average (SLG). On the same page, the fielding performance of the selected team is illustrated by stacking together the teams total Errors and Double Plays. We can see that peaks in their team batting stats corresponding strongly (but not perfectly) with their WS wins.
The Earned Run Average (ERA) has historically been one of the most common measurements of a team’s pitching staff, averaging the number of runs allowed by the team’s pitching staff over a 9 inning period while the Strikeout-to-walk Ratio K/BB displays the team’s rate of strikeouts for each walk. Examining these Yankees, it’s no surprise they were so often victorious with a minuscule team ERA of 3.2 in ’27 and a scorching K/BB ratio of 1.39 in ‘32.
Batting Analysis
While Babe Ruth or Ted Williams aren’t slouches, Jackie Roosevelt Robinson might be the most famous and iconic baseball player to have lived. Let’s look at his on-field contributions because not only was he a trailblazer, he was really good at baseball.
Select an era, then a team, then a player, and view their basic personal profile along with statistics and an individual analysis breaking down their On-Base-Percentage(OBP), Slugging Percentage(SLG), and On-base Plus Slugging (OPS) percentage is displayed. The OBP determines how frequently a batter reaches base per plate appearance. Slugging represents the total number of bases a player records per at-bat. OPS is a combination of a player’s On-base percentage (OBP) and Slugging average to illustrate how well a player can hit for average and for power.
Dizzy yet? Like we said, Analytics in Baseball is mature. To prevent the graphs from becoming too overwhelming, players’ At-bats were omitted as well as stats that weren’t official during the selected era (like the Sacrifice Fly).
Pitching/Fielding Analysis
While just about every athlete plays a position, except Designated Hitters (DH), it is important to consider a player’s contributions on the field. The third and final page of this application evaluates a player’s Fielding as well as Pitching (if applicable) ability. Life before, select an era, team, and player to see their defensive statistics. We’ll continue with Jackie Robinson’s tremendous impact at 2B.
For many, analyzing the Fielding percentage (FLD/FPCT) is the only way to determine a player’s value at a given position. This calculates a player’s tendency to make an expected out whenever they field, throw, or receive the ball without making an error. Now pitchers, while their FLD is important, are judged by another slate of robust record-keeping.
For pitchers, let’s examine another titan: Bob Gibson.
For this application, a player is evaluated as a pitcher using Walks And Hits Per Inning Pitched (WHIP), Winning Percentage (WPCT), along with their Earned Run Average (ERA) and Strikeout-to-walk Ratio (K/BB). As it suggests, the WHIP is a modern method of tracking a pitcher’s effectiveness in preventing base runners. Similar to the team pitching evaluation, the app illustrates the selected players ERA and K/BB. Gibson’s 1968 season leading to a World Series appearance and Cy Young award, may very well remain one of the best pitching performances ever!
From the first World Series to today, understanding how a player affects a teams’ performance is essential. The MLB History explorer will allow any nostalgic fan and analyst to discover their favorite team’s past and uncover the players that contributed to the team’s success!
2. ⚽ Match Data Analysis
Author: @douglashagey1
Tech used: Snapshot Engine, Design Kit, Job Queue
Link to app: https://dash-gallery.plotly.host/soccer-match-analytics/
Reach out for the source code!
From pitching to the pitch we go. Soccer is notoriously difficult to analyze being such a low-“event” sport, compared to, say, baseball, (goals are few, balls go out of play often, even stoppage time can seem unspecific) but the availability of tracking data and development of technical language has revolutionized the way that teams are able to focus on actionable insights. Watching the beautiful game on the telly rarely captures the whole story.
Douglas Hagey’s app analyzes the performance of any team’s collective movements and assists with the assessment of individual players. Dash Enterprise’s Snapshot Engine empowers users to capture, archive, and share point-in-time revelations — no matter where in the match they reveal themselves. Using such analysis (without the hindrance or distortion of simple video feedback), coaches and managers can recreate match action in order to evaluate unique activities including:
Players’ individual on-ball activity and off-ball positions and movements
Team formations (on attack and defense and offense)
Selecting for whole team movement or portions of players
Animating this tracking data to better understand game-flow, and more!
Knowing where an opposing team takes the majority of their shots could have a significant impact on your preparation for the match. Tendencies related to set plays, crosses, assists to shots, corner kicks, goal kicks, etc. gives a team a distinct edge. The below snapshot diagrams set plays and each player’s action (identified by jersey number).
One particular metric of interest is “progressive passes”. A recent series of articles from the Where Goals Come From Project details how progressive passes are key to scoring goals in a sport where goals are a relative rarity in comparison to other sports. As such, calculating and assessing progressive passes is key to understanding threats coming from the opposition as well as advantages inherent in your own team’s ability to produce these kinds of passes. Additionally, graphing progressive passes allows a team to visually assess whether there are distinct, habitual patterns and actions performed by opposition teams.
The use of highly targeted terms like “expected goals” (xG: the probability for any shot to turn into a goal or the cumulative probabilities of such events at the end of each match) and “passes per defensive action” (PPDA: the quantity of offensive passes before defensive challenges are made adjusted by number of possessions) has proliferated. They aren’t perfect indicators, but they greatly expand how scientists can help teams to study opposing teams, players, and goalies, assess their own team’s performance, fitness, and adherence to the match plan and even serve as a tool in player recruitment. Smart teams will capitalize on Data Science’s advancements in this realm.
The selected data, courtesy of Metrica Sports, really scratches the surface of just how revolutionary this data could become.
For a larger sample of what apps like this can do, check out Doug Hagey’s twitter for glimpses of how access to larger pools of data can be focused into serious advantages!
3. 🏎️ NASCAR Spoiler Design Optimization
Author: @peterdsharpe
Tech used: AeroBox
Link to app: https://dash-gallery.plotly.host/dash-airfoil-design/
Reach out for the source code!
The history of airfoils is an interesting one. In 1967, Lotus made its Formula One debut with the Lotus 49. In 1968, it became the first F1 car to use aerofoil wings to increase its traction navigating hairpin turns. In planes, airfoils add lift and reduce drag, producing flight! In cars, it’s actually the reverse: at high speeds, the increased drag and downward-force are trade-offs against pure speed to increase the tires’ grip on the road.
The future of airfoils is bright and getting faster! Peter Sharpe studies aircraft design, multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO), and applied aerodynamics in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He made this Dash app to help MIT student racing teams optimize their vehicle performance:
“I’m envisioning an app that lets automotive engineers interactively design spoiler airfoils to maximize downforce during turns. I occasionally advise automotive student teams here at MIT about aerodynamics, and questions about this topic always seem to come up.”
In case you’re not, yourself, a PhD in Automotive Physics and Design, below are some helpful hints to navigate this app:
The app starts by displaying an airfoil that shares a lot of features with the DAE51 airfoil used on the Daedalus human-powered airplane. (An MIT-built plane that still holds FAI flight records)
The Daedalus Aircraft 1988 — Credit… John McIntyre
Toggle the first salmon-colored modifier button on the left side to find a dropdown menu with interactive sliders.
Angle of Attack rotates the airfoil relative to the oncoming air. A negative value here generates downforce like a car’s spoiler and positive values generate lift like an airplane’s wing.
Height adjusts the vertical location of the airfoil compared to the ground.
Ground Effect modifies the aerodynamics engine to treat the bottom boundary of the flow field as a “wall”. As an airfoil approaches this wall, lift can be massively altered — this effect is key in automotive aerodynamics.
Streamline Density modifies the number of streamlines that are drawn. (As density increases, calculations become more complex, so be patient as the callback renders on the screen.)
Next, we can also directly modify the shape of the airfoil using Kulfan (CST) parameters (“class function/shape function transformation”: a popular classification method where a design’s physical features and geometries could be represented exactly by analytically smooth and consistent mathematical functions). An app like this cannot account for the full possibility of all design choices, so it was defaulted to three degrees of freedom for each side. However, adding back the complexity here actually requires changes to just one line of code.
Approximately speaking, on both the top surface and the bottom, the three Parameters correspond to: nose curvature, middle thickness, and trailing edge angle (in descending order). Adjust these levels and watch the shape reform itself.
Finally, a text output of the airfoil’s Raw Coordinates (using the *.dat file format convention that is universally used in aerospace design) is provided to the user, so that they can take airfoils they’ve designed in the app and use them in other applications.
Putting all these tools together, we can create everything from the airplane airfoils shown above to automotive airfoils in the following screenshot below. Throughout the entire design process, the engineering figure of merit (lift coefficient, or equivalently, downforce) is given in the bottom left!
Next, after all those numbers have been crunched, calculations made, and design choices executed, let’s examine what happens when the rubber meets the road…
4. 🏎️ Formula 1 Stats Explorer
Author: @christopherjeon
Tech used: Design Kit
Link to app: https://dash-gallery.plotly.host/formula1stats/
Reach out for the source code!
I have to admit, Lewis Hamilton is my favorite Formula 1 driver. He is the first black driver to race in the sport. He’s cool. He’s suave. He’s even got nice hair. But is he good at racing?
Actually, Hamilton is arguably the greatest! Let’s see his and his all-time competitors’ stats with Chris Jeon’s awesome app using Dash Enterprise’s Design Kit!
Parsing data from the Ergast Developer API, this web application easily reproduces thousands of race results, driver and constructor rankings, up-to-date timetables, circuit layouts, and comparisons of Formula 1 seasons from 1950 to present. Ergast’s vast database makes it easy for motorsport fans to visualize and interact with F1 data.
This app goes full throttle and conveniently assembles information not only spanning decades but also scraping current news feeds as they update today!
Seasons
Ever wondered how each driver accumulated points for each race in a given year? The Seasons page visualizes the points progression of any driver in any given year using Dash and a line chart produced with Plotly’s graphing library.
Drivers
With Ergast’s vast database, you’re also able to access the biography and race results of every single Formula 1 driver that has competed in the motorsport since 1950. This page takes advantage of Dash’s DataTable components as well as information from Wikipedia.
Constructors
While Formula 1 may seem like an individual sport, there is also a team/constructor aspect to it as well. This page shows the percentage of points earned by team in any given year.
Circuits
Formula 1 offers a diverse range of circuits located everywhere across the globe -until you’re lucky enough to visit each one, we can access a bird’s eye-view. On this page you will be able to see who has won the most, who secured the most pole positions, and who has the fastest lap time in history at this circuit.
Now, Lewis Hamilton may be fast… But I think this crew might even be faster! Honestly, everything about Formula One racing impresses me. And we can conveniently collect that information all in one place! Let’s speed on to our first of three basketball apps!
5. 🏀 Shot Chart Explorer
Author: JP Hwang
Tech used: Snapshot Engine, Design Kit, Job Queue
Link to app: https://dash-gallery.plotly.host/bball-shot-explorer/
Reach out for the source code!
One of the defining trends in the last decade of the NBA has been its growing emphasis on efficiency. It saw the rise of Moreyball and shot charts becoming fashionable parts of mainstream basketball coverage. The Shot Chart Explorer app maps the league, teams’ tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses and adds context utilizing AI.
The example below breaks down Brooklyn’s offense to separate its tactic-based (shot location) and execution-based (shotmaking) prowess. It shows Brooklyn’s outstanding shotmaking talent despite a 10th best location-based efficiency.
The app also identifies teams’ similarities based on location or accuracy profiles. Minnesota may be a dead ringer for Brooklyn for its shot locations, but they have a dramatically different accuracy profile, as confirmed by the shot charts.
Another look at the shot efficiencies chart above confirms that Minnesota lies about “fifty feet of crap” below Brooklyn, despite making similar shot location choices.
For those looking to understand impacts of situational variables such as number of dribbles or defender distance, a sensitivity analysis lays out an overview for each variable, and how it impacts the shot distance as well as accuracy, for each team, as well as for the NBA as a whole. Does the team get much of its points from catch & shoots? Are they, on average, more open than other teams? You can see it here:
And finally, filtered, in-depth shot charts allow the analyst to get down to the weeds in any data subset as they would like.
This data includes all regular season shots from 2016–17. Follow the links to see what you can find about your team, or configure the constraints to test your basketball hypotheses!
6. 🏀 NBA Player Performance and Scouting Explorer
Author: @_jphwang
Tech used: Snapshot Engine, Design Kit, Job Queue
Link to app: https://dash-gallery.plotly.host/bball-player-explorer/
Reach out for the source code!
In just a single season, the league’s player list is 500-strong. Looking over its history, that number swells to over 4,500. Given all that, it’s no surprise to see endless debates about who player X reminds us of, and whether player Y is more like a center or a power forward. As for the scouts, evaluating and projecting players is not any easier.
That’s where the NBA Player Performance and Scouting Explorer app comes in. It aims to provide an unbiased, structured, interactive way to trawl through what can be an overwhelming list of players and metrics.
The Player Finder is designed to help place a player in the context of the league in its history. The Player Finder arranges all players in the database according to a combination of physical and statistical similarities. Select your favorites, and adjust the weighting of physical or statistical similarities to see what happens.
That’s just the start of what this app can do. Frustrated by the limitations of grouping players by one of five traditional positions? Try the player grouping tool as demonstrated below.
This tool uses machine learning to cluster players by similar attributes and/or statistics, into any number of groups. In the above example, players are grouped by what might be typical metrics for point guards. Once the groups are derived, you can explore each group’s details further by seeing what positions make up the group, and how their statistics compare against the rest of the league.
Here, the AI has identified two clearly different groups (1 & 3). Even though their three point attempt rates are similar, their assist numbers are clearly differentiating factors. Here is group 1:
And now group 3:
And each group’s physical attributes can be put into the context of the league as a whole (see below: left: group 1, right: group 3), and any physical outliers identified. (You may notice a certain 221cm man who likes to hoist up three-pointers from Texas.)
This app can help to take player evaluations, comparisons and projections to the next level through its clever groupings and structured, unbiased outputs.
7. 🏀 Player Video Computer Vision Analysis
Author: JP Hwang
Tech used: Snapshot Engine, Design Kit, Job Queue
Try the demo on Dash Enterprise
Reach out for the source code!
Our last app… returns in earnest to the “eye-test”. Fans can see a lot watching a game on TV. On the court, basketball is a fast game. Even for seasoned scouts and evaluators, it’s not easy to spot differences when limbs are flying on the hardwood, let alone to quantify minute changes in kinetic motion.
The Player Video Computer Vision Analysis app solves that problem by providing pose analysis outputs to any video. Take a look at the clip below, where the app analyses this YouTube video in real-time and adds landmarks to the figure of two-time MVP Steve Nash’s free throw form.
The outputs can be quantified, displayed, and analyzed, to learn how the best do what they do, or to identify your own players’ potential sources for improvement.
If you’re looking to identify the perfect free throw form from another two-time league MVP, see how we can map Elena Delle Donne’s form.
Steph Curry is quantifiably the best three-point shooter in NBA history. Sometimes, the “eye-test” doesn’t lie. Case-in-point: this legendary practice session.
The same app can easily be adapted to utilize videos from a webcam, or to compare two videos. The real-time nature of these outputs makes it ideal for training sessions, or to see if a player’s in-game mechanics start to falter under pressure or fatigue.
Maybe it could even be used to help quantify degrees of difficulties in dunk contests. (Aaron Gordon was robbed, for the record.)
Click the above links to see analysis in action! Or enter a YouTube URL on the app to track your favorite player’s kinesthetics!
Conclusion
1% of humans can dunk a basketball. 1% of humans can race a car at 200 mph. 1% can throw a 95 mph fastball. 1% can hit that fastball 425 ft for a homerun. You and I may only be able to imagine these feats of athletic prowess. Yet it is the power of our mind’s eye that allows us to create tools like the ones we just examined!
Sports Analytics combined with Data Visualization and powered by Plotly’s Dash Enterprise takes what our coaches, players, trainers, and executives can imagine, and transforms it into science. That science can help us achieve victory!
Maybe one day you’ll be able to visualize yourself lifting your team’s championship trophy high above your head for the world to see.
If you have any questions about Dash and what it can do, get in touch with us!
Also if you have more questions about these apps and want a demo, come see our webinar on April 21st. 2021! We’ll talk sports and meet some of the apps’ creators! | https://medium.com/plotly/7-dash-apps-bringing-ai-ml-to-sports-analytics-cb6e7c993064 | [] | 2021-06-28 01:25:12.600000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Basketball', 'Data Visualization', 'Dash', 'Baseball'] |
by Martino Pietropoli | First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.
Follow | https://medium.com/the-fluxus/saturday-83838649e000 | ['Martino Pietropoli'] | 2017-06-10 01:46:13.267000+00:00 | ['Saturday', 'Psychology', 'Life', 'Humor', 'Comics'] |
15 Things That Happen When You Fall In Love With Your Life Instead Of A Person | 1. You discover what you’re wildly passionate about, and you make time for those things.
Love is beautiful, but it isn’t everything. There are so many other things to be passionate about besides a person — art, photography, music, writing, literature, sports, exercising, work — to just name a few. When you start falling in love with your life, as opposed to investing all your time and energy into a relationship, you find time for the things that light a fire within you, the things that inspire and fuel you. And your life becomes more satisfying and complete as you focus on those things rather than romance.
