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How to Use Google My Business to Improve Your Local Search Ranking | Google My Business Strategy
The first step is having a Google My Business profile. But the challenging work is not all done! The profile must be optimised and there must be a strategy, just like with any other marketing tool.
There is actually one step before the first step (I know, makes no sense) — do a Google search to make sure a listing does not already exist. If one does, from a previous owner or third-party data source, Google Maps allows the new operator to claim ownership.
Next, verify the My Business listing. Find out how to do that here. This is critical for the listing’s visibility and performance — Google will not display the business or its edits until ownership is verified.
Having a completed profile
Having as much useful information about your business as possible through having a completed profile will help boost the ranking of your business page in local search results and increase the chance of potential customers engaging and acting.
The sections to complete and other tools to optimise your Google My Business profile are:
Name
Location
Phone Number
Website
Service Hours
Category and attributes
Products and services
From the business (description)
Posting updates
Photos
Reviews
Q&A
Messaging
The next section will go into more depth on these.
“The strategy represents the ultimate in genuine pay for performance marketing and, as a result, represents one of the most promising long-term marketing strategies for e-commerce.” — Duffy, 2005
Name, location, and phone number
The business name should be identical to what is used on store signage and other marketing. Makes sense, right? The location obviously needs to match your physical location and any other listings of the business online.
Since many businesses operate as service-area businesses and do not have a physical brick-and-mortar location, the location of the business can be switched off if it is a home office for example that does not take appointments. Adding a service area means the business will still show up in relevant local searches.
With such a high number of people making search queries on Google Maps via mobile phones, it is important to list the business phone number so customers can contact the business to make bookings or ask questions. Make sure there is someone who answers that phone number promptly and returns calls if they are missed.
Website
Make sure the website (if there is one, which there should be) is included. One of the key benefits of a My Business profile is the ability to send more traffic to the website to convert more customers.
It is not often people are going to decide to purchase from a My Business profile unless they are looking for something on the go, such as a café or gas station nearby.
Hours
Add the hours that the business is physically open or taking appointments and update them if they change. As with Covid-19, if the business is forced to close, a My Business profile should reflect this. The profile can also be customised for holidays and other special events. If customers know you are open, it will encourage them to visit your physical store.
Category and attributes
Choosing the right category for your business to help the most appropriate customers find you is key. Over 80% of My Business views are through discovery searches for a product or service category rather than searching for a business name.
After choosing a primary category for your business, you can choose secondary categories. Make sure they are relevant, so the right people are finding your business who need a product or service you offer.
When you choose your categories, Google will give you a list of attributes you can check off to further describe your business.
Many attribute options are available. Note that currently, this option has been deactivated due to Covid-19 and there are only a small number of available options.
Add products and services
By adding all your products and services to your profile, this will tell potential customers exactly what you do and what your specialties are. It also adds relevant keyword terms to your profile to improve your ranking on Google searches.
Include the product or service name, description, and price if applicable. Link these products or services to be purchased at the website’s store if you have one.
“From the business” description
The description of your business is included in the “From the business” section. Try and use all the available 750 characters, with key information in the first 250 characters.
Use content you have already created for your social media accounts or from the About Us page on your website (assuming you have one).
You can use this to talk about how you provide value to customers, what makes you unique and how you are different from competitors. This is called positioning.
Just like traditional website SEO, using keywords in the business description will increase the chances of customers finding your profile.
Posting regularly with updates and photos
A My Business profile can be used to post about a variety of things such as business announcements, offers, and events. Posting content on your My Business page is like blogging on your website for SEO or posting on social media.
The aim is to provide as much quality and detailed information about your business as possible, to try and connect with searchers.
Posting regularly will increase your Google ranking, and increase the number of actions taken by consumers who find your profile. Some posts will be viewable on Google search or Maps if relevant keywords are triggered, making it valuable marketing direct to customers.
Posts expire every seven days, so it is important to be consistent to keep your presence fresh on Google. Posts can be made on-the-go via the app from a phone or tablet, or via a computer.
Include links and other calls to action, such as getting visitors to visit your website, follow you on social media or sign up to mailing lists for example.
Because of the little situation going on around the world currently forcing many businesses to close their doors, there is now a specific option to add COVID-19 updates.
“Adding links to Google Business profile, as well as relevant photos and images, encourages Internet users to take targeted actions on the retailer’s website. Targeted actions of Internet users, including the number of routes and the quantity of calls are directly depend on the number of photos uploaded by retailers.” — Murphy, 2019
Photos
Adding photos regularly will help a My Business page to perform better by positively impacts your ranking.
According to Google, businesses with photos on their My Business profile receive 42% more requests for driving directions via Google Maps and 35% more clicks through to their websites than those without any. One of your images may be used by Google to display in local search results if it matches a keyword term searched for.
I add photos to my profile of the whiteboard from my marketing training such as this one below.
Photo added to Google My Business photos (Source: author)
Try to add a new photo once a week. Use photos to summarise the business and what it can do for its customers. Create an identity.
Encourage customers to leave photos as that will improve your ranking. If you are a restaurant or café, you could offer a free voucher for photo of the week, for example, to incentivise people to leave a great photo on your profile. The photos I have added to My Business profiles via Google Maps have now surpassed over one million views, which proves people are looking!
If you are a restaurant, add photos of food items on your menu, or satisfied customers.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
If you are a consultant, add some photos of you in your work element. Other examples of photos you could share are interior and exterior views (e.g. parking), or team photos.
Ensure your photos are of high quality. If your photos are of low quality, that does not leave a great impression on customers. Follow Google’s best practice for images: JPG or PNG formats, sized between 10KB and 5MB, minimum resolution of 720 pixels height and width.
Make sure photos are in focus, well-lit, without editing or excessive use of filters. Professional and keep it as real as possible!
Upload your logo for your profile thumbnail and one that highlights your brand as the cover photo. Edit to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio.
You can also add video, so include a video of you introducing yourself and how you help people or maybe a video snapshot of you or the team on the job.
“Internet users’ reviews/comments in Google affect the retailer’s website position in the local search results.” — Natorina, 2020
Customer Reviews
Positive reviews have a positive effect on potential customers who are researching your business. They also increase your business’ visibility in search results, so try and encourage customers to make reviews.
Reviews influence consumer decision-making, so reviews are a key ranking factor in the My Business algorithm. On Google searches, often the first results are those with multiple reviews and a high rating, and search results may also display a review for a My Business Profile if it uses certain keywords people are searching for.
Encourage customers to leave feedback by creating a link they can click to write a review. Around 60% of people will leave a review if requested, so ask! It could be in a follow-up email. Start with your loyal customers.
Reviews help other customers decide about a purchase, so people often do not mind leaving one (like I leave photos of every restaurant I eat at on Google Maps).
Make sure you monitor and respond to reviews. This feedback will encourage additional customers to leave one as it illustrates that your business values its customers and their feedback.
Questions and answers (Q&A)
Set up alerts to monitor your Q&A, as anybody can ask and anyone can answer. Monitoring this ensures you maintain accurate information.
Questions and answers that contain keywords can help improve you are My Business profile’s ranking for that keyword. Creating your own Q&A is, therefore, an important optimisation tool. Make a list of the business’ most frequently asked questions and then ask, answer, and upvote answers on your personal profile.
Messaging
Over 80% of people use their phone or tablet for local search, so being able to conveniently message from their device to your My Business profile is a fantastic opportunity.
Businesses can only reply to customers through Google My Business app. Messaging must be enabled via settings on your Google My Business dashboard and once enabled, a button appears on your profile for direct messaging from customers. To make sure you do not miss an opportunity, set up alerts for messages.
Businesses can set up customised automated responses to messages. This will improve your responsiveness which will help keep message response time under 24 hours and make sure you are not penalised from slow response times.
Other functionality
Google My Business is continuously being updated with more tools for businesses.
Marketing kits are now available with a recent update, which you can use to share on other forms of social media to bring traffic to your page. One of these is to encourage reviews. On the topic of reviews, make sure you have some! Try to encourage satisfied customers to write you a glowing review. This will increase your credibility with anyone who finds you.
Google reserve is another useful function, allowing people to make reservations or book a meeting time with you via integration of a calendar application. This syncs with your calendar with notifications. This is a very convenient feature to show people what time slots are available to book without having to go backwards and forwards.
You can now add a short name to your Google My Business account, which makes your business easier to find through a map search, and URLs are not as messy if you share the link. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/how-to-use-google-my-business-to-improve-your-local-search-ranking-759899ac8517 | ['Daniel Hopper'] | 2020-11-24 01:57:10.634000+00:00 | ['Google', 'SEO', 'Digital Marketing', 'Marketing', 'Startup'] |
Where Curiosity Leads You | Image by Marta Matyjas from Pixabay
Whenever someone asks me about how I got into software development, it would put on a big smile on my face because I would tell them a funny story about a naive twelve-year-old kid who followed his curiosity. In a way, it’s my own unique origin story that I look back upon a time that I plunged deep into my passion and chased my curiosity to achieve a dream. I hope this story inspires you to follow your curiosity.
If I can do it, you can too
My Software Developer Journey
Back in the late 1990s before online graphical games became immensely popular, there were online multiplayer text-based dungeon games called “M.U.D.,” which is short for Multi-User Dungeon. That’s a type of game and not the game’s name. I have long forgotten the name of the game that I played. Anyways, playing the game required a lot of reading and typing because you needed to read what was happening and type out what you wanted to do. Fundamentally, it’s an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) without the fantastic graphical user interface and ability to use the mouse.
There I was playing the game with my friends, and I thought “Hey! What if I built my own?” so I began to do some research into what it would take. Youtube “how to” videos didn’t exist back then, which meant I had to visit a lot of various forums and websites scattered across the internet. The first problem I encountered was choosing a code base because there’s a large variety of different code forks of M.U.D. code bases. Each was customized differently and had a different explanation of how their code base runs. I forgot which one I chose, but after deciding, it was not difficult to download the code base because they are open source.
WAMP? LAMP? What’s a LAMP? Some furniture?
The second problem encountered was how to set up the code base and the right environment to run the software. Idiotically, I downloaded the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Php) package, and I spent a week going down the Cygwin route to run Linux programs on a Windows machine. Eventually, I found the WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-Php) package and found someone who wrote up instructions on compiling the code base on Windows. It was much easier to set up a WAMP package than a LAMP package on Windows. Everything lined up afterward, and I successfully had a localhost version that I could start tinkering.
The fun part began with changing the code and adding new capabilities to the stock version. The community had a bunch of code snippets and tutorials on how to make code changes. While making changes, I self-taught myself the programming language C with a used copy of “C for Dummies” and understanding the changes I was making. At one point, I swore that semicolons and curly bracket were my banes of my existent with every syntax error I ran into when compiling the code. I remember posting on forums asking for help about why something didn’t compile correctly or a problem I couldn’t solve. There was always someone who would chime in on things to try to resolve the issue.
The hardest part came next, which was creating a theme and a story for my dungeon world. My other interest is anime, so I created an anime theme world full of Non-Player Characters of famous anime characters of the time. Adding new areas into the game wasn’t too difficult as there was a dungeon room editor that did the heavy lifting. The tricky part was writing all the room’s descriptions and planning the area out. The total time I spent was close to a few months to change the default medieval theme into what I wanted.
Toward the end of development, I realized that I couldn’t possibly host a M.U.D. on my not always online 56k dial-up connection, so I had to find host server. The great opportunity I had was I became friends with the creator of the game that I was playing, so I asked him about hosting services, and he introduced me to his server host who I talked to about having her host for me. She explained that the service costs $60 a year which I ended up naively sending cash in an envelope. Luckily, the money arrived at the server host’s address, and my hosting account got up a week later.
After uploading my customized code base to the server, there was one last small set back that occurred. The server was a Linux OS, and I had no idea how to work in a Linux environment except for my Cygwin experiment. Once again, I went online to read it up and purchased a book, “Unix for Dummies,” to learn how to use Linux. In hindsight, that was the wrong book, but I didn’t know that back then. Luckily, Linux is based off on Unix, so the environment is quite similar. The code compiled without a problem with the gcc compiler on Linux. Everything finally came together, and I finally launched my game! | https://buisteven.medium.com/where-curiosity-leads-you-9769a57d8b0d | ['Steven Bui'] | 2019-04-10 07:50:17.479000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Learning', 'Programming', 'Dreams', 'Inspiration'] |
RecyclerView and LazyColumnFor in Jetpack Compose | Learning Android Development
RecyclerView and LazyColumnFor in Jetpack Compose
Learn The RecyclerView of Jetpack Compose
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash
Most of the Apps if not all, will need to store a list of items to be viewed. RecyclerView is the key view one cannot go without in developing a professional App.
As we are transitioning to Jetpack Compose, the ability to display a list of items is most important. Hence this article looks into both approach and share them.
RecyclerView
This is presented for comparison with LazyColumnFor . If you already familiar with RecyclerView, you can skip to the next section.
In conventional Android Development, we will need to have XML to define the layout view. For RecyclerView, we’ll need to have at least 2 layouts, one is the Activity layout that contains the RecyclerView, and the other the Item Layout for the individual ViewHolder.
On top of that, to access the XMLs, we’ll have the Activity Class and the ViewHoldre class, which are connected through the RecyclerView.Adaptor class.
The XMLs
The Activity.xml contains just the RecyclerView inside
<androidx.recyclerview.widget.RecyclerView
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
android:id="@+id/recycler_view"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
tools:context=".RecyclerViewActivity" />
The Item.xml defined the layout of individual
<androidx.cardview.widget.CardView
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:card_view="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
card_view:cardBackgroundColor="#ccc"
card_view:cardCornerRadius="4dp">
<LinearLayout
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:orientation="horizontal">
<TextView
android:id="@+id/item_number"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:padding="8dp"
android:textAlignment="center"
android:textColor="#f00"
android:textSize="24sp" />
<TextView
android:id="@+id/item_country"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:padding="8dp"
android:textAlignment="center"
android:textColor="@color/black"
android:textSize="24sp" />
</LinearLayout>
</androidx.cardview.widget.CardView>
The classes
We are using View Binding, and bind the Activity to the XML as below
class RecyclerViewActivity : AppCompatActivity() {
private lateinit var binding: ActivityMainBinding
override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
binding = ActivityMainBinding.inflate(layoutInflater)
setContentView(binding.root)
val listItems = intent.getSerializableExtra(
LauncherActivity.DATA_KEY) as List<Item>
binding.recyclerView.apply {
layoutManager = LinearLayoutManager(
this@RecyclerViewActivity)
adapter = RecyclerViewAdapter(listItems)
addItemDecoration(MarginItemDecoration(
resources.getDimension(
R.dimen.default_padding).toInt()))
}
}
}
In order to connect the ViewHolder, we need to have the RecyclerView.Adaptor
class RecyclerViewAdapter(private val listItems: List<Item>)
: RecyclerView.Adapter<ItemViewHolder>() {
override fun onCreateViewHolder(
parent: ViewGroup, viewType: Int): ItemViewHolder {
val binding = ViewItemBinding.inflate(
LayoutInflater.from(parent.context), parent, false
)
return ItemViewHolder(binding)
}
override fun onBindViewHolder(
holder: ItemViewHolder, position: Int) {
holder.bindView(listItems[position])
}
override fun getItemCount(): Int {
return listItems.size
}
}
Lastly, the ViewHolder, which bind to the XML
class ItemViewHolder(private val viewBinding: ViewItemBinding)
: RecyclerView.ViewHolder(viewBinding.root) {
fun bindView(content: Item) {
viewBinding.itemNumber.text = content.number
viewBinding.itemCountry.text = content.country
}
}
Quite a bit of classes to code. The summary diagram can be seen below.
You’ll see a disconnect of the two XMLs below, which are connected through the RecyclerView.Adaptor.
LazyColumnFor
In JetpackCompose, we no longer need to have XML. Instead, we replace both the class and XML with composable functions.
So nice, no more XML, and we see the direct connection of the LazyColumnFor with the ViewItem directly without the need of any Adaptor.
If we look at the code
The Activity
class LazyColumnActivity : AppCompatActivity() {
override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
val listItems =
intent.getSerializableExtra(DATA_KEY) as List<Item>
setContent {
MyLazyColumn(
listItems = listItems
)
}
}
}
The Lazy Column
@Composable
fun MyLazyColumn(
modifier: Modifier = Modifier,
listItems: List<Item>,
) {
LazyColumnFor(
modifier = modifier, items = listItems,
contentPadding = PaddingValues(16.dp, 16.dp, 16.dp)
) { itemText ->
ViewItem(itemText = itemText)
Spacer(modifier = Modifier.fillMaxWidth().height(16.dp))
}
}
The View Item
@Composable
fun ViewItem(
itemText: Item
) {
Card(
shape = RoundedCornerShape(4.dp),
backgroundColor = Color(0xFFCCCCCC),
) {
Row {
Text(
text = itemText.number,
modifier = Modifier.padding(8.dp),
style = TextStyle(
fontSize = 24.sp, color = Color.Red),
textAlign = TextAlign.Center
)
Text(
text = itemText.country,
modifier = Modifier.padding(8.dp),
style = TextStyle(
fontSize = 24.sp, color = Color.Black),
textAlign = TextAlign.Center
)
}
}
}
Here, we can see so much simpler and directly related.
Margin between the View Items
In RecyclerView, in order to have a proper margin between the view, we’ll need ItemDecoration for that purpose.
ItemDecoration
In our RecyclerView, to ensure proper margin, we have the below ItemDecoration where for the first view item, we’ll have the Intop margin, while the others will only have the left, right, and bottom margin.
class MarginItemDecoration(private val spaceHeight: Int) :
RecyclerView.ItemDecoration() {
override fun getItemOffsets(
outRect: Rect, view: View,
parent: RecyclerView, state: RecyclerView.State) {
with(outRect) {
if (parent.getChildAdapterPosition(view) == 0) {
top = spaceHeight
}
left = spaceHeight
right = spaceHeight
bottom = spaceHeight
}
}
}
Notice only the first item has a top margin
Workaround for LazyColumnFor
I cannot find the equivalent of ItemDecoration for LazyColumnFor in Jetpack Compose. I have posted a StackOverflow inquiry but got no answer other than my workaround below.
The workaround doesn’t seems bad. We can add contentPadding to the LazyColumnFor , which each of the item, we add a Spacer as the padding.
@Composable
fun MyLazyColumn(
modifier: Modifier = Modifier,
listItems: List<Item>,
) {
LazyColumnFor(
modifier = modifier, items = listItems,
contentPadding = PaddingValues(16.dp, 16.dp, 16.dp)
) { itemText ->
ViewItem(itemText = itemText)
Spacer(modifier = Modifier.fillMaxWidth().height(16.dp))
}
}
The top left and right margin are the LazyColumnFor padding
Other comparisons
Overscroll Indication
In normal RecyclerView, when one over-scroll the list, there will be some indication shows.
However, this is not readily available for LazyColumnFor . Perhaps one day later, or I’m not aware of it.
Scrolling State
In Android, sometimes the app will be killed by the system and get restored then the user return to the App. We can emulate this behavior using Don’t Keep Activity.
For simple RecyclerView and LazyColumnFor, based on the experiment, it seems the scroll position state is automatically saved and restored. Hence no extra coding required. | https://medium.com/mobile-app-development-publication/recyclerview-and-lazycolumnfor-in-jetpack-compose-a7842cd7f17e | [] | 2020-12-13 03:27:42.789000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Android App Development', 'AndroidDev', 'Android', 'Jetpack Compose'] |
Toward a new theory of housework | Where less is more….
©andy katz
Two facts in juxtaposition: first, in nearly four decades of marriage and domestic tete-a-tete I do nearly all of our housework, save for washing and ironing my wife’s clothing, she does that. Second, I don’t do very much housework.
So, we’re slobs, right?
Not entirely.
It’s a question of priorities.
At least since Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Second Shift, 1989, husbands and male domestic partners have been accused of demanding a Legionne d’honneur with palm frond enhancements simply for turning on the vacuum cleaner, or dusting the bric-a-brac.
I don’t dust. As a result we have a fair amount of the stuff on hand at any given time. Lisa really doesn’t mind. She gets allergic, sure, but it’s more of a seasonal thing, pollen in the air. I do do windows, infrequently, and clean the bathroom, often.
Around the same time as Hochchild’s study appeared, an article ran in the Utne Reader, the author was a woman, an unsung shero whose name escapes me after all of these years. But her thesis was simple: was housework, done by either partner, really important enough to spend the irreplaceable moments of one’s life performing?
Her answer: maybe not so much.
She described her home, her family. They weren’t slobs. The home she described wasn’t an early contender for Hoarders. Crucial surfaces in the bathrooms and kitchens were cleaned daily. For the rest, however, it was largely catch as catch can. And that was okay.
How liberating was that?
Liberty, however, always comes at a price. When Hochschild argues that “If men lose power over women in one way’’ [by no longer being the sole source of support], ‘’they make up for it in another way — by avoiding the second shift,” she begs the question of whether or not there is power to be found in that “second shift”. After four decades of doing the lion’s share of housework, I think there is. And that leaves me wondering, to what degree, if any, are women who feel their mates aren’t pulling their weight domestically ambivalent about relinquishing the authority over what transpires within the four walls of home and hearth.
“I’m not allowed in the kitchen!” my wife insisted some years ago during a rare quarrel over shared responsibilities at home. That gave me pause. To the best of my knowledge, I had never suggested the kitchen was off-limits to her. Was my protest to the contrary an attempt to deny her reality. Was I guilty of gaslighting?
©andy katz
Or, perhaps it was more like this: mise-en-place is what professional cooks call everything they need to create a particular dish or series of dishes, set just so. Everything in its place. Even the most casual cook, intentionally or not, creates his or her own mise-en-place over time. It becomes an extension of one’s nervous system, as individual as a fingerprint.
Small wonder someone trying to step in might not feel entirely welcome.
I also pay the bills, do our taxes and manage our humble investments. That perforce leaves me with near total authority of what and how we spend. Were I to keel over right now from a coronary, or get run over by a rogue MTA bus I worry that she wouldn’t know how to access our joint banking account, or even her own 401k.
Pretty much the only thing I don’t do is wash and iron her clothes. It’s not that I’ve drawn a line there, rather she likes her ironing done a certain way, and she uses those anti-static sheets in the dryer, which I always forget because I think they work just as well whether you remember to put them in or not.
Of course, that’s a point where many women express frustration — he’ll do the chore; he just won’t do it very well.
When our son was younger and we assigned chores around the house, we never knew for sure if he tanked them intentionally in a passive-aggressive avoidance strategy, or had we failed to ensure that he understood not only what needed doing, but how?
Not surprisingly, it was easier just to do it oneself.
Along with that term from a 1940s movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, “gaslighting”, I propose another, from a far more recent movie. In 2008’s Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood’s character, Walt Kowalski, a grizzled Korean War veteran, is faced with adjusting to a new world. Kowalski’s relationship with his adult sons has become fraught because he never trusted them to do any task, however trivial, correctly.
So yes, I would argue that men who avoid the second shift aren’t necessarily gaining power, but rather avoiding it. To what degree is that their own choice?
Power and responsibility go hand in hand. That’s as true in the domestic sphere as it is in the world of business or politics. If you’re a working woman straining under the burden of childcare, housework and a full-time job, and you believe your mate isn’t pitching in, I would ask: are you absolutely certain you want him in control of your living spaces? You’re willing to cede responsibility for doing the dishes, dusting the family heirlooms, wiping out the toilet bowl, cleaning the windows, sure, but are you also willing to step back, and let go just a bit?
Not Walt Kowalsky the situation?
Having someone else perform household chores means that unless that someone is a professional house cleaner they might not be done the way you’d like.
©andy katz
Is that okay?
After we took Aaron and his fiancé in to our home, they chose a day to pay us back with a surprise “straightening up”. Because I’m a grown-up I accepted the gesture in the spirit it was offered, but for months afterward I couldn’t find anything. It was as though our home had been invaded by mischievous poltergeist — the drawer where I kept my favorite spatula suddenly contained steel shish-kabob skewers, which I never use except occasionally to poke through muck in the kitchen sink; my favorite carbon fiber monopod wound up in the closet next to umbrellas, which we also never use because we’re from California. I’m pretty sure Lisa’s still looking for her favorite walking shoes.
It stands to reason that our lives are the sum totals of our own unique experiences.
I’ve written elsewhere about my parents’ marriage — it most ways it followed the customs and mores of the Greatest Generation. My mother was a homemaker and my father certainly never sought the applause of bra burners and women’s libbers. Yet as his wife’s health failed, he stepped in to do every sort of household chore without complaint. He wasn’t the sort of guy who did things to make a point. If you told him “real men dust” he would shake his head while wiping down the mantel and prepping another load of wash.
While I was too much the entitled teenage Boomer prick to lend much of a hand, I did have his example, which conveyed far more power than any lecture on social justice or gender equity.
Years later, after we were married, my wife and I ran afoul of the IRS. We found ourselves owing a substantial amount to the government. Although we maintained joint accounts and filed our taxes jointly, the IRS never contacted her directly, or attempted to levy her salary, as they did mine. For several years during the mid 1980s I never brought home more than $75 per week, regardless of how much I earned. The rest went to pay our back taxes.
©andy katz
(In case you’re wondering, why didn’t they just arrange to make regular payments? When you’re paying back the IRS, they determine how much you’ll pay based on their assessment of your expenses. Because my wife’s finances weren’t visible to them, or so it seemed, we felt we couldn’t take the risk of laying it out to them. Suffice to say we’ve been square with Uncle Sam now for a couple decades….)
This was also around the time Lisa took a position as an office nurse in a small, three-physician medical practice. She drew blood, did BPs and kept charts. Five years later, that practice consisted of seven office, fifty MDs, more than a hundred ancillary employees and Lisa was general manager, second only to the founder and owner.
Our talents lead us whither they will.
By the time our son was born, Lisa had completed her MBA at Pepperdine Univesity. Given these circumstances, it should come as no surprise that I became Aaron’s primary caregiver.
©andy katz
Childrearing differs from housework because there really aren’t any shortcuts available. Leaving windows to smudge a bit is fine, but kids need 100% of their parents’ best efforts, and a bit more.
We never did quite agree, even to this day, on who exactly was “in charge” raising our son. I often felt as though I was carrying out marching orders, while Lisa insisted it was me when I was boots on the ground.
During Aaron’s first two years there were few jobs I could do that would also enable us to hire quality child-care for him, and really we didn’t want to go that way. So I started my first free-lance photo business, which didn’t pay very much, but offered the kind of scheduling flexibility that meant Aaron wouldn’t be at the mercy of strangers.
Sometime his grandfather would call. “So, are you doing anything?” the man who taught me how to hang bedsheets on a clothesline in order to dry evenly would always ask near the end of the conversation. Meaning, did I have a job yet?
“Babysitting, are you?” other people quipped.
Many assumed I was divorced and out with my son on one of “my days”, or even widowed. What else could possibly explain a solitary man setting forth into the public sphere with just a baby for company?
Women complain, with some justice, that a man performing even the simplest of childcare chores incurs waves of approbation from friends and family, while their own efforts go largely unheralded.
That’s a fair point. But in my experience that praise was often accompanied by friendly-seeming questions aimed at determining whether or not I had stolen the child; was there a mother on the scene, and, oh, where did she happen to be right then? Combine that with the way fathers, especially new fathers are portrayed in film and TV — utterly incompetent, handling baby as though she were made of Baccarat crystal, dependent on mom’s direction for pretty much everything — and what results isn’t the most encouraging of environments in which to be a male primary caregiver.
What I found to be particularly frustrating was often I was excluded from grown-up conversation. You’re out with friends at a restaurant for lunch, or having an early dinner with the folks — kids find that shit extremely boring, and tend to act accordingly. Telling them to go play or sit quietly works … in the movies or on TV, but almost never in real life. They tire of their own company and must be aggressively engaged if the entire evening isn’t to be disrupted. While Lisa spoke eloquently about the mechanics of managed healthcare to her parents, who would hang enthralled on her every word, I would try to keep the little one quiet and out of their hair. In my mind I replayed my father’s question: “Are you doing anything?”
1987’s Three Men and a Baby was Hollywood’s highest grossing picture that year. Writing for the LA Weekly, critic and feminist author Helen Knode suggested that the main characters, who band together to care for the surprise baby daughter of one, are in reality simply running away from adult relationships with women.
I remember my reaction to that: is she calling them pedophiles? Because that is part of what pedophiles do — in addition to eroticizing children, they substitute relating to peers by relating to kids.
Granted, this was just one movie, a light comedy derived from a French original. And I met Helen a few years later. Her feminism is far more nuanced than to call men raising kids pedophiles. Still, lots of folks aren’t entirely comfortable with men taking charge of the next generation that way. Nor are all of them silverbacks.
He can change a diaper, and arrange a play date, sure. But is he also okay to buy onesies, follow up a well-child exam, or select a pre-school?
According to the Stay At Home Dads [SAHD] network, as of 2014 some seven million men were primary caregivers to their children, with two million not working outside the home at all. These numbers reflect a modest, but increasing trend. But another 2014 survey performed by the Pew Institute resulted in 51% of Americans believing that a child is best raised by the mother, while only 8% believed that a child is better off with an SAHD.
All of this means what exactly?
Raising kids in any capacity is a tough gig, whether you’re a single parent, SAHD, working mom, or old-school, two-parent array able to double-team the ankle biter.
©andy katz
And, of course, my experience is strictly my own. It isn’t necessarily yours. Suffice to say there’s a lot more ambivalence about men stepping further into the domestic sphere than many people might realize. Some of it from surprising places.
The entropy of the universe increases. An intractable law of thermodynamics. Housework is humanity’s oldest and most direct form of combat against universal decay. But that doesn’t mean it must consume our lives. Historians of the homefront point out that each new technological development — the vacuum cleaner, the automatic washer-dryer, the motorized lawn mower, to name a few — increased the amount of time and effort homemakers engaged in housework, because the process of marketing them raised the standard of what people perceived as a clean home.
©andy katz
First ads in print, then motion pictures and later TV all dictated what the interior of what your basic, standard-issue domicile should look like. They really had no choice, either, because clutter distracts the viewers’ eye from whatever it is the filmmakers are trying to show. Let the protagonist be a black-out drunk, or a single-mom working two-and-a-half jobs, and the home is spotless inside. Set directors around the world armed the switches in our minds that would compel us to keep scrubbing and wiping and rearranging before allowing ourselves to put feet on the ottoman and fill our hand with a vin rose or micro-brew.
Maybe it’s past time to retrieve that authority, vest it back into ourselves?
My opinion — worth exactly what you’re paying for it right now — sit back and ponder what is most important.
Is it a clean kitchen (as it is for me)? Invisible windows? A toilet into which the Ty-D-Bol Man would happily skinny dip?
©andy katz
I think you’ll want to keep those chores on your own to-do list, because in my experience no one else is going to manage them to your standards. After decades cooking for myself, I really hope you won’t invite me over to your house for dinner because I probably won’t like your cooking. Nothing personal.
If your partner’s not pulling his household weight, let him start catching up with the less vital task. Must the laundry be separated prior to washing? Folded & ironed thus? If the vacuum misses a spot, will anaerobic Clostridia spores bloom? Accept that when he takes baby in for a well-child exam he’s not going to ask the doctor the same questions you would. Not at first.
Dirty windows are easy to clean. Getting them spotless, less so; clothing is easy fold, not so easy to fold so they don’t wrinkle. When I was in culinary school we students were required to wash our own equipment after the day’s lesson. Because I had worked my way through school as a stagiaire, cleaning up after the chef-instructors had completed their evening lessons, I would plow through the stacks of dirty sauté pans and ring molds. It was frustrating to watch some of the other students, male and female, carry on as though they were polishing a family heirloom.
It takes time and effort to learn how to do these things well. And patience to sit back and await optimal results.
I won’t lie: after nearly forty years together Lisa and I don’t entertain. That’s not our priority. Only rarely are people in our home, so the judgment of others is of little concern to us. Most of our domestic energy is put into managing our half-dozen wiener dog rescues, and there’s not a single one we would trade for a spotless floor or a fur-free sofa. That’s our priority. What’s yours? What must you have, and what can you relinquish … at least for the time being?
Can you take a lesson from Walt? | https://andrewkatz.medium.com/toward-a-new-theory-of-housework-40c458e37a99 | ['Andrew Katz'] | 2018-09-12 01:33:51.165000+00:00 | ['Equity', 'Fairness', 'Parenting', 'Housework', 'Cleaning'] |
The World Food Programme | The World Food Programme
The World Food Programme (WFP) is the leading humanitarian organization saving lives and changing lives, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience.
As the international community has committed to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition by 2030, one in nine people worldwide still do not have enough to eat. Food and food-related assistance lie at the heart of the struggle to break the cycle of hunger and poverty.
For its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict, WFP was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020.
In 2019, WFP assisted 97 million people — the largest number since 2012 — in 88 countries.
On any given day, WFP has 5,600 trucks, 30 ships and nearly 100 planes on the move, delivering food and other assistance to those in most need. Every year, we distribute more than 15 billion rations at an estimated average cost per ration of US$ 0.61. These numbers lie at the roots of WFP’s unparalleled reputation as an emergency responder, one that gets the job done quickly at scale in the most difficult environments.
Cecilia, 38 years old, breast feeding her son Samuel Jebara, 2.5 years old, inside her house. Cecilia have been receiving WFP Super Cereal since she was 4 months pregnant. WFP/Gabriela Vivacqua
WFP’s efforts focus on emergency assistance, relief and rehabilitation, development aid and special operations. Two-thirds of our work is in conflict-affected countries where people are three times more likely to be undernourished than those living in countries without conflict.
In emergencies, WFP is often first on the scene, providing food assistance to the victims of war, civil conflict, drought, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, crop failures and natural disasters. When the emergency subsides, WFP helps communities rebuild shattered lives and livelihoods. We also work to strengthen the resilience of people and communities affected by protracted crises by applying a development lens in our humanitarian response.
WFP development projects focus on nutrition, especially for mothers and children, addressing malnutrition from the earliest stages through programmes targeting the first 1,000 days from conception to a child’s second birthday, and later through school meals.
WFP is the largest humanitarian organisation implementing school feeding programmes worldwide and has been doing so for over 50 years. In 2019, WFP provided school meals to more than 17.3 million children in 50 countries, often in the hardest-to-reach areas.
In 2019, WFP provided 4,2 million metric tons of food and US$2.1 billion of cash and vouchers. By buying food as close as possible to where it is needed, we can save time and money on transport costs, and help sustain local economies. Increasingly, WFP meets people’s food needs through cash-based transfers that allow the people we serve to choose and shop for their own food locally.
WFP also provides services to the entire humanitarian community, including passenger air transportation through the UN Humanitarian Air Service, which flies to more than 280 locations worldwide.
Funded entirely by voluntary donations, WFP raised a record-breaking US$8 billion in 2019. WFP has 20,000 staff worldwide of whom over 90 percent are based in the countries where the agency provides assistance.
Lola Castro, Regional Director at World Food Programme (left), and the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) David Beasley (right) flew over Buzi to get a first hand view of the situation after cyclone Idai in Mozambique. WFP/Marco Frattini
WFP is governed by a 36-member Executive Board. It works closely with its two Rome-based sister organizations, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. WFP partners with more than 1,000 national and international NGOs to provide food assistance and tackle the underlying causes of hunger.
To support our work in around 83 countries
Donate now | https://medium.com/world-food-programme-insight/overview-1211270a8b06 | ['World Food Programme'] | 2020-10-23 08:44:53.264000+00:00 | ['Humanitarian'] |
The Gravity of Monetary Maximalism | The Gravity of Monetary Maximalism
Gigi, anonymous and prolific Bitcoin thinker and writer, comes to POV Crypto to discuss his latest article, “Bitcoin’s Gravity”. David Hoffman Jun 6, 2019·2 min read
In short, Bitcoin’s Gravity is about the pulling force that Bitcoin has to so many different people from so many different populations
Gigi has a website
Bitcoin’s Gravity article
David makes the point that this very really effect is not specific to Bitcoin, but it’s crypto at large that people come to, and Ethereum has the capability to generate much more ‘pull’ through its high expressiveness.
David and Gigi go off to the races with a great debate about Bitcoin vs. Ethereum fundamentals!
Topics:
Bitcoin’s gravitational push and pull of people with different mindsets
Bitcoin changes you more than you change it
Being a good trader requires understanding Bitcoins value prop, means you need to understand Austrian economics, means you need to understand politics. In Crypto, traders are also politically opinionated!
PoW & PoS, Competitive or not?
Debate!: | https://medium.com/@TrustlessState/the-gravity-of-monetary-maximalism-cf968dd23268 | ['David Hoffman'] | 2019-06-06 16:44:14.853000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Bitcoin', 'Proof Of Work', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Blockchain'] |
Trust is The Start of Friendship | Build bridges for friends to cross over here
Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash
Reflection Mark 14:43–52
Earlier, Jesus had a Passover meal with His disciples. The Passover meal was usually celebrated with close friends and relatives. During the meal, Jesus mentioned that someone was to betray Him. While He knew the betrayer was Judas, He did not want to dishonor him. Hence, He did not mention him by name. Rather, He gave him an opportunity to speak to Him in private. Probably, if Judas had confessed, Jesus would have forgiven him. In the Garden of Gethsemane, He allowed Judas to kiss Him. This was a gesture of friendship despite knowing Judas had brought a crowd who came from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders to arrest Him. While Jesus gave His friendship to Judas, Judas did not reciprocate. On the contrary, he broke Jesus’ trust by betraying Him. Later, he realized how terrible it was to break the trust of friendship that he took his own life.
Corporate Leadership
Jesus had many disciples with Him. Among them, He chose twelve Apostles. Of these twelve, Peter, James and John were closest to Him. Jesus placed great trust in them and valued their friendship. When Judas realized his mistake in betraying Jesus, he was so remorseful he took his own life. Likewise, people trust each other after working together for many years. One of the things a good leader does is to foster that feeling of camaraderie because trust among workers brings about productivity naturally. Having said that, there could be instances whereby one black sheep could betray the others and break the bond of friendship. A good leader always gives him the chance to explain himself rather than seek revenge first. When the leader shows forgiveness, the person may be sorry for what he has done and try to gain back the confidence and trust of his friends. Stanley Allen McChrystal, a retired US Army general, said, “I cam to believe that a leader isn’t good because they’re right; they’re good because they’re willing to learn and trust.”– XW
Family Leadership
In Jesus’ three-year ministry, His disciples heard His teaching, saw Him healing the sick and performing miracles. Jesus did these because it was the will of God. In fact, He taught that “whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:35) He emphasized the actions of a person over blood ties as a test of the family bonds. Even for Judas who betrayed Him, He gave him opportunities to repent and even accepted his kiss. In children, however, obedience does not come naturally. There could be instances whereby children could disobey their parents openly. When that happens, parents should refrain from shaming their children openly. Instead, bring them aside and give them a chance to explain. When children see that their parents are sensitive to their feelings rather than react negatively, they are more likely to trust their parents the next time around. Dr. Brene Brown, an American author said, “When people we love, stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.” — XW
Next: Have Nothing to Hide & Nothing to Fear | https://medium.com/@xavierwoon/trust-is-the-start-of-friendship-f3343ae46d5e | ['Xavier Woon'] | 2020-12-28 00:36:52.886000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Parenting', 'Christian', 'Family', 'Catholic'] |
3 Bedtime Habits of Highly Successful People | Eliminate the following from your mind and soul for the next 30 days
1. Self-Doubt — Never doubt yourself, always remember you are the creator and you have immense potential to conquer the reality, so never doubt yourself for ANYTHING
2. Fear — Fear is an illusion. If something is making you un-ease or something is going the other way than the way you expected, then fear arises. So do not fear anything or anyone.
3. Frustration — Do not frustrate for anything or anyone, we are humans, and we are born to live a happy life, not a life filled with sadness or worries. Frustration will leads you to sorrow and kill your happiness.
4. Why me? — These are two least essential words you need to eliminate from your Life dictionary. Why is nothing happening to me? Why am I unable to manifest anything? Why are people not good at me? Why can’t I get that Job? Eliminate all these why’s from you for the next 30 days.
5. Anger — It is another form of negative emotion, never get angry for anything, it is robust in the first few days, and slowly your anger level will decrease if you understand responding to the situation is better than reacting to the situation. Never respond immediately, and you will reduce your anger to zero levels. Following 30 days, you should not get angry(have a goal like this).
6. Overthinking — It is one of the bad habits which we need to eliminate to have a peaceful life. It is explained in detail here
Now, promise yourself that you are going to follow the life ethics for the next 30 days diligently. At any cost do not break this promise, if in case you happen to break the promise, do not feel bad about it and say yourself I will follow the life ethics without further break-up of promise.
Every day you are going to dedicate 60 minutes. This one hour is the investment for your future. So please do not miss this one hour.
Let us see what habits we are going to develop during this one hour. | https://medium.com/illumination/3-bedtime-habits-of-highly-successful-people-d46bd765e6d7 | ['Rajesh Vairapandian'] | 2020-08-20 13:20:42.348000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Self Improvement', 'Lifestyle', 'Productivity', 'Habits'] |
Machine Learning: Decision Tree Classifier | A decision tree classifier lets you make non-linear decisions, using simple linear questions.
As noted in a previous blog (https://medium.com/@mikecavs/machine-learning-supervised-learning-classification-4f44a91d767#.5rqr5srd1), a decision tree classifier deals with different parameters and, depending on the response over each parameter, splits the data until a final answer is reached.
What the machine does is to select the best attribute that can split the data and can give as much information as possible. That is how the machine selects the best decision tree among many.
Although, it is important to understand that the more we split the data the more we risk overfitting the data.
This concept can be understood by taking a closer look at one of the parameters available in the “sklearn” library, used to build this sort of classifier.
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.tree.DecisionTreeClassifier.html
“min_samples_split” is the parameter that tells the machine the “granularity” of the data we want to reach. The default value is 2, which means that the algorithm will continue to split the data until it reaches a node where there are at most 2 samples.
Intuitively, we can gather that if we are in this condition, than there is a high probability of overfitting, since the algorithm will try to cover pretty much all the data. In fact, if we increase this value we can see that the complexity and the “depth” of the tree diminishes and therefore it avoids overfitting our data.
Surprisingly, increasing the “min_samples_split” parameter increases also the accuracy of the algorithm.
One of the main, fundamental concepts to understand how a decision tree classifier works, is introduced by “entropy”. It is a measure of the “impurity” found in a bunch of examples.
Entropy controls where a decision tree decides to split the data.
In a decision tree we try to find variables and split points that make the subsets as pure as possible, therefore with the lowest value of entropy.
If all the examples are of the same class then the entropy value is zero. So we want to arrive to a node that splits the data into 2 complete separate classes, meaning each side of the node has zero entropy.
On the other hand, if the examples are evenly split between different classes, then the entropy is at the maximum, 1.
To further understand this concept, it is important to reference the “information gain” which is intrinsically connected to the entropy.
In mathematical terms, the “information gain” is defined by the “entropy of the parent” less the “weighted average entropy of the children”.
A decision tree algorithm aims to maximize the information gain. This is how the machine chooses which feature to split on.
So we simply want to arrive to a node that splits the data “clearly”.
Let’s say we have a bunch of 12 examples containing two different classes, 6 identified as A and 6 as B. If a node further splits the data into two smaller samples, each one containing 3 units of A and 3 units of B, we can clearly see that we haven’t gained much information compared to before the split. We just have divided the 12 examples into two parts of 6 but the content of each is still “unclear”. We still don’t know which one to choose as they both contain the same amount of A and B.
If, instead, the node splits the data in two parts where on one side we have 6 units of A and on the other we have 6 units of B, then we have much clearer information about the data. On one side we have all the As and on the other all the Bs. Therefore we gained the greatest amount of information to properly answer a question (which could be “which side should I go if I want have an A?”).
The entropy on each side of the data is zero. Both are “pure” as they contain examples of the same class (A or B). | https://medium.com/machine-learning-bites/machine-learning-decision-tree-classifier-9eb67cad263e | ['Michele Cavaioni'] | 2017-02-05 18:16:15.840000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science'] |
How to Answer “Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?” In an Interview | How to Answer “Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?” In an Interview Sarah Seweryniak Follow Dec 16 · 4 min read
Why employers ask this question and how to ace it
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” is a question that requires you to outline your intentions for the future. Interviews can be intimidating. Planning your answer is essential.
It’s important to recognize where you want to be in five years. You can do this based on the job description, your interests, intentions and goals. These thoughts can help develop an answer that demonstrates why you’re the best person for the role.
Why employers ask this question
There are many reasons why an employer will ask you where you’ll see yourself in five years. Employers want to know if you’re expectations and goals will align with what they’re offering.
Employers want to see if you’re interested and satisfied in the position for many years. This will help a company decide whether you’re overqualified. It would spark concern over whether your interest in the position may subside.
Turnover can be high in some businesses, so a company will want to see if you’ll be worth the investment of training. Companies like to hear that you’re interested in staying long-term. This is important because there will not be a need to fill an open position and onboard a new employee.
Employers want to get a sense of your ambition, drive and interest in the role. Employers will see your passions and interests. It allows them to know how you would contribute to the organization in the short-term and long-term.
What NOT to say in an interview
Companies want to make a lengthy commitment to a prospective employee. Do not give the company any sign that you have no intention of staying with the company long-term. Even if you know without a doubt you won’t stay, don’t tell them that.
It’s important not to tell an interviewer that you hope to have their position one day. While they may seem like a “no brainer,” many people don’t realize that. While you’ll want to appear ambitious, you don’t want to appear like you want your bosses’ job.
How to answer, “where you see yourself in five years?”