2. You become more in-tune with your wants and needs.
Falling in love with your life means learning what you love, what you desire, and what you need. It means focusing on your goals and how you can, and will pursue them. It means discovering what you really want out of relationships, out of yourself, out of your existence on this earth, and creating a well-designed plan for your future.
3. You value the relationships that you do have, instead of focusing on the ones you don’t.
Romantic relationships aren’t the only things that fill your life with love and happiness. When you’re focused on things other than your love life, you invest more time in the people who fill you — your family members, friendships, and other platonic relationships. And you learn the incredible value of those people.
4. You travel, explore, and live selfishly.
When you fall in love with your life, you want to squeeze every minute dry. You want to travel to new places, try new foods, explore, and live how you want. This isn’t wrong. Falling in love with your life means taking advantage of what you have and chasing after the things you want. It means doing, going, and truly living.
5. You shift your focus to other important pieces of life.
When you’re not focused on a relationship, you take and make more time for other things — your career, hobbies, future, finances, etc. Your priorities shift in healthy ways and you learn to ground yourself rather than letting a relationship ground you.
6. You spend more time doing things, rather than wishing for things to happen.
Falling in love with your life means that you don’t like to waste time. You don’t like to chase things that don’t build or grow you. You don’t like to live a mediocre, uninspired existence. When you love your life you do things, rather than being a passive character in your own story.
7. You value advice from others, and take time to lend a listening ear.
You want to learn, to experience, to grow, to be inspired. Thus, you value the advice and guidance given to you from others and you’re more willing to be a support system for people who may need you.
8. You take more time to appreciate the little things.
Suddenly, little things like the sunset or a dog curling up next to you on the couch carry meaning. These little things that you so often overlooked are a central focus, and integral part of the wonderful, meaningful life you’re living now.
9. You are continually striving for better.
You pursue a life that supports your dreams, goals, and purpose. You appreciate where you are, but are never satisfied. You want to achieve more, be more, and live even more authentically. You love who you have the potential to be, and are continually trying to build and develop that person.
10. You spend more of your days outside or in nature.
The world around you has more value now. You enjoy hiking, walking, biking, or just sitting outside in the shade. You love just being — around friends or solo, just soaking in the beauty the world has to offer.
11. You feel fulfilled by the memories, experiences, and relationships you have in your day-to-day existence.
When you fall in love with your life, you aren’t looking for a romantic relationship to make you feel whole. You feel complete because of people around you, the experiences you’ve had/are having, and the memories you are continually making. Your happiness isn’t dependent upon a significant other, rather all the tiny, wonderful things that give you meaning and purpose.
12. You pray often, and feel both humble and thankful for what you’ve been given.
Every day, life surprises you with its beauty and wonder. You find yourself praying for the blessings you’ve been given, and relying on your faith to pull you through the hard times. You trust that you will find love when the timing is right; in the meantime, you are thankful and humble for where you are.
13. You no longer feel sad about not being in a relationship; your happiness is invested in, and dependent upon other things.
Your ‘single’ relationship status is no longer a burden or a negative label. You have come to terms with where you’re at romantically, and aren’t looking for a lover to fill a hole in your heart. Instead, your happiness is dependent on your experiences, your passions, your other relationships, and yourself.
14. You find yourself in awe of all that you’ve been through, and of the person you’re still becoming.
When you fall in love with your life rather than a person, you start to value yourself and what you’ve overcome. You start to see your purpose, and how events in your life have shaped or changed you. You find yourself in awe of how you’ve grown, and excited for who you will become.
15. You have learned the slow, beautiful, complicated, rollercoaster ride of loving yourself.
You still have days when you struggle to love yourself, but because your life has shifted from loving someone to loving your existence, you’ve learned to value your own heart and mind. You’ve learned that it’s okay to put yourself first, healthy even. You’ve learned that you are the only one who can determine your happiness. And you’ve learned that when you love your life, love will come when it’s meant to. | https://thoughtcatalog.medium.com/15-things-that-happen-when-you-fall-in-love-with-your-life-instead-of-a-person-20549032b2de | ['Thought Catalog'] | 2019-08-29 16:06:01.228000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Self Love', 'Self', 'Self Discovery', 'Love'] |
Can a vegan diet help you lose weight? | Can a vegan diet help you lose weight?
Hiyaa!! Welcome to my blog! I hope you are having a wonderful day, if not then its okay. Its okay to be tired of your life. Its okay to feel what you're feeling right now. Trust the process. I am sure you'll feel better after some time.
So, We all have seen skinny vegans at some point of our lives promoting veganism and we all have wondered if going vegan will actually help
our weight loss. But mind it, if you opt for veganism you have to take care about all the multi vitamins you're taking and whether you are getting all the nutrients that are required for our body or not.
I opted for a vegan diet in the beginning of 2020 and let me tell you, it was BAD. I did not consult a doctor or took any of the multi vitamin tablets needed or any other supplements these people take. I suffered. A lot.
I only did it for like 10 days and did not even did it properly. Some day I had honey or a yogurt that wasnt from a plant based milk and someday I had so much craving for meat and many more. Also I wasnt getting proper nutrients and thus my hair started falling badly by the end of those 10 days.
Apart from that I also plateaued on my weight and my skin was worse than ever. I am not saying that you shouldnt opt for a vegan diet or all vegans are insane. I am just saying that dont make a mistake like I did. Consult a specialist or your doctor. Take proper supplements needed and then continue with your diet. Take care and I hope you succeed.💓
Best vegans I know on YouTube
Lilly Sabri ( one of my favorite people on YouTube)
https://youtu.be/PWkv8HkG5vc
Pick up limes : https://youtu.be/OJxMsypwnqg
Boho beautiful: https://youtu.be/xCyvgMZmPUI | https://medium.com/@pariyanimaryam/can-a-vegan-diet-help-you-lose-weight-ad2b2a9f789c | [] | 2020-12-18 07:15:45.419000+00:00 | ['Fitness', 'Health', 'Weight Loss', 'Vegan', 'Nutrition'] |
Power of Why by Setting-Deadlines. Maximilian Alexander Agostini PRSC | Live your legacy
Put a date on the calendar, it is date simple, once done you are getting serious, if you don’t and that event arrives, you are embarrassed and humiliated.
Deadlines is not only a great way to get yourself to stop procrastinating, also an encouragement to simply finish up the task required. As that time approaches, you may feel more motivated to get the task done, it also encourages to creating a daily routine, and to start appreciating that the sun rises, and if there is an extreme power in your mind, you also be able to get out of bed early enough to play a round of golf with your friends, no matter how late or early you did go to bed last night.
Stop hitting the Snooze Button:
To commit to something forces you to do the work, once you put a date on the calendar you will become disciplined and to try to balancing your work-life-style and
stop ending up in talking yourself out of doing the work, believe me, New Years resolutions are not the date that will make you succeed. Teams need coaches, construction sites need leaders to lead for greatness, same as life needs a hobby, only working all the time will most likely never let you reach top-tier-performance. Meet friends, talk and share, stare into enemies eyes, and make it clear to your life and opponent that there is no quitting. My opponent and enemy is the SNOOZE Button on my alarm-clock for sure, every step out of bed and to knock down this feeling of being tired, the slow
walk to the coffee machine, nothing left in my tank, being tedious will never ever break me, even if I am broken and wounded, issues are here to be resolved, work is to be done and completed. Sometimes we only got one single shot and if this goes wrong, we could have lost the whole project or a magnificent sales opportunity, but even if you fail you get up and your spirit will keep you out of those distractions. Sometimes only a short get-away, to a driving range, is already an encouragement to getting out of bed and to simply make the best of your 24 hours today, how you are going to respond and how you are going to use every single minute of this precious life, is simply up to you, we all know that life is not rainbow and sunshine, one day we will have to get used to being attacked, and to get hit, it is never about getting hit, more about how many times you can take the hit.
Life is so short, use every single moment and appreciate to be on this wonderful planet earth.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
If there are any questions that may arise in the meantime, please feel so free to contact me directly at (86–21) 6157 4954 or drop me an email to max (at) prscenterprises (dot) com.
Kind regards from the very city centre of Shanghai, The People’s Republic of China,
Max
Maximilian-Alexander Agostini
PRSC APAC Procurement Team a division of People’s Republic Sourcing Channel Limited Corp..
Chief Executive Officer
People’s Republic Sourcing Channel Limited (Shanghai, CN)
People’s Republic Sourcing Channel Limited (Beijing, CN)
People’s Republic Sourcing Channel Limited (Dubai, UAE) | https://medium.com/@maxagostini/power-of-why-by-setting-deadlines-maximilian-alexander-agostini-prsc-e8d1d1f04619 | ['Max A. Agostini'] | 2020-12-24 11:01:03.843000+00:00 | ['Golf', 'Strategy', 'Business Intelligence', 'Business', 'C2c'] |
What to Pack for a Hiking Trip: Your Ultimate Guide | Spring break is just around the corner and you are all set to hit the trails but don’t know how to pack? Well,smart and easy does the trick.Packing perceptively is one of the key to bagging the summit successfully.But you have to consider where you are headed to,how cut-off the place is and what the weather forecast is telling.Here is our list of things to pack:
Backpack: A lightweight and comfortable backpack is necessary for carrying the gear you’ll need.You should pick a backpack that has user-oriented storage compartments and is just the right size for your need.
Navigation Tools: A topo map and a compass are your go-to guardian whenever you are about to get lost or setting foot in a new territory so they are must haves.You could also use a GPS device but unlike former devices it needs a battery so you must keep a USB power bank in case it needs a recharge.Map should be kept in a water-proof map-sack to keep it dry and protected.
For navigating in the dark,headlamps and flashlights (or mobile built-in) are the necessary devices you must have even if you are planning a day-hike.
Photo by Banff and Lake Louise Tourism
Hydration: No-one wants to come back from a trip dehydrated which was meant to be a wonderful experience.You should browse about water resources on your route and have a water purifier so you can replenish whenever the opportunity comes and don’t have to carry extra weight by loading on water bottles.Statistically two-litre per person is minimum you could start your hike with.
Nutrition: It is recommended to pack food which is nourishing to have a safe food experience.Opt for dry and canned goods which do not require refrigeration and have a longer shelf life like energy bars,fruits like bananas ,apple,oranges,nuts,seeds etc.
Clothing: Wear clothes which have simple layering,insulation against the sun and have quick dry property as a caution for unexpected climate changes.
Foot Wear: Footwear depends on where you are hiking, whether it is a rocky trail or a smooth trail.Hiking boots are sufficient for both cases while running trail shoes are ideal for the latter one.
First-Aid Kit: For unprecedented events on a hiking trip , a first-aid kit is necessary.Most hikers or backpackers carry a ready-made first-aid kit which provides basic equipment to treat minor injuries and illnesses.You could customise the kit according to your personal preferences as you become a seasoned hiker.
Personal Items: It is rational to keep your personal identity on yourself all the time.It is recommended that you keep your personal ID,credit cards and cell phone with you so that they can be availed in case of emergency.
Miscellaneous Essentials:In addition to the things mentioned above ,here is a small list of tools that are also necessary:
an emergency shelter if you are on a multi-day backpacking trip.
a knife or a multi-tool,a whistle,tenacious tape,climbing rope,insect repellent.These things come handy in time of need.
fire starters,lighters to build fire in nasty weather conditions.
That’s it.This list provides a pretty much basic guide but you can modify it according to the requirement of the hiking trip.I hope this guide helps you pack aptly and make your trip an unforgettable one. | https://medium.com/@mariahareem/what-to-pack-for-a-hiking-trip-your-ultimate-guide-f094808c3c99 | ['Maria Hareem'] | 2021-03-31 11:17:18.123000+00:00 | ['Hiking Gear', 'Hiking'] |
DIM team and HYBSE join forces with MINDEX and GMEX Group | DIM and HYBSE have today made a joint venture with MINDEX and GMEX to deliver a revolutionary blockchain exchange that is based in Mauritius.
This joint venture brings the opportunity for institutional investors to access an exchange with cryptocurrency ETF’s and other crypto-instruments for the first time. The following asset classes will be available on the exchange:
Cryptonized Shares
Cryptonized Currencies
Commodities
Indices
Forex
ETC’s (Exchange-Traded Commodities)
ETF’s (Exchange-Traded Funds)
CETF’s (Crypto Exchange Traded Funds)
Furthermore, will SME’s be able to use HYBSE to seek capital through IBO.
You can see the official announcement here including a press release from cointelegraph.com:
https://medium.com/welcome-to-dimcoin/joint-venture-announcement-5717dd6b74e5
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not provide financial or investment advice.
I’m a paid promoter for DIM. The above is my personal view and not an official communication by DIM. | https://medium.com/dim-univers/dim-team-and-hybse-join-forces-with-mindex-and-gmex-group-b60a0855d6ac | ['Morten Madsen'] | 2018-11-06 19:31:18.658000+00:00 | ['Investment', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Money', 'Investing', 'Bitcoin'] |
The New Colours | The New Colours
A poem about that longing trapped in writer’s mind
Photo by AltumCode on Unsplash
the writer in me longs to dust the many shelves in my mind.
the poems trapped in the pages, the many stars.
the writer in me wants to wrap the sky with new colours. | https://medium.com/broads-non-grata/the-new-colours-a9bfda377e26 | ['Priyanka Srivastava'] | 2020-12-30 17:45:36.471000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Writing Life', 'Writing', 'Words', 'Writers On Writing'] |
Planning for accessibility from the start | Modular heated pavement. Sidewalk and road maintenance can be a common impediment to accessibility. The Quayside plan features modular pavers that can be individually and quickly replaced if one cracks or breaks. Pavers at key street crossings and intersections would also include heating elements that can prevent buildup of snow and ice on pedestrian throughways, making streets more passable to people using wheeled mobility devices and more comfortable for service animals year-round.
Wayfinding beacons. Beacons are small objects, about the size of Post-it Notes, that emit signals that can be picked up by smartphones or other Bluetooth-enabled devices. Beacons can broadcast navigational information about the environment that is especially useful to people who are blind or partially sighted — for example, that there is a garbage bin to the right of the staircase. In Quayside, beacons would enable the use of BlindSquare and other wayfinding apps as part of the default streetlevel experience. Related areas for wayfinding innovation that we have identified included audible traffic approaching signals and artificial intelligence floor describers.
Adaptive signals. To further improve street safety and work towards a Vision Zero goal of no street fatalities, we’ve designed an adaptive traffic management system that can prioritize pedestrians and detect when people need more time to cross the street. This system would be particularly useful for people moving slower or experiencing physical disability.
Sidewalk width. All thoroughfares in Quayside are planned to have at least enough room for two people using mobility devices (wheelchairs, scooters, white canes) to ride or travel side by side or for two people to sign while walking. Even more room would be provided wherever possible. Critically, thanks to feedback during the co-design sessions, the sidewalk pavers themselves are designed to be large enough to fit a wheelchair or scooter.
Curbless streets. In Quayside, instead of a vertical step separating the vehicle right-of-way from pedestrian paths, tactile indicators would indicate the line between pedestrian-only areas and spaces shared between pedestrians, bikes, and low-speed vehicles.
Accessible, affordable autonomous vehicles. Self-driving vehicles have the potential to transform travel in cities, and have particular potential for people experiencing reduced mobility or sensory perception. We commit to partnering with ride-share services to provide a physically accessible and affordable autonomous vehicle experience.
Designing accessible buildings and homes
Our accessibility plans go beyond mobility. For housing, we plan to build adaptable “Loft” spaces that make homes easier to renovate, allowing them to serve the individual needs of their tenants.
To ensure we were on the right track, we talked with Chris Stigas, CEO and co-founder of HandiHelp, who helped us make sure Loft units would enhance the experiences of people using wheelchairs or other mobility devices. For example, during our conversation, we discussed using fold-away tables and doorways that were threshold-free to make maneuvering as easy as possible.
In fact, a session co-hosted with the Inclusive Design Research Centre focused on improving these “threshold” moments: transitioning through a door into a home, between floors in an office building, or past a badged access point. That’s because getting through a door with an armful of packages can be difficult for anyone — and may also be difficult for people who are partially sighted, using a wheelchair, or experiencing reduced dexterity.
Digital technology can provide safe and secure building entry without push buttons or fob keys. (Sidewalk Labs)
The difficulty of these threshold moments can be eased or eliminated by applying simple technologies, like automatic doors. Where access control is necessary, doors can have a contactless scanner for a card, fob, or phone. Participants in the co-design session highlighted these as useful innovations, particularly when they are all knit together, such that a single access device can open doors, call elevators, negotiate access controls, and request street crossings.
We commit to a design principle that “fewer doors are better.” When doors are necessary, designs should preference sliding automatic doors over button-controlled doors.
Wherever possible, we incorporated best practices in DeafSpace, architectural principles tailored towards the deaf community. We saw these concepts in action at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., where they make use of easily controllable window shades (so that your eyes won’t be strained when signing) and soft corners inside buildings.
Creating infrastructure that reports back
What causes a frustrating delay for some commuters can create an arduous ordeal for others — the wheelchair user faced with a broken elevator at her transit station; the student with cognitive disabilities whose bus route unexpectedly changes; the older adult experiencing sight loss whose daily walk is interrupted by road work.
Wearable tech can provide wayfinding instructions and alert people to obstacles or delays. (Sidewalk Labs)
But imagine if people could be alerted immediately when station infrastructure breaks down, when transit service gets delayed or detoured, or when street maintenance occurs — and be instantly re-routed via a smartphone or wearable device. Participants at a Sidewalk Labs accessibility hackathon prototyped just such a technology, which would allow pedestrians using the BlindSquare app to be safely guided around construction sites.
We commit to developing infrastructure capable of reporting itself as broken and to working with existing navigation tools to ensure every journey in Quayside is accessible, safe, and convenient for all.
Always looking to improve
By no means is our work in the accessibility sector done. We’re currently in the process of hiring an accessibility consultant in Toronto and have consulted with the CNIB Foundation on designing our wayfinding and publicly available technology systems to be open to all.
Through these innovations, we hope to see the breakdown of systemic barriers that often make it harder than it should be for members of our community to easily enjoy all aspects of Toronto life. By putting accessibility at the forefront, we believe we can create one of the most inclusive communities in the world.
Mary-Margaret McMahon is Director of Community at Sidewalk Labs, based in Toronto. Samara Trilling is a Software Engineer at Sidewalk Labs, based in New York. | https://medium.com/sidewalk-toronto/planning-for-accessibility-from-the-start-e7cea8552bc7 | ['Sidewalk Toronto'] | 2019-10-25 21:39:27.914000+00:00 | ['Mobility', 'Urban Planning', 'Inclusion', 'Accessibility', 'Toronto'] |
The Great Division | What happens in the corporate world post covid?
The isolation economy caused by covid forced us to change. It forced us to accept pre-existing technology that we had resisted e.g. remote working, zoom calls and online collaboration became a necessity.
As we overcame our inertia to change then this in turn allowed for new possibilities as the the adoption of more industrialised technology enables new wonders to appear. These basic patterns of the evolution of technology, inertia, forcing function and times of peace, war and wonder are staple parts of the mapping diet. Nothing about this isolation economy induced by COVID was surprising which is why we were so able to accurately predict its general effects.
Nothing should surprise us about what will happen next. As we move into the post isolation economy and pressure of the forcing function that is COVID is reduced then some companies that have adapted fully will appear to accelerate compared to those that will attempt to return to old patterns of work driven by issues such as power and status between the physical and virtual world. That top floor office, that expensively furnished boardroom will turn out to be a curse.
We should see a bifurcation of society with some companies accelerating far ahead of the pack. This will be compounded by a new time of wonder as those accelerating companies spur creation of new services, new practices and the resultant confusion of terms this creates as we explore the uncharted but adjacent possibles.
For many, as they slam on the brakes by returning to the office, they will face a future of increasing confusion, uncertainty caused by a bewildering array of terms and competitors that seem so far ahead that they are almost magical. For others, they will barely notice the change as they accelerate far beyond others by simply continuing with the adaptations that they have already started.
Acceleration is relative.
The single most important factor for any company in this time will be the imagination and willingness of executives to adapt to the change. Many companies will face a grim future as executives exchange the adaptability that was forced upon them for the warm comfort of an expensively furnished top floor office. Bifurcation and the twin forces of creation and destruction (known unimaginatively as creative destruction) will wreak their havoc as they have done so, many times in the past.
This will be a time of the great division, between the haves and the have nots, between varying rates of speed in the corporate world. Don’t be so willing to rush to return to the office, act in haste and you’ll repent at leisure. | https://medium.com/@swardley/the-great-division-87a58e8d3709 | [] | 2021-05-10 08:56:30.027000+00:00 | ['Strategy', 'Mapping'] |
In The Twilight Hours Of Our Discontent | Didn’t we see it coming? Didn’t we know I’d break it all and be broken as a result? I was trapped in the room with the purple wallpaper alongside a special friend that fed on souls and snapped my wings off as it tried to devour me. I had fallen so far from God’s grace that when I looked in the mirror I saw a stranger staring back at me. Where was my light? Where was my love? Where was my halo? Where was my divinity? Stolen, sacrificed, snuffed out, crushed. I incarnated in the realm of mortal men and I didn’t understand their ways. I didn’t know that this game was competitive instead of collaborative and inherently predatory. You had to eat consciousness to remain conscious. What a grossly wicked deal we make with our higher selves when we volunteer to be of service in this realm of fallen stars and broken dreams, where only the crudely powerful thrive by stepping on the necks of their brothers and sisters.
I should have been better prepared. I was hasty. I had to have it now. I rushed to judgment. I thought this was the duty I was born for, until the exact moment I was born. Then I came to the awful realization that I was dependent on enslaved victims for my survival. Why was everyone’s eyes glazed over? Why was everyone acting out roles that did not align with their true selves? How had everyone suddenly become a performance artist? Did they realize they were a story being told? Did they realize they were making art? Did they realize they were an echo of the distant past? I don’t think they did. I think they were convinced that every line they uttered originated from within them, and not from somewhere further up the food chain.
The world is suspicious of me now. My father looks at me like he’s wondering what I’m hiding, what drug I’m taking this time. He’s too clever for his own good. I’m actually not taking any. I had my first sober Christmas in years and I can be proud of that. We had a nice time together, as nice of a time you can have while giving each other gifts you don’t need while people starve. But it’s all about keeping up appearances. My guides told me that I have to be human. There is no way around it. I try my best. I certainly don’t put myself above anyone else. I’m just wired a little differently.
These are hard days for everyone. We are all under greater stress than we have ever been before. This is why I’m guided to infuse my stories with love, because that is what the world needs from us right now, not a recitation of the ills and obstacles, the dangers and the evils. We know them all too well. But I’m not feeling the love right now. I’m being systematically broken down by my circumstances and made to feel the fool for just attempting to live my life to the best of my ability. You knew what you were getting into. I am unsympathetic to your ultimatums and critiques.
They could pull the plug at any moment. Imagine having that specter following you wherever you went. It’s chilling. When my guides speak to me I feel the bitterly cold breeze of entities that have witnessed the full scope of human suffering and who have no patience and no tolerance for petty complaints. This is fair. What is not fair is driving me to the brink over and over again as a means of testing my ability to perform under pressure. You must have ulterior motives. I won’t waste my time speculating.
My best friend’s sister is in the throes of active addiction and I saw her briefly at his wedding. She did not look to be in good shape. A group of us were talking about her and one young man was being exceptionally harsh. I wasn’t saying much at all because I am an addict and I know exactly what it’s like to carry that addiction with me into social gatherings. And yet this young man doesn’t judge me. He gives me a pass. I know I should have said something. If I were a brave man who had the courage of his convictions I would have. Instead I was silent. That night I had a dream where I was trying to talk to my best friend’s sister. She was too high to understand a word that was coming out of my mouth. I told her that the little verbal flubs and awkwardness that come with social anxiety was not what people would remember. Being high is what people would remember. I said something along the lines of people not understanding. That’s when my guides, who were standing to the side, cut in with a curt ‘They can learn’. My guides don’t mess around. After what people have done to each other and this planet they don’t cut us much slack. They can’t afford to. If you’re an adult you’re expected to act like one.
So what I perceive as harsh and unforgiving and painful might actually be love in some alternate universe. They said I was too smart to be this far behind my classmates. I said maybe I am this far behind my classmates because I’m too smart. Either way, it’s been a unique learning experience, albeit one that has put real lives in jeopardy. They’re hard on me. Very hard. Relentless. Sometimes I blast a song in my headphones and squeeze those headphones tight to my ears to try to drown out the voices, but they still cut in, demanding to be heard.
Like I’ve said in the past, it’s not easy to have a genuine spiritual experience when you’re mentally ill, because the spiritual is invisible like the mental and they easily get confused for one another. But there is an entire profession devoted to treating mental illness, because it interferes with one’s quality of life. If you are simultaneously having a spiritual experience they will naturally view it through a psychiatric lens and see it as just another symptom in need of treatment. Then you begin to doubt yourself. Am I having delusions? Are these people I see and talk to all just figments of my overactive imagination? But we’ve tried to talk and medicate them out. They’re not going anywhere. They’re more real than I am, since I am a second generation consciousness.
What is the most discouraging to me is when I hear the voices announcing that they’re out or they can’t do this anymore or when, God forbid, I hear them arguing with one another. I guess I’m a divisive personality. A polarizing figure.(wink wink) That does not surprise me in the least. What does surprise me is entities with too much time on their hands ever giving up on me, when they’ve been on my case for a mere fraction of their existence. I know I am receiving celestial charity and that I should be grateful, and I am, but I constantly feel the need to prove myself worthy of their benevolence. You made the right decision and you won’t regret it. Or so I say.
These are the twilight hours. The hours in which the day gives way to night, science gives way to superstition, hope for a better tomorrow is suspended in shadow and love struggles to reach the last survivors of the Earth game with its radiance. It is the time when martyrs reflect on the sanctification of their doom, when saints turn into dissolute sinners, when time is marked not by the numbers on your phone or by the ticking of the clock but by our consciousness passing through the heavenly bodies. This is the time we contemplate what it means to be human in the midst of the gravest battle humanity has ever fought.
I can’t tell you what it means to be human, because I am barely one myself. I could say it means to be loving, kind, compassionate and empathetic. I could say it means learning from mistakes and learning, period. I could say it means balancing your internal and external realities. I could say it is a striving for meaning and purpose and a universal context. I could say it means doubt, despair and helpless anger, and it also means hope, resiliency and perseverance. It means ingenuity and creativity. It means building and destroying. It means the ability to reflect on our own sentience. It means a knowledge of death. It means a search for a higher power. It means complexity. It means we fall but we don’t stay down. It means that we rally to the causes of justice, equality and freedom. It means that we tend to our sick, and our sick at heart. It means that we try to do our best by each other when we’re not doing terrible things to each other. It means that we’re guilty and ashamed and humiliated. It means we possess an inherent dignity that no amount of torture can take from us. It means we need one another. It means we came together and formed societies for our mutual benefit and that that basic model of living has lasted throughout the ages. It means good and bad, light and dark, the best and the worst. It means we have hearts and minds and spirits that all know how to sing, even when they are besieged by the forces that would seek to silence us. It means going to sleep and having bad dreams. It means desperately trying to awaken to the truth. I can’t tell you what it means to be human, because I barely am one myself.
I’m just trying to make it through another day. I get so frustrated at how dependent I am on my external environment for my mood, and thus my behavior. My guides will dispute this, but I’m not suicidal. I want to live as long as I can do so humanely. My unconscious mind must have more influence on my conscious mind than I realize because you accuse me of suicidality when I wasn’t aware what I was doing was dangerous. I want to be that guy who says he is taking the reins of fate and riding that horse into the great beyond. I don’t have his confidence. I’ve been made to believe that I am just living someone else’s dream. I think back to the entity who showed up and told me she liked my story. Well harrumph. I don’t like it! Or maybe I like it too much to let it go and that’s the problem. I’m the method actor that lost himself in his role like Jim Carrey channeling Andy Kaufman in ‘Man on the Moon’. Even when he was lounging about on set Carrey never broke character. I think I’m that person. The person who mistook his dream self for his actual self and paid an awful price.
Twilight is when you sundown. When you start to forget. Maybe I could forget all the little things, the unnecessary things, in order to make room for the things I want to remember. There is a special power in memories. They are a mixture of our brain’s recording system, an artist’s rendering of the past, suggestions, manipulation, cues and our own vivid imaginations. If we could extract memories, actual memories, we would not see a literal depiction of a past event, we would see a subjective impression of that past event. And the event might not even be past or present. It may be from the future. Stranger things have happened.
I don’t know if I’m fully prepared for what comes next. I know that I’ve shown complete devotion to my work. I would rather collapse at the keyboard then on my kitchen floor. Anything is possible on these winter days when the sun bows out early and darkness is painted across our pristine blue sky. Never before have I been afraid of winter. I’m afraid of this winter. But it won’t get the best of me. I’ll have the final say. I’ll eventually arrive at the point where I can warm myself up in the middle of a blizzard, or at least openly surrender to the fact that there is a blizzard and I need to move along. It’s time now, I think. It’s time for all of us to do some soul-searching, because we know that we are better than the world we have created. We deserve to live in a world of truth and peace and harmony. This will take time, and even if we don’t get there we are ennobled by the attempt.
Come with me my friends. Come round the campfire during the twilight hours and I will tell you a story of how humanity rose up with one voice and, at long last, shouted ‘Enough!’ It may sound like a fairytale to the cynics, but I promise I only tell true stories. Or, at least, stories rooted in truth. Because it is getting late for us to be wandering about on our own, persecuted by our internal predators that are forever afraid and forever hungry. It’s time for us to grow up. It’s time for us to do the hard work of deconstructing our whole selves and unlearning all that we have been taught. They’ve been whispering stories in our ears for decades now, stories about how humanity is ugly and greedy and untrustworthy. Don’t believe a word of it. We don’t have to hate ourselves or others anymore. We can learn to love, and once we do there isn’t any force on Earth that can stop us. | https://medium.com/grab-a-slice/in-the-twilight-hours-of-our-discontent-231606a3be03 | ["Timothy O'Neill"] | 2020-12-27 20:58:00.786000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Spirituality', 'Self', 'Reflections', 'Mental Health'] |
3 Unfortunate Consequences of Trying to Live a Better Life | You Will Regret the Past.
As I worked toward my personal success, I felt my past holding me back.
The closer I got to my goals, the more salient my past failures felt. The closer I came to a better life, the more I realized how much time I had wasted living without direction. Regret is the emotion we feel when we think that our present experience might be better if we had done something different in the past.
In a paper published in 2008, studies revealed that:
We perceive regretful experiences as offering the least opportunity for improvement in the future. People experience the most regret for outcomes that are not repeatable. Perceptions of higher past than future opportunities and low psychological closure predict regret intensity.
Therefore, missing in the definition are two necessary components to feeling regret — agency and imagination. The more agency we have in a particular situation, the more we feel regret. And similarly, the more we can imagine a better present experience if we had done that one thing differently, the more we feel regret.
In my case, I had a strong sense of agency and imagination. Therefore, I felt a powerful sense of regret — if only I had decided to live a better life sooner, I would be XY% happier or YZ% better off. At first, I tried to rationalize my regret to avoid it. Our society tends to demonize regret. We say there’s no point crying over spilt milk. There’s no value in lamenting about things that happened in the past. We prescribe methods always to look forward, never to look backward. I bought into this regret-avoidance narrative. And it made me miserable.
For a long time, I lived an uninspired life. I woke up tired, went to work, came home and watched movies till late, inevitably leading to another tired morning. On the weekends, I drank and partied and engaged in purely hedonistic behaviour.
I had aspirations to be more, but I made excuses. I didn’t have enough time; I was too busy. I didn’t have the resources; I needed more money or access to learning materials. It was just my age; my 20s were to have as much fun as possible. It was my friends; they were always asking me to go out. It was everything — except for me.
At that moment, I rationalized my experiences, justifying my actions based on the person I was, the information I had or lack thereof. I’d think about a particular string of decisions, concluding that my life happened exactly how it was supposed to, despite any regretful choices.
We’re a “BirdBox” society — we prefer blindness. We don’t like to face our realities. We put our faith in some futuristic new technology that will solve global-warming instead of modifying our behaviour. We believe money and social-welfare are satisfactory solutions to resolve decades of oppression, injustice, and hate. We block our exes because it’s easier than dealing with the emotional pain. And we silence our regret.
But I realized that when trying to live a better life, regret becomes inevitable. As you build momentum, increase your productivity, and create better outcomes, you’ll face the stark contrast between present and past. You’ll wonder how you could have been so lazy, so uninspired, so negligent.
We undoubtedly need to accept our past — we can’t live in denial. To this point, the lesson is to perceive the past in a different light. We shouldn’t rationalize our past nor hate or beat ourselves up for our mistakes. Instead, we should use the past as a metric for performance, a cautionary tale of the possibilities of living uninspired.
I needed to be broke so I could learn how to budget. I needed to be treated poorly so I could appreciate being treated well. I needed to have jobs I hated so that I could work hard doing what I love. To ignore or try to suppress regret is to live an inauthentic life. To regret is human. To live through and accept regret is okay.