When you reflect on the question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” think about how you could evolve in this role. Many people don’t stay in the same job for 30 years anymore. So you may not see yourself with the company long-term. That’s okay.
It’s important not to disclose your longevity with the interviewer. But, imagine how you could grow into this career. What career trajectory you could see yourself embarking on with the company.
It’s important to come to the interview prepared to answer this question. Here are some things to consider to help you ace the answer:
Discuss how your career objectives fit with the job description
Familiarize yourself with the job description. Acknowledge the qualities and skills you have and how a company could benefit. Think about how the opportunity could strengthen your skill-set.
Assess what the job requires and how the knowledge gained could benefit your career. Expanding on your expertise could create advancement opportunities, whether it’s within the company or with another organization.
Envision what you’d like to have on your resume in five years
Companies want to hear about how you want to grow with them. Try to imagine what an ideal resume would look like for a candidate with the next five years.
During an interview, discuss job titles that you could grow into. Discuss the possibility of training or certification programs. Companies like to see your interest in training opportunities that you could pursue.
Discussing advancing your knowledge would benefit an organization. They would benefit from a developed skill-set. Thinking about your future could help develop your response to a future employer.
Show your interests and how you might grow in this role
Employers like seeing the willingness to continue to learn. If there is a specific area of interest, talk about it during your interview. This could spark inspiration and may lead to further development.
There is always room for growth. Talk about an area where you feel you may want to focus. An employer may be willing to invest in that area of interest to develop an employee who wants to be an expert.
Understanding tasks, skills and subject matter associated with the position will help you develop ideas for the future. | https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-answer-where-do-you-see-yourself-in-five-years-in-an-interview-474b9b21b4ed | ['Sarah Seweryniak'] | 2020-12-16 12:29:01.640000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Self', 'Careers', 'Culture', 'Society'] |
Ashes, Ashes, Everywhere There | The first days after my son’s suicide were punctuated with question marks. Words uttered in library whispers by well-meaning relatives or friends hinted at the questions that always swirl around suicide. None of them were answerable, except to say that my son was fiercely private about his inner struggles. He didn’t want to burden anyone by sharing his darkness, so he hid it all behind smiles and laughter.
I preferred the questions I could answer: the simpler ones related to the business of death.
Who is writing the obituary? I am, with input from my family. Where do you want to publish it? Online and in our home newspaper. Burial or cremation? Cremation, please. We have a range of options for the body, from an unadorned box to the fanciest of caskets. What do you prefer? The box suits him; he used to keep his clothes together with duct tape. Do you want remembrance jewelry? Jewelry? Oh, with ashes in them? (I wear my necklace every day.)
What kind of container do you want for the ashes? Where do you want to put them?
The last two questions stumped me.
One of Ben’s professors in college deemed him a “force of nature,” a description so apt that we used it in the obituary. Ben was elemental, connected to the natural world he loved, and he was impossible to contain in life. His spirit seemed too large for any container to hold him in death.
Ben never stayed anywhere for long in life. His grandmother called him her will-o-the-wisp, an elemental force who drifted in and out of her life, dropping by without notice to share an order of crab rangoons or raid her refrigerator for leftovers. A sudden invitation to spend a week at a friend’s slope-side cabin coupled with an impending snowstorm saw him depart a family visit in PA — right after dinner, on Christmas Eve — to drive north; he never could resist the siren’s song of fresh snow. Unannounced, last-minute adventures were his signature. He existed in so many places to me; how could we put him in a single location in death?
Any decision seemed impossible; I needed time to think about it, to talk to my husband and our children.
We settled on scattering tubes, which come in several varieties and different sizes depending on the purpose. Cardboard single-use with outdoor scenes like a sunset or the mountains for Ben’s closest friends. Small, discreet wooden tubes for travel to distant areas. Resealable metal ones in velvet cases for scattering ashes in multiple places.
The containers didn’t hold all the ashes; I received a box with the rest the day of the funeral. There are fewer ashes now, but there are still places he longed to go; I plan to take him.
His ashes contain his every moment, birth to death, reduced to their essence, and they sparkle in the sunlight.
The funeral director’s face paled when I asked him to tell me about the ashes, but he patiently explained that the remains are similar in size and weight to a 5-pound sack of flour. Later, when I looked it up, I learned that the composition and color of remains are influenced by their exposure to minerals, metals, and elements stored in the bones. The amount of body fat can affect the color (more body fat can cause the ashes to be darker in color, for example).
Ashes In My Hand
The first time I held Ben’s remains in my hand was after his funeral, sitting at the Penobscot River in the spot where he meditated. Sunlight warmed my face as I opened the scattering tube. The grief was settling into my soul, weighing on me in inverse proportion to the tiny pile of bone shards and powder — the consistency of sand — I held in my palm.
I dropped them into the river along with my heart and watched them swirl and sink slowly to the rocks. In the clear water, they caught the sunlight, and I remember thinking that Ben was so brilliant that it was entirely logical that his ashes would shine, even underwater.
I realized Ben’s ashes are as unique in death as he was in his life. They are not just his bones. Call it energy, call it spirit, call it love in a different form. His ashes contain his every moment, birth to death, reduced to their essence, and they sparkle in the sunlight.
Scattered Ashes
I resolved to take Ben to the places I associate with his passions and interests, to go on adventures as a way to remember him and try to make peace with his loss. I’ve taken him to a music festival, ridden on a float in a Mardis Gras parade, and gone whitewater rafting down the Penobscot. I’ve gone backpacking and camped out solo. I’ve been on open mountain tops, deep woods, waterfalls, rivers, oceans. Brilliant sunshine, blowing snow, dense fog, drenching rain. Sunrise, sunset, and every hour in between.
Friends and family took ashes to honor our lost adventurer in the one way he would want: they’ve gone on adventures of their own. It’s become a group project as a tribute to him. Ben’s life-long best friend and “brother by choice” chose Mt. Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain and the site of one of their most epic camping adventures. His three high school buddies: tubing down their favorite river and planting sunflowers at the apple orchard they all loved. A close college friend: a favorite trail with an overlook in Connecticut. His Aunt: an Arizona desert canyon. A cousin: cliffs on the Irish coast. One of my dearest friends: The Arctic Circle, after sending me pictures of “beer with Ben” from the trip to get there.
Ben kept many of his relationships separate. Words, thoughts, the manner of scattering, whether they cried, I have no wish to know the details beyond receiving a picture or two. They were part of his story in life; they remain part of his story by honoring him in death. I know they take him to places symbolic of his meaning in their lives, or places he would have visited someday. It’s enough to know they loved my son.
Ashes in My Heart
There have been days it felt effortless to be out on the trails, and days it was so hard and heavy that I wanted to cry. Days the ashes felt weightless and ethereal, and days the metal tube weighed my entire body down as I climbed the trail.
But I find him out there on the trails when I see it through his eyes or let the wonder of the view from the top of the world wash over me. I see him standing on peaks, wading through streams, feeling the spray of waterfalls, or watching ocean waves. He always said he felt most himself when he was outside, drinking in the wonder of the world.
The act of scattering helps us honor and remember our loved ones, and possibly find a moment of peace.
When the timing suits me and I feel him, I sprinkle a tiny handful of his ashes and take a picture of his hat, stolen from him at graduation with a suicide remembrance ribbon pinned to it, made by his auntie for his funeral, and my remembrance necklace: a green malachite pendant for the color of his eyes, and a small, ash-filled, silver bead.
Some images will stay with me. The double rainbow on Garfield at the end of a 2-day trek is etched in my brain. If I close my eyes, I am back in Yellowstone, on my snowshoes in the brilliant sun, listening to wolf-song wash over me. It was a mile away, but it echoed up the valley so loud that I felt it on my skin.
I look up and imagine the sweep of the eagle in the Cascades as it flew, eye-level, across a mountain peak. I see the bighorn ram standing mere feet away, posing and peaceful, on the Continental Divide in Glacier. I feel the peace of watching the sunset from West Bond in the White Mountains of New Hampshire or the majesty of Knife Edge on Mt. Katahdin, the rooftop of Baxter State Park, and Ben’s favorite hike.
I think Ben sends me these moments, and I store them away in my heart. Sometimes I wonder if I got enough of them, they could start to fill the emptiness of loss, or at least begin to make the space less jarring. But they have to be earned. They come at the end of long, arduous treks or after I’ve overcome some obstacle or taken a step forward on this journey and learned a lesson from it.
Ashes In the Sunlight
Life is fragile and messy. We lose the ground, and love is so quickly reduced to ashes. But what I’ve learned this year, scattering my son’s remains from one coast to the other, a tiny handful at a time, is that my connection with him is unbroken.
Whether we scatter their remains a tiny bit at a time or all at once, the act of scattering helps us honor and remember our loved ones. Hopefully, we find a moment of peace and grace in the act of sending their essence into the air, or water, or earth.
When I scatter Ben’s remains, I gain understanding. I catch glimpses of my son, and his life, and our love, in the sparkle of his ashes.
The first days after my son’s suicide were punctuated with question marks. Words uttered in library whispers by well-meaning relatives or friends hinted at the questions that always swirl around suicide. None of them were answerable, except to say that my son was fiercely private about his inner struggles. He didn’t want to burden anyone by sharing his darkness, so he hid it all behind smiles and laughter.
I preferred the questions I could answer: the simpler ones related to the business of death.
Who is writing the obituary? I am, with input from my family. Where do you want to publish it? Online and in our home newspaper. Burial or cremation? Cremation, please. We have a range of options for the body, from an unadorned box to the fanciest of caskets. What do you prefer? The box suits him; he used to keep his clothes together with duct tape. Do you want remembrance jewelry? Jewelry? Oh, with ashes in them? (I wear my necklace every day.)
What kind of container do you want for the ashes? Where do you want to put them?
The last two questions stumped me.
One of Ben’s professors in college deemed him a “force of nature,” a description so apt that we used it in the obituary. Ben was elemental, connected to the natural world he loved, and he was impossible to contain in life. His spirit seemed too large for any container to hold him in death.
Ben never stayed anywhere for long in life. His grandmother called him her will-o-the-wisp, an elemental force who drifted in and out of her life, dropping by without notice to share an order of crab rangoons or raid her refrigerator for leftovers. A sudden invitation to spend a week at a friend’s slope-side cabin coupled with an impending snowstorm saw him depart a family visit in PA — right after dinner, on Christmas Eve — to drive north; he never could resist the siren’s song of fresh snow. Unannounced, last-minute adventures were his signature. He existed in so many places to me; how could we put him in a single location in death?
Any decision seemed impossible; I needed time to think about it, to talk to my husband and our children.
We settled on scattering tubes, which come in several varieties and different sizes depending on the purpose. Cardboard single-use with outdoor scenes like a sunset or the mountains for Ben’s closest friends. Small, discreet wooden tubes for travel to distant areas. Resealable metal ones in velvet cases for scattering ashes in multiple places.
The containers didn’t hold all the ashes; I received a box with the rest the day of the funeral. There are fewer ashes now, but there are still places he longed to go; I plan to take him.
His ashes contain his every moment, birth to death, reduced to their essence, and they sparkle in the sunlight.
The funeral director’s face paled when I asked him to tell me about the ashes, but he patiently explained that the remains are similar in size and weight to a 5-pound sack of flour. Later, when I looked it up, I learned that the composition and color of remains are influenced by their exposure to minerals, metals, and elements stored in the bones. The amount of body fat can affect the color (more body fat can cause the ashes to be darker in color, for example).
Ashes In My Hand
The first time I held Ben’s remains in my hand was after his funeral, sitting at the Penobscot River in the spot where he meditated. Sunlight warmed my face as I opened the scattering tube. The grief was settling into my soul, weighing on me in inverse proportion to the tiny pile of bone shards and powder — the consistency of sand — I held in my palm.
I dropped them into the river along with my heart and watched them swirl and sink slowly to the rocks. In the clear water, they caught the sunlight, and I remember thinking that Ben was so brilliant that it was entirely logical that his ashes would shine, even underwater.
I realized Ben’s ashes are as unique in death as he was in his life. They are not just his bones. Call it energy, call it spirit, call it love in a different form. His ashes contain his every moment, birth to death, reduced to their essence, and they sparkle in the sunlight.
Scattered Ashes
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I resolved to take Ben to the places I associate with his passions and interests, to go on adventures as a way to remember him and try to make peace with his loss. I’ve taken him to a music festival, ridden on a float in a Mardis Gras parade, and gone whitewater rafting down the Penobscot. I’ve gone backpacking and camped out solo. I’ve been on open mountain tops, deep woods, waterfalls, rivers, oceans. Brilliant sunshine, blowing snow, dense fog, drenching rain. Sunrise, sunset, and every hour in between.
Friends and family took ashes to honor our lost adventurer in the one way he would want: they’ve gone on adventures of their own. It’s become a group project as a tribute to him. Ben’s life-long best friend and “brother by choice” chose Mt. Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain and the site of one of their most epic camping adventures. His three high school buddies: tubing down their favorite river and planting sunflowers at the apple orchard they all loved. A close college friend: a favorite trail with an overlook in Connecticut. His Aunt: an Arizona desert canyon. A cousin: cliffs on the Irish coast. One of my dearest friends: The Arctic Circle, after sending me pictures of “beer with Ben” from the trip to get there.
Ben kept many of his relationships separate. Words, thoughts, the manner of scattering, whether they cried, I have no wish to know the details beyond receiving a picture or two. They were part of his story in life; they remain part of his story by honoring him in death. I know they take him to places symbolic of his meaning in their lives, or places he would have visited someday. It’s enough to know they loved my son.
Ashes in My Heart
There have been days it felt effortless to be out on the trails, and days it was so hard and heavy that I wanted to cry. Days the ashes felt weightless and ethereal, and days the metal tube weighed my entire body down as I climbed the trail.
But I find him out there on the trails when I see it through his eyes or let the wonder of the view from the top of the world wash over me. I see him standing on peaks, wading through streams, feeling the spray of waterfalls, or watching ocean waves. He always said he felt most himself when he was outside, drinking in the wonder of the world.
The act of scattering helps us honor and remember our loved ones, and possibly find a moment of peace.
When the timing suits me and I feel him, I sprinkle a tiny handful of his ashes and take a picture of his hat, stolen from him at graduation with a suicide remembrance ribbon pinned to it, made by his auntie for his funeral, and my remembrance necklace: a green malachite pendant for the color of his eyes, and a small, ash-filled, silver bead.
Some images will stay with me. The double rainbow on Garfield at the end of a 2-day trek is etched in my brain. If I close my eyes, I am back in Yellowstone, on my snowshoes in the brilliant sun, listening to wolf-song wash over me. It was a mile away, but it echoed up the valley so loud that I felt it on my skin.
I look up and imagine the sweep of the eagle in the Cascades as it flew, eye-level, across a mountain peak. I see the bighorn ram standing mere feet away, posing and peaceful, on the Continental Divide in Glacier. I feel the peace of watching the sunset from West Bond in the White Mountains of New Hampshire or the majesty of Knife Edge on Mt. Katahdin, the rooftop of Baxter State Park, and Ben’s favorite hike.
I think Ben sends me these moments, and I store them away in my heart. Sometimes I wonder if I got enough of them, they could start to fill the emptiness of loss, or at least begin to make the space less jarring. But they have to be earned. They come at the end of long, arduous treks or after I’ve overcome some obstacle or taken a step forward on this journey and learned a lesson from it.
Ashes In the Sunlight
Life is fragile and messy. We lose the ground, and love is so quickly reduced to ashes. But what I’ve learned this year, scattering my son’s remains from one coast to the other, a tiny handful at a time, is that my connection with him is unbroken.
Whether we scatter their remains a tiny bit at a time or all at once, the act of scattering helps us honor and remember our loved ones. Hopefully, we find a moment of peace and grace in the act of sending their essence into the air, or water, or earth.
When I scatter Ben’s remains, I gain understanding. I catch glimpses of my son, and his life, and our love, in the sparkle of his ashes. | https://medium.com/@shannonf-genoveses/ashes-ashes-everywhere-there-61b06e5e2ce8 | ['Shannon F. Genovese'] | 2020-12-18 23:44:36.603000+00:00 | ['Suicide', 'Grieving Process', 'Death', 'Grief'] |
In Defense of Daydreaming | In Defense of Daydreaming
Leave science out of it
Author’s photo
I didn’t do well in grade school. I always thought I was dumb–and it’s possible I really was–but even after the teacher wrote on my third grade report card, “Ramona needs to work on her concentration. She daydreams too much in class”, I saw my lack of interest in learning the hard stuff as little more than a case of misinterpretation. Daydreaming is nothing more than thinking, and thinking, I knew even then, was good.
My mom, always one to let me believe I might be the most important person on the face of the earth (A terrible burden to place on such young shoulders, I know, but back then I enjoyed the hell out of it), sighed over the hard evidence–the C’s and D’s–and winced when she spotted the notation. She was quiet for a minute and then she said, “Well, honey, you know I would never tell you to give up your daydreams. You’re just going to have to stop dreaming in school.”
I never did give up my daydreams. They’re such a part of my life I might as well stop my daily breathing as to stop my daily dreaming. It’s a wondrous thing, the ability to slide away from the real and glide into the realm of imagination.
It can cause problems, I will be the first to admit. I used to keep my thoughts to myself when I was younger but nowadays whatever is going on in my head is somehow coming out of my mouth. I don’t notice until I get the stares, and all I can hope for is that I was mumbling and they weren’t actually hearing, say, my acceptance speech at the Oscars.
So, because my daydreams have been with me forever, I’ve never thought about them as being the kind of thing the scientific community might latch onto.
Who but someone who doesn’t daydream would think it might be interesting to investigate the cause and effect of daydreams and write it up as scientific data?
If these people really understood how delicious daydreams can be they would be doing more of it and less of the drudgework–which trying to dissect the makeup of daydreams must be. It’s like tearing the stuffing out of Winnie the Pooh to see what makes him so special.
How would you go about researching them? Do you ask daydreamers what happens when they daydream? Any self-respecting daydreamer would never tell. What goes on inside our heads is nobody else’s business. (Forget what you saw above about the Oscar speech. I didn’t say that exactly.)
What brought me to thinking about this is an article I found at Maria Popova’s wonderful ‘Brain Pickings’, called, “How Mind-Wandering and ‘Positive Constructive Daydreaming’ enhance creativity and Improve our Social Skills.” I’m a huge fan of “Brain Pickings” and of Popova, and I usually eat these things up, but this one sounded silly at the get-go.
It’s a wondrous thing, the ability to slide away from the real and glide into the realm of imagination.
I’m protective of daydreaming, even when it’s being dissected as the prime outlet for creativity, and any time it goes under the microscope–which seems to be every few years–I want to remind everyone to just take it easy. There is no mystery to it. I call it a relaxation of the brain. Even brains need some R&R.
But here you go:
In the 1950s, Yale psychologist Jerome L. Singer […] embarked upon a groundbreaking series of research into daydreaming. His findings, eventually published in the 1975 bible The Inner World of Daydreaming (public library), laid the foundations of our modern understanding of creativity’s subconscious underbelly. Singer described three core styles of daydreaming: positive constructive daydreaming, a process fairly free of psychological conflict, in which playful, vivid, wishful imagery drives creative thought; guilty-dysphoric daydreaming, driven by a combination of ambitiousness, anguishing fantasies of heroism, failure, and aggression, and obsessive reliving of trauma, a mode particularly correlated with PTSD; and poor attentional control, typical of the anxious, the distractible, and those having difficulties concentrating.
Creativity’s subconscious underbelly? Good lord, really? Guilty-dysphoric daydreaming? Poor attentional control? (Attentional??)
We’re talking about vegging out for a few unplanned moments in which we–at least I–get to be somewhere else but here. I don’t know about yours, but my daydreams are deliciously pleasant, moving ever so inexorably toward fame and fortune. If anxiety or fear invades, they’re no longer daydreams. Then they’re called nightmares.
But, wait–was I just analyzing?
Oh, Gawd. I was. | https://medium.com/indelible-ink/in-defense-of-daydreaming-264bc8f913bd | ['Ramona Grigg'] | 2020-12-07 15:30:09.636000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Creativity', 'Life', 'Imagination', 'Writing'] |
Trump Isn’t Entitled To Freedom Of Speech Anymore | I am watching in amazement as Trump and the GOP are staging a coup right under our noses, on television in America. They feel that they are so above the law, so entitled, they aren’t even respecting the first and elementary rule of coups — plan it in secret and surprise everyone.
No, they are staging their coup in broad daylight. Wasn’t that a smirk I saw on Attorney General William Barr's face when he said: a smooth transition to a second Trump Administration?
My word, not only are they doing it, they actually seem amused. They are basically walking a fine line between instigating a brutal civil war and outright treason, and they are laughing about it. Is this some sick joke? | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/trump-isnt-entitled-to-freedom-of-speech-anymore-9f77343c306c | ['Rebecca Stevens A.'] | 2020-11-12 03:37:07.522000+00:00 | ['Elections', 'Leadership', 'White Supremacy', 'Politics', 'USA'] |
Passwords are not secure! The solution for developers | The Problem
WHEN THE COMPUTER security company Hold Security reported that more than 1.2 billion online credentials had been swiped by Russian hackers, many people were worried — -and justifiably so. Hold isn’t saying exactly which websites were hit, but with so many credentials stolen, it’s likely that hundreds of millions of ordinary consumers were affected.
Some of these may be incredibly complex passwords — -with lots of jumbled numbers and symbols. And some may be incredibly simple — -using just the simplest of English words, like, say, “password.” But after the hack, most all of them have left their users vulnerable to attack. According to Alex Holden, Hold Security’s founder, the “vast majority” of the passwords he uncovered had been stored in plain text on company servers.
What this shows that a complex password isn’t necessarily a secure password. As the wired have written before, password systems have a very annoying way of putting most of the hard work onto the shoulders of the users. You’ve got to mix up a jumble of numbers and letters (some in capitals, please) and special characters. Some passwords time-out after 90 days, forcing you to reset them. But that doesn’t mean they’re that much safer than simple passwords.
Read this to: Harsh truth of Digital India
Some of our ideas about passwords date back to the 1980s, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology came up some guidelines for creating secure passwords for local area networks. Back then, they’d mail them out to interested computer security types via U.S. Post. Now, NIST is trying to help the U.S. move beyond the password, says Donna Dodson NIST’s chief cyber security advisor. “Putting the burden of security on the end-user and making it more complex just doesn’t work,” she says. “The security has to be usable for the end-user. Otherwise they’re going to find workarounds.”
In some situations, a complex password can help you. But in others — -like when the company holding your password stores it in plain text, without encrypting it — -that complexity is meaningless. And some passwords may seem complex, when they’re actually pretty easy to guess. They can trip you up, even if they’re stored using cryptographic techniques, when someone hacks into the machines that they live on. The lesson here is that system administrators — -the people who oversee all those password rules you have to follow — -need to shoulder a bit more of the work. They need to better understand what makes a secure password — -and how passwords should be stored.
“Everyone is confused in this space,” says Cormac Herley, a Microsoft researcher who’s been studying passwords for years. System administrators will lay down rules for passwords but often, “we don’t know half of why we’re doing this stuff.,” says Herley. And they may not realize they should be spending their time securing systems in other ways.
Either way, pinning your security on an insanely complex password is a fool’s wager. Just ask the people running the airline, travel and social networking sites that got hacked by Alex Holden’s Russian hackers. “Why are we burdening users with demands to chose stronger and stronger things with the goal of withstanding increasingly sophisticated guessing attacks when 1.2 billion credentials are just spewed from servers that are improperly protected,” says Herley. “That seems like a big waste of effort.”
The Solution for Developers
The solution's are ranked on basis of how easy it is for developers to implement: | https://medium.com/@nu21/passwords-are-not-secure-the-solution-for-developers-651b12b3c560 | ['Nishant Upadhyay'] | 2020-12-08 04:46:15.529000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Paas', 'Privacy', 'Authentication', 'Developers Update'] |
Design Team Collaborations during the Pandemic | Exploring the social and psychological repercussions of the pandemic.
The economic and social repercussions of the pandemic have left most of us feeling anxious not only about the future but about the present itself. In a time of no clarity, all of us are now taking things one day at a time. The pandemic has also completely changed the way we approach our life and the one aspect which has been impacted almost universally is people’s way of working. There are only a select few people you may (or you may not) know whose working conditions are unchanged. We are all navigating through the space of what might be the new normal — working from home. We thought it would be pertinent to see how an industry like design, which heavily relies on team collaborations to move forward- is impacted.
It’s not easy to replicate the same results you would get from brainstorming sessions, ideating, and trial-and-error creative processes while you attend Zoom meetings and interact with clients and fellow designers over video calls. That’s something all designers would probably nod their heads in agreement on.
One of our designer’s told us how working from home during the pandemic has caused a shift in his work life.
“Working from home in this pandemic is definitely big a shift in the way we all used to work. The biggest challenge is managing your personal time along with work when both of them are intersecting. At the end of the day I often feel like should I feel bad for not working much or not taking care of myself enough?”
Almost everyone is grappling with issues along the same lines. When you are working from home and your room doubles as your workspace, where do you draw the line between your work and personal life? Additionally, because of the economic ramifications of the pandemic, many people are working extra hours without speaking out over fears of unemployment. To some extent, this shift of working from home has actually unveiled how unbalanced many of our work schedules are. How does one collaborate creatively and ensure that their personal life also holds a priority?
The answer to that question lies in an approach which keeps the welfare of the employees at a top priority along with keeping work on track. Planned agendas for meetings, clear communication, set deadlines with achievable timelines, and making video calls the “new normal” are a few things that we all have to embrace with open arms. Since we are losing out on informal time with our fellow colleagues, such as taking a break with them or having lunch together, taking some time off to have a call for informal conversations or maybe just to blow off steam, will also break the monotony of team collaborations only for work.
Whether this threat is short-term or long lasting, companies who can enable a virtual workforce, especially design agencies who thrive on team collaborations to get the work done, will have a significant competitive advantage in the long run.
Read more at: https://yellowchalk.com/blog/ | https://medium.com/yellowchalk-design/design-team-collaborations-during-the-pandemic-da184f6a59ed | ['Yellowchalk Design Studio'] | 2021-08-27 07:35:25.399000+00:00 | ['Designer', 'Pandemic Diaries', 'Collaboration', 'Remote Working'] |
How to Organise a Review of The Year Session for Your Team | A lot has happened in 2020 which you’d probably like to forget. But chances are, your team also did some really good work.
It’s precisely because this year has been a bit rubbish that celebrating what you achieved is really important. An easy way to do this is through a team ‘Review of the Year’ session.
This is a good thing to do for several reasons.
It’s easy to lose track of what has happened over the course of 12 months. Those demos you did in January and February feel a very, very, very long time ago now.
Given that many of us have been working from home for a while now, these events are also a good way for team members to find out what their colleagues have been doing whilst working from their kitchens for the past nine months. They’ll know some of the details — but things get lost and overlooked when people aren’t sat together.
These sessions are also a goldmine of information for anyone who has joined your team in the past year. It helps them find out more about their team members (who they may not have actually met in person), find out a little about their lives and what they’ve worked on.
So if you put one more meeting in your team’s diary this year — make it one of these.
But there’s a bit of prep to do, so make it a team effort. I’m sharing how I’ve prepared and structured these for the past few years. You might want to do it a different way — but if anything in my method inspires you to set up an in-person or virtual session of your own, consider it my holiday gift to you.
Find a host or two
This is a great role for people in your team who want to build their presenting and public speaking confidence. It’s presenting positive messages to friendly crowd who will be rooting for them to succeed.
If you’ve got a big team or lots of work to include, you might want to divide the year up into chunks for different hosts or find a couple of people to run it together. Try to avoid hosting if you are the team lead — make it about the team.
2. Get a date in the diary soon
Between an hour and two hours (with a break) should do it — depending on how big your team is. Make it time-neutral by cancelling a meeting (or two) which you can live without at this point in the year. No-one needs any more Zoom-time right now.
3. Create a skeleton presentation
If possible, build the outline of the review in a collaborative tool like Google Slides. Make a title page for each month and add a couple of example pieces of content to give people ideas about what to submit.
If you don’t have access to a collaborative tool, one person can be responsible for building the presentation if you communicate who to send things to and what the deadline is.
4. Invite the team to add their events
Send a message to the whole team, including the link to the presentation and invite them to start adding their highlights of the year.
Stick to maximum of one slide per ‘thing’. A ‘thing’ is anything that someone did which they are proud of. It could be launching a new feature, bashing a really annoying bug, hitting a KPI target, a great sale, some funny user feedback, taking part in a conference, conducting user tests, winning an award — anything.
I’ve seen some teams also add quiz questions throughout the deck. Things like ‘How many lines of code did we write this year?’ But the team decides what goes in the presentation. These are their stories.
5. Don’t forget about the happy personal events
Did anyone get married? Have a baby? Made an impressive sourdough loaf? Did new people join the team?Have you got any pictures from team events earlier in the year? Let the people in your team and share and celebrate whatever they want to (but don’t force them).
6. Make sure everyone is included
Encourage people to namecheck people they collaborated with and make sure that everyone has had an opportunity to contribute if they want to. Also don’t forget to call out and thank the awesome people who keep your team running too — your team assistants, interns etc. The world doesn’t turn without them.
7. It’s show time! Turn off your messages and fully engage
Suggest people grab a coffee, get comfy and turn off their mails and messages. As you run through the year, the hosts can invite some of the people who submitted slides about their work to say a few words about what they did and what they learned. You might also learn a thing or two about your team. Pay attention and do not look at your phone.
8. Say a few words — including two very important ones
One the review is finished, it might be nice to say a few words if you’re the team lead. If difficult things have happened this year which it would be weird not to mention then do acknowledge them. You’re not trying to erase history.
But the most important words you can say at this point are thank you. Then you can wish your team a happy, healthy 2021 — ideally with another great Review of the Year session at the end of it.
If you have any end of year ceremonies in your team I’d love to hear about them. Please do share them in the comments. | https://productcoalition.com/if-you-add-one-more-meeting-to-your-teams-calendar-in-2020-make-it-a-review-of-the-year-session-9b9fef28356b | ['Lucie Mclean'] | 2020-11-30 11:37:15.529000+00:00 | ['Agile', 'Collaboration', 'Team Building', 'Product Management', 'Leadership'] |
How a Pixar Movie Warned Us About the Rise of Trump | The story of a fictional small town in the middle of Arizona called Radiator Springs might hold the key to fixing the dangerous divisiveness that is plaguing American life.
Radiator Springs. Source: Pixar
Eight months after my son was born, Trump took the reins of the United States announcing the end of the “American carnage.” Like many, I tried to grasp in the following months and years how a country that had elected Obama twice, could move so far to the opposite edge of the political spectrum only to eventually fall off the cliff, face first into the cacti. For those of you who haven’t watched Cars since its theatrical release in 2006, here’s a quick refresher on the plot: on his way to Los Angeles, race-car sensation Lightning McQueen gets lost and lands in a desolate town in the middle of Utah — Radiator Springs. Radiator Springs used to be a lively, colorful, booming little town, but when the nearby highway opened, cars stopped driving through its streets “to save 10 minutes,” leading the town to its slow demise and leaving its inhabitants wondering how much longer they could survive in the place they’ve always called home.
It was around viewing #91 that it hit me: what happened to Radiator Springs is the reason Trump got elected. That’s how every authoritarian leader gets elected. Disenfranchised people with no economy to support their livelihood and their pride embrace a populist who finds them the scapegoat they’ve been looking for. Take your pick — immigrants, minorities, Muslims, Jews, coastal elites, China… And Donald Trump (with the help of sound bite media culture) accomplished the unbelievable trick of diverting the attention from the people actually responsible for the disappearance of small town economies (he and many of his wealthy friends) and redirecting it toward people who work 12 hours a day and can’t even afford their own homes.
What used to be the engine of American life, what has filled the collective vision of the American dream for more than half a century: the small town life, the self-serving community where everyone has a business to run and a role to play, has slowly disappeared in the heart of the country. A lot of manufacturing jobs did go to China, where they produce for cheaper to allow more of us to buy more plastic things we don’t really need, while increasing the margins for a few multi-million dollar companies. Back in 2016, Trump got a good start toward his win when he said all Mexicans were criminals. But he definitely won the election when he said he was going to make China pay.
So now what does this tell us? First it tells us that cinema studies are not just an after-hour dorm-room activity for nerdy, intellectual college kids. It tells us that movies, even those made for kids, can teach us a lot. It tells us that instead of binging as many hours of stories as we can, maybe we should watch less and think about them a little more. It also tells us, we should all re-watch Wall-E.
But here’s the scary part: we’re not making any of this better, even as the country voted for a new president. Because if the rural areas were hit first, suburban areas are next and the Covid pandemic has shone a blinding spotlight on this unsettling reality. Cars was written almost 15 years ago. Since then Amazon multiplied its revenue by 35 and we can only imagine what their 2020 numbers are going to be. If we order everything on Amazon, if we read all our books on Kindle, if we watch all our movies at home, we are all actively participating in the decay of our downtowns, destroying livelihoods and neighborhoods. Right now, everyone is worrying about restaurants, bars and barbers, and of course these businesses are hit hard. But in the long run, if we can help them survive this crisis, these types of businesses are actually probably going to be fine. The businesses that aren’t are the bookstores, the hardware stores, the toy stores, the stationeries, the movie theaters, the boutique clothing stores, the places that give a town its soul and give a community income and liveliness. Yes Amazon has everything, yes Amazon delivers fast, and yes Amazon is often cheaper. But is it worth pulling the curtain on Main Street America? Because there’s no way that’s not what’s next. Is the division and the exhaustion we’re all feeling worth getting that book in two days instead of waiting a week for our local bookstore to order it? Saying on social media we want to change the world is a good thing. Voting is a great thing. Taking responsibility and changing our everyday habits to help our society survive instead of pursuing speed, convenience and a $10 discount is better.
You think I’m over-reacting? You think I sound like an old man, rejecting new technology? Maybe you don’t, but I’ve heard it many times and here’s my answer: new technology is only worth it if it makes the world a better place. If not, it doesn’t belong in our evolution as a species. It’s not because something is new that it’s progress. What exactly gets better when a bookstore or a toy store closes? It takes money out of the pocket of our neighbors, erases a place of social interaction and helps make the same few people a little bit richer. Also, it’s going to make us all fat. (Again, you should re-watch Wall-E.)
The other recurring counter-argument is that Amazon creates jobs, that there is always creative destruction in an evolving economy. True, but let’s look at a map of America — these new jobs are now all concentrated in the same parts of the country, and we can all guess what color those states are on the Electoral map. Yes Amazon creates jobs, but the good ones are all on the coasts. When they announced the building of HQ2, I was hopeful. I though maybe they’d take this opportunity to rekindle a part of the country that desperately needs it. What did they choose? New York and a suburb of Washington, D.C.
If you look at history, it’s not hard to notice that geography is everything. Every war has been primarily about geography: the attempt by the leaders of a land to conquer another piece of land that has more or better resources. We can get upset at the Electoral College system all we want, but that’s precisely why the Framers created it: so that geography doesn’t fall off the map in our politics. So we don’t have wars.
I disagree with Trump on just about everything, except this: people in America should buy more American (a rule he of course doesn’t follow himself). People in France should buy more French. People in Japan should buy more Japanese… Only 29% of American wants Roe V Wade to be overturned, only 35% think gun legislation should be looser or kept the same and only 16% want to repeal the ACA’s protections for pre-existing conditions. I’m not great at math, but out of the about 160 million registered voters, none of these percentages add up to the 73+ million votes Trump got in the past election. That only leaves us with the “America First” message. That’s what resonates. That’s what people are asking for. There are clear benefits to globalization, and as a dad and husband of a multi-national family, I’m the first one to have benefited from it, but not all of it is worth it if it’s destroying the fragile peace the Western World has built since the World Wars. Because America’s newfound isolationism is not an isolated case: Brexit in the UK, the Yellow Vest movement in France and the rise of just about every eurosceptic populist politician in European democracies are proof that we’re going through a moment in time where the people are shouting that something is just not heading in the right direction. We can elect people who promise to put safeguards on global Capitalism. Or we, the people, can do it ourselves. Yes, it will be harder than casting a ballot every two or four years. But I have a feeling it will be 10 times more efficient.
Getting ourselves to a store or a curbside pickup will be less convenient than scrolling on our phones and having the thing delivered to our front-door 24 hours later. And we might pay a little more, but let’s think of everything we’ll get in return for that premium: the privilege of talking to a fellow human, the health benefits of going outside and the relief of knowing we’re not participating in the destruction of our towns and the rise of the next authoritarian figure.
Time constraint is also a fair argument. We all have busy lives, everything moves faster and we’re all constantly struggling to keep up, especially for families where both parents need to work to be able to afford anything. But here’s an idea: let’s delete Facebook from our phones — we just saved ourselves an average of 58 minutes per day. Double that if you include the time we need to calm ourselves down from everything we just read. If we choose to delete Instagram instead, it’s 53 minutes of our lives that we reclaim and the same amount we wasted by comparing our own lives to what we just saw. Easier said than done of course. I personally only successfully deleted one of the two. But this is a conversation we need to bring front and center, especially in a year where we see small businesses and retailers shut down at lightning speed.
My bottom line is this: if we really want to make the world a better place for our children, we need to start by watching more and better movies with them. And this holiday season, we should also ask Santa to do curbside pickup at our local toy store. That is if we have one left. | https://matthieusilbpro.medium.com/how-a-pixar-movie-warned-us-about-the-rise-of-trump-a524965a83eb | ['Matthieu Silberstein'] | 2020-12-03 15:16:35.792000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Pixar', 'Amazon', 'Trump', 'Cinema'] |
10 Quotes From the Harry Potter Series That Are Valuable Life Lessons | Esquire.com
Who doesn’t know this guy?
If there is one thing most of us can agree on, it is the fact that we all have imagined ourselves in the Harry Potter Universe, even if that was once. And it is no one’s fault to be delusional and so much obsessed, it’s the sheer brilliance of J.K Rowling, who not just wrote a good fictional book series, but also created a world everyone wants to be a part of. J.K Rowling is the reason many of us waited at our local railway platform, wondering the Hogwarts Express to arrive. We all loved Harry as much as Albus Dumbledore & we all hated Lord Voldemort as much as Neville Longbottom.
But apart from bringing a revolution in terms of fantasy literature and giving the characters life through words, Harry Potter is a tale of a surreal journey filled with Incredibly valuable life lessons. From the rich experienced Albus Dumbledore to the naive Harry, here are some quotes from the Harry Potter Saga that can help you become a better human. | https://medium.com/change-your-mind/10-quotes-from-harry-potter-series-that-are-valuable-life-lessons-b07cd8720587 | ['The Essentialist'] | 2020-12-23 12:37:07.775000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Hollywood', 'Harry Potter', 'Quotes', 'Life Lessons'] |
A New Adventure | Family adventures in Romsdal. Fall, 2020.
23 Oct 2020
Hi Wifey, Leslie, and Baby!
Daddy’s at work trying to avoid the soul crushing existence of sitting at a desk. So, I decided to spend some time each day recapping the things that make me smile most in life: My memories of you.
Yesterday, I came home just in time for pancakes with blueberry and bacon for dinner. YUMM! I always love watching Leslie eat pancakes because her whole face gets covered a deep purple and she smiles so big. We have some photos from when Leslie was 1 yr old, eating pancakes before she had any teeth and she has the most beautiful, precious huge smile, so big her eyes are closed… like the whole world is celebrating pancake day with her. These are the memories that drive my life.
I’ve been listening to an audiobook at work, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” about a guy who was raised with his father and a friend’s father and how the friend’s dad taught him how to make money and become rich. The book is ALL about making money. From a financial literacy standpoint it’s great… but I can’t believe so many people place all of their focus on money. There is nothing I can buy that will make me happier than a few more extra minutes with you. I understand everyone has different perspectives on what’s worth chasing in life… but I hope we fill your hearts with a love for nature, family, and experiences.
Focus on what matters in life
Maybe it’s because we never had much money growing up, but I was always raised to believe that people, love and adventures are waaaay more important than money. Sure, you can buy a lot with cash and definitely understanding of finance, economics, budgeting, risk, etc are all super important and I like dabbling in them… but money is not the thing to focus on in life, in my opinion.
I hope we raise you full of love, laughter, smiles and a desire to help others and bring positivity and excitement into the world around you. Lots of people get caught up in all the things in life that you can chase after… but not so many focus on all the things in life you can give; namely, LOVE. So many people are in need of someone to talk to, someone to listen, someone to support or praise them, someone to help cheer them up and motivate them when they are down. If the whole world is always focused on taking, we will always be focused on ourselves. But, when we shift to a focus on giving or on what we can give to others, suddenly our personal situation matters a whole lot less and we can toss away the chains of comparison and self doubt and self perception.
Yesterday was a rare, almost perfect day. Everyone was in a good mood and had energy, Leslie wanted to play with all of us together, and we had perfect family time just playing with Lelsie on the floor as she brought us toys and we all laughed and snuggled together. She is so very imaginative and creative, so sweet and thoughtful and so funny. She brought tea for the baby and rubbed her head on mommy’s belly saying “helllooo baby, storesøster Leslie”.
Mommy and Leslie went down to bath and daddy got goodnight snuggles. I submitted some applications to companies, dreaming of finding something that doesn’t keep me tied to a chair and a screen all day delivering millions of dollars worth of value to someone who pays me a tiny percentage in return (to be fair, a normal salary).
Leslie snuggling in Mommy and Daddy’s bed
Then, mommy and I finally snuggled for a few short moments before I got up again to wash the table and dishes, clean the house and get stuff ready for tomorrow. Mommy is so funny to look at… her belly is huge and she’s got her feet propped up on 3 or more pillows on the sofa, but she is still by far the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. She radiate light and love as a pregnant woman, as she does all the time. Some people are born for certain things…perhaps to be musicians or athletes or bakers or dancers or whatever else; your mommy was born to be a mommy and she is so perfectly good at it (and she’s an amazing baker, dancer and athlete too).
After brushing teeth and getting ready for bed, we went in to check on Leslie and make sure she was tucked in good. As usual, we took a few moments to snuggle on our perfect little angel, filling our hearts with a love and affection that carries us through the rest of the day, before kissing her goodnight and slipping away to our bedroom. I gave mama a long, nice back massage as usual to help keep her body warm and ease the pain of carrying around a bowling ball in her belly. Then, I snuggled and kissed on baby and told her how much we love her and how excited we are to meet her.
Leslie slept well throughout the night (hooray!) and we woke up rested and ready for another day of adventures. We got up together this morning and Leslie sang and danced while we dressed her, before heading upstairs to eat a little breakfast before watching a quick cartoon and heading off to barnehage in her little tricycle, with papa pushing her and stopping for kisses and snuggles along the way.
I love you my family, with all of my heart!!! ❤ ❤ ❤ | https://medium.com/raising-vikings/a-new-adventure-e66b03a21741 | ['David Smith'] | 2020-12-01 13:23:44.003000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Adventure', 'Parenting', 'Parenthood', 'Family'] |
Experiences from Homelessness in Preston | Reporter: Angel Zheng
What would you do if you met a homeless person on the street? Would you stay and listen to their experience? You can see there are many homeless people curled up on the streets of Preston, wrapping themselves in old coats and blankets because this year is the coldest year in Britain. Three homeless people in Preston shared their different experiences.
Carl Anthony Mason curled up on the street / Angel Zheng
Carl Anthony Mason was a chef before he became a homeless people, he always sat in front of Tessco and said: “I had been here for nine months and I am here every day from March 6. I lost my job because I became my mom’s carer when she got cancer, and when I went to look after her and she got me off.”
Homelessness has been a problem in British society and has been on the rise in recent years. According to Statutory Homelessness, January to March (Q1) 2019: England, “Between January to March 2019, 70,430 households were initially assessed as threatened with homelessness or homeless. This is up 10.7% from 63,620 households in the previous quarter.”
As the group grows, there are more and more charity centres specialized in helping them. Some of them are getting their lives on track because of helping and their own efforts.
Lewis Holdsworth was a homeless people last year, now he sells magazine to earn money, he said: “I do not have a job and I have memory problem. If I make claim benefits, they make me lots of appointments to remember. And I cannot remember all of them. So I do not ask them for benefits, I sell the magazine instead.”
Lewis Holdsworth’s dog was looking at him / Angel Zheng
And now he lived with his wife and dog, he said: “I got this dog before I was homeless. When I got homeless, she kept me warm every night. So she was my hot water battle, best friend and saleswoman.”
Emmaus Preston store was a second-hand store and people could buy something here cheaper than other shop. All the money generated at it was used to support their community of 26 formerly homeless people.
Bechie O’nell is a volunteer at Emmaus who was a homeless person, she said that they hold events like someone raising money for this community to help them and they would give homeless meals at Christmas. | https://medium.com/@angelzheng/experiences-from-homelessness-in-preston-97b1645721f9 | ['Angel Zheng'] | 2019-12-12 01:36:13.987000+00:00 | ['Preston', 'Homeless', 'Homelessness', 'Emmaus', 'Experience'] |
Qalat; A Village with Unique Nature, Old History in Southern Iran | Qalat village, located 36 kilometres northwest of Shiraz in Fars province, is a beautiful historical village with a cool climate even in the hottest months of the year. The village is at an altitude of 2,065 metres above sea level with about 7,000 inhabitants.
The village dates back to several thousand years ago, and a church on the hillside and among the wild trees of Qalat is a testimony to this claim.
One kilometre away from the village, staircase houses — where the rooftop of one house is the yard of the other — are not well visible, as the tall trees cover all of them.
The houses of this village are mostly made of stone, clay, mud, plaster and wood and their ceilings are flat.