I believe life isn't about living regret-free. It’s about living a life where we don’t hate ourselves for having regrets. We’re imperfect, we’ll do imperfect things, we’ll create imperfect memories — but we should forgive ourselves. Regret doesn’t need to remind us about all the things we did poorly, all the mistakes we made, all the time we wasted. Regret reminds us that we can do better. | https://medium.com/mind-cafe/3-unfortunate-consequences-of-trying-to-live-a-better-life-65e5f30c557b | ['Tenzin Ozaki'] | 2020-11-20 13:56:40.713000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Life', 'Self', 'Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons'] |
The Land of Lincoln Part I | The Land of Lincoln Part I
His Story Is History…My Story Is Mystery
Photo by Fatih Kılıç on Unsplash
Talledega I-20
travelling down a road
should mean a look ahead
for things to come
a travel down this road
to confront a past
that generated one future
and places me on this road
One dead dog, two, and then a third
large, tan, mangled, fresh,
no more than 500 feet away
emergency lights flashing
a truck on the side of the road
and as I pass
I see the driver
tall, large, holding his hands
behind his hips
as if pregnant with worry
looking out towards a ridge
where part of the nation’s pride
is known
He stares
There is grief in the way he turns his neck
towards the edge of mountain and sky
and I recall that stance
that posture
My mother used to tell me to save things for posterity
I didn’t know who she meant | https://medium.com/literally-literary/the-land-of-lincoln-part-i-a6ee58520e41 | ['Alan Asnen'] | 2019-12-01 14:25:46.416000+00:00 | ['Memories', 'Past', 'Travel', 'Poetry', 'The South'] |
Breaking Down Gender And Generational Gaps In Nepal | “We were never allowed to walk to school with girls our age.”
Saroj is from the town of Jaubari in rural Nepal, not far from the epicenter of the devastating 2015 earthquakes that left over 8,000 dead. Growing up, he recalled it was taboo to talk about sex, or even to be seen talking too often with girls. Friendship and conversation between genders was difficult, and usually occurred under the watchful eye of parents and elders.
“People were always suspecting something,” says Saroj. “Sometimes we couldn’t even speak to girls.”
Rural Nepal is bound through tight communities and extended families. Life exists around the daily rhythm of the soil, and a constant countdown to the next colorful festival. While many traditions enrich both community and culture, others hinder communication between genders and generations, blocking critical knowledge of socially sensitive issues–such as sexual and reproductive health, in the process often leaving girls behind.
“During menstruation we had to stay outside the house, sometimes we had to go into sheds with the cows. We were untouchable to family members,” said Muna Thapa Magar, a 16-year-old girl from a village not far from Saroj’s. “During menstruation, we couldn’t even see our brothers.”
Across Nepal many girls of all ages face isolation during their periods, resulting in weeks of missed school each year relative to male classmates. Boys can sometimes reinforce these stigmas, unless they are educated about menstrual cycles.
“We didn’t like to sit on the same benches as girls and if they were having their periods, we would never study together either,” said Shyam Panta, 11.
But given the chance, Nepal’s young people are optimistic and open-minded. When International Medical Corps and SOLID Nepal arrived in Jaubari, Saroj saw a chance to work together in making a positive difference.
After the earthquakes, International Medical Corps provided immediate medical relief, then stayed on in Nepal to help rebuild shattered communities. Part of this effort has included comprehensive Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health programs. The programs train healthcare providers in adolescent-friendly health services, mentor parents in effective communication with their children, and educate adolescents by building life skills and providing education on puberty, family planning, and menstrual hygiene management. Girls and boys learn together about healthy relationships and mutual respect between genders, and how to access health services.
In working with International Medical Corps to change the perceptions of his community, Saroj has grown personally as well. His father Dhurba, who received mentoring on parent-child communication, has watched his son’s development with pride.
“Saroj has grown into a confident speaker and an advocate for positive change in the community,” he says.
Speaking about his own experience, Dhurba adds, “I realize now that we parents did not have enough knowledge before.”
International Medical Corps’ Sexual and Reproductive Health program also assists pregnant mothers and their newborns. In nearly every town that offers International Medical Corps-led reproductive health education, there is a mobile maternal health program working through the local health center in partnership with the Nepal Fertility Care Center. In this program, female community health volunteers are given a mobile phone platform that helps register pregnant women in remote villages. Throughout the pregnancy the volunteers send updates to a central system which helps them in coordinating pre and post-natal care visits, watching for danger signs, deliver and obtaining feedback for mothers. Because of this program, the number of antenatal care visits and institutional deliveries in the villages has increased. At the same time, the female volunteers have gained their own skills. | https://medium.com/international-medical-corps/breaking-down-gender-and-generational-gaps-in-nepal-a1a0b1bca88a | ['International Med. Corps'] | 2017-06-28 21:07:03.061000+00:00 | ['There No Matter Where', 'Reproductive Health', 'Women', 'Children', 'Nepal'] |
The Russia-Ukraine Donbass conflict and the threats to the oil and gas industry | The impact of the Donbass conflict on oil and gas
Russia’s invasion and continued possession of the Donbass region and the Crimea Peninsula since March 2014 has subsequently caused significant, strategic level damage to Ukraine’s economy. Looking at Figures 5 and 6, the fighting between Ukraine and the DPR/LPR in the southern edges of the Dnipro-Donetsk basin, along with its proximity to Russia-Ukraine borders, would appear to deny Ukraine the full use of its largest oil and gas basin. Furthermore, the possession of Crimea by Russia would appear to deny Ukraine access to its Crimea Oil and Gas basin as well as use of its Deepwater Licences due to the risk of Russian naval activity in the Black Sea.
Adding to the above problems is the impact of Russia’s invasion on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the industry. After the conflict began in 2014, oil and gas firms Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron withdrew their investments in the Yuzovsky and Olesska shale gas blocks, affecting even the Carpathian basin despite it being insulated from the fighting. As shown in Figures 4–6, the withdrawal of these investments has amplified the impact of losing the Dnipro-Donetsk basin and the Crimea basin (Cunningham, 2014; Russia Today, 2015; Alexeev, 2014; Central Intelligence Agency, 2021; Intelligence Fusion, 2021).
Figure 5 — Donbass conflict hotspots, oil and gas resources, and major gas transmission lines (Source: Intelligence Fusion, Outside the Beltway Blog, and The Energy Consulting Group)
Figure 6 — Donbass conflict hotspots and controlled territories (Source: Intelligence Fusion)
Furthermore, ongoing monitoring of the conflict has indicated that mining, oil and gas infrastructure continues to be affected by ceasefire violations. Shown in Figure 7, the actual incidents themselves and the growing threat of mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) pose a threat to current infrastructure and personnel now and in the future. Adding to this problem is reporting which indicates that from 2024, Russia could end its contracts with pumping gas through Ukraine — denying Ukraine billions in revenue — based on the upcoming completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which will bypass Eastern Europe, rendering many of the current pipelines largely irrelevant to Russia’s economic interests.
Figure 7 — Incidents relating to oil, gas and mining in Ukraine (Source: Intelligence Fusion)
Finally, recent reports suggest the DPR intends to bolster the local mining economy and has — allegedly — been exporting goods to countries which include Russia, the UK, Japan, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. These claims of ‘exporting goods’ are more than likely to be selling goods via the black market to criminal networks — given the DPR is fighting against Ukraine — rather than legitimate trade with other countries. Given the crime incidents which have been logged which are linked to or caused by the current war — as shown in Figure 8 below — the environment in the Donbass region would appear to be conducive to such trading. Such trading will bolster the DPR’s revenues to continue fighting and increase Russia’s access to natural resources at the expense of Ukraine’s economic health and legitimate operations in the oil and gas sector (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2021; Intelligence Fusion, 2021; AFP, 2020; Yermolenko and Panchenko, 2021). | https://medium.com/@intellfusion/the-russia-ukraine-donbass-conflict-and-the-threats-to-the-oil-and-gas-industry-df6160e065ae | ['Intelligence Fusion'] | 2021-09-12 09:32:58.889000+00:00 | ['Russia', 'Threat Intelligence', 'Oil', 'Ukraine', 'Risk Management'] |
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Full Phone Specification: Everything You Need to Know | Galaxy Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Full Phone Specification: Everything You Need to Know
in this blog you can get information related to the general specifications of the product Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Full Phone Specifications, Galaxy S21 FE by Samsung and also mention the expected price and launch date. Remember the thing that we are not responsible for the whole information in this blog, there is might be few changes.
Source: whatmobile.com.pk
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Full Phone Specification
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE uses built in Android 12 OS with OneUI 3.1 UI.
This device Galaxy S21 FE by Samsung is supported 2G, 3G, 4G LTE, and 5G band as well.
It contains Octa Core CPU, with Exynos 2100 Chipset and Adreno 660 GPU.
This device named S21 FE has display size of 6.4 inches with 1080 x 2400 Pixels, Dynamic AMOLED 2X Capacitive Touchscreen, and Multitouch with Gorilla Glass Protection and 120Hz of refresh rate.
Source: whatmobile.com.pk
Galaxy S21 FE Pro has built in 128/256GB memory and 6/8GB of RAM with dedicated SD slot available (up to 1TB).
The device contains Triple Rear Camera of 12MP + 12MP + 8MP with LED Flash, and containing 32MP of front camera.
Source: whatmobile.com.pk
S21 FE has fingerprint sensor (under display) for security, Audio, Browser, Games, Torch, Messaging, and lot of extra features.
The battery that is used in S21 FE Galaxy is 4500mAh with 25W fast battery charging and 15W of wireless charging.
Connectivity: The connectivity of the device Samsung’s Galaxy S21 FE is WLAN, Bluetooth, GPS, USB, NFC (Yes), Radio (Yes), and Data.
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Price
Source: whatmobile.com.pk | https://medium.com/@chsb28745/samsung-galaxy-s21-fe-full-phone-specification-everything-you-need-to-know-5afaeefbe07 | ['Ch Sb'] | 2021-12-19 05:28:23.461000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Samsung Galaxy', 'Samsung', 'Mobile', 'Android'] |
What does “There is no widespread voter fraud sufficient to impact the result of the election” mean? | The meaning seems fairly obvious to me, but the interpretation that keeps getting repeated by damn near everyone is so obviously different, it seems clear there’s a disconnect. So let’s parse that sentence for a minute, and let’s figure out if it’s a statement of opinion, or a statement of fact. There’s really three parts to it, that can be broken into three questions. 1: Was there voter fraud? 2: Was there widespread voter fraud? 3: If yes to either (or both) of those, was it sufficient to impact the result of the election?
1: “Was there voter fraud?” Voter fraud is a broad term that can encompass many actions. But this is still an easy question to answer. First, a caveat; “There is no voter fraud” is not “there is no widespread voter fraud.” Further, the statement “there is no voter fraud” is demonstrably untrue; there was a conviction in Limestone County, Texas, for example. I didn’t go looking to determine how many convictions there are, because I’m not looking to prove “Trump was right” — I’m not insane. I’m just trying to parse the language and prove the distinctions. So, off the cuff, there’s already proven voter fraud. There’s also multiple allegations, and evidence (yet to be fully investigated, adjudicated, and proven whether it’s conclusive) of other cases. So, the answer to “Was there Voter Fraud” is a clear Yes. We do not know if there were instances of Voter Fraud that have not been detected or caught, because that’s the nature of crimes that have not been detected or caught.
2: Was there “widespread voter fraud.” This a trickier thing to parse, because it requires us to define or interpret the word “widespread” in the context of this discussion. Are we referring to the number of votes? If so, are we referring to it in relation to the number of votes nationally, or the number of votes in the given county or state where the allegedly fraudulent votes were cast? Are we referring to the number of jurisdictions it allegedly happened in? Are we breaking that down at the State Level, or is it widespread if it happened in enough counties? How many is enough?
In effect, in order to answer the question here, we have to define what we mean by the question. On its own, the question itself is too subjective. The definition I have in my mind might be different than the definition you have in yours. If I recall correctly, Rudy Giuliani has alleged they have evidence of fraud in at least six states, and that it impacts potentially hundreds of thousands of votes. In a race where some states were decided by less than twenty thousand votes. Six out of fifty doesn’t sound like that much, but would swing the election. That number of votes could swing some of those states. I’m not saying it is widespread, I’m simply pointing out the subjective nature of this term. So, Was it widespread? Verdict: Indeterminate because the word is too subjective without a consensus on how we define it in this context.
3. What does it mean to be “sufficient to impact the outcome of the election”? Well, I think we’d all agree that part is pretty obvious; if it could lead to someone else being elected, it would impact the outcome. But there is one point of contention; what if it could impact the outcome of the election on the Local, or State level, but not the Federal Level?
Either way; If the answer to 1 or 2 is yes, and we have already determined that (at least for 1) it is, was it sufficient to impact the outcome of the election? See, here’s where it turns into a complete Charlie Foxtrot. “Sufficient to impact the outcome of the election” is a conclusion. It’s a conclusion that, in order to agree with or to refute, any person seeking to formulate their own opinion on the matter would need more data than is presently available. The only way to actually determine this would be to do a complete audit and investigation and attempt to rule out voter fraud in all at-issue jurisdictions, and see what the outcome would be once it was accounted for.
Everyone propagating the line at the beginning of this article, the sentence I’ve been parsing, is seemingly implying the requisite audits and investigations have already been completed and proven what they need to, but the ongoing incomplete audits and recounts are a testament they have not. Of course, people can decide they believe, based on the data they have, that the sentence is more likely than not to be true, and can thus be repeated as if it is true. But that makes it a statement of belief, not a statement of fact. Conclusion: Insufficient data to determine whether or not any voter fraud, whether widespread or not, was sufficient to impact the outcome of the election.
What was the point of this exercise? Am I attempting to argue that Trump Won, or Should Win? Hah, no. That’s almost as funny as the people who pretend it’s only The Republicans who are the problem, while ignoring the rot and corruption in the Democratic Party, or the people who pretend it’s only The Democrats who are the problem, while ignoring the rot and corruption in the Republican Party, all accusing me of being for the other party. Truthfully, I don’t have a dog in the fight anymore; as I said in my other article, I believe this nation has embraced tribalism on both sides of the aisle, and is done for. As for the candidates, we’re screwed either way. Anyone who believes a Biden-Harris Administration won’t be disastrous is as delusional as anyone who believes a Trump Administration is going to lead us to prosperity.
No, the point of this exercise is to get those who read it to think critically. A skill I believe the vast majority of people have either forgotten how to utilize, or chosen to let stagnate in favor of kneejerk reactions based on their partisan divides and personal biases. The point is to get people to analyze headlines like the one I began this article with, and actually think through the steps instead of just accepting the narrative whichever side you listen to is spoon-feeding you. Let’s see if it sticks. | https://medium.com/@LiterateNomad/what-does-there-is-no-widespread-voter-fraud-sufficient-to-impact-the-result-of-the-election-mean-53b9a819ddbd | [] | 2020-12-04 22:19:40.870000+00:00 | ['Trump', 'Election 2020', 'Media Criticism', 'Politics', 'Critical Thinking'] |
Curate App — Fundamentals. Hi there, I’m James, the founder of… | Hi there, I’m James, the founder of Curate, a discovery marketplace app supporting crypto payments and rewards.
My twitter profile is: twitter.com/jvhak and you can find me on telegram with the username @curateproject where I hang out in our group t.me/curate
There’s been a lot of focus recently on $XCUR, our native token, and how valuable it’s become and that’s not surprising given its 2900% rally since the beginning of the year.
However, from an end user perspective, I see even greater value in the Curate App.
In this article I’ll highlight some of the key differentials we’ll see in the upcoming Curate app and how its MOAT is wide.
Also, I’ll be discussing some of my goals for the next 18–24 months.
3 Key Features
Peer to peer marketplace for buying and selling goods, supporting crypto payments such as BTC, BCH, ETH and XCUR as payment options in addition to credit card and PayPal. Payment rewards given back to the buyer and seller as a thank you for their loyalty. Rewarding loyalty for repeat custom and activity is part of the Curate culture we are creating. An additional payments rewards layer given to engaged members based on a metric points system to encourage activity. Strict anti-abuse measures will be in place to prevent spam.
Business Model
Curate is a free to download app with free membership and no monthly subscription fees. Curate operates on a commission business model, where it currently charges a 5% success fee to the seller for any successful sale, however as rewards are issued from this commission, our net commission is 4% (see below for a breakdown). This amount is auto-deducted at the time of purchase, so all credit received into the sellers wallet is 100% theirs. By default, all sellers earn 95% revenue from their sales with upgrades up to 100% made at the discretion of the team during promotional events. Rewards will be issued to buyers and sellers who complete a sale. 20% of the commission will be split 50/50 and issued out to both parties. For example: $100 sale = $5 commission (5%), of which $0.50 is rewarded to the buyer and $0.50 rewarded to the seller (20% of 5% = 1% taken from the 5% commission i.e 4% is curates net commission). Engagement rewards and gas fees when paying in $XCUR are funded from the Curate team ETH wallet where we spot exchange the rewards token chosen by the user (ETH, XCUR or USDT).
Our MOAT
The world’s first peer to peer marketplace app supporting on-chain payments and rewards targeting two of the fastest growing industries, mobile e-commerce and cryptocurrency.
The Bull Case
Curate will be the first app to market offering the above and we plan to accelerate fast and scale up as we grow. We’ve secured our development funding indefinitely and have raised funds for Q1 and Q2 marketing already. Disputes and real reviews are a major concern to buyers and sellers. Payments in crypto solves this thanks to blockchain. When a buyer leaves a review will we display if they paid on-chain. If there’s a dispute, blockchain makes it easier to resolve. Curate’s slick UX and functionality supported our ETH node will ease the ability to buy and sell with crypto, something the crypto space urgently needs right now. In comparison to eBay, Amazon and other marketplaces our fees are fraction of what they charge, especially if you pay using $XCUR as all gas fees are covered. Proof of postage for physical goods will also be incentivised by Curate in $XCUR. A picture of the receipt of postage will kickback a reward in $XCUR to the seller for being transparent. This image is stored on-chain to keep confidential information decentralised. We’ve partnered with some great names in crypto, and these names will only get bigger as we move forward with a fully managed social media marketing campaign operated by one of the biggest agents in North America and more partners for Q2.
Goals in the next 18–24 months
My Goals (some already met):
#1 CoinMarketCap — DONE
#1 CoinGecko
#1 trending App on iOS/Android
Go public in 18–24 months
App Launch Timeline
Public pre-registration and direct approach to bigger merchants/sellers iOS app submitted to the App store as manual release (allows for internal testing and early feedback from Apple) Android to be submitted a few days later Internal testing and possible resubmissions if errors App v1.1 live App download link to sent to pre-reg user App announced to community and 2nd wave marketing starts rolling into Q2 marketing
At the time of writing we’re currently preparing step 3 (android app submission for internal testing).
Thank you for you support as always,
James
Founder & CEO | https://medium.com/@curate-xcur/curate-app-fundamentals-68bfe41cce8c | [] | 2021-02-10 00:23:45.795000+00:00 | ['Defi', 'Curate App', 'Marketplace', 'Curate', 'Xcur'] |
Investing in Near Protocol | Investing in Near Protocol
Near Protocol is a sharded, proof-of-stake public blockchain, built by a world-class team that has developed some of the world’s only sharded databases at scale. The Near team has worked extensively to understand the problems developers face when trying to access new platforms as well as the usability of layer one protocols. Developers oftentimes are unable to leverage blockchain technology due to slow settlement times and scalability challenges. We at Xpring believe in empowering developers and providing the tools to address the pain of adopting and using blockchain technology.
Near has created a developer focused experience for building decentralized applications. They address scalability using sharding and their consensus model, Nightshade. The developer suite includes tools, resources, education materials, and the Near Studio. The studio is a space to create projects and write smart contracts in accessible languages, including TypeScript and Rust, and will eventually support all of the target languages that compile down to WASM.
I am excited to announce our investment in Near Protocol, alongside investors Accomplice, Electric Capital, Pantera Capital, MetaStable, Amplify Partners, Scalar Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Ideo, a_capital and others.
To build a decentralized application on near, apply for their beta program here. Near is hiring across all functions, see openings here. | https://medium.com/xpring/investing-in-near-protocol-b3de9b6209e2 | ['Vanessa Pestritto'] | 2019-07-10 16:19:05.937000+00:00 | ['Scalability', 'Investment', 'Decentralized Apps', 'Sharding', 'Blockchain'] |
Can Being Divisive Build the World’s Best Investment Strategy? Yes. Fight Me! | Being divisive is actually super important to developing a tangible investment strategy that is built out of empirical experience. In my experience, you have to fight to gain experience. And you have to struggle to get to the point where you see the truth, rather than accept what most consider to be the truth.
If you can’t be hard-edged to do that fighting, then you don’t belong in non-mainstream, non-cautious investing. Venture capital especially is all about taking the risk, and the first thing you have to fight through to take risk is other people’s complacency.
And complacency is the norm in investing.
Many people I have met in the venture capital community, or in the invesment banking circles, tend to come at investments with group think. They think because they can articulate a thesis that everyone shares better than anyone else says it that this makes their approach and their investment stronger.
They want to feel safe. They pack their charts with data that show the past. They pack their pitch decks to committee with statistics and proof that seal up their argument to the point that you can’t actually see that they have a thesis. They are so buttoned up that they forget that the honesty that is needed in making a venture capital investment has more to do with what goes on inside the founder’s head, rather than what goes on in the P and L sheet.
The truth about great investments, and huge home run hits, is that they come out of nowhere, and you are likely only going to be able to carve out space to think about it in an investment committee or a board of trustees by pushing and pushing and pushing to make people see your point. You can’t make a home run investment, if you are too busy making sure your approach to making the investment ticks all the boxes that make it look like an investment that has already been done before.
VC investing is about non-duplicable approaches to creating superstrong growth curves. You cannot get there by looking at the past of business performance. You can only get there by dismantling everything that stands between you and the psychology of the person who is making the new reality.
I think that any VC shop that builds a divisive culture can actually go far. The fighting passionately for what you believe in, and throwing bullshit back at the person flinging it, is a good way to establish trust. When people feel emboldened to be sharp, to be critical and to to be honest, then you know they mean what they say and they mean that they will stand behind the money they put up.
There are not many places that will encourage this, especially in Asia. But it’s super important to encourage it.
Reality can only be changed when you come at it with a hammer. | https://medium.com/@douglascrets/can-being-divisive-build-the-worlds-best-investment-strategy-yes-fight-me-de10cb7e0b53 | ['Douglas Crets'] | 2020-12-27 03:58:18.249000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Entrepreneurs', 'Startups', 'VC'] |
vscode: debugging python scripts with args | On the top, left side of VSCode, find your debug settings files by going to the gear icon.
In launch.json you should see pre-populated settings that looks something like:
{ // Use IntelliSense to learn about possible attributes. // Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes. // For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387 "version": "0.2.0", "configurations": [ { "name": "Python: Current File (Integrated Terminal)", "type": "python", "request": "launch", "program": "${file}", "console": "integratedTerminal" }, ] }
For scripts, that require args you can update the json configuration to look something like this:
"configurations": [ { "name": "Python: Current File (Integrated Terminal)", "type": "python", "request": "launch", "program": "/Users/<username>/<path>/<to>/<file>/<file_name>.py", "console": "integratedTerminal",
"args": ["-p","<project_name>", "-k", "<key_name>"] }, ]
If you get an error that a Python Interpreter is missing:
You need to select a Python interpreter before you start debugging. Tip: click on "Select Python Interpreter" in the status bar. | https://medium.com/@codelovingyogi/vscode-debugging-python-scripts-with-args-d8ac1cf9a191 | ['Diary Of A Codelovingyogi'] | 2020-03-11 20:28:02.777000+00:00 | ['Vscode', 'Python'] |
Top 10 Global DevOps Consulting and Service Providers | DevOps is in full throttle.
Take a look at the supportive predictions from well-known organizations:
According to MarketsAndMarkets , DevOps market size is projected to grow from USD 2.90 Billion in 2017 to USD 10.31 Billion by 2023, at a CAGR(Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 24.7% during the forecast period.
, is projected to grow from USD 2.90 Billion in 2017 to USD 10.31 Billion by 2023, at a CAGR(Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 24.7% during the forecast period. By 2024, DevSecOps will be automated to the extent that 60% of new applications will have complete security and compliance assessment included in the continuous delivery pipeline, according to this IDC community .
will be automated to the extent that 60% of new applications will have complete security and compliance assessment included in the continuous delivery pipeline, according to this . The global DevOps market size is predicted to reach USD 12.85 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc., representing an 18.60% CAGR during the forecast period.
The popularity of DevOps is not hidden.
Tech giants such as Amazon, Netflix, Target, Walmart, Facebook and many more have adopted DevOps and delivering a superior experience to their customers. Since faster software development and delivery become essential, approaches like Agile and DevOps are all the rage these days.
I believe successful DevOps stories are significantly less than the hype DevOps has created in form of debates, summits, posts, and graphics. The real picture of DevOps can’t be seen in the numerical figures; it should be viewed in a number of organizations benefitted by it.
Let’s come to the point.
Here, I compiled the list of Top DevOps Consulting and Services Providers companies globally to help you craft successful DevOps story.
Note: This unbiased list of Top DevOps Service Companies is intended to make the selection process of DevOps outsourcing company easy for you. This comprehensive list is not a result of overnight effort. I have taken the help of Google and platforms like LinkedIn, Forbes, Clutch, GoodFirms, social media presence, and overall ratings.
We all know that the definition of best doesn’t exist. Best is subjective and depends on various factors such as time, cost, requirement, and suitability.
In order to narrow down the choices, I’ve kept the following factors in mind:
Team size
Founded year
Diversity of portfolio
Global presence
Experience
Cost
Social media presence
Important Note:
I am not favoring any company neither I have any experience working with any of them. I am amazed by the number of people searching ‘Top 10 DevOps Services Providers’ and ‘Top Devops Outsourcing Companies’ and that’s why I ended up creating this list.
The company order doesn’t matter here. I’ve kept it in a random order and I’d request readers to consider the same.
Here is the quick list of Top 10 DevOps Consulting and Services Providers
Sogeti
TCS
Accenture
CA Technologies
SPEC INDIA
SSW
Datacom
Tech Mahindra
Micro Focus
XenonStack
Let’s get into details of each:
1. Sogeti:
Sogeti is a leading technology service provider and part of Capgemini Group, a global leader in digital transformation. They hold expertise in providing cutting-edge solutions including cloud, cybersecurity, digital manufacturing, and emerging technologies with strong technology supplier partnerships.
Sogeti is UK based DevOps company that provides end-to-end DevOps service with the help of best-in-class tools, experienced DevOps team, and right devops practices. To ensure successful devops transformation, they prioritize cultural change that devops brings.
Company Size: 10000+
Founded Year: 1967
Location: UK, USA, and other countries
Other Services: Digital Assurance & Testing, Cloud services, Testing Services, Tech Product Engineering, etc.
2. TCS:
TCS is a globally well-known leader in IT services and digital business solutions. With an aim to simplify and transform businesses, TCS is one of the top employers globally representing 151 nationalities across 46 countries.
TCS delivers exceptional Enterprise Devops Consulting and Services including advisory and implementation with the use of excellent tools and strong partnerships.
TCS is a reliable name in the IT industry ensuring excellent customer experience regardless of the services you opt.
Company Size: 300,000+
Founded Year: 1968
Location: India, USA, UAE, UK, and other 40+ countries
Other Services: Application Development and Maintenance, Business Process Outsourcing, Enterprise Solutions, IT Infrastructure Services, Engineering, and Industrial Services, etc.
3. Accenture:
Accenture is one among the Fortune Global 500 companies and a global technology service provider helping enterprises embrace digital way of working and living. Covering the majority of the industries and business functions, they offer services in strategy, consulting, technology, operations, and digital.
Accenture’s devops services helping clients to deliver applications faster and with the quality-driven approach. Accenture DevOps platform can help you bring business, deployment, and operation teams together to automate the processes.
Company size: 300,000+
Founded Year: 1989
Location: India, USA, Philippines, and 52 other countries
Other Services: Accenture Strategy, Accenture Consulting, Accenture Digital, Accenture Technology, and Accenture Operations
4. CA Technologies:
CA Technologies is ranked as the largest independent software corporation in the world and a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. The company delivers system software, application software, and B2B software focusing on agile software development and DevOps.
CA Technologies, headquartered in New York, USA is a DevOps company offering end-to-end DevOps processes that enable automated software development ensuring security, scalability, and continuous delivery.
With hands-on experience and skillful Team of DevOps Experts, they help clients achieve new business heights by accelerating development and delivery. They possess expertise in agile management, automated testing, and continuous delivery to create a fully automated devops pipeline.
Company size: 10,000+
Founded Year: 1976
Location: USA and 35 other countries
Other Services: Advanced Analytics, Release Management, API Management, Cloud Solutions, AIOps, API Development, Mobile App Development, Industry Solutions, Products, Consulting, etc.
5. SPEC INDIA:
SPEC INDIA is a DevOps consulting company based in India, providing digital solutions and business IT services covering wide-ranging industry verticals. They’ve been helping enterprises grow with scalable, futuristic and feature-rich solutions for over 30 years. Their clients range from large enterprises, SMEs, to Fortune 100 companies.
With an aim to leverage experience and expertise to deliver excellence, SPEC INDIA’s DevOps services are used widely by many Enterprise clients and they are experiencing a cultural and technical shift in software development. Not only DevOps but they also hold expertise in DevSecOps which prioritizes security at initial stages rather at the end of the software development life cycle.
Company Size: 300+
Founded Year: 1987
Location: India and USA
Other Service: Enterprise Mobility, Custom Software Development, Startup IT Solutions, Cloud Deployments, Business Intelligence Solutions, IoT Solutions, Technology consulting
6. SSW:
SSW offers scalable and extensible custom software solutions with core expertise in Microsoft technologies. Their clients range from bus companies, government organizations to large accounting companies.
SSW is one of the Australia based DevOps Company, with a combination of supporting tools and culture, they help companies integrate DevOps in a development environment to improve overall quality.
Company Size: 200+
Founded Year: 1990
Location: Australia
Other Service: Software Development, Web & Mobile App Development, Business Intelligence, and Cloud Services
7. Datacom:
Datacom is Asia Pacific’s leading locally-owned IT service providers with 50 years of experience in technology. Their portfolio has a large number of diverse clientele and solutions.
Being New Zealand’s leading DevOps Company, Datacom’s Devops as a Service is aimed at bringing agility through training, consulting, and implementation by experts in order to improve overall performance.
Company size: 5000+
Founded Year: 1965
Location: New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, US and UK
Other Services: IT Management, Cloud services, Custom Software Development
8. Tech Mahindra:
Tech Mahindra delivers innovative and customer-centric IT experiences to worldwide enterprises including Fortune 500 companies. Tech Mahindra is the highest ranked Non-U.S. company in the Forbes Global Digital 100 list (2018) and in the Forbes Fab 50 companies in Asia (2018).
Focusing on velocity and connectivity, their highly-experienced team possesses the expertise to help the large enterprise in successful devops implementation.
Company size: 100,000+
Founded Year: 1986
Location: India, USA, and other 50+ countries
Other Services: Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Services, Infrastructure and Cloud Services, Next-Gen Solutions, Integrated Engineering Solutions
9. Micro Focus:
Micro Focus is one of the largest pure-play software companies focusing on building, selling, and supporting software. From mainframe to mobile to cloud, they help companies maximize ROI through high-quality software solutions.
In the spectrum of hybrid IT, they focus on modernizing core business system that can help integrate Enterprise DevOps to build the software at pace.
Company Size: 10,000+
Founded Year: 1976
Location: US, UK and India
Other Services: Hybrid IT Management, Security & Governance, Predictive Analytics
10. XenonStack:
XenonStack is a software company developing platforms for DevOps, Data Integration, Analysis, and Security. They also offer big data solutions, enterprise application development, and decision science.
They are one of the top devops consulting services and solutions companies helping enterprises to enable continues delivery pipeline across the platform with a focus on increased efficiency.
Company Size: 50+
Founded Year: 2011
Location: India and USA
Other Services: Managed Cloud Services, Application Migration Solutions, Big Data Engineering, IoT Platforms and Solutions, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, Business Intelligence
While researching, I came across some other leading DevOps outsourcing companies that are worth adding in the list:
Other Top DevOps Services Provider Companies:
11. Appnovation:
Appnovation is Vancouver based global digital solution and managed service provider helping many popular brands in driving growth through scalable digital solutions.
Appnovation’s DevOps consulting services help enterprises improve software quality, automate the processes, adopt the right DevOps culture, and build an agile software release cycle.
Company Size: 200+
Founded Year: 2007
Location: Canada, USA, UK, Europe and India
Other Services: Digital Strategy, Development & Engineering, User Experience & Design, Data and Analysis Solutions, Cloud Services, Business Process Management, Mobile Solutions
12. Sumo Logic:
Sumo Logic is among the most powerful machine data analytics services globally having expertise in delivering best-in-class cloud solutions.
They offer a number of apps for accelerating continuous delivery pipeline in any environment to simplify complex processes and challenges.
Company Size: 300+
Founded Year: 2010
Location: USA and India
Other Services: Cloud Management, Sumo Logic Apps, Monitoring and Troubleshooting, Cloud SIEM, Cloud Migration
13. ECS Digital:
ECS Digital, a London based company specializes in offering enterprise solutions to meet the evolving needs of businesses since 2003. Their focus is to leverage Enterprise DevOps and agile testing and help their clients deliver faster and better products.
With the years of experience and right skills, they are dedicated to transforming traditional software development methodologies to DevOps pipelines through the adoption of DevOps culture across the organization.
Company Size: 100+
Founded Year: 2003
Location: UK and Singapore
Other Services: Enterprise DevOps, Agile Testing, Training
14. ANATAS:
ANATAS is a leading IT service consultancy having offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. They offer enterprise cloud transformation right from planning, implementation, strategy, and maintenance. They are helping enterprises to adopt enterprise cloud computing to work collaboratively.
One of the leading DevOps Companies in Australia, ANATAS consultants help companies optimize DevOps and automation processes through dependency management, monitoring, automated testing, and infrastructure automation to build software at pace.
Company Size: 50+
Founded Year: 1996
Location: Australia
Other Services: Integration Architecture and Testing, SOA, Testing and Quality Assurance, Cloud-Native Application Development, and Enterprise Architecture
15. 8th Light:
8th Light is a leading custom software development company dedicated to building software from mobile to microservices.