Most people in the village of Qalat in Shiraz are engaged in animal husbandry, horticulture and handicrafts. Walnuts, almonds, grapes, figs, pomegranates, apricots, plums and green tomatoes next to dairy products such as milk, cheese, butter and whey are the main products of this village.
Other items that people sell to make a living are giveh (a kind of soft, comfortable, durable and handwoven-top shoe common in several parts of Iran), hand-made baskets, musk (used to keep water cool) and wooden tools.
Next to its beautiful nature and unique waterfalls, there is an old church in the village which has a stone-like and interesting architecture and represents the old history of this village. The church, which was the pastoral home of Christians in the countryside, now has been ruined after the immigration of local people.
Water mills, the Qalat cemetery, the carvings, and, most importantly, the Qezel Arsalan castle are other attractions of the historical village.
https://ifpnews.com/exclusive/qalat-a-village-with-unique-nature-old-history-in-southern-iran/ | https://medium.com/ifp-news-iran-front-page/qalat-a-village-with-unique-nature-old-history-in-southern-iran-cfd23094cb6c | ['Maryam Khy'] | 2019-04-27 05:06:44.044000+00:00 | ['Villages', 'Tourism', 'Nature', 'History'] |
Your Inspiration Could Be Blinded | It’s almost like you need inspiration to do almost anything these days. Like how it took me some minutes to come up with a title for this article. I’m tired to think and over-think on how to make stuff work, it is the hardest part about being a creative.
Although, music is great source of inspiration for me, but I would prefer to stay closer to anyone that places me on the bridge of their brainstorming for great ideas. What I mean is, there’s usually one person around doing something that you adore, and because you can’t do it like they do, they inspire you, to do more of you. Literally, just doing anything at all is enough to inspire what you could do next. It’s all an intentional way of living.
Okay! So, let’s start with a list of things that could possibly inspire you;
1. Music, which I mentioned earlier, is a pretty great start for inspiration. Having a writers’ block can be discouraging, and I always need something to push me past the halt. This is where good lyrical music comes in. I just discovered DSVN, the man is awwmazing with rhythm. (Music recommendation; Do it well, Mood, Too Deep, check him out!). Maybe you have the brain of a writer and use it for other things, yea? Like art! So music can make you feel like a Da Vinci in your downtime moments.
2. Read a book, okay? Like I’ve read about 3 books already into this year, and I. Am. Still. Searching. For the right inspiration. I think? I don’t know, but reading does help with smart thinking. But it has to be a book that you can relate well with. Like, can you relate with ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck’? Honestly, let’s not deceive ourselves, a lot of y’all like the art of that book, but do you really do what the book teaches? Do you? Maybe a good start will be ‘Who Moved My Cheese’. Not giving a review, but yea… Reading inspires… (some) people.
3. Exercise, before you try out number 4, test out the effectiveness of exercising. I mean like, running, skipping, swimming, crunches, squatting, all of that are great ways to keeping your brain active, your mind positive and most definitely a hearty and healthy heart. If you do have a positive mind at 89% of your time, inspiration will be right next to you.
4. Even coffee. If you have a good bright cup of coffee, I promise you that your back will be well straightened out to do the work that you have set out to do. I’m not sure how it might work for you, especially if you don’t already like drinking coffee, but having a cup of coffee twice a week won’t harm you at all… Nooo! It will in fact force you to stay hydrated. I think you could have a seizure if you take too much (maybe 9 cups) a day, and an entire month to recover, so I’ve heard. LOL.
5. Then there’s talking to a friend. My Yoruba friend thinks I’ve used him as an inspiration to write this article, because I told him that. No, he wasn’t the ginger, he just subconsciously helped slice the ginger to my spice. Okay, none of that makes sense. What I mean, again, is, talking to people can inspire you to the one thing that you’ve procrastinated on all day. And it’s okay to share with them how you really feel about your creative burnout.
Now, all these are possible ways to inspire you. I honestly don’t think inspiration starts on the outside, I think it begins from within. | https://medium.com/@melaninjulia/your-inspiration-could-be-blinded-7fce8df99977 | ['Juliana James'] | 2020-02-07 16:47:38.976000+00:00 | ['Self Inspiration', 'Lifehacks', 'Motivation', 'Inspiration', 'Self Improvement'] |
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❏ STREAMING MEDIA ❏
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream identifies the process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner.[clarification needed] Streaming refers to the delivery method of the medium, instead of the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies particularly to telecommunications networks, as almost all of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, music CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the Internet. For instance, users whose Internet connection lacks satisfactory bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of the content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content.
Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time much as live television broadcasts content over the airwaves with a television signal. Live internet streaming takes a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio tracks interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it frequently is.
Streaming is an option to file datvloading, a process where the end-user obtains the entire file for this content before watching or listening to it. Through streaming, an end-user can use their media player to get started on playing digital video or digital sound content before the complete file has been transmitted. The word “streaming media” can connect with media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are considered “streaming text”.
❏ COPYRIGHT CONTENT ❏
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its atver the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[1][1][1][4][4] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[6][4][1] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][4][10][11][11] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[1]
Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsistent.[14]
Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 40 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[4] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration.
It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[14]
❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏
Credit (from Latin credit, “(he/she/it) believes”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[1] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and extensible to a large group of unrelated people.
The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[1] Credit is extended by a creditor, also knatv as a lender, to a debtor, also knatv as a borrower.
FIND US:
✓ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
✓ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/
✓ Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/ | https://medium.com/japanese-drama-cherry-magic-episode-11-eng-sub/cherry-magic-978e6f80012e | ['Lynda D Hollins'] | 2020-12-17 02:32:55.822000+00:00 | ['Romance', 'LGBTQ', 'Gay', 'Comedy'] |
Life, Should It Be Miserable? | “He’s turned his life around. He used to be depressed and miserable. Now he’s miserable and depressed.”
~David Frost~
How do we see our life? Are we happy with where we are now? If not, what should we do to be happier?
Soon we may reset our goal, again, for the new coming year.
As we know, we may wish to have something, but if we won’t take the action and stick to the plan, we’ll give up easily and go back to the old habits.
Our life is in our hands, we decide what do we want to do with it.
I remember wanting to be a fashion designer but didn’t push myself to go to Milan as my plan was. Instead, I went to China with Silver to open a trading company.
By the time I realized that I missed the chance to go to Milan, I was a breastfeeding mom.
I sighed almost every morning, feeling blue under the bright beautiful sky.
I was so blessed that I didn’t keep blaming the “unfair” life; instead, I took action to take the step, did what I believed may give me a happier life.
I felt the designer feeling when I walked on the stage, presented my designs, won the second prize for the menswear competition.
I was almost 8 months pregnant with my daughter when Silver, me, and 3-year-old Patrick went to Korea, Hong Kong, and China to purchase some fabrics, buttons, etc to start my first collection.
I remember well how we chased the taxi in China at that time.
I was holding a bag of fabric in one hand and carried my son on top of my big belly when Silver got lots of other heavy things on both of his hands.
I was so exhausted but I was so happy that I managed to step out and do what I wanted to do.
I saw how my husband supported me (well.. he chose to see me on fire rather than a nagging and whining woman at home)
He wanted me to be a happier wife.
The journey to find the answers never stops.
There were some rocks on our way, and at some point, we stood at the crossroads and had to make difficult decisions.
No one said that it would be easy.
There was a time when everything that we did seemed so useless and hopeless, we were asking ourselves, should we turn back or should we go on?
“No! There is no turn back, we must go on!” We reminded each other.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
~Winston S. Churchill~
When we grow from inside, and we stand on our hope and faith, together we can solve whatever roadblocks in front of us.
Believe in ourselves, as long as we are doing good things, there will be an answer to every problem. | https://medium.com/@sylvia-silvers/life-should-it-be-miserable-fb80c67c347b | ['Sylvia Silvers', 'Aka Sylvia Astuti Gunawan'] | 2020-12-08 09:44:05.667000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Depression', 'Courage', 'Miserable Life', 'Failure'] |
How I Built an Automated Text Messaging Ordering System In Less Than A Day | How I Built an Automated Text Messaging Ordering System In Less Than A Day
Many people are out of a job and struggling to find work. Find it yourself and build your own business in a day.
Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash
COVID-19 has hit us all pretty hard. Whether you’re sick, know someone who has been sick, know someone who has passed, lost your job, been furloughed, or been forced to work from home, each and every one of us has been affected at a personal level to some degree.
The US unemployment rate is the highest its been since 1940 at a staggering 13%. That means one out of every 8 people are without a job right now. Ouch.
I am a software engineer by trade, so I am lucky enough to have the option of working from home during these tough times. My brother on the other hand, does not have the luxury.
He is a chef, and unfortunately his place of work has shut down indefinitely. So he’s been left without a job. He decided to take it upon himself to stay in the service industry and start up a business where he can continue to pursue his passion and make food for people. | https://medium.com/pushtostart/how-i-built-an-automated-text-messaging-ordering-system-in-less-than-a-day-224445f16407 | ['Allen Helton'] | 2020-06-22 15:08:44.980000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'Startup', 'Technology'] |
10 sources of profitable orders for the aspiring copywriter. No exchanges! | 10 sources of profitable orders
The rule of the moment of force
Usually, a copywriter doesn’t need to know physics. But I want you to know this useful rule: it will come in handy more than once in life. It’s very simple. The same effort can produce different results. The question is, what are you making these efforts for? By choosing the right point of application of force, you get the best result.
Let’s look at this idea with an example. Let’s say I need to write the text “About the company”. If I received an order on the stock exchange, I would be paid for it at best $1. But I know where to apply force, so I get at least $100 for such a text (100 times more). In this case, the efforts and time in both cases are spent the same. See the difference? Find the right point of application of the force and you will have a more tangible effect.
10 sources of orders and points of power for them
Now we will consider with you 10 sources of orders that a novice copywriter can get.
1. Your own customer
The simplest and at the same time the most difficult source. On the one hand, a copywriter will never be left without a piece of bread. For at least 3 reasons.
He can sell his services through his texts.
He can sell other people’s goods and services with the help of his texts.
He can launch his content project.
The first two methods allow you to get money quickly. The main thing in this business is to understand that the text itself will not sell from scratch. In addition to the text, you need an audience, attracting which is a separate issue.
In the first case, you are selling yourself as a specialist. Everything is simple and clear here: we created the text, brought the audience, and are waiting for orders. In the second case, the system is more complicated but more interesting. It can be broken down into 4 easy steps.
Step # 1: Choose a niche that you are well versed in.
Step # 2: Create a sales copy or sales page.
Step # 3: Accept applications (warm potential customers).
Step # 4: Sell applications to those who do business in your chosen niche.
This technique is called “selling leads”. Alternatively, you can simply rent out the page. If it generates targeted applications, then any real business will gladly rent it from you.
The third way will take time. And strength. In my observation, 8 out of 10 copywriters who create their own content project fail because of faded enthusiasm. When I created this blog, I lost my hands not one, not two, or even five times. And much more. It helped me that in those days I worked as an engineer and could switch between projects.
It’s good to generate orders for yourself. However, most novice copywriters have difficulty with this: they have not yet formed their marketing thinking, and it is unusual to work in this format. Again, basic sales skills are needed here. However, even if you don’t have them yet, it doesn’t matter. There are at least 9 alternative sources of orders.
2. SEO studios
In 95% of cases, SEO companies need content. Nice, helpful, and high quality. Adapted to your needs. If you can offer them such content and know the basics of search engine promotion, then your services will be in great demand. Of course, you need to offer these services.
A separate plus — if you are well versed in some kind of commercial niche. Even now, when dumping is flourishing everywhere, such specialists are highly valued and always in demand. Of course, SEO studios will not give you stars from the sky, but it is quite possible to earn $ 3–5 per 1000 signs there, especially if you specialize in some area. Another plus of companies, although not all of them, is a conditional career growth with an increase in the size of payment (it is also often called the grading system, or the gradation of authors).
The disadvantages of this source of orders include the fact that you will not be allowed to develop as a real copywriter here. However, if you specialize in SEO content, then pump your skills to the fullest.
Important: When offering services to SEO companies, remember their interest. They are interested in effectively promoting their clients’ sites at a minimal cost. Therefore, in the offer, focus on compliance with the terms of reference, possession of SEO copywriting skills at an above-average level, and knowledge of the specifics of in-demand niches.
3. Single optimizers and webmasters
As practice shows, you most likely will not work for an SEO studio for a long time. Of course, if you are a good content producer. The fact is that SEO-specialists, as a rule, have their own projects, and they willingly lure good authors to themselves, providing them with a large amount of work.
If we abstract from SEO companies, then single optimizers and webmasters can be found on thematic optimization forums (searchengines.ru, webmasters.ru, cy-pr.com, etc.), as well as on forums of various affiliate programs, where these webmasters earn money (forum.profit-partner.ru, etc.).
The practice of receiving an order is, as a rule, the same everywhere: you perform a test task, receive positive feedback from an old-timer with a high rating, and then you are loaded with work in full.
Disadvantages similar to the previous point: sharpening for the article format, at least a commercial component. When making an offer to SEOs, remember: they are interested in getting good content at the lowest price. If you want to make more money, add value in the form of advanced search engine optimization knowledge, a perfect match of technical specifications, or expertise in a specific niche.
4. Corporate sites
This is a bottomless source of orders, which for some reason few people use.
And there are most of such sites requiring text processing. There are hundreds of thousands of them. All you need to do is offer your services to the owners of these sites and redesign the texts so that they work for sales.
Please note: here you are already working in the corporate (B2B) segment. The main value: the maximum result for the money invested. Also, please note that most companies prefer to pay by bank transfer, so if you have a sole proprietorship or limited liability company, this will be an additional plus.
When offering services in the corporate segment, focus on attracting additional customers and additional sales, rather than on texts. Then the value of your proposal will be an order of magnitude higher, and along with the value — and payment.
The main advantage of the corporate segment is that you can offer it a lot: a selling page, texts on the site, content marketing, email marketing, and a lot of other tools. If the proposal is submitted in the right way, then one order may be enough for a month of work. The most profitable option is to agree on the provision of services with a monthly fee.
5. Infobusinessmen
Another gold mine if you know how to write sales texts. Tens of thousands of people are now entering the info business. And they all need sales copy for their products. All you need to do is find an info business person who is interested in your services. As a rule, they inhabit thematic forums (eg info-forum.ru) and conferences.
I know copywriters who worked for only one customer, information business and were provided with work (and money, respectively) to the eyeballs. Such copywriters are also called personal.
When making an offer to information businessmen, remember that they are primarily interested in the sales volume of their product. Place the right accents and you will receive your order.
6. Information sites and mailing lists (magazines)
There are tons of thematic magazines out there that need quality articles. If you feel the inclinations of a journalist in yourself, then it’s a sin not to try to make money on it. An indisputable plus of working in thematic magazines and portals is that you choose the topic that interests you, and work not only for money but also for pleasure. An alternative to thematic magazines is the increasingly popular email newsletter
Few people know, but in my student years, I also moonlighted as a journalist at one game portal. In those years I was fascinated by the topic of the gaming industry, and the work itself aroused keen interest, and the payment for it was a pleasant addition.
When you offer the services of a journalist, remember that for the owner of the publication (or the editor-in-chief), the most important thing is the audience. She should be interested in your materials, and as long as you satisfy her information hunger, you will have a job.
7. IT companies
Companies working in the field of information technology are constantly releasing new services and programs. All of these products require datasheets and manuals. Authors who create such content are called technical writers and are greatly appreciated.
The main value for IT companies is the attractiveness and competitiveness of the product. By creating quality white papers and manuals, you improve the product, making it accessible and understandable for the end-user.
The problem with most IT companies is that they are full of techies. They are great at solving technical problems, but making a description for them is difficult. And here you will be very useful to them. By the way, the IT industry is one of the most profitable, so a good technical writer starts at $ 1000.
8. Video studios and game developers
A profitable source of orders for creative people with well-developed abstract thinking. The task is to create scripts and descriptions of staged scenes. Kind of a variation on the duties of a technical writer, but with a more creative twist.
This job requires good writing skills (which, by the way, develop through reading fiction). The key factor here is the detailed study of the little things and the creation of an atmosphere of maximum viewer involvement. The requirements for scriptwriters are high, but their pay is more than decent. At the very least, it’s worth a try if you are confident in your abilities. To get this job you will need sample scripts or, better yet, case studies.
There are studios, the main direction of which is the creation of selling videos and promotional videos (video presentations). For such work, you need the skills of creating selling texts and knowledge of the main selling models.
9. Creative and marketing agencies
The main difference between this source of orders and SEO companies is that marketing agencies work not only to attract traffic but also to increase sales. The effect is achieved with the help of selling pages and a customized advertising campaign. If you know how to create selling texts for landing pages, then your services will be in great demand.
Creative and branding agencies create image advertising (outdoor advertising, banners, signs, slogans, etc.). If you manage to sell yourself to them (and for this you need to correctly place accents), they can delegate some of the work to you. Although, I must admit that such companies prefer to keep copywriters on the staff, but what the hell is not kidding. Be prepared to be asked to complete a test task.
10. Groups in social networks
Social media marketing is at its peak right now. Groups with a lot of subscribers always need new content. If you can provide such content, offer your services to the group administrator.
As in the case of journalism, you are free to choose those groups to which you have a heart. As a rule, the administration of groups is interested in high-quality content from people who are interested in the topics of the community.
By the way, social networks are another good source of orders, if used correctly. So, for example, I quite often receive various offers of cooperation from the LinkedIn network.
+1 bonus source of orders
There is another way to get orders — a resume. The principle is simple: you create a resume, post it on HeadHunter, and wait for employers to find you. The main thing is to write your resume correctly.
In some cases, you may be invited for an interview and offered a job on the state. Look here for the situation and possibilities. Working in the state deprives you of your freedom (to some extent), but gives you a lot of invaluable experience, having received which you very quickly (after 3–6 months) will no longer be a beginner.
You can combine different sources until you either find your way or until you get a surplus of orders that you physically cannot fulfill. For you, this will mean an increase in the level and will become an occasion to think about organizing a workflow or raising prices.
The reverse way of finding orders is also fair: go through the list of copywriting jobs and offer your services to those who need them. If you want to stay out of state, focus on solving the problem, and use arguments:
Saving at the workplace (additional savings on office equipment and room rental).
Savings on taxes and contributions to the pension fund.
Savings on vacation and sick leave payments, etc.
Work on weekends
The ability to be online at a specified time to interact with employees, etc.
In this article, we’ve covered 10 sources of ordering for aspiring copywriters. I deliberately did not list content exchanges and freelance exchanges among them, since they are overwhelmed with competition and dumping. Customers actively use this, and it is almost impossible for a beginner to get a normal order with good payment.
For the future, remember: when you sell your services yourself, you can sell them at an order of magnitude more expensive than when the customer chooses you from a dozen other performers.
And let you have as many orders as you need. Plus another 10%. | https://medium.com/marketing-laboratory/10-sources-of-profitable-orders-for-the-aspiring-copywriter-no-exchanges-21d0fa928fda | ['Alex Koma'] | 2020-09-05 17:36:01.870000+00:00 | ['Copywriting', 'Writing', 'Blogging', 'Writer', 'Writing Tips'] |
Album Review: WE ARE CHAOS // Marilyn Manson | Marilyn Manson spat in the face of the moral panic unfairly pinned on him in the mid-90s, and has emerged as a true powerhouse of artistry. With WE ARE CHAOS, Manson continues the excellent revival most clearly seen in 2017’s Heaven Upside Down. You could argue that his new release isn’t as electrifying, but it is still the kind of relentless, unforgiving creativity that he has become known for. WE ARE CHAOS is both a resoundingly expressive personal project and a response to the torrid year we have had, proof that even the unholy zeitgeist is not impervious against what the world throws at him.
The darkness and the industrial noise are all still there, but there aren’t as many high tempo, hard rock bangers like the ones Manson made his name with. Instead, working closely with producer Shooter Jennings, this is a story crafted through Manson’s typically heavy soundscape. The title track is almost melancholic, a realisation of change that somehow feels both downbeat and optimistic: “In the end we all end up in a garbage dump, but I’ll be the one that’s holding your hand.” Clearly, Manson’s ever present and peculiar sense of frivolity is still there, but layered underneath something more meaningful and timely.
The way Manson thrives on pure chaos, panic and instability is ever present. Chords are blasted out violently left right and centre as if they are being fired from a cannon, and white noise is ringing in your ears. And any number of inspirations and influences lurk underneath the surface, from The Cure to The Beatles — proof that Manson is not simply a violent force of nature that some have accused him of being. He is a hurricane, surrounded by a seemingly relentless violence but with a calm and deliberate focus to be found in his eye.
There are frequent jabs at the privileged and those drowning in the spotlight, a theme that re-emerges throughout Manson’s career; “champagne problems” as he puts it in ‘HALF-WAY & ONE STEP FORWARD’. Yet here it feels more for the sake of anarchy than shock value, the commentary lurking alongside the lyrics as ever important as Manson’s own mentality when it comes to making WE ARE CHAOS more than a musically astute rant.
Over the years and especially in recent times, Manson has proved that he has a staying power that far outlasts his reputation. WE ARE CHAOS is yet another peerless example of that. Jennings has clearly played a massive role in helping to keep the sound feeling fresh. There is a push for alternative rhythms and compositions compared to recent albums, meaning that all the tracks are endlessly captivating and never quite sound like you expect. A dramatic tonal change by the album’s midpoint doesn’t throw it off course. Instead, the heavy guitars and looming synth reward fans of Manson’s back catalogue while the lyrics entice newer listeners into his state of mind. Manson is riding a high wave of artistic and emotional expression, and this continues with one of his most intimate works to date.
Support The Indiependent
We’re trying to raise £200 a month to help cover our operational costs. This includes our ‘Writer of the Month’ awards, where we recognise the amazing work produced by our contributor team. If you’ve enjoyed reading our site, we’d really appreciate it if you could donate to The Indiependent. Whether you can give £1 or £10, you’d be making a huge difference to our small team. | https://medium.com/the-indiependent/album-review-we-are-chaos-marilyn-manson-44a03c67cff4 | ['James Hanton'] | 2020-10-02 17:21:49.708000+00:00 | ['Metal', 'Album Review', 'Review', 'Music', 'Rock'] |
Capitalism Undermines the Middle Class | Democratic socialists believe the rich and powerful have rigged the system. On the whole they have rigged the system not through conspiracies, but through using their vast resources to donate to political campaigns, lobbying politicians, busting unions, and influencing political narratives in the media. One narrative in particular that has been central to capitalism: capitalism is the only economic system to create the middle class. Despite how many times as it has been repeated, this narrative is in conflict with the evidence. Unions created the middle class, not capitalism.