A premium DevOps provider headquartered in Chicago, aiming to build software at high velocity, 8th Light assists companies in reducing cost and time by streamlining and automating deployments with a DevOps culture.
Company Size: 100+
Founded Year: 2006
Locations: USA, UK
Other Services: Blockchain, Mobile Development, Web Development, Consulting, Managed Services
16. Aim Consulting:
Aim Consulting, an Addison Group company, is an industry leader providing technology consulting and solutions delivery.
With years of consulting experience in DevOps, they’re helping organizations to realize DevOps benefits through improved quality, reduced time to market, automation, and modernized software process.
Company Size: 300+
Founded Year: 2006
Locations: USA
Other Services: Application Development, Cloud and Operations, Data & Analytics, Digital Experience & Mobile
17. Cloud Technology Partners:
With a core focus on cloud technologies, CTP, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company helps clients with designing, building, and implementing IT solutions across industries.
As they are the premier USA based cloud service provider, they make the best use of right toolset and people to assess devops maturity and automate processes with the help of DevOps experts.
Company Size: 200+
Founded Year: 2009
Locations: USA, UK and Europe
Other Services: Cloud Adoption, Application Migration, IoT, Compliance, Digital Innovation
18. Eficode:
Eficode is a Nordic-based software development company offering design, consulting, developing, and automation engineering through DevOps with a customer-centric mindset.
Eficode is an European DevOps company based in Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, specialized in creating DevOps culture by combining the right tools, operating methods, training, and supportive technologies to build software in an agile and efficient manner.
Company Size: 200+
Founded Year: 2005
Locations: Europe and Nordic Region
Other Services: Cloud Service, UX Research, Design, Software Development
19. Contino:
Contino is a global technical consultancy helping enterprises transforming people, process, and technology to create a modern way of working through DevOps and cloud solutions.
One of the premium DevOps Company in London, they help organizations leverage Enterprise DevOps with strategy, automation, and implementation to accomplish agility and efficiency.
Company Size: 250+
Founded Year: 2014
Locations: USA, UK and Australia
Other Services: Cloud Platform Build & Migration, Cloud-Native Software Development, Data Platform, and Analytics
20. Versent:
Versant is a leading technology solution provider in Australia and consults to a number of high profile clients in the finance, telecommunications, media, public sector, and utility industries.
They offer the best devops practices to enable faster, a continuous delivery pipeline through a collaborative culture.
Company Size: 200+
Founded Year: 2014
Locations: Australia and Singapore
Other Services: Cloud, API, Managed Services, Big Data Solutions, Security Solutions
You Can Help!
I tried to leave no stone unturned in providing you with Top DevOps Consulting and Services Companies. If you feel anything is missing, you can help complete this list via mentioning the names in a comment below!
Let us make this post a valuable read! | https://medium.com/hackernoon/top-10-devops-consulting-and-service-providers-globally-7f761632d7a | ['Smit Maurya'] | 2019-03-22 05:11:47.862000+00:00 | ['Research', 'Company Research', 'Devops Practice', 'DevOps'] |
A Succinct Scikit-learn Solution for Kaggle House Prices Prediction Challenge | 1. Overview of the Process Flow
The source code is split into two parts: Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and Scikit-learn modeling, and the code can be run on Google Colab. The EDA file loads the raw training and testing data from Kaggle. After the exploratory data analysis and data transformation, the transformed data is exported by using pickle. Then, also by using pickle, the second Scikit-learn modeling file loads the transformed data.
For the EDA part, the detailed code and data transformation process can be found in the source code.
Process flow of EDA and Scikit-learn hyperparameter tuning
2. Scikit-learn Hyperparameter Tuning
Cross-validation
When modeling this house price dataset, my focus was to implement Scikit-learn cross-validation procedure. Since Scikit-learn only provides high-level estimators to the users, we cannot modify the implementation of these estimators. Thus, the only tunable elements left for the users are the estimator hyperparameters. Tuning hyperparameters requires splitting the training data into training and validation data. In addition to the simple train_test_split method, Scikit-learn also provides cross-validation mechanism to avoid wasting training data.
Pipeline
However, if not used properly, cross-validation may suffer from data leakage, which means the validation data statistics may get leaked to the training data. To avoid data leakage, Scikit-learn introduces pipeline , which enables chaining multiple preprocessors together. Chaining the preprocessing estimators together with the final classifier/regressor estimator ensures that the training data remain independent from the validation data. Meanwhile, the pipeline can be easily applied to the testing data.
ColumnTransformer
To apply different preprocessing estimators to the numeric and categorical columns, ColumnTransformer is used. After separately defining two pipelines and specifying the numeric and categorical columns, ColumnTransformer is then chained to a regressor estimator for generating final output.
GridSearchCV
To jointly tune the hyperparameters of the pipeline, gridsearch parameters are defined. By calling GridSearchCV , the optimized hyperparameter combination can be found.
Here, the process of how to tune the ElasticNet estimator hyperparameters is shown. Similarly, other regressor estimators, such as Ridge, Lasso, gradient boosting, can be optimized.
# define numeric column preprocessing pipeline
numeric_features = numericColumns
numeric_transformer = Pipeline(steps=[
('imputer', SimpleImputer(strategy='mean')),
('scaler', StandardScaler())]) # define categorical column preprocessing pipeline
categorical_features = categoricalColumns
categorical_transformer = Pipeline(steps=[
('imputer', SimpleImputer(strategy='constant', fill_value='missing')),
('onehot', OneHotEncoder(handle_unknown='ignore'))]) # define ColumnTransformer preprocessing pipeline
preprocessor = ColumnTransformer(transformers=[
('num', numeric_transformer, numeric_features),
('cat', categorical_transformer, categorical_features)]) # add regressor estimator to the pipeline
ElasticNet_pipeline = Pipeline(steps=[
('preprocessor', preprocessor),
('regressor', ElasticNet())]) # define GridSearch parameters
ElasticNet_param_grid = {
'regressor__alpha': [0.0001, 0.0005, 0.001, 0.005, 0.01, 0.05, 0.1, 0.5, 1, 5, 10,100],
'regressor__l1_ratio':[0.5,0.6,0.7,0.8,0.9]} # 'neg_mean_squared_error', metrics.mean_squared_error is used here
scoring_metrics = make_scorer(mean_squared_error, greater_is_better=False) ElasticNet_grid_search = GridSearchCV(ElasticNet_pipeline, ElasticNet_param_grid, scoring = scoring_metrics, cv = 5) ElasticNet_grid_search.fit(df_train[numericColumns+categoricalColumns], df_train['SalePrice']) print(f"best score is {ElasticNet_grid_search.best_score_}, best parameter from grid search is{ElasticNet_grid_search.best_params_}")
Conclusion
This post focuses on the implementation of Scikit-learn key concepts of cross-validation , pipeline , ColumnTransformer , and GridSearchCV . Don’t forget to check out the source code on Github, to find out the code, intermediate visualization output, and the detailed code annotation.
Meanwhile, I have also modeled the same Kaggle House Prices Prediction dataset using TensorFlow 2.0. If you are interested in the differences between Scikit-learn and TensorFlow 2.0, please stay tuned! I will be updated the post on how I model using TensorFlow 2.0 soon! | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-succinct-scikit-learn-solution-for-kaggle-house-prices-prediction-challenge-b096871615f2 | ['Jiahui Wang'] | 2020-02-20 14:23:51.536000+00:00 | ['Gridsearchcv', 'Crossvalidation', 'Scikit Learn', 'Regression', 'Pipeline'] |
Blocksquare sponsors the upcoming 2020 FIBREE blockchain real estate industry report | Blocksquare sponsors the upcoming 2020 FIBREE blockchain real estate industry report
The number of people we were able to meet because of FIBREE is astounding. This is a way for us to give back but also an opportunity to take the lead in an industry bound to evolve as digitalization takes up a bigger role in real estate business in the post-COVID era. Denis Petrovcic Apr 23, 2020·3 min read
FIBREE network — reach the relevant people anywhere in the world
In 2019 FIBREE published the first-ever industry report on blockchain and real estate. The report has been officially announced at MIPIM in Paris with Unissu publishing a short review (if you haven’t already, you can download the full report here).
The report was a passion project put together by people who want to see the industry develop, grow, and thrive. With the COVID situation being what it is, this year’s edition will be published mainly through digital means and mailing lists in collaboration with the network of FIBREE partners.
We feel it is our responsibility to support FIBREE. Here are a couple of reasons why we decided to sponsor: | https://blog.blocksquare.io/blocksquare-sponsors-the-upcoming-2020-fibree-blockchain-real-estate-industry-report-b4b354591408 | ['Denis Petrovcic'] | 2020-04-23 11:52:49.152000+00:00 | ['Updates', 'Sponsorship', 'Tokenization', 'Blockchain', 'Report'] |
The Value of a Velvet Rope: Effects of Hype and Exclusivity on Launch Strategies | Welcome to TestFlight
The playbook starts with TestFlight, an app that allows startups to soft-launch their own products before publicly hitting the App Store. Until recently, TestFlight was mainly employed as a place for a company’s inner circle to test an app, give feedback, and share bugs. Due to its “invite-only” nature, however, TestFlight has recently become a popular mechanism to stoke curiosity and build hype.
This wouldn’t be a piece on TestFlight launch strategies if we didn’t start with Clubhouse, an audio-social app capturing the zeitgeist of the current Silicon Valley tech bubble. Founded by Paul Davidson and Rohan Seth, Clubhouse is still in beta with less than 5,000 users. It’s worth around $100M in valuation. Where can you find Clubhouse on the Internet? Well, nowhere, really: there’s no landing page besides a link to the waitlist, and it’s not on the app store. Instead, users receive invitations to try the TestFlight beta privately on a case-by-case basis after joining an increasingly long waitlist. (Side note: For more information about Clubhouse, check out this comprehensive guide.)
Clubhouse didn’t employ this hush-hush launch strategy by accident. In fact, the founders launched another audio app, Talk Show, before Clubhouse (and there were plenty of other audio-social apps out there, too: Anchor, Bumpers, and TTYL, to name a few). The Clubhouse founders knew how to make this launch strategy successful, and they planned ahead. For years, they built up leverage by creating relationships with some of the most influential VCs and founders around the world. They also capitalized on word-of-mouth: buzz and momentum for Clubhouse came entirely from early fans and users. There wasn’t a paid ad in sight, and you didn’t see any Quibi-like user acquisition strategies floating around the tech Twitterverse (but more on Quibi later). Perhaps most surprisingly, Clubhouse didn’t even have a launch on Product Hunt. This secrecy was part of their success.
There are myriad products that experience explosive launch day growth, yet quickly cool off and become an afterthought as time goes on. Clubhouse stands out from this group, steadfastly remaining top-of-mind among the tech community since their private launch in mid-April. The genius of Clubhouse’s launch strategy lies in its social status machine: like the most successful cult brands, Clubhouse has set itself radically apart from the rest by consistently maintaining that it is only for the select few.
The Waitlist
Clubhouse garnered a massive waitlist of potential users hoping to pass through the velvet ropes of its Testflight doors. Their waitlist was a trickle-down invite model, becoming the modern-day version of a bouncer asking, “Which two friends do you want to bring in?” However, Clubhouse is only one example out of the many companies who have employed waitlists to build a similar sense of hype and exclusivity.
In early February, Basecamp co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson promised to bring a much-needed renovation to email as we know it with the launch of HEY, a simplified, potent email service that forces you to start from scratch. Within 24 hours of Fried’s Twitter announcement, HEY had already garnered around 13,000 people on its invite waitlist. Now, about six months later, the list is hovering over 100,000 signups.
HEY is a premium product, with no free tier besides a 14-day free trial. Instead, HEY users pay $99/year (with no option to pay monthly) for 100 GB of storage. For a two-character address (think [email protected]), the price jumps to $999/year. For a waitlist that long, it must be worth it, right? That’s not for us to decide — but we do know that the waitlist was effective in getting people excited.
These waitlist case studies all tend to start the same way, with a Request early access or Grab an invite! call to action. They tend to end the same way, too: a Typeform asking for your name and email, and then… deafening silence. As customer acquisition costs rise, startups employ waitlists as a way to onboard small numbers of high-intention users, as opposed to large vanity numbers of low-intention users. This was clear in HEY, as well as in products like Superhuman and Pitch — when Superhuman launched, for example, the only way to get past the waitlist was to get an invite from someone already onboarded to the product.
It’s important for startups to employ some kind of filtering method to bucket potential users into low, medium, and high-intention users. These surveys and filters typically assess potential users’:
Role and seniority within an organization
within an organization Level of social status (by requesting social links, like a Twitter URL)
(by requesting social links, like a Twitter URL) Current workflows and operating systems
and operating systems Eagerness to use the product and familiarity with the pain point
Another case study of brands using waitlists to test consumer demand is the 2018 launch of Robinhood’s high-yield checking account. Robinhood set out to test both growth and consumer demand in one shot by developing a “social waitlist:” users were encouraged to share their unique signup link to move themselves further up the list. The result was a wave of word-of-mouth virality, with 90,000+ people joining the waitlist shortly after it went live. Spoiler alert: after the viral initial launch, it never got off the ground.
In short? Waitlists are a popular launch strategy, but they aren’t one-size-fits-all. Enterprise startups typically leverage waitlists while they stack their user base with impressive logos, thus increasing landing page signup conversion rate when they launch publicly. Consumer startups use waitlists to create network effects and ensure the product is sticky before opening up for business. As a general rule of thumb, waitlists should be used until startups see product market fit markers (more on that here), and retired as the startup scales.
The Blue Check Phenomenon (Influencer)
We get an especially fresh take on exciting product launches from MSCHF, a Brooklyn-based ideas factory known for “capturing meme lightning in a bottle.”
“We build what we want. We don’t care,” says MSCHF head of commerce Daniel Greenberg. “If we can make people a fan of the brand and not the product, we can do whatever the f — k we want.” MSCHF sets aside no budget for advertisements and marketing, and conducts no user testing of its products. Instead, they partner with “blue check” influencers like Future, NBA athletes, and MrBeast (YouTuber with over 37 million subscribers) to add virality to their tongue-in-cheek products. MSCHF’s Drop 25, a $1,000 multi-brand collab shirt, sold out in less than an hour.
The same “blue check phenomenon” is seen with gaming and lifestyle brand 100 Thieves, which boasts Drake and Scooter Braun as two of its high-profile co-owners, and Cash App, Red Bull, Totinos, and Rocket Mortgage as commercial sponsors.
This trend is common in consumer & software products, too: companies like Clubhouse and Atoms have also employed influencer marketing as part of a larger launch strategy. When Clubhouse launched, they made sure to get positive press from a number of Twitter “blue check” influencers, like Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, Chris Rock, and Mark Cuban. And when Atoms was just getting started, they capitalized on positive public feedback from notable Twitter personalities, like Alexis Ohanian, Anthony Pompliano, and Ashley Mayer.
Building In Public
One of the most well-known leaders of the “building in public” phenomenon is Austen Allred, Founder & CEO of Lambda School. Allred largely built his company on Twitter, and those who followed him got to see him build Lambda in real time. Each tweet strategically related to Allred’s bold vision of reforming the higher education landscape; Allred encouraged his followers to engage and publicly brainstorm with him. Allred didn’t celebrate Lambda’s wins alone — he and his followers were all part of the same team. Like the underdog on a baseball team, Allred was the face of Lambda School and the underdog of the tech community. Each time he got on base, the crowd went wild.
More recently, the tech Twitter community watched a similar journey with Domm, Founder & CEO of Fast. He met his cofounder Allison Barr Allen through a cold DM, hired “probably half [his] team through Twitter,” and even made connections with VCs and angels through Twitter, leading Fast to a $20M Series A round in March. As Domm explained during an interview with The Takeoff, Twitter “can be amazing at driving community support and building teams, a community of investors, or a community of users and early adopters.”
What does this “building in public” phenomenon actually look like in action? For both Allred and Domm, it looked like vulnerability and authenticity. Their playbook for building in public looked something like this:
Share real quotes & screenshots of feedback from users
of feedback from users Propose interesting product ideas and ask the community for feedback
and ask the community for feedback Articulate roadblocks the company is facing and how to overcome them
the company is facing and how to overcome them Give insight into largely unknown aspects of the company/product
of the company/product Share “sneak peeks” and vague product updates for things to come
for things to come Post screenshots of internal Slack messages showcasing company culture
of internal Slack messages showcasing company culture Tell emotional stories about your company to pull at followers’ heartstrings
about your company to pull at followers’ heartstrings Quote Tweet someone describing a problem and respond “We are fixing this at …”
Moneybags
Next in the playbook is Moneybags: paid marketing… and lots of it. Especially in recent months, we’ve watched from afar as some consumer products employed aggressive launch strategies but ultimately resulted in major flops… or nothing at all.
For example, short-form TV app Quibi predicted 7.2 million subscribers by year-end. They launched on April 6th — now, they’re on pace for just 2 million, as millions deleted the service after their three-month free trial was over.