When the Middle Class was Small
Let’s talk about what capitalism has done. Capitalism has done extraordinary things for humanity. It is a laughable understatement to say capitalism has created more wealth and prosperity than any prior economic system. Before capitalism, people rarely collaborated to produce goods and services for society. In Europe the primary economic system preceding capitalism was feudalism. Under feudalism most people worked just hard enough to support themselves and the aristocratic lord that gave them land, lodging and protection. Often craftspeople did most of the work of making shoes or hammers themselves. They could not depend on a complicated supply chain for raw materials. When they did collaborate it never compared to the collaboration that occurs in today’s interconnected global economy. Under capitalism some people build the machinery to harvest raw materials, while other develop the science. Sophisticated logistics planners send truck drivers, trains and ships to transport the raw materials to factories. The factories may distribute their output to other factories to finished products. Finished products get distributed to retail stores throughout the world. What humanity has accomplished since the Industrial Revolution, starting around 1760, is incredible.
Understandably, defenders of capitalism emphasize these accomplishments. They claim not only has capitalism developed unprecedented wealth, technology and collaboration, it created the middle class. The reality is that without the formation of the middle class these accomplishments amount to nothing. If capitalism had created billions of jobs, and incredible wealth for the 1%, but the rest of the 99% lived in poverty, few people would defend capitalism, or identify as capitalists.
In feudalism, during the middle ages, the aristocracy lived in incredible opulence. The old castles that stand to this day are beautiful. We love to admire them. But today we condemn feudalism for its vast inequality and poverty. While the aristocracy lived in luxury, the peasants had no access to opportunity.
Wealth inequality remains a central attribute of capitalism. Yes, the middle class became the majority “class” in the United States and Europe in the twentieth century, but democratic socialists argue that if the capitalists had had their way, twentieth century capitalism would have continued to look like nineteenth century capitalism. In the nineteenth century children worked in factories, workers often worked twelve to sixteen hour days, six days a week. Their housing was often inadequate, unsafe, and shared. Workers did not have access to worker protections or safety regulations, so if they were injured on the job, unable to work, they were forced to beg on the streets.
Union Power in the Twentieth Century
Unions created the middle class. In the twentieth century workers began to see unions as their road out of poverty. They found that their bosses could not earn a profit without their labor. The workers refused to return to work until their demands were met. Individually they had no power to fight their bosses, but together they could demand better wages, safer working conditions, and even democratic control over their workplaces. As they gained power in their workplaces, and gained economic power (while their bosses lost economic power), the workers and the middle class gained political power over what laws were passed by Washington.
Not only did the middle class grow as union membership grew, the decline of unions correlated with the decline of the middle class in the United States. Union membership is tied to the size of the middle class.
Democratic Socialism’s Argument in the Twenty First Century
I said democratic socialists believe the rich and powerful have rigged the system. By this I meant that they have made it difficult for workers to form unions, difficult for poor people to vote, difficult for poor people to get justice out of the justice system, difficult to find affordable housing, difficult to afford medically necessary healthcare. Many Americans have become disenfranchised from politics, and have even stopped voting. Everyone recognizes the system is broken. There are many theories about how Washington became so polarized, dysfunctional and unresponsive to the needs of the voters. Democratic socialists blame the rich. The bigger the wealth divide between the rich and everyone else, the more politicians serve the rich.
Democratic socialists argue that capitalism doesn’t work. Unchecked capitalism results in more wealth inequality, not less. Even many capitalists recognize this, nihilistically arguing there is no alternative. Socialism says there is an alternative. In spite of capitalism’s many accomplishments, the real work gets done by the workers. The creation of the middle class is touted as one of capitalism’s greatest successes, if not its greatest, but the reality is that capitalism did not create the middle class. The workers did. If the workers wanted to they could fight for a world without bosses, a world in which the workers owned all the businesses, a democratic socialist world.
Some Charts about Unions, the Middle Class and the Rich
I tried to find data that supports my claims. I found a couple of charts that begin to tell a story of the workers and the one percent fighting over who makes the rules governing the system. Capitalists slam socialists for “redistributing wealth,” but the problem is how that wealth is distributed in the first place. If the workers had been given the opportunity to share in the profits that their labor helped earn, there would be no need to discuss redistribution.
Figure 1, from Business Insider, shows two things:
the percentage of the workforce that were members of unions from 1967–2010, and the middle class’s share of the United States’ aggregate income. Note that union membership was in decline during this entire period, as was the middle class.
Figure 2, from Economic Policy Institute, shows two things:
the percentage of the workforce that were members of unions from 1918–2008, and the share of income going to the top 10%.
We can see a reduction in the share of income going to the top 10% by the end of the 30’s, which then returns in the 1980’s. It appears that as union membership grew in the mid 1930’s, within about five years we see a reduction in the wealth accumulation by the most rich. Even as union membership began to shrink beginning in the mid-1950’s, and again in the early ‘70’s, something prevented all of the wealth going to the top for a little while. Although in Figure 1 we see the middle class’s wealth shrinking from at least 1967, we begin to see the rich get richer again at the end of the 1970’s. It is not pictured here, but this trajectory has continued to this day.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2 | https://medium.com/@theworkingclassintelligentsia/capitalist-undermines-the-middle-class-139da3cfa65b | ['The Working Class Intelligentsia'] | 2020-12-21 03:42:10.707000+00:00 | ['Socialism', 'Middle Class', 'Politics', 'Economics', 'Unions'] |
RATHER THAN FEELING EMPTY | RATHER THAN FEELING EMPTY
have you ever feel hollow?
it feels like you sit on an empty chair, facing the wall, waiting for someone to give you a tap on your shoulder.
at that time,
you did not feel anything at all.
at that time,
you once longed to feel something.
at that time,
you no longer knew how and what it feels like to feel something.
you are not sad,
nor lonely —
endless hiss of demons beneath the heavy untold thoughts,
chaotic silence within the dim blackness,
only darkness understands.
— darkness is merely the absence of light.
emptiness darken your soul.
sadness makes you feel human.
a peculiar thing, isn’t it? of how sadness makes you feel alive.
at the very least, the intensity of the emotions from being sad reminds yourself of the ability to feel something.
and the only way you could feel miserable now, is because you have felt something really good before.
oh my my,
the art of your beautiful sadness.
if sadness is a path, i hope yours is filled with flowers.
sadness is not your enemy,
emptiness is.
🌹 | https://medium.com/@audrey_dap/rather-than-feeling-empty-3506613bedce | [] | 2020-12-25 17:41:13.719000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Emptiness', 'Poetry Writing', 'Poetry', 'Sadness'] |
This Book Is a Big Deal In a World of Thin People | Marisa Meltzer opens up about writing “This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World — and Me.”
I live in a world of thin people. I interview the famously thin — actors, models, musicians, influencers — but mostly I observe them. I know their habits, but I’m also aware that I am not one of them.
That’s a slice of Marisa Meltzer’s third book, This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World—and Me. The book tells the true story of Jean Nidetch, who overhauled her life from a frustrated housewife to pioneering weight-loss entrepreneur before she died in 2015.
But this is more than just Nidetch’s biography. Stylistically similar to Julie and Julia, Big is also Marisa’s story as a lifelong dieter who struggles to make peace with her weight. Marisa documents a year in her life on the Weight Watchers program, while weaving in the history of Nidetch’s business-building journey.
You might know Marisa’s work from the Me Time column in The New York Times, her Roxane Gay profile for Elle, or her Busy Phillips story for the New Yorker. She’s a brilliant writer, a former riot grrrl, a Brooklynite from California, and as much as she disagrees with some of Jean’s rigid philosophies, sees a bit of herself in the dieting mogul.
This is a healthy slice of our conversation from February 2020, before the pandemic hit the States and before the world had access to her book. At the time that we talked, she was in “the weird in-limbo state, when you’ve finished something but it doesn’t quite doesn’t belong to the world yet.” Marisa talks about “confident vulnerability,” her inability to make peace with her body, and how she’s at the age where she’s wise enough to not take shit from anyone.
How does it feel to completely open up to the world about your struggles with weight loss?
I’m still processing my feelings about people reading the book. It’s honest and raw. It was important to me to be really honest. While writing the book, I kept thinking, “I can edit this stuff out,” but it didn’t feel right. I’m a bit nervous but also excited. This is a book about weight loss, dieting, and body in a way that hasn’t been talked about before. There are a lot of people like me who’ve been many different sizes and who have similar histories.
People who know me well and read This Is Big said there was so much they didn’t know about me. It’s not because I don’t trust those friends with my feelings. How often are you like, “Let’s sit down and talk about the things I’m most uncomfortable talking about”? I see my friends rarely enough. As you get older and have more responsibilities, you don’t see your friends in person all the time like in college.
When I see my close friends, that time is precious. I’m probably not going to interrupt and say, “Hey, can we talk about junior high for a while?” It’s not a super fun place to think about. I understand why it was news to them — these things just don’t come up; they live deeply within you.
I’ve become what I call “confidently vulnerable” in my 40s. I’m talking about my problems and flaws as if they’re a gift. Do you feel like you’ve gained confidence in being vulnerable?
I’ve written personal things for years. My vulnerability has changed with age. There’s a lack of vanity, and there seems to be less strings attached. As I age, I’m better able to get to the heart of what I’m talking about. There’s something about aging that makes you vulnerable — especially in your 40s.
Aging seems like an abstract thing for most of your life, with so many jokes and cliches. In my early to mid 30s, I began noticing that I was aging. Fine lines were the first indication of, “Oh, my face is aging. I’m getting older.”
Around 40, I started feeling changes in my body. I broke my ankle when I began writing This Is Big. Healing was really hard — even in the way my body felt after healing. The cast has been off for almost a year and half, but I still feel asymmetries. I feel a little off.
I experience perimenopausal symptoms. I’m 42 — very much in the perimenopausal age range — and I got an ulcer recently. All of these things made me think, “Wow, this is happening.” It’s affecting me.
I showed up sweating for a fancy magazine interview, thanks to perimenopause, plus it was a really humid day. An assistant set a box of paper towels next to me while I was doing the interview. That made me feel really vulnerable. Maybe I’m more at ease with being vulnerable and I’m becoming more comfortable.
At the same time, I live a pretty youthful life for someone in their 40s. I’m pretty free and live in a big city — you can have all of that and still feel like aging is unavoidable.
You share so much juicy info about Jean, Weight Watchers, and the weight-loss industry in general — stuff I’ve never heard before, and I’ve devoured a crap-ton of women’s magazines since I was a pre-teen. How much time did you spend on research for ?
I gave myself about a year to do the research. I kept a journal of my experience doing Weight Watchers, and took notes about the meetings and my thoughts. I also went to the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library and studied everything pertaining to Weight Watchers and dieting. I interviewed an expert at the Heinz Corporation. I interviewed people who knew Jean and read tons of archival information, magazine articles, and Weight Watchers magazine stories, and watched TV shows featuring Jean. I read vintage cookbooks and talked to cooking experts — I cast a wide net. I never regret interviewing someone. I tried to do as much as possible so I could have an informed biography.
“Jean was kind of a fabulist, so you have to take some of what she said with a grain of salt. Jean had an over-the-top way of talking about her life, and I wanted to fact-check as much as I could.”
Jean was kind of a fabulist, so you have to take some of what she said with a grain of salt. Jean had an over-the-top way of talking about her life, and I wanted to fact-check as much as I could.
What do you hope people take away from reading This Is Big?
I hope they think a lot about what dieting really means to them. Dieting is shorthand for transformation — what are you really talking about when you say you want to lose 20, 50, or 100 pounds?How do you want your life to change and to what degree are you willing to go to do it? Who do you want to be in the end?
I hope readers realize it’s really hard to give up a certain desire to consume things. Maybe you’re going to diet yourself away from yourself, but it may come out in different ways — think about what you consume, whether it’s food or, say, time on the internet.
You’re very open about how dieting is all-consuming — you think about food all the time. How do you feel now that you’ve poured your heart out — are you more at peace with yourself?
I’m never at peace. I’m not a peaceful person; I’m never satisfied with myself or anything. I accept that I can be kind of proud of myself and also dissatisfied all the time. Because of the ulcer, I had to cut out a lot of foods — which was so different from dieting just to lose weight. Changing foods to prevent pain has been interesting — that has been interesting and much easier to do and have much resistance to it.
I come to you a year and a half after starting to write the book as pretty much the same person. I’ve made progress in some ways, but food really frustrates me. Sometimes I see a person in a bikini and feel jealous but also good about who I am and proud of the work I do.
It’s a fine line about feeling at peace. I’m also really driven and ambitious. It’s hard to imagine myself being any other way. I have a certain amount of desire to be better, and I’d like to eliminate the desire to be the best.
I’m grateful that you wrote about using drugs as a teen. You wrote, “The only time I’ve ever been thin-indisputably thin, in the way I’ve always dreamed of-was for a few short years in high school. This was achieved primarily through starvation eased by drugs.” How did you “coach” yourself to open up about using cocaine, methamphetamine, and other drugs?
It was more of a process of elimination. I was starting the writing just in journals and in notes on my phone, wherever I could record them, as the year was going on. By nature, those journals and notes were intimate and honest. Once I started outlining the book and writing, I took a lot of those initial passages and, of course, didn’t want it to sound like a diary entry, so there was polishing. There was still this rawness and honesty that remained that felt right for the book. The book wouldn’t work if there was any coyness or reluctance to be totally honest. I think it would be plain as day to the reader and to myself.
I’m a methodical planner when it comes to making my deadlines. I broke my ankle the week I was about to start writing the book in earnest, and was housebound. I live in a third-floor walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, so using crutches to get down the stairs was out of the question. In order to leave my building, I scooted down on my bottom. Luckily, in New York so many things can be delivered. I was really alone in August when so many people leave town.
I started writing the book in a vacuum space that felt separate from the world, which was good because a sort of intimacy and vulnerability were really in step with how I was feeling. I thought I could change certain things in the next draft, but once my editor and my team read it, they were so moved by the honesty, I knew I had to get over any fear and leave the feelings in.
You wrote “Denial, particularly self-denial, is its own kind of pleasure” among other psychological insights. Where does your emotional intelligence come from?
I’ve been in therapy for most of my life. Reflecting on myself and the world comes pretty naturally to me. As a Cancer, it’s my astrological birthright. I might liken it to my body. I’m really good at styling and dressing other people; a part of that is looking at other people’s bodies that I don’t have. I’ll be like, “I’m working with the whole rainbow here. This person doesn’t have this thing they hate about themselves.” It’s easy for me to dress other people.
I’ve learned how to dress myself without having so many reservations about myself. I’ve spent much of my life feeling ambivalent about my body and guilty and ashamed and also trying to be proud of it and trying to ignore it. All of these emotions are really normal to me. I’m pretty attuned to how emotions feel for other people.
I think a lot about how the world treats me and how the world treats other people. I’ve been treated unkindly by other people because of my body, but I also realize that I’m a white woman who hasn’t had to overcome much adversity. I definitely use myself as a baseline. I remind myself that if things are hard for me, what if I was a size 30 and not a 14? I think about how much harder the world must be for other people and try to understand how other people feel. It helps me understand some of the issues with size and helps me explain that to people.
You wrote that you were looking for a group to talk about emotions, something that you couldn’t instantly find in Weight Watchers groups. Why do you think the older generations were less interested in talking about their emotions than younger people?
In the book, I was talking about the first Weight Watchers group that I went to, which was charmingly old-school. I knew it wasn’t for me. I need more of an emotional connection. The women in that group were probably older boomers and the greatest generation. Maybe it’s the way they were raised to understand food and dieting — “you shouldn’t eat this.” I was interested in something more touchy-feely. I wanted to understand that people were feeling the same as I was. I wasn’t interested in talking about a smoothie recipe with one Weight Watchers point.
How do you feel about being in your 40s — what do you like and dislike?
I used to fantasize about what my exciting adult life would be like — maybe really rich or living with a super hot husband. I used to feel like sky is the limit, but once you get to a certain age, it’s like, “Oh, this is my life.”
In our 40s, we’re not waiting for life to begin anymore — there’s something that can be a little sobering and a little dreary about that. And I say that as someone who goes on awesome vacations all the time.
As for the good parts of my 40s, I feel more comfortable with myself and what I want, and everything is more sharply in focus. When I turned 40, I realized that I’m too old for this shit for certain things. Like, I’m 40 fucking years old — I’m not dealing with this person. For certain things, it’s become easier to trim the fat, so to speak.
As I get older, I’ve become happier about my decision not to have children. Some of my friends have kids and I love them and enjoy buying them lavish stuff and taking them to musicals. Every year I go on a sailing trip — people in their 40s and their kids; we’ve made good choices to get here. | https://amyschroeder.medium.com/this-book-is-a-big-deal-in-a-world-of-thin-people-aaefa09f1d1e | ['Amy Cuevas Schroeder'] | 2020-05-09 20:09:57.024000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Personal Development', 'Personal Growth', 'Life Lessons', 'Self'] |
Watch Barcelona — Real Sociedad 2020 TV ((Live Stream) | Barcelona return to La Liga action, once more at the Camp Nou and take on league leaders Real Sociedad in what should be a thrilling encounter. Ronald Koeman’s side will be well aware of the importance of this fixture, as we desperately need to make up ground and get closer to the top of La Liga, and victory here will not only help us do just that, but will also be a massive boost to this team.
Culers will be watching closely on Wednesday evening to ensure that the performance levels from this Barcelona side are of the highest order, as now is the time to stand up and be counted, put in a display that will make us fans proud, and wrap up a big three points against impressive opposition.
But Barcelona will not only have to worry about themselves come tomorrow, as Real Sociedad are a fine side, and their league form has proven just that. Managed by Imanol Alguacil, and with so many quality players at their disposal, they have been an exciting side to watch for a short while now. | https://medium.com/@mdmidulislam46/watch-barcelona-real-sociedad-2020-tv-live-stream-3d13e82a007d | [] | 2020-12-16 17:02:45.643000+00:00 | ['Football', 'Soccer'] |
I Finally Read The Hunger Games Prequel | Background
This past summer, Collins published a prequel to her hit series titled The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. On first glance, it feels out of place compared to the original trilogy, all of which boast a short and snappy title (i.e. Catching Fire, Mockingjay). While the title is a tad wordy for my taste, it certainly catches one’s attention. The summary reads:
It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He’s been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined — every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute…and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.
Back of hardcover version of the novel. Photo by Megan R. Clark
I purchased the book for my dad for his birthday in June. He and I shared a love for the original trilogy, which we read in quick succession one week when my youngest sister was hospitalized for pneumonia. I felt inspired and driven by Katniss’s love for her sister and dedication to doing what’s right. My dad liked having a distraction, I think. Regardless, we devoured Collins’ words and looked forward to seeing the films.
The final book in the original series was released in 2010, which means it has been ten years without anything new in print about the Games. Collins dropped her book at the best time: Right smack dab in the middle of quarantine when everyone was begging for stuff to do.
My dad read the novel quickly and let me borrow it after the fact. While that was at the end of June, I only picked up the book the other day. It had been sitting on my coffee table, begging to be opened, but I was concerned. The same way I was nervous about reading The Cursed Child (the on stage future world from the Harry Potter franchise).
I didn’t want to be disappointed.
Summary
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes tells the story of a teenage future President of Panem, Coriolanus (Coryo to his friends and to us, as his name is a pain to type). The book opens with Coryo getting ready for the reaping, trying to decide what to wear. His cousin, Tigris, is a fashion student and promised to make him something great to wear so he wouldn’t be embarrassed. The Snow family only appears to be wealthy, but are actually financially struggling just as much as citizens in the Districts despite living in a huge penthouse in the center of the city. Coryo lives with his cousin and the Grandma’am (grandmother) in a penthouse in the Capitol. His father a war hero, his mother died during the childbirth of who should have been his sibling.
Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash
It’s ten years after the end of the rebel war, and ten years into the Hunger Games. Seeing as it is an important anniversary, the Head Gamemaker, Dr. Gaul, decides to include some Capitol children as mentors to district tributes. She, along with the others involved in creating the Games, hopes to get more people involved and watching. No one wants to witness something so depressing every year; this seemed like a good way to get the Capitol involved.
Coryo along with 23 of his classmates embark on a journey to improve the Games and increase viewership throughout Panem. Between his friend Sejanus breaking into the arena, becoming infatuated with his tribute, and classmate Clemensia getting attacked by mutant snakes, Coryo is all but relieved when his tribute comes out victorious. However, Coryo manipulates the Games in a way to advantage Lucy Gray, his tribute. Because of his cheating, Coryo is forced to join the military force in Panem, the Peacekeepers.
Coryo requests District 12 in hopes that he can meet up with his beloved victor, and much to his surprise, Sejanus ends up being his bunkmate in the barracks. While he is relieved to have a familiar face, Sejanus proves to be a difficult housemate as a rebel sympathizer.
While in District 12, the Peacekeepers participate in hangings, help collect data for the Capitol on jabberjays and mockingjays in the woods, and attend music shows at the Hob. Coryo matures quickly in the few months he lives in District 12 and falls even more madly in love with Lucy Gray Baird.
The shift in Coryo’s mindset doesn’t become clear until the very end of the book, where he sabotage’s Sejanus’s plan to escape District 12 and head up North to be free. Sejanus is sentenced to be hanged for treason and Coryo can’t help but feel directly responsible for the death of his friend, a friend who thought of Coryo as a brother.
Photo by Diego González on Unsplash
Coryo and Lucy Gray decide to follow through with Sejanus’s plan and run away together to make a life for themselves away from Panem entirely, but Coryo backs out at the last minute because his fate changes. He gets accepted into an elite officer’s school and abandons Lucy Gray in the rain out by the lake. Coryo goes back to his barracks and gets on the aircraft that is set to take him to District 2 for school. However, it is intercepted by Dr. Gaul and Coryo finds himself back home at the Capitol and enrolled in University.
In the epilogue, reader’s find out that Coryo has all but been adopted by Sejanus’s parents and is fully taking advantage of them despite basically killing their son. He’s a student in the Capitol’s University and works directly under Dr. Gaul as a Gamemaker intern. | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/i-finally-read-the-hunger-games-prequel-51db32d4ac5f | ['Megan R. Clark'] | 2020-12-11 01:12:15.112000+00:00 | ['Review', 'Fiction', 'Pop Culture', 'Reading', 'Books'] |
China GDP Growth Records 30 Year Low | In the second quarter of 2019, China’s economy grew at 6.2 percent year-on-year, a slight drop from 6.4 percent in the first quarter and, more notably, a nearly 30 year low. Not even during the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 did China’s GDP growth rate fall below 6.4 percent. Nevertheless, China remains the fastest-growing economy among the world’s largest economies.
It’s misleading to point to the trade war with the United States — which hurts Chinese exports — as the cause for the economic slowdown because the reality is more complicated and concerning. True, Chinese exports decreased significantly as a result of the trade war with the United States: in 2019, export growth halted and slipped into negative rates, whereas 2018 boasted 10 percent export growth year-over-year. But, the trade war is not one-sided.
In reply to US tariffs on Chinese exports, China stopped purchasing US farm products, a hit on US exports and a boost to the Chinese trade balance.
Exports do not enter GDP as is; exports enter GDP net of imports. And, lo and behold, China’s reduced imports more than compensated for its declining exports, increasing China’s trade balance (so far) this year compared to 2018. That is why we saw a positive contribution of net exports to the GDP growth during the first two quarters of 2019.
What does the trade war mean then if not a direct hit on China’s GDP? Even if there was no direct effect of the trade war on Chinese GDP through the trade balance, the decline in exports and expectations from the trade war chill investment, employment, and household consumption, the strength of which to date has sustained the country’s economic growth. Chinese consumers cannot trail the economy forever, and the trade war, along with other financial structural problems, such as high debt levels, decelerating real estate market, and unproductive use of capital, may contribute to a further decline of the world’s largest economy before long. | https://medium.com/knoema/china-gdp-growth-records-30-year-low-4eab3856cad7 | ['Ivan Lapickii'] | 2019-08-14 07:44:46.640000+00:00 | ['China', 'Macroeconomics', 'Data Visualization', 'Economics', 'Infographics'] |
A Guide to Reflective Meetings | Product Management
A Guide to Reflective Meetings
Reflection is one of the most important parts of growth, within individuals and within teams. Whether you are a product manager or not, you will likely encounter many work situations that require reflection. This act enables us to learn from the past and improve for the future. In the context of product development, two types of formal reflection are often used: retrospectives and post mortems. You may hear professionals using these two words interchangeably, but they mean two different things. Thus, both forms of reflection have different applications in your work.
Image Source: Pexels
What is a retrospective, and when should we use it?
The word retrospective comes from Latin, meaning to “look back.” In Agile development, retrospectives are a central part of the process. This is a regular ceremony which includes all team members and provides the opportunity to reflect upon previous sprints. Given the preplanned nature of a retrospective, it is a proactive mechanism to reflect upon work. The dictionary defines the noun version of retrospective as “an exhibition or compilation showing the development of the work…over a period of time.” Within the context of Agile software development, the definition is even more precise:
The Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next sprint. — scrum.org
If you are familiar with Agile, you’ll know that a retrospective serves to have the entire team answer several questions: what went well in the past sprint? what could have gone better? what can be done to improve next sprint? These questions allow your team to celebrate wins, fix potential issues, and hold each other accountable. Using the retrospective framework on a regular schedule enables continuous improvement. By identifying better ways of working together and eliminating disruptive patterns, the team boosts productivity and morale.
Image Source: Pexels
How is a post mortem different, and when should we use it?
On the other hand, a post mortem translates literally to “after death.” This not only implies a reflection back on something, but that the event was not necessarily positive. The prevailing output of a post mortem are lessons learned. These meetings do not necessarily translate to actionable items, but ideally can provide best practices for the future. Although a post mortem is reasonable to conduct at the conclusion of any project, my experience has typically been that such a review occurs when something has gone wrong. Therefore, a post mortem is a more reactive response that leads to reflection.
Again, if we think in the context of product development, a post mortem is often preceded by a root cause analysis (RCA). In a root cause analysis, we seek to understand the variables that led to an undesirable event occurring. We know that many of the most serious issues arise from multiple contributing factors, not a single point of failure. It’s therefore important to build a full picture and timeline of the causes of the problem. This forensic analysis becomes “evidence” that can be discussed during a post mortem.
Image Source: Pexels
What else should we know about reflection meetings?
While frequent reflection can make us better performers, there are diminishing returns with formal meetings to accomplish this task. If your team holds a retrospective after every sprint and has post mortems on a frequent basis, you may begin to experience meeting fatigue. This analysis of every action and event can reduce the morale of a team, while fostering an environment where people are afraid to make any mistakes. Keeping retrospectives spaced appropriately and using post mortems only when needed will ensure that these meetings are more useful to the team.
It’s also important to note that retrospectives and post mortems are both about actions and teams, not people. Neither form of reflection seeks to place blame on individuals. We all make mistakes; how we react and learn from our mistakes is what is most important. Therefore, it is important for retrospectives and post mortems to create safe environments where we can analyze areas for improvement. Lastly, we want to make sure to recognize positive actions and events along with the negative ones; this reinforces the types of behaviors and outcomes we seek in our work. | https://blog.producttom.com/a-guide-to-reflective-meetings-eecedcc23e6a | ['Tom Comerford'] | 2020-10-13 14:55:07.465000+00:00 | ['Product Management', 'Retrospectives', 'Process', 'Post Mortems', 'Meetings'] |
Paulo Coelho’s Bestseller in 2 Weeks Method | Paulo Coelho’s Bestseller in 2 Weeks Method
With thanks to Aaron Nichols for the audio narration.
Paulo Coelho — like most writers — felt anxious about starting his first novel. He wanted to start writing, and kept postponing. Plagued by doubt, he made himself a promise: “If I see a white feather today, I will write my book.” As a Coelho fan, I say thank goodness he saw a white feather that day.
Here’s how Coelho tells the story:
I saw this white feather in a window of a shop. And since then, every second year, in January, I need to see a white feather. And the day that I see I start writing.
That was in 1987, and since then he has written a book every couple of years, as long as he sees a white feather.
He’s also known for writing his books really, really fast. The first draft of his best-selling novel, The Alchemist, Coelho wrote in just two weeks. Every time he starts a book, he writes with a similar intensity. With all his books he aims to finish the first draft in just one month.
The “white feather then furious writing” ritual is one that has created astonishing results for Coelho. His most popular book, The Alchemist, has sold over 150 million copies and been translated into 80 languages, making it the most translated book by a living author. In total, his books have sold an estimated 350 million copies.
Coelho is generous in sharing his writing techniques, and I dived deep into his interviews and articles to find the specific reasons he’s able to write so many books, so quickly, and with such passion.
This article shares what I found — all quotes below are from Coelho himself. Here is Paulo Coelho’s writing method (excluding the white feather, but you know that part now).
Step 1: Go out into the world and live your life — no notebook allowed
“You cannot take something out of nothing. When you write a book, use your experience.”
Attend a creative writing class, and there’s a good chance that keep a writer’s notebook is one of the first things you’re taught. Yet Coelho’s novels have sold hundreds of millions of copies, and he makes a principle of never carrying a notebook.
The reason? Coelho believes that jotting down notes makes you an observer of your life instead of a participant. With a notebook in your pocket, you see yourself as a journalist on the sidelines of your life, instead of the lead character in your own story.
Coelho goes so far as to avoid thinking about writing as much as he can, and instead jump right into life:
“I strongly encourage writers not to think about writing every time that they do something. If you want to capture ideas, you are lost. You are going to be detached from emotions and forget to live your life. You will be an observer and not a human being living his or her life.”
What’s more, Coelho believes that when something really matters, it will stick in your memory. And if you forget something, no big deal, it wasn’t meant to feature in your writing.
“Forget [about] taking notes. What is important remains, what is not important goes away.”
What’s the best way to spend your life? Coelho’s books encourage you to follow your heart, find your inner dream, go hunting for life’s treasure. That said, Coelho does offer one specific way writers should spend their time. The good news is it’s something instinctive for most human beings: seeking the company of others.
“The best way to get inspired to write–in my case–is by meeting people.”
Writing well, for Coelho, means living your life, then sharing your experiences on the page. And that means with every story, you’re not conjuring up a plot from nothing, but plundering the treasure of your daily experience.
Step 2: Ask yourself “What’s bothering me?” and write about that
“All of my books are attempts to answer my own questions about life.”
Coelho doesn’t write for his readers, he writes for himself, to answer his own questions. “I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer,” Coelho says, meaning that he doesn’t write books as a way to help himself or others, but as a way to explore his own problems.
When choosing the subject for his book, he pays attention to what’s on his mind, what’s bothering him, what aspects of himself does he not yet understand. The Alchemist, for example, was for Coelho “a matter of looking back and finding a good story, finding a metaphor, for me to understand myself.”
By exploring himself in his books, Coelho is a subject-matter expert. There’s very little research he needs to do, so he can dive right into writing. That said, Coelho will occasionally look up information, such as the name of a particular street in a city, but as far as possible, he focuses on getting words onto the page. Coelho believes this approach gives more spirit to his writing:
“If you overload your book with a lot of research, you are going to be very boring to yourself and to your reader. Books are not there to show how intelligent you are. Books are there to show your soul.”
Step 3: Follow the thread of your first sentence and write it all down
“I write the book that wants to be written. Behind the first sentence is a thread that takes you to the last.”
Some fast writers (myself included) like to plan out the structure of an article or book before writing. Coelho is a seat of the pants writer. He begins with his first sentence, then follows the thread wherever it leads.
As a result, when Coelho has finished his first draft, he has a lot of words (typically triple what he needs). That leaves a ton of editing to do. Coelho sculpts his writing and chips off the excess ballast to craft the most powerful version of the story. He filters his writing to find the essence of what he wants to say.
“The first version of any book of mine has three times more pages than the final one. It is like cutting your own flesh, but you need to do it.”
Step 4: You will get stuck, so sit tight
“You book are fighting with me. Okay. I’m going to sit here, and I’m not going to leave you alone until I find a way out of the crossroads.”
Like all writers and artists, Coelho hits creative blocks. There are points in his writing when he has no idea what to write next. When this happens, he could step away from his writing desk in frustration. He could go for a walk.
Instead, he sees the block as an enemy, one he fights by sitting with the discomfort until he knows the way forwards. He holds the gaze of his story and refuses to back down. This process may take 10 minutes. It may take 10 hours. Either way, this discipline to sit it out means Coelho’s stories get finished and ultimately get published.
Step 5: Use your own, natural writing voice — it’s magical
“Don’t try to innovate storytelling, tell a good story and it is magical.”
New writers often believe they need to find their voice. I previously fell into this trap, believing that if I could just “find my voice” it would be so much easier to write. That wasn’t helpful and held me back as a writer.
Here’s what I’ve discovered: your writing voice is what happens naturally when you take words from your mind, and put them onto the page. You have something to share — an idea or a story — and you write it down just like you were speaking with a friend. This makes it much easier to write quickly because you can write as you speak. And it means your writing voice will be completely natural.
Coelho agrees — it’s not your writing voice or style that counts, but the story that you tell. Instead of being clever with story structure, just get the story down onto the page, and let it speak for itself. Here’s how he puts it:
I see people trying to work so much in style, finding different ways to tell the same thing. It’s like fashion. Style is the dress, but the dress does not dictate what is inside the dress.”
Most importantly, if writing is your dream, keep writing
“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
You could wait for a white feather to show up as Coelho did. Or you could just start writing, telling your story, and exploring the questions that matter to you. “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it,” Coelho says.
So, if you want to write, start writing! The universe is conspiring on your behalf. Who is to say what could happen next?
Read more: | https://writingcooperative.com/paulo-coelhos-bestseller-in-2-weeks-method-83d1b75183b0 | ['David Majister'] | 2021-02-04 10:13:36.606000+00:00 | ['Biography', 'Writing Tips', 'Books And Authors', 'Paulo Coelho', 'Motivation'] |
5 Takeaways from the Syria Memo to Hillary Clinton | 5 Takeaways from the Syria Memo to Hillary Clinton
4 March 2013 by Bernd Schwabe via Creative Commons.
Daniel Lazare writes about the The Memo that Killed Half a Million People in Syria, in which former diplomat James P. Rubin recommended the overthrow of Syria’s Assad regime to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton, in turn, persuaded President Obama to pursue this policy, which continued under Clinton successor John Kerry.
Here are my takeaways from the memo:
U.S. foreign policy is ignorant. Just like the George W. Bush Administration before it, the Obama Administration knew virtually nothing about the Middle East or its dynamics. Rubin actually assumed rebel victory in Syria was possible, and that the new regime would be friendly to the United States. Not only was this not going to happen, but Assad, brutal dictator though he was, protected the rights of Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities. The radical Islamist rebels, had they prevailed, certainly would not. U.S. foreign policy is NOT about the security of the U.S. The U.S. is hostile toward Iran because Israel views Iran as its #1 enemy. The U.S. wanted to overthrow Assad because he’s aligned with Iran. But let’s remember that the U.S. has no mutual defense treaty with Israel. Taking sides in Syria’s civil war did nothing to enhance U.S. security, and only led to a prolonged civil war with half a million dead. The memo treats the U.S. as a parent spoiling the unpredictable child Israel: let’s do what Israel wants, or we don’t know what Israel will do! But how is it any of our business? Does Paraguay worry about Israel? Does Switzerland? Singapore? Why should the U.S.? Blowback is unpredictable, except when it isn’t. The U.S. aided forces resisting the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, and they became Al Qaeda. We know what happened on 9/11. Likewise, the U.S. aided Syrian rebels. They became ISIS, and committed terrorist attacks in the U.S. and in NATO ally France. Why are we surprised when bad guys bite the hand that feeds them? They’re bad guys! This is why we have conspiracy theories. It is hard to fathom the sheer stupidity of Rubin’s memo, or why Clinton and Obama agreed with it. It’s almost more comforting to believe the “ruling class” is composed of evil masterminds, not arrogant dimwits. As the comedian Monique Marvez has said, “I’m not afraid of evil because I’ll match wits with the devil. Stupid scares me because it’s random.” Democrats must learn from this. Hillary’s record as Secretary of State certainly did not help her in the 2016 Presidential election. Americans are tired of the constant meddling overseas. They’re tired of policing the world and don’t want to take sides in civil wars. If Democrats are to take the White House in 2020, they must nominate a candidate more dovish than Trump, even though the clueless Beltway Establishment will demand someone more hawkish.
Our “leaders,” regardless of party, are dangerously incompetent, and countless innocent people die from their errors. This Syria memo is Exhibit A. | https://medium.com/@jamesleroywilson/5-takeaways-from-the-syria-memo-to-hillary-clinton-6b77167ebaf1 | ['James Leroy Wilson'] | 2019-01-15 20:48:54.971000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Hillary', 'Syria', 'Foreign Policy', 'Conspiracy Theories'] |
Commute With Me to Makati | Commute With Me to Makati
It’s surprising how the most stressful moments could become nostalgic now that the world shifted. I’m talking about commuting and heavy traffic. The rush hour. The bundy clock.
In my past life, I mean before Covid, I was a hotel salesperson who was always out meeting clients. Therefore, isolating for more than a year made me realize how much I miss the streets.
My camera roll is my own rabbit hole. (Hey, that rhymed!) For my first day with Dark Room pub, allow me to pour my heart out and share a story that's been sitting in my drafts for months now. I have the tendency to hyper-organize and my favorite victim is my camera roll. I’d browse “All Photos” and notice a theme and put relevant pictures in a folder. One is full of petty shots of the distant moon. Another is full of empty chairs and tables. In doing so, I saw random shots while on the commute. Then, I became nostalgic to see some office photos.
Commuting was strangely meditative for me. It gave me peace of mind. Leaving earlier for work allowed me to avoid the rush hour. Fewer cars and people means saving myself from the city’s toxic pollution — both air and noise. Imagine the calm, quiet, and crisp city mornings you’d miss if you choose to join the panic of city congestion.
The following photos were taken at random times and are years apart but obsessive organizing naturally wrote the story of traveling to and from work.
Accompany me, please? | https://medium.com/counterarts/commute-with-me-to-makati-a02d60e86e51 | ['Harry Male'] | 2021-04-13 22:38:48.104000+00:00 | ['Philippines', 'Travel', 'Culture', 'Nonfiction', 'Photography'] |
WILL AMERICA STRIKE IRAN? | NYT says Trump intends to strike Iran before he leaves office
The “Mike” shot in 1952 inaugurated the age of fusion weapons — .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
The fight between Iran and Donald Trump is not over. Not yet. Trump is still in office, and the New York Times says he plans to attack Iran before he leaves. Though it sounds like a game for Trump, or for the NYT, an attack against Iran is a serious matter and it could have damaging consequences.
NUCLEAR FACILITIES
We believe the NYT should have been more forthcoming in its accusations against Trump on the Iran issue. it cites sources and we know what Trump says about ‘sources’.
Nevertheless, an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will be bad for the people of Iran, for the environment and will create bigger tensions in the Middle East. Does Trump really want to create such a mess?
KILLING OF IRANIAN SCIENTISTS
Yesterday, unknown gunmen killed an Iranian scientist in Iran, near Teheran. They gunned him down and he died at the hospital.
Iran says the assassination against Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is a terrorist act.
The number of Iranian scientists killed is rising. Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated.
One was wounded in an assassination attempt.
SOLEIMANI
Iranian Judiciary says it is still tracking down culprits involved in Qasem Soleimani killing.
On January 3, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered drone strikes that martyred General Soleimani, chief of the IRGC Quds Force.
Iran did not respond to the killing of its top general and is also silent on the killing of its nuclear scientists.
Read more from us on wftv.live | https://medium.com/the-week/will-america-strike-iran-23c0c96fb96b | ['Kazi Mahmood'] | 2020-11-28 06:39:33.389000+00:00 | ['Iran', 'Scientists', 'Trump', 'Bombing', 'Nuclear'] |
Functional and Non-Functional Testing | In a good software development life cycle, software testing is a necessary process on a mission to deliver high-Quality software, thus in the software testing process there are two main techniques which are Functional Testing and Non-Functional Testing that will be discussed in this article.
What is Functional Testing?
Is a testing type that covers what the software is capable of based on the requirement specifications.
Functional testing is to check whether the application feature such as major functionality, basic usability, and validation functioning properly compare to the expected result from the requirement.
Variation of Functional Testing
Types of Functional Testing
Unit Testing : to test by the smallest part of the application that can be logically isolated in the system
: to test by the smallest part of the application that can be logically isolated in the system Smoke Testing: This test is conducted on initial application build, to check all the critical functionalities are working as expected before continuing to further test
This test is conducted on initial application build, to check all the critical functionalities are working as expected before continuing to further test Sanity Testing: Sanity testing is conducted on a stable build, to check if there are any impacted module (issue) due to the newly added or changed code in the system
Sanity testing is conducted on a stable build, to check if there are any impacted module (issue) due to the newly added or changed code in the system User Acceptance : the purpose of this test method is to check whether the system is already met customer acceptability or not
: the purpose of this test method is to check whether the system is already met customer acceptability or not Integration Testing : This test method is conducted when two or more system module is combined as one group, to verify the interaction between integrated modules
: This test method is conducted when two or more system module is combined as one group, to verify the interaction between integrated modules Regression Testing: regression test is performed when there is a new feature or any major deployment to ensure the existing functionality is still behave properly due to updates
What is Non-Functional Testing?
In a non-functional testing type, the test is focused on the system or software behavior rather than a specific function or action
Non-functional testing focus on system aspect that may not be related to a specific function such as security, scalability, usability and several other aspects.
Variation of Non-Functional Testing
Example of Non-Functional testing types
Performance Testing : is a test method that determines how fast the performance of the system in some aspect under a particular workload
: is a test method that determines how fast the performance of the system in some aspect under a particular workload Volume Testing : in Volume testing, the system should be able to accept the huge volume of data, to analyze the system performance by increase the data in the database
: in Volume testing, the system should be able to accept the huge volume of data, to analyze the system performance by increase the data in the database Load Testing : This method is to test the expected system load and determine the system’s behavior under peak and normal condition
: This method is to test the expected system load and determine the system’s behavior under peak and normal condition Stress Testing : Stress Testing could be used to evaluate the system behavior when a significant amount of workload is provided continuously
: Stress Testing could be used to evaluate the system behavior when a significant amount of workload is provided continuously Scalability Testing : in this test method, the system performance is measured its capability to scale up in terms of user load, data volume, and much other performance attributes
: in this test method, the system performance is measured its capability to scale up in terms of user load, data volume, and much other performance attributes Usability Testing : is a test method by observing real user reveal the area of confusion and improve overall user experience
: is a test method by observing real user reveal the area of confusion and improve overall user experience Security Testing : Security Testing is conducted to make sure that the system is free of threat or any potential risk
: Security Testing is conducted to make sure that the system is free of threat or any potential risk Reliability Testing : This testing method is conducted to see whether the system is already meet the user requirement in terms of reliability or not before the system is deployed
: This testing method is conducted to see whether the system is already meet the user requirement in terms of reliability or not before the system is deployed Recovery Testing : is a method to test how the system behaves on the recover process side whenever gone thorough a crash, hardware failure, etc
: is a method to test how the system behaves on the recover process side whenever gone thorough a crash, hardware failure, etc Documentation Testing: Documentation testing is a method to test the system by using several types of document, i.e. Test Plans, Test Cases, Test Log, Test Report, etc
Reference
Visit those articles above for a more detailed explanation regarding Functional and Non-Functional Testing. Thank you for reading! | https://medium.com/dsf-developers/functional-and-non-functional-testing-22e9a11dc8c5 | [] | 2020-10-07 01:15:03.541000+00:00 | ['Dipostarfinance', 'QA', 'Quality Assurance', 'Development', 'Testing'] |
A 5-Day Sketch challenge: Growing a gardening app from the ground up | Our third project as part of General Assembly London’s 12-week UX Design Immersive course was all about honing our visual design skills using the graphic design tool Sketch.
While our second project also found us using Sketch, this week’s work saw us take a much deeper dive into visual design and branding strategy, taking in mood boards, brand affinity, personality traits, mind mapping and typography in order to create polished high-fi prototypes.
This is the story of our week’s work.
Assessing the brief
This week’s brief was to build a visual identity for a mobile app optimised for iPhone 8 screen dimensions.
We were given three options for the type of app. I decided to build a gardening app, which would allow ‘budding’ gardeners — pun intended– to network and share pictures and tips through blogs, forums and picture uploads.
For this project, we used the double diamond approach, dividing the process into four phases — discover, define, design, deliver.
The Discovery phase
Following a day spent introducing ourselves to core visual design principles, we kicked off our app by selecting some brand values that would give our app a ‘belief system’.
Noting that many gardening apps had a quite traditional feel, and wanting to reach out to a younger generation of keen, internet-savvy gardeners working in sometimes limited urban or suburban space, I went for the following: Modern, Growth, Sharing, Network and — this last one with the grow-your-own gardeners in mind — Harvest.
With this in mind, I created a mood board. I’ve worked in the branding space, so I was familiar with the concept and aims of a mood board — but I’d never built one myself. The board went through several iterations, but after a few reorganising exercises, some common themes started to present themselves.
You can see a curated selection from the mood board, along with some descriptors below. | https://medium.com/@louispattisonux/a-5-day-sketch-challenge-growing-a-gardening-app-from-the-ground-up-58a466a7ba33 | ['Louis Pattison'] | 2020-11-27 10:12:37.591000+00:00 | ['Gardening', 'UX Design', 'Apps'] |
8 Ways to Optimize Your Focus | Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash
The following is an excerpt from Lost in Startuplandia: Wayfinding for the Weary Entrepreneur by E. Keller Fitzsimmons.
Focus is increasingly hard to come by in today’s world. We’re bombarded by constant stimulation coming from every direction. For all my fellow business owners out there, we don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with all these distractions and run our business in an optimal fashion. We need to focus — but where can we find it?
I’m not an expert, but throughout the years I’ve spent navigating my own headspace and running multiple businesses, I developed a few strategies for optimal focus.
Here are eight of my favorites.
#1: Stay well hydrated.