Or think of Elliot, which invested huge sums of money into its marketing strategy, but ultimately had nothing to show for it.
According to their pitch, Elliot was “going to be the anti-Shopify — an international e-commerce platform that focused on smaller businesses in an increasingly globalized world.” Elliot branded itself as hip and transparent, securing ad placements in newsletters like Lean Luxe and gaining traction on Twitter through inspirational (and easily shareable) threads.
Now-deleted screenshot (credit here) from Elliot CEO Sergio Villaseñor.
Elliot rode the direct-to-consumer wave of marketing first, product second, spending $800,000 on marketing, according to a court document from last January. Investor checks rolled in, and excitement began to build for their planned launch on June 18. When the day finally came, however, things began to unravel: the launch was abruptly pushed back to December 25th, and a few days later, the CEO announced that he was stepping down. Within 24 hours, Elliot was shut down completely in a “triage scenario” — with many employees learning of the demise through social media before any internal channels. Their fall from greatness was just as public as their rise up in the first place.
Wild Card
Lastly, of course, a piece centered around launch strategies and virality would no longer be complete without a reference to itiswhatitis (@itiseyemoutheye on Twitter), a mysterious meme that flooded the tech Twitter timeline in late June, leveraging the relentless hype of exclusive consumer apps. It reached top Product of the Day on Product Hunt, and its website accumulated over 20,000 email signups. Perhaps most importantly, itiswhatitis raised over $200,000 in donations to racial justice charities from people who “hoped to get special treatment within [the] fabled waitlist.” As written in this Product Hunt Daily Digest, itiswhatitis wasn’t a startup, or even a product. It was a statement, highlighting the influence of secrecy and exclusivity on the entire Silicon Valley tech community — and it will forever be an important case study of consumer virality in its rawest form. | https://gabygoldberg.medium.com/the-value-of-a-velvet-rope-effects-of-hype-and-exclusivity-on-launch-strategies-8e8061cf517e | [] | 2020-08-07 02:56:40.088000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Consumer', 'Venture Capital', 'Launch Strategy', 'Tech'] |
How COVID 19 Is Affecting The Fashion Hub- Shahpurjat | Shahpurjat
“We cannot shut down completely and tell the workers to leave and not come from tomorrow forever, so we need to keep generating orders to give out salaries, we run families here. Hence, we have asked our staff to work from home and built a separate team to coordinate with them keeping in mind their safety and health first. ” — Samant Chauhan, Fashion Designer, Shahpurjat
Shahpurjat situated in South Delhi is an urban village with remnants of the Siri Fort ruins. It is a heritage site for expats with ruins of traditional havellis and fashion boutiques exhibiting the indigenous fashion of India. It is also a go to destination for the brides to be and a perfect place to find any kind of an outfit for all sorts of events. The hustling and bustling market has narrow lanes and architecture boasting of the Mughal Empire.
In the 21st century many fashion designers took rental spaces in the market due to its architectural value, existing footfall and the comparatively lower rental demands. Along with fashion designers settled migrant artisans, dying workshops and other craft guilds. Currently there are more than 500 fashion designers and other fashion accessory stores in Shahpurjat providing a daily livelihood to thousands of craftsmen and skilled workers in and around that area.
After a global slowdown and the economic reforms that urged India to change its business practices and while they were just coping up with it, hoping for 2020 to bring some relief, corona virus turned out to be another fall leaving the fashion designers clueless about what to do and how to take the next step?
COVID 19 in India
COVID 19 in IndiaPIN IT
COVID 19– Corona Virus 2019, first diagnosed in China Wuhan, had been declared a pandemic in the month of March by the World Health Organization. Spread across the globe with more than 200,000 cases, it has already affected about 173 countries.
India, the second most populated country of the world, took preventive measures to contain the corona virus. Even though health is the primary concern with the outbreak of this deadly virus, yet there are other unsettled situations creating panic amongst the business owners, store owners, traders, wholesalers and exporters.
Further the government regulation of closing down markets and urging citizens to stay indoors have worsened the situation. Earlier this week the Chief Minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal ordered for the closing down of cinema halls, markets, schools and night clubs further prohibiting a gathering of more than 50 people till the 31st of March 2020. This has led to deserted markets and empty streets, with fashion store owners peeping out of their windows in hope of the situation to calm down soon.
“You can feel the pinch, COVID has really started affecting us, as no one is coming out on the streets, the multi designer stores I sell through are also not placing any further orders, I am waiting for the month end report to know the actual status, my sales has dipped down 80%-90%”- Jenjum Gadi, Fashion Designer, Shahpurjat
JENJUM
Designer Jenjum GadiPIN IT
Jenjum Gadi, Creative Director and Founder of the label JENJUM holds a production and exhibiting space in Shahpurjat, The Lakme men’s wear designer explained that the Indian fashion market is majorly wedding oriented. The Indian culture leverages saving budgets during the wedding season. Shahpurjat is one of the most visited markets during this season. Having the April- May celebrations being pushed further to other undecided dates, the designer stays perplexed on how to tackle the current scenario. “I got a call from one of my clients, Don’t start the garment, we are not sure about the situation right now.”
“Everything is on a hold right now, so I also have to slow down the work, give offs to karigars and just wait to see what will happen further. I have just launched the S/S 20 collection and had already put it on Instagram to promote it, but nothing is getting converted, yes curiosity is there but buying sentiments are not.” He hopes that once things settle down, people will come out to buy and order making the situation better.
SAMANT CHAUHAN
Designer Samant ChauhanPIN IT
A renowned fashion designer selling across globally Samant Chauhan has a two floor store at Shahpurjat. He is relying majorly on online sales right now. “There has been no footfall in Colaba, Mumbai and we have in the past one week just made a sale of a single piece in Kolkata.”
“We are spending so much more than the expected to keep our factory in Noida full of sanitizers and masks. It is a necessity thus, cannot be neglected too. Honestly a day or more we have been discussing about what we can do if the stores will remain closed for a month . After all we have a heavy salary structure to pay.”
Samant also expresses that it is not just about keeping the retail stores open, the luxury market depends upon sentiments and the people’s sentiments are not focusing on celebrations right now.”Why would they buy clothes when there is no birthday or event that they are going to attend right now!”
“In the U.S.A everyone is working from home, we have an order in hand, the raw material is with us, the Purchase Order has been sent but as the samples are not reaching them physically everything is on a hold. We are panicking but there is nothing that we can do!”
Yet keeping his spirits high, Samant Chauhan plans to utilize the quarantine to fulfill all that he has been wanting to do but couldn’t due to lack of time. “Now I’m settling everything, but if the city shuts down then I’ll be completing a lot of things that have been kept pending for long.”
SHREEYA MONGIA
SHREEYA MONGIAPIN IT
Label Shreeya Mongia, a couture brand based out of Shahpurjat is also facing a backlash in the COVID 19 situation “The market has completely shut down. There is nobody in the market, the entire March was very empty, everybody is facing rental issues and we are going to try to talk to the landlords, although we have not spoken to them yet, we hope something concrete turns out.” Shreeya Mongia is a well known fashion label and boutique known for its bridal wear outfits.
LABEL APARNA & HERITAGE COUTURE
Label AparnaPIN IT
Fashion Designer Aparna from Label Aparna stresses concern over COVID-19 and the rage, sickness and health problems it is spreading but, at the same time mentions that “Empty markets and streets are giving us a dry March, many weddings have been postponed as a result of which the expected orders do not seem to be coming our way, Even my appointments have been cancelled and the scare of the virus has made me close down the store too”
Sharing the same concern is Shilpi Dutta of Heritage Couture, “We have received no order in the month of March, not a single piece, so it’s just better to keep the store closed”
CHRISTINA WT
CHRISTINA WTPIN IT
“We have been closed for a while, there is nothing happening” Christina from Christina WT organized herself just as she heard about the spread of the virus “We contacted our clients when we heard about it, those who wanted an urgent delivery, we did so on priority before shutting down our operations. Our clients have been very helpful and cooperative they agreed to late deliveries and we have ourselves offered to pay for shipments, It is an unfortunate situation and nothing can be done about it.”
“In case everything shuts down for a month or more we intend to have very few and selected people work for only sampling, we have already taken precautionary measures like food, sanitization, disinfecting etc.”
SEE ALSO
BLOG, THURSDAY
Will Online Retail Benefit Due To Coronavirus?
Common Concerns of designers at Shahpurjat
ShahpurjatPIN IT
Witnessing a walk in of just 5%- 10% of the crowd that is generally seen dwindling, shopping and eating at Shahpurjat, The fashion designers and store owners are struggling to retain orders already placed or promised by the buyers. As people stay indoors, and refrain from malls and markets a major setback that the fashion designers are facing is the cancelling or postponement of weddings and other events.
Another concern is that of rentals.“Most of the places have lock in periods in rentals, I cannot vacant the place before 1–2 years, and brands like ours that donot have any back up, it’s very difficult during such times”- Shahpurjat Fashion Designer. “We are trying to renegotiate our rentals with the landlords, if they can give us some concession but we do not know if they will agree with it.” quotes another concerned designer.
With no footfall, literal shut downs and adverse sentiments of the public, the fashion designers are facing losses with increased or equal expenditure. Fashion designers of Shahpurjat are definitely looking to re negotiate on the rentals with their land lords in order to sail through this crisis situation.
Shahpurjat Designers on Online sales
ShahpurjatPIN IT
Not a very common and well adjusted medium to sell for the fashion designers, some might see it differently after COVID 19 and its widespread scare in the India and international market. Most designers of the market do not feel online sales can be a savior for them at this moment.
“The price point we have people prefer to visit the designer’s store itself before buying”- Jenjum Gadi, Fashion Designer, Shahpurjat
While others are prepared to explore and focus on the digital platform for tackling the current scenario.
“We are trying to get orders online, I think we are totally dependent on that to get some business right now”- Samant Chauhan, Fashion Designer, Shahpurjat
“We are booking orders online, but are mentioning the deliveries to be after a month”- Chritina, Fashion Designer, Shahpurjat
As fashion accessories and garments are not a product of necessity there might be a limited scope for its sales both online and offline currently, Yet most of the designers, if not using the digital world as a medium of sales, are focusing on branding and spreading information through it about their label and collections.
Fashion Street- ShahpurjatPIN IT
IKF Desk
An unforeseen situation like this has left the Indian fashion designers in a confused and chaotic state, they are looking up to the government for assistance and support. Having no answers about when this will settle, what the market will be like when it reopens and about re negotiations on rentals. Hoping for a silver lining the fashion designers are all prepared to game up once there is indication about the fall out of COVID 19 from the Indian subcontinent.
Source: https://www.iknockfashion.com/how-covid-19-is-affecting-the-fashion-hub-shahpurjat/ | https://medium.com/@iknockfashion/how-covid-19-is-affecting-the-fashion-hub-shahpurjat-7e162f037af4 | ['I Knock Fashion'] | 2020-06-12 08:11:51.419000+00:00 | ['Fashion', 'Shahpur Jat', 'Covid 19', 'I Knock Fashion', 'Corona'] |
Tellor and Binance | @Full Node Berlin
So what have we been up to out here?
Well, we’ve been very hard at work finishing development and gearing up for mainnet launch (we are up on Rinkeby!). We’ve had the opportunity to learn so much from many experienced crypto developers and founders who’ve held private AMAs with us and served as mentors to us along with the other teams in the Berlin Chapter. Speaking of the other teams: shout-out to Phishfort, Dune Analytics, Maverik, and Keylabs, you guys are all doing great things and it’s been inspiring for our team to share in this process with you.
And we must mention the Berlin community.
This city really is a hot bed for crypto development and the meetups here have been full of top minds in the space. We will miss you!
What’s Next?
Tellor will be coming to SF for the final 3 weeks of Binance Labs Season 2! There we will be finalizing all our hard work and preparing to proudly share our oracle solution with the decentralized world.
Keep an eye out for much more coming soon. | https://medium.com/tellor/tellor-and-binance-696352c7fc1f | ['Tellor Core'] | 2019-05-09 17:41:47.658000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Binance'] |
Introducing (M)Pond: The Marlin Network Tokens | Marlin is a layer-0 protocol focused on network-layer performance and security. Think of it as SilverPeak for blockchains or Akamai for decentralized storage. This means that Marlin could be a backend to Polkadot, Near, Solana, xDai, Matic, Filecoin — at the same time, supporting them from the ground up. Check out this article for a high level overview.
Validators, miners and communities of different blockchains are thus important stakeholders in the Marlin network. After several months of hard work, we’re happy to share the distribution mechanism of our network tokens POND and MPond to facilitate inclusive governance, provide strong economic security and foster development of a critical piece of web 3.0 infrastructure.
Design Rationale
Being at the base layer imposes strict requirements on Marlin to provide strong security and decentralization guarantees expected by blockchains. Not unlike blockchain platforms themselves which require years of real-world testing to display their characteristics before an ecosystem develops around them, the deployment of the Marlin network is the first step in its goal to establish itself as the de facto incentivized networking layer.
Incentives and consequently the nature of token ownership affect the evolution of a network. Hence, it is important to ensure that tokens are distributed in a way that ensures that the network develops to meet its envisaged purpose. Some factors that went into the design of the Marlin Token distribution include:
Geographical diversity: Geographical clustering and colocation of nodes harms the censorship-resistance properties required by users. Economic security: Protocols building on top of another are only as secure as the one they build on top of. Cross-community distribution: Token ownership shouldn’t be dominated by any one group of whales, VCs, or the team. Illiquid governance: It shouldn’t be easy to bribe, borrow or quickly accumulate and dispose off governance rights in the network. Usage: Token ownership should incentivize active participation.
The Network Tokens
The Marlin economy uses two Ethereum-based tokens — POND and MegaPOND (MPond). While POND is initially transferable, MPond is not (with a few exceptions such as the token distribution contract and transfers to/from a bridge). The bridge allows conversion from 1,000,000 POND to a 1 MPond and vice versa while imposing certain restrictions (described later).
The total supply of POND is 10 billion. Thus, there can only exist up to 10,000 MPond.
As an example (find actual numbers in further sections): if there exist 6 billion POND in circulation, 6000 MPond is locked in the bridge to back future conversions. Correspondingly, 4 billion POND is locked in the bridge to back the 4000 MPond distributed amongst users.
Note 1: MPond is also referred to as LIN.
Note 2: The MPond-POND design is similar to the MSRM-SRM design used by Serum.
The Token Utility
A Marlin node relays and caches data. Every Marlin node is required to stake at least 0.5 MPond. The node receives staking rewards and fees based on its performance. Both MPond and POND can be delegated towards other Marlin nodes. In such cases, delegators share a portion of their rewards with the node operator.
MPond stakes may receive a different rate of staking reward as compared to POND delegators. Initially, they are set to the same values but may be modified via governance. MPond holders also gain the right to participate in governance by making or voting on proposals. Discussions on the first proposal is already live at https://research.marlin.pro/t/proposal-1-change-the-calculation-of-mpond-distributed-to-different-blockchain-communities.
The Bridge
Conversion between POND and MPond is facilitated through a permissionless bridge. Anyone, at any time, can lock x million POND in the bridge and receive x MPond or lock x MPond and receive x million POND.
It is to be noted, however, that while the conversion from POND to MPond is instantaneous, the bridge enforces a delay when converting from MPond to POND. The delay is implemented via two parameters, d and l, which allows only l % of MPond in an account to be converted to POND in an interval d. Both d and l can be updated via on-chain governance.
This setup ensures that no malicious actor can easily acquire governance rights within the system. It also guarantees that there’s always a threshold amount of economic security provided by the system. More information on the bridge is available at https://www.marlin.pro/docs/staking/token.
Token Distribution
Marlin Tokens, POND and MPond, are cumulatively allocated for different stakeholders as per the pie chart shown below:
In particular, the following participants are distributed tokens in the form of MPond to enable their participation in the upcoming Larvanet:
Validators and delegators of various chains receive 1600 MPond via FlowMint [Note 3] Core team members receive 1000 MPond Advisors are allocated 300 MPond 1723 MPond have been sold in several private rounds
Providing validation services even during the Larvanet incurs day-to-day operational expenses. This is met by a transactional token POND which can be exchanged amongst users to enable new users to join the Larvanet. POND is distributed amongst service providers in the network as participation rewards:
2.184 billion POND tokens are reserved towards staking rewards to incentivize node operators to participate in the network 3.193 billion POND tokens are allocated to various ecosystem Service Providers including but not limited to validators, staking infrastructure providers, community evangelists, consultants and developers
The DAO managed by MPond token holders is expected to eventually take control of the latter.
It is to be noted that the POND token contract is Mintable with a supply cap of 10 billion. Not all of POND’s maximum total supply is minted at the beginning. A fraction of it (46.23%) is to be locked in the bridge to back the MPond supply. [Note 4]
Note 3: FlowMint comprises 16% of the Total Supply or approximately 20% of the Genesis Supply which excludes staking rewards.