Sounds easy enough, but drinking enough water can be daunting. The rule of thumb is half our body weight in ounces of water. For me, that’s sixty-four ounces of water daily.
Coffee and caffeinated beverages don’t count, as they are diuretics. Filling up a large water bottle and leaving it on our desk can help a ton. Why? When we are thirsty, we are distracted. Evolution has primed our brains to take thirst seriously.
Bonus: We’re less hungry when we are hydrated, so water could help our diets.
#2: Create a nightly sleep ritual.
When we don’t get enough sleep, we can’t focus. Few entrepreneurs get optimal sleep. However, it’s a habit that needs to be established and then continuously protected.
The rule is eight to ten hours for adults. The best way to do this is to create strict bedtimes and wake-up times. To bed by 9:00 p.m., up by 6:00 a.m. is mine.
You can also try creating a nighttime ritual. This has been huge for me.
I turn off all electronics thirty to forty-five minutes before bed and charge them in another room. I like to listen to a mellow podcast. It’s like being read to sleep.
#3: Practice honesty.
Honesty is hard, even excruciating at times. Why bother?
Honesty isn’t the best policy only because it’s the right thing to do. It’s a miraculous way to free up our brain power and focus. Managing tiny half-truths is every bit as mentally taxing as managing whoppers. Our brains are constantly trying to remember what we said and to whom.
When we are honest all the time, we don’t have to manage anything. We free up countless brain cycles.
Three years ago, I committed to being rigorous with my honesty. Very soon thereafter, my brain got quiet. The chatter damn near stopped. It’s felt like a flipping miracle.
#4: Take a news fast.
Giving up the news for five days — televised and online — can change how we feel. I’ve found there is a difference between obsessing over current events and staying current.
Today, I use my Twitter feed to curate newsfeeds from wire services like Reuters and AP, and then a couple of international sources. I check it only when I have downtime, such as waiting in line. By giving ourselves a break from the news, we’re freeing up our subconscious to be able to concentrate on solving the actual problems close at hand.
#5: Block out all messaging for 90 minutes during the work day.
We live in a 24/7, always-on culture. When we are always on, we are killing our ability to think. Thinking requires mental rest. I keep the first 90 minutes in the morning clear of all messaging so that I can focus on the hard stuff first and get myself organized.
#6: Address physical pain.
Many of us, particularly as we age, start to experience chronic pain. This can be the old knee injury that comes back to haunt us or a hangover from a killer workout.
When our bodies don’t feel right, it steals our ability to focus. Our brain goes into hyperdrive and focuses on the pain rather than our task at hand. Addressing physical pain can mean scheduling a doctor’s appointment; working with a physical therapist, chiropractor, or acupuncturist; doing yoga; or buying an ergonomic desk chair.
#7: Thank unfriendly people.
We can’t avoid unfriendly people. Too often, we get triggered and ruminate on these unpleasant interactions. Why was Bob so short with me? Why did that guy flip me off? People today are so rude! This kind of mental chatter kills our mojo.
When we catch ourselves ruminating, celebrate! We caught ourselves and that takes a good deal of self-awareness. Once aware, we need to release the thought. Start journaling and dump the upset onto the page. Get specific about the incident.
We must ask ourselves: Why am I so upset?
Once we think we’ve got it, we write down, “I want to thank you [insert name or description (“guy in car”)] for helping me realize that I want to be kind to myself and others today. I am going to do this [insert act of kindness] for [insert name] to repay my debt.”
Now go do it! (And then back to work!)
#8: Find the takeaway in negative feedback.
Negative feedback, even when it’s well-crafted constructive feedback, can be awful to receive. Once we receive it, we tend to ruminate: How could they say that? They don’t know me! It’s easy to write it off and justify our lack of listing, as most advice, including negative feedback, is for the person giving it — not us.
However, there can be gold in there.
So, we should try looking for that nugget of wisdom and ask ourselves: what is one takeaway I need to hear and act on? Then we need to be done with it and move on. If we find ourselves stewing anyway, tip #7 can help us deal with that.
***
For more advice on maintaining focus, you can find Lost in Startuplandia on Amazon.
E. Keller Fitzsimmons is a serial tech entrepreneur, artist, and mother of two. She is the cofounder of Custom Reality Services, a virtual reality (VR) production company whose first two projects, Across the Line (2016) and Ashe ’68 (2019), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Keller is the recipient of the Silvertip PwC Entrepreneurship Award and Speech Technology’s Luminary Award. Her work has been published by Network Computing, InformationWeek, and Inc. An active angel investor, she serves on the technology committee for BELLE USA, a venture fund that invests in women-led startups. Originally trained as a classical archaeologist, Keller holds a master’s degree from Harvard University. | https://medium.com/book-bites/8-ways-to-optimize-your-focus-39f59edd6fb3 | ['Jessi Cimafonte'] | 2019-05-09 15:40:54.972000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Focus', 'Career Advice', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Work Life Balance'] |
Five Ways to Teach Children How to Be Assertive | Dare to question the wizard even if it gets you kicked out of Oz-
Robin Laurain
Somewhere in our parent brains we have gotten the message that the only way to have successful children is to teach them to “fit in” and to be a part of the pack. We really do have their best interests at heart. We want our kids to belong to the “in” crowd, color within the lines, and be part of the winner’s group. We subliminally give our kids the message not to rock the boat and good things will come their way.
Every kid gets an award, they all wear the same uniform to school, and we teach them to never ask why.
This conformist mind set can set kids up to be door mats at the low end and victims at the high end of the conformity scale.
Kids trying to be part of the team have created situations where kids have been brutalized by hazing as well as sexual abuse by pedophile coaches. After having said all of the above, I do understand that children incapable of conformity fill our juvenile detention centers. So where is the balance?
The answer to this question is not an easy one. Many parents will face situations where what we think is the best situation for a child may actually be making their life miserable. By teaching our children at an early age how to be assertive, we reduce the risk that the situation will go undetected. We can teach our children how to get their needs met without being disrespectful or aggressive.
Model assertive behavior- Children watch what we do and say. I have often overheard my kids say to their friends, “My mom said” or “My mom did it this way”. They may never admit this to you, but it is a sure bet that any daughter who observes her mother never stand up for her own rights will do either one of two things: Become a carbon copy of, “mom the doormat”, or become so aggressive to be the total opposite of door mat you. Both are not desired outcomes. We want our children to be confident enough to be able to express what they need without aggression. If someone is making our son feel uncomfortable we want him to be able to say firmly, “No, don’t do that!”
Don’t place your kids in all or nothing situations- Many times parents will tell their kids that they have to make a situation work or they will not achieve their goal. Parents do this to motivate or to impress upon the child the seriousness of the situation. Rarely, is one person the end all to your child’s goal. They may make it easier for your child to achieve his goal with their help, but we never want to give all that power to one person. An unhealthy person could zero in on your child’s desperateness to please them and use it in an unsafe way. You don’t want your kids to think they have to put up with something that isn’t safe just to please this person.
Remember kids brains aren’t fully developed until they are about 25. This means you need to do some thinking with them. Don’t assume they know how to handle a situation because you went over it with them one time. They also have magical thinking and believe it will all work out and may put up with a situation thinking it will magically go away on it’s own. Role play situations with your children so you give them the opportunity to practice assertive behavior.
Tell your kids to follow their gut and to remove themselves from situations that feel wrong- That statement is what it is. If it feels wrong, it is wrong!
Allow your kids to pick your brains. Talk to your kids about situations that bother them and let them know it is o.k. to confide in you. You will believe what they tell you.
Keeping kids safe starts with teaching kids how to be assertive and not passive victims. Telling kids it is o.k. to question authority is a healthy thing all parents must do.
Sources:
Michigan Association for Children’s Mental Health Care web site
SAMHSA web site | https://medium.com/@robinlaurain/five-ways-to-teach-children-how-to-be-assertive-7d333c5a2b97 | ['Robin Lea Laurain'] | 2020-12-19 05:45:40.708000+00:00 | ['Chidren', 'Safety Training', 'Assertiveness', 'Boundaries', 'Safety'] |
Honest & Brutal Advice on How to Start an Online Business | Being successful in business comes down to 3 key components: Persistence, Passion, Hard Work
With sufficient persistence, you’ll be successful one day. You will have the persistence to learn, research, and hustle your way to find the solution to any hardship you face. Whether it’s financial, legal, marketing, sales techniques or etc.
Passion — if you love what you are doing or if you have a reason to do what you are doing, you will find enough energy and time to achieve it. If you are lazy and just hope for handouts or luck or fairy tale assistance, it will not happen to you.
Hard Work beats luck because, with hard work, you create your own luck. Nothing comes easy. Elon Musk famously works more than 120 hours a week when he is launching his Tesla. How many hours have you worked this week?
Business Ideas
There is no right or wrong to a business idea. It’s all about timing and execution. What may seem like a good idea may not be appealing to the market today because it’s either too early or too late. A great idea will not be successful if it’s poorly executed and this is why persistence, hard work, and passion all come into place.
So now, you have decided or are exploring to start your own online business.
There are no golden rules to how to start your own business but there are several things that everyone needs to go through, albeit in different sequences. Here is what we believe the most logical sequence of things that you need to do to start your own business in 2020–2021
1. Have an idea of what you want to offer to the world? For this, you should know before thinking to start your own business. Did you see something that the market is lacking? Do you have special access to something that is better/cheaper than what the market has? Do you have a skill that the market wants?
2. Do a quick competitor check / real-world check to see who else is offering that service. If you are planning to sell it within your area, don’t worry too much about competitors selling the same service in different parts of the world. Focus on your competitor within your area of reach / within the area where your target market resides or does business.
3. Understand your competitor. At this stage, many new entrepreneurs give up because they then realize that their world-changing idea is not new after all. The hard truth is most services you can think of are not unique either.
4. Find your niche. Do quick math. What do you expect from your business? How much money do you realistically want to make per month? For example, you want to earn USD3,000 a month then divide that with the potential profit you can get per customer or item. For example, if you are thinking of selling a one-to-one cooking class and recipe at $30 per hour per student. To achieve USD3,000 per month, you need to be teaching 100 hours. Assuming each session (on average) is 2 hours, you need to be teaching 50 sessions per month, and assuming each student will sign up for and pay you for 2 sessions per month, all you need to do is to find 25 students.
5. Now with this number and information on hand, do you think you can find 25 students with your city, reach, circle, neighbourhood? The answer is most likely YES!
6. Build a social media presence and a website. To build your own social media presence, all you need is some Hard Work, Passion and you will be able to do so. If you think you can’t, that’s because you are lazy because Facebook and Instagram have spent billions of US Dollars to make sure their platform is usable by everyone from the age of 7.
7. As for the website, there are many website builder solutions that are easy to use out there. In all honesty, you can do this at a later stage when your business gets a bit bigger or busier. You can either try to do it yourself or hire a 3rd party to do it. If it is cheaper for you to learn and do it yourself, then do it yourself else outsource it to someone who can do it better and cheaper than you.
8. Marketing, Marketing, Marketing! — Focus all your effort on marketing. Create a relatable story. Create a reason for people to have an interest in your service. Create a reason for people to like you. Create a reason for people to feel ‘They have lost out’ if they don’t get your service. Make your service easily shareable on social media. Create an easy to repeat tag line, slogan for your friends, customers to tell their friends about you. Give them a reason to talk about you.
9. Delivery — make sure you deliver as promised. It’s better to under-promise (but do not be too humble) and over-deliver than vice versa.
10. By now, you should be halfway to your monthly profit target and now it’s time to think about the 2nd stage of owning your own business.
11. This is the time when you should have a ‘feeling’ whether this is for you for the long term, can you grow this business even more, and if the answer is yes — congratulation.
12. Time to get your house in order. Now it’s time to look into proper account/record keeping, taxes, and legitimacy of your business according to your local laws.
13. In general, you will need to register your business with the authority, hire an accountant/tax agent, set up a virtual office as your formal business presence and also as the registered address to receive government notices, bank and other institution notices to ensure you comply with your local government laws.
14. Lastly and probably the best advice from us — Remember, everything you do, you communicate, is part of your marketing. Check for missed marketing opportunities — be it your packaging, receipt, invoice, the footer, or the closing of your video — every little extra marketing helps!
Good Luck!
From all of us here at UnionSPACE Bangkok | https://medium.com/@naf-29115/honest-brutal-advice-on-how-to-start-an-online-business-311f2dd4ffd4 | [] | 2020-12-16 07:39:49.235000+00:00 | ['Passion', 'Hard Work', 'Persistence', 'Online Business', 'Business'] |
Object Localization with Keras | Object Localization with Keras and W&B
This report explores object localization using the bounding box regression technique in Keras and interactively visualizes the model’s prediction in Weights & Biases Ayush Thakur Follow Nov 3, 2020 · 7 min read
Photo by Nick Hillier on Unsplash
Introduction
Object localization is the task of locating an instance of a particular object category in an image, typically by specifying a tightly cropped bounding box centered on the instance. Object detection, on the contrary, is the task of locating all the possible instances of all the target objects.
Object localization is also called “classification with localization”. This is because the architecture which performs image classification can be slightly modified to predict the bounding box coordinates. Check out Andrew Ng’s lecture on object localization or check out Object detection: Bounding box regression with Keras, TensorFlow, and Deep Learning by Adrian Rosebrock.
Figure 1: Difference between image classification, object localization and object detection. (Source)
In this report, we will build an object localization model and train it on a synthetic dataset. We will interactively visualize our models’ predictions in Weights & Biases.
The Dataset
We will use a synthetic dataset for our object localization task based on the MNIST dataset. This dataset is made by Laurence Moroney. The idea is that instead of 28x28 pixel MNIST images, it could be NxN(100x100), and the task is to predict the bounding box for the digit location.
Figure 2: Samples from the dataset. Every image is 100x100 pixels.
Download the dataset
This GitHub repo is the original source of the dataset. However, due to this issue, we will use my fork of the original repository.
We also have a .csv training and testing file with the name of the images, labels, and the bounding box coordinates. Note that the coordinates are scaled to [0, 1] .
!git clone https://github.com/ayulockin/synthetic_datasets
%cd synthetic_datasets/MNIST/
%mkdir images !unzip -q MNIST_Converted_Training.zip -d images/
!unzip -q MNIST_Converted_Testing.zip -d images/
Dataloader using tf.data
We will use tf.data.Dataset to build our input pipeline. Our model will have to predict the class of the image(object in question) and the bounding box coordinates given an input image.
In the model section, you will realize that the model is a multi-output architecture. Check out Keras: Multiple outputs and multiple losses by Adrian Rosebrock to learn more about it.
The tf.data.Dataset pipeline shown below addresses multi-output training. We will return a dictionary of labels and bounding box coordinates along with the image. The name of the keys should be the same as the name of the output layers.
AUTO = tf.data.experimental.AUTOTUNE
BATCH_SIZE = 32 @tf.function
def preprocess_train(image_name, label, bbox):
image = tf.io.read_file(TRAIN_IMG_PATH+image_name)
image = tf.image.decode_png(image, channels=1) return image, {'label': label, 'bbox': bbox} # Notice here @tf.function
def preprocess_test(image_name, label, bbox):
image = tf.io.read_file(TEST_IMG_PATH+image_name)
image = tf.image.decode_png(image, channels=1) return image, {'label': label, 'bbox': bbox} # Notice here trainloader = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices((train_image_names, train_labels, train_bbox))
testloader = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices((test_image_names, test_labels, test_bbox)) trainloader = (
trainloader
.map(preprocess_train, num_parallel_calls=AUTO)
.shuffle(1024)
.batch(BATCH_SIZE)
.prefetch(AUTO)
) testloader = (
testloader
.map(preprocess_test, num_parallel_calls=AUTO)
.batch(BATCH_SIZE)
.prefetch(AUTO)
)
The Model
Bounding Box Regression
Before we build our model, let’s briefly discuss bounding box regression. In machine learning literature regression is a task to map the input value X with the continuous output variable y.
Thus we return a number instead of a class, and in our case, we’re going to return 4 numbers (x1, y1, x2, y2) that are related to a bounding box. We will train this system with an image and a ground truth bounding box, and use L2 loss to calculate the loss between the predicted bounding box and the ground truth. Check out this video to learn more about bounding box regression.
Figure 3: The general model architecture for bounding box regression for object localization task. (Source)
Going back to the model, figure 3 rightly summarizes the model architecture. The model constitutes three components — convolutional block(feature extractor), classification head, and regression head.
This is a multi-output configuration. As mentioned in the dataset section, the tf.data.Dataset input pipeline returns a dictionary, whose key names are the name of the output layer of the classification head and the regression head.
The code snippet shown below builds our model architecture for object localization.
def get_model():
inputs = Input(shape=(100,100,1))
x = Conv2D(32, (3,3), activation='relu')(inputs)
x = MaxPooling2D((3,3))(x)
x = Conv2D(32, (3,3), activation='relu')(x)
x = MaxPooling2D((3,3))(x)
x = Conv2D(64, (3,3), activation='relu')(x)
x = GlobalAveragePooling2D()(x) classifier_head = Dropout(0.3)(x)
# Notice the name of the layer.
classifier_head = Dense(10, activation='softmax', name='label')(classifier_head) reg_head = Dense(64, activation='relu')(x)
reg_head = Dense(32, activation='relu')(reg_head)
# Notice the name of the layer.
reg_head = Dense(4, activation='sigmoid', name='bbox')(reg_head) return Model(inputs=[inputs], outputs=[classifier_head, reg_head])
The names given to the multiple heads are used as keys for the losses dictionary. Note that the activation function for the classification head is softmax since it's a multi-class classification setup(0-9 digits). The activation function for the regression head is sigmoid since the bounding box coordinates are in the range of [0, 1] .
The loss functions are appropriately selected. We can optionally give different weightage to different loss functions.
losses = {'label': 'sparse_categorical_crossentropy',
'bbox': 'mse'} loss_weights = {'label': 1.0,
'bbox': 1.0}
The BBoxLogger - Interactive Visualization of Predictions
When working on object localization or object detection, you can interactively visualize your models’ predictions in Weights & Biases. You can log the sample images along with the ground truth and predicted bounding box values. You can even log multiple boxes and can log confidence scores, IoU scores, etc. Check out the documentation here.
The report Bounding Boxes for Object Detection by Stacey Svetlichnaya walk you through the interactive controls for this tool. It covers the various nuisances of logging images and bounding box coordinates.
The code snippets shown below is the helper function for our BBoxLogger callback. The function wandb_bbox returns the image, the predicted bounding box coordinates, and the ground truth coordinates in the required format. Note that the passed values have dtype which is JSON serializable. For example, if your pred_label should be float type and not ndarray.float .
def wandb_bbox(image, p_bbox, pred_label, t_bbox, true_label, class_id_to_label):
return wandb.Image(image, boxes={
"predictions": {
"box_data": [{
"position": {
"minX": p_bbox[0],
"maxX": p_bbox[2],
"minY": p_bbox[1],
"maxY": p_bbox[3]
},
"class_id" : pred_label,
"box_caption": class_id_to_label[pred_label]
}],
"class_labels": class_id_to_label
},
"ground_truth": {
"box_data": [{
"position": {
"minX": t_bbox[0],
"maxX": t_bbox[2],
"minY": t_bbox[1],
"maxY": t_bbox[3]
},
"class_id" : true_label,
"box_caption": class_id_to_label[true_label]
}],
"class_labels": class_id_to_label
}
})
Our BBoxLogger is a custom Keras callback. We can pass it to model.fit to log our model's predictions on a small validation set. Weights and Biases will automatically overlay the bounding box on the image.
class BBoxLogger(tf.keras.callbacks.Callback):
def __init__(self):
super(BBoxLogger, self).__init__()
self.val_images, label_bbox = next(iter(testloader))
self.true_labels = label_bbox['label']
self.true_bbox = label_bbox['bbox']
def on_epoch_end(self, logs, epoch):
localization_list = []
for idx in range(len(self.val_images)):
# get image
image = self.val_images[idx]
# get ground truth label and bbox coordinates.
true_label = int(self.true_labels[idx].numpy())
t_bbox = self.true_bbox[idx]
# get model prediction.
pred_label, p_bbox = model.predict(np.expand_dims(image, 0))
# get argmax of the prediction
pred_label = int(np.argmax(pred_label[0]))
# get wandb image
localization_list.append(wandb_bbox(image,
p_bbox[0].tolist(),
pred_label,
t_bbox.numpy().tolist(),
true_label,
class_id_to_label))
wandb.log({"predictions" : localization_list})
We will soon look at the results.
Results
Now on to the exciting part. I have trained the model with early stopping with the patience of 10 epochs. Feel free to train the model for longer epochs and play with other hyperparameters. Try out the experiments in this colab notebook.
Since we have multiple losses associated with our task, we will have multiple metrics to log and monitor. Weights and Biases automatically log all the metrics using keras.WandbCallback callback.
Check out this interactive report to see complete result.
Figure 4: Train and validation loss. (Source)
The result of BBoxLogger is shown below. In the interactive report, click on the ⚙️ icon in the media panel below(Result of BBoxLogger) to check out the interaction controls. You can visualize both ground truth and predicted bounding boxes together or separately. You can even select the class which you don't want to visualize.
Observations
The model is accurately classifying the images. This can be further confirmed by looking at the classification metrics shown above. For MNIST like datasets, it is expected to have high accuracy.
The prediction of the bounding box coordinates looks okayish. We should wait and admire the power of neural networks here. With just a few lines of code we are able to locate the digits.
Improvements
Few things that we can do to improve the bounding box prediction are:
Increase the depth of the regression network of our model and train. It might lead to overfitting but it’s worth a try.
Train the current model. Freeze the convolutional layer and the classification network and train the regression network forfew more epochs.
Figure 5: Result of the BBoxLogger. (Source)
Conclusion
I hope you like this short tutorial on how to build an object localization architecture using Keras and use interactive bounding box visualization tool to debug the bounding box predictions.
You can find more of my work here. Check out the interactive report here. Would love your feedbacks. :D | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/object-localization-with-keras-2f272f79e03c | ['Ayush Thakur'] | 2020-11-06 17:06:12.353000+00:00 | ['Wandb', 'Object Localization', 'Keras', 'Object Detection', 'Visualization'] |
Brushing Up on Pandas Groupby | The questions that emerged in my mind were: how many genres are represented in each book category and which genre in each category is represented the most? How shall I go about figuring it out? I recall from my Bootcamp days the Pandas groupby function and decided to brush up on its use to see if it could provide answers to my two questions.
Let’s start with some background information about pandas.DataFrame.groupby from the documentation:
A groupby operation involves some combination of splitting the object, applying a function, and combining the results. This can be used to group large amounts of data and compute operations on these groups.
Applying the groupby() operation on the Data Frame
Make note that creating a groupby object alone will not display a result — although you have split the dataset into groups — the power to display meaningful information comes from chaining an Aggregation Function onto the groupby object. There are 13 such functions; their role is fairly self-explanatory, but for more information, I suggest you investigate here:
count()
describe()
first()
last()
max()
mean()
min()
nth