Note 4: The 4.623 billion POND required for the bridge (to back MPOND) will be minted later to provide sufficient time for a public review of the bridge codebase. There have been 3 rounds of audits already but there’s no harm in allowing further time for examination given the MPond→POND conversion via the bridge doesn’t open until at least 6 more months (the Smoltnet). This setup enables MPond holders to participate at an early stage of the network and provide feedback on the upcoming Larvanet and Frynet while still being rewarded for their effort.
POND Release Schedule
POND has an initial Total Supply of 3.184 billion and a potential Circulating Supply of up to 1 billion. But 2.184 billion are staking rewards vested over 24 months and which start with Larvanet stage going live. The 10% unlocked tokens (of the 10 billion total supply) are distributed in the following ratios amongst ecosystem service providers:
Validators (4.33%): 433 million tokens are distributed amongst eggnet participants: developers and validators who helped test the network, relay blocks, and improve the ecosystem as a whole for the past few weeks. Thank you!
2. Developers and Community, TBA (5.67%): 567 million tokens are not yet allocated and are available initially to reward developers and participants engaging in the development of the peripheral tools, increasing awareness and growing the ecosystem. We expect it to be decided by community members on how to further allocate these funds.
There is no team, liquidity fund, or any other portion of liquid POND that is available to the team or SAFT participants in the first few months. We have taken this approach to make the launch community-oriented, and to encourage developers to join Marlin on its mission!
The initial circulating supply is thus going to start at 433 million and can expand up to 1 billion in the first 6 months (excluding staking rewards). The remaining 2.184 billion tokens generated as part of the initial total supply is to be moved to the staking contracts once the Larvanet is live.
MPond Release Schedule
4623 MPond as per the allocation shared earlier is released according to the following schedule:
Team: Vested over 24 months in the form of MPond at half-yearly intervals with a 1-year cliff. Advisors: Vested over 12 months in the form of MPond at half-yearly intervals. Stake Drop: Vested linearly over 24 months in the form of MPond. Private sale: Vested over 12 months in the form of MPond at half-yearly intervals.
As a result, 4.623 billion POND will be minted and locked on the bridge in the future to back these MPond if they were to convert to POND. MPond is initially non-transferrable but can be turned transferrable after a corresponding governance proposal is successfully passed. The success of the governance proposal would depend on the maturity and adoption achieved by the network ensuring long-term alignment of core developers and early backers.
In the meantime, rewards for staking and other kinds of possible engagements are distributed in the form of POND incentivizing MPond holders to be active participants in the network.
Effective POND Release Schedule
MPond converted to POND cannot increase POND’s total supply beyond 10 billion as described earlier. However, it can change POND’s and MPond’s circulating supply. In order to ensure some predictability in the circulating supply of POND and economic value locked in MPond, the Marlin protocol uses two governance parameters, d and l mentioned earlier on the section about the Bridge: https://www.marlin.pro/docs/staking/token/#bridge.
These parameters being governance controlled ensure that different factors such as adoption, level of economic security required, unforeseeable conversions from POND to MPond can be accounted for to prevent unhealthy changes to the economic guarantees provided that may affect protocols relying on Marlin.
Conclusion
Such a partially dual token model with a governance controlled barrier is fairly unique to the best of our knowledge. It ensures recovery of operating costs and provides only as much liquidity as is required for healthy functioning of the network. Simultaneously, the idea of semi-liquid governance creates strong incentives for the team and early backers to be aligned with the community in supporting network adoption in the long run. All parameters are governed by MPond holders but require them to justify their actions making them accountable to the community at large.
Speaking of community, we believe that the FlowMint stakedrop coupled with initial validator distribution amongst Eggnet participants will result in tokens being distributed to all kinds of ecosystem participants allowing anyone, anywhere to be able to run a Marlin node without much barrier. The token model and its distribution seems to meet the goals of wide distribution, economic security, illiquid governance and active participation initially envisaged. We hope this turns out to be an interesting experiment if executed well. The Larvanet, the reason behind the token distribution, begins in a couple of weeks.
Risks
You acknowledge and agree that there are numerous risks associated with purchasing MPond/POND, holding MPond/POND, and using MPond/POND for participation in the Marlin network. In the worst scenario, this could lead to the loss of all or part of the MPond/POND which had been purchased. IF YOU DECIDE TO PURCHASE MPond/POND, YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE, ACCEPT AND ASSUME THE FOLLOWING RISKS:
Uncertain Regulations and Enforcement Actions: The regulatory status of MPond/POND and distributed ledger technology is unclear or unsettled in many jurisdictions. The regulation of virtual currencies has become a primary target of regulation in all major countries in the world. It is impossible to predict how, when or whether regulatory agencies may apply existing regulations or create new regulations with respect to such technology and its applications, including MPond/POND and/or the Marlin network. Regulatory actions could negatively impact MPond/POND and/or the Marlin network in various ways. Marlin Labs (the “Company”), the Distributor (or its affiliates) may cease operations in a jurisdiction in the event that regulatory actions, or changes to law or regulation, make it illegal to operate in such jurisdiction, or commercially undesirable to obtain the necessary regulatory approval(s) to operate in such jurisdiction. After consulting with a wide range of legal advisors and continuous analysis of the development and legal structure of virtual currencies, a cautious approach will be applied towards the sale of MPond/POND. Therefore, for the token sale, the sale strategy may be constantly adjusted in order to avoid relevant legal risks as much as possible. For the token sale, the Company and the Distributor are working with Bayfront Law LLC, a boutique corporate law firm in Singapore with a good reputation in the blockchain space. Inadequate disclosure of information: As at the date hereof, the Marlin network is still under development and its design concepts, consensus mechanisms, algorithms, codes, and other technical details and parameters may be constantly and frequently updated and changed. Although this white paper contains the most current information relating to the Marlin network, it is not absolutely complete and may still be adjusted and updated by the Marlin team from time to time. The Marlin team has no ability and obligation to keep holders of MPond/POND informed of every detail (including development progress and expected milestones) regarding the project to develop the Marlin network, hence insufficient information disclosure is inevitable and reasonable. Competitors: Various types of decentralised applications and networks are emerging at a rapid rate, and the industry is increasingly competitive. It is possible that alternative networks could be established that utilise the same or similar code and protocol underlying MPond/POND and/or the Marlin network and attempt to re-create similar facilities. The Marlin network may be required to compete with these alternative networks, which could negatively impact MPond/POND and/or the Marlin network. Loss of Talent: The development of the Marlin network greatly depends on the continued co-operation of the existing technical team and expert consultants, who are highly knowledgeable and experienced in their respective sectors. The loss of any member may adversely affect the Marlin network or its future development. Further, stability and cohesion within the team is critical to the overall development of the Marlin network. There is the possibility that conflict within the team and/or departure of core personnel may occur, resulting in negative influence on the project in the future. Failure to develop: There is the risk that the development of the Marlin network will not be executed or implemented as planned, for a variety of reasons, including without limitation the event of a decline in the prices of any digital asset, virtual currency or MPond/POND, unforeseen technical difficulties, and shortage of development funds for activities. Security weaknesses: Hackers or other malicious groups or organisations may attempt to interfere with MPond/POND and/or the Marlin network in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to, malware attacks, denial of service attacks, consensus-based attacks, Sybil attacks, smurfing and spoofing. Furthermore, there is a risk that a third party or a member of the Company, the Distributor or its affiliates may intentionally or unintentionally introduce weaknesses into the core infrastructure of MPond/POND and/or the Marlin network, which could negatively affect MPond/POND and/or the Marlin network. Further, the future of cryptography and security innovations are highly unpredictable and advances in cryptography, or technical advances (including without limitation development of quantum computing), could present unknown risks to MPond/POND and/or the Marlin network by rendering ineffective the cryptographic consensus mechanism that underpins that blockchain protocol. Other risks: In addition, the potential risks briefly mentioned above are not exhaustive and there are other risks (as more particularly set out in the Terms and Conditions) associated with your purchase, holding and use of MPond/POND, including those that the Company or the Distributor cannot anticipate. Such risks may further materialise as unanticipated variations or combinations of the aforementioned risks. You should conduct full due diligence on the Company, the Distributor, its affiliates and the Marlin team, as well as understand the overall framework, mission and vision for the Marlin network prior to purchasing MPond/POND.
Twitter | Telegram Announcements | Telegram Chat | Discord | Website | https://medium.com/marlin-protocol/introducing-m-pond-the-marlin-network-tokens-92ae19b37d61 | ['Tully The Fish'] | 2021-02-15 11:24:53.598000+00:00 | ['Scaling', 'Networking', 'Design', 'Layer 0', 'Blockchain'] |
Keystone Species and Biodiversity — Sea Otters and Kelp Forests. | An ecosystem is a community of organisms interacting directly and indirectly in their environmental roles. They are neither completely ordered nor in complete chaos. The appearance of a species within an environment occurs because the organism lives in a habitat that is suitable to their particular adaptations. In each community that makes up an ecosystem, there are different trophic levels of organisms present which will affect the population sizes of other species already present. Those species with the most pull in an ecosystem are referred to as keystone species. The removal of the keystone species from an ecosystem may be devastating to the entire ecosystem and can lead to the decline and near extinction of other organisms present, and also allow for organisms not currently present to invade and alter the entire structure of the ecosystem.
Sea otters are large-bodied, agile because of their relation to weasels, have cat-like whiskers covering the face, and typically have lazy or lethargic expressions. The sea otter, scientifically known as the Enhydra lutris, is anything but lazy or lethargic in practice and is a keystone species that is of particular importance along the Pacific Coastal line. The seashore is the natural habitat of sea otters in the wild.
Sea otters extend over a range of land from as far north as Alaska and south to Southern California. By the end of the nineteenth century, Enhydra lutris was in danger of becoming extinct, due to the extensive predation of the animal for their fur.
Vanishing completely from parts of their natural habitat, the missing sea otter leads to a chain of events occurring. The primary diet of sea otters includes a diet rich in sea urchins. Because of the lack of pressure, the sea urchins population grew exponentially in size after sea otters disappeared as a natural predator. Sea urchins eat kelp as a nutritional source. Large populations of sea urchins consumed much of the kelp and seaweeds that were close to shore. Heavy kelp in an intact habitat acts as a veritable forest of the marine area, and it is essential to the anchoring of the sea bottom. While the sea otter was present equilibrium was reached which allowed for sea otter, sea urchin, and kelp to survive and flourish. After the keystone otter species disappeared much of the underwater terrain near the coast was turned into desert-like regions. While the decline in sea otter populations directly caused sea urchins to overpopulate, the absence of the sea otter indirectly caused other organisms to vanish with the kelp.
Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash
It’s important to ask why the indirect impact of disappearing kelp and the subsequent desertification would even matter. The impacts can be far-reaching. The kelp forests are rich marine habitats that provide shelter and food to many other species of marine animals. Without a place to hide from predators and without food these species will disappear with the kelp. This includes the disappearance of fish that humans may consume.
After a significant amount of time, the sea otter was restored to its original habitat and biodiversity. Two places where the sea otter was able to survive well were in the Aleutian Islands, at the northern end of their original terrain, and also in Southern California. A new equilibrium was reached between sea otters and sea urchins. With the sea otter populations rising, the very large populations of sea urchins began to decline in size. With this new equilibrium reached, fewer sea urchins were grazing on the sea kelp at the bottom of the ocean. Many of the once luxurious kelp forests were able to grow back and eventually began to resemble something of the past. After the sea otter was again introduced into the ecosystem as a keystone species, algae along with crustaceans, squid, and fish species also moved into the ecosystem. Gray Whales were able to bring their young into the shore and let them rest in the kelp edges. During these times adult gray whales would feed on the plankton animals that were present in high concentrations. This is only one example of how a keystone species can drastically affect the ecosystem present.
How does this relate to the present day? Over the past several years there has once been a stark decrease in the presence of kelp forests along the Pacific Coastal waters. The main culprit this time is not the disappearance of the keystone species the sea otter. The main culprit this time is the warming of the environment and waters. While it may seem like a more difficult problem to overcome it is possible to reverse the impact of disappearing biodiversity and bring back equilibrium. | https://medium.com/environmental-intelligence/keystone-species-and-biodiversity-sea-otters-and-kelp-forests-487a64d5cace | ["Thomas O'Grady"] | 2020-10-27 14:04:23.237000+00:00 | ['Environmental Health', 'Biodiversity', 'Ecology And Environment', 'Environment', 'Biology'] |
Vulnerability | Health is one of those things that can shake the ground right out from underneath us. I think most people I know have had a moment at least, of fear, if not for their own health, for the health of someone they love. So how do we deal with this?
Even though I would say I was a victim to my body, it gifted me a toughness and perhaps a slight arrogance that I’ve got this, got this whole life thing sorted. We can get quite comfortable within our own parameters of what works for us. We learn how to work around our aches and pains until something scary happens.
I’ve often wondered why I tend to live life in an intense way, I like intense experiences and have a curiosity that can be somewhat insatiable at times. I’ve been on an insulin pump now for 4 years and 4 months, before that I used a “pen” a small needle injected up to 6 times a day. Two Monday’s ago my pump wasn’t clipped onto my shorts properly and my pump slid off my lap onto to the floor, it cracked and all of a sudden I found myself without a pump. The battery wouldn’t go back in properly and the damn thing alarmed like a lock down was occurring. It was in this moment I shed a tear and my tough “I’ve got this” attitude slipped away for a moment or two. F#*k was my first reaction, I’m not on private health and they cost $10,000 for a new one. It was the first time in a long time I was reminded of my vulnerability and my reliance on a small battery powered device to keep me healthy. I must admit I stressed out as I had to rush back home to find some old pens and the two kinds of insulin I needed to replace the pump. I didn’t eat but the stress response in my body already had my levels rising. I proceeded to experience disappointment in myself for not being more ‘careful’, more prepared for eventual failure. Turns out I had no pens that worked anymore, I’d thrown them out, also turns out I had no script for the insulin I needed and my specialist was away for the next week. Not much help to my growing feeling of being at the mercy of bureaucracy. Eventually I managed to find old school syringes and two year expired insulin, i injected this and hoped for the best. I had to buy myself enough time to get the girls off to school so I could sort the issue properly.
I spent a week on the old style of injecting, every mouthful of food accounted for. My sugar levels still swinging around despite my best efforts. One afternoon I went from 15 back down to 2 and had the funnest hypo I’ve had in years. Sitting there at my dining table, by myself, half laughing, half stuffing my face like I’d never eaten before. My whole body sweating from the low, mouth tingling, it was such an intense experience. Strangely fun, to feel things that intensely made me realise how full on it must have been for me growing up. Living life on the edge of intensity all of the time. Feeling vulnerable, yet not understanding why. Seeking out intense experiences because in reality that was the norm. I feel like all these experiences have given me such an appreciation for being alive. If I’m going to be here I want it to be real, I want to feel close to death to remind me that life is worth living. When we lose touch with our mortality we do become arrogant and it’s easy to forget that we are so blessed to be here. Even in our struggles we have this gift of life.
Live the life you love xx
P.S Luckily my pump still had a few months left on warranty and I restarted the pump again, my levels are back to balanced again! | https://medium.com/@chrissiekeynes/vulnerability-63f09907d7d6 | ['Chrissie Keynes'] | 2020-11-24 12:00:43.624000+00:00 | ['Fear', 'Type 1 Diabetes', 'Health', 'Vulnerability', 'Gratitude'] |
LOC is now trading on KuCoin! | Dear Community,
we are excited to announce that we successfully passed all listing requirements from KuCoin and are now trading on their exchange!
Trading pairs include LOC/BTC and LOC/ETH.
Trading fee is 0.1% ( discount available).
You can view the official announcement from KuCoin here.
About the listing
As you know, this achievement was something, we worked on for a long time. It is very important for the LOC token to have a good liquidity, and we consider this as one of the difficult things to provide for any project. You can see the importance of it reflected in the low trading volumes for most of the crypto projects.
Often, token holders do not have the chance to buy or sell at high volumes, which hinders organic price movement and offers a free playing field for speculators. This is, why providing high liquidity was always one of our priorities from the beginning.
With today’s milestone, we now have 3 high liquidity exchanges (KuCoin, HitBTC and Bancor), of which 2 where added recently.
But of course, we will not stop pushing until we are listed on all major exchanges!
In addition, the listing comes with a free $30,000 advertisement package as a reward for winning their competition.
We want to thank our community once again for their amazing support.
About KuCoin
We consider KuCoin as a high quality exchange with a professional team. Advanced platform features, as well as a good user interface, make KuCoin to one of our recommended exchanges to trade on.
Homepage (KuCoin)
Telegram channel (KuCoin)
LockTrip is the first marketplace with 0% commission where you can save on average 20% on your hotel and rental bookings compared to anywhere else. Learn how to buy LOC tokens to enable access to our marketplace and its lower prices here! | https://medium.com/locktrip/loc-is-now-trading-on-kucoin-1936ce1460a4 | ['Locktrip.Com', 'Loc Token', 'Official Blog'] | 2018-08-22 14:24:13.955000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Locktrip', 'Crypto', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
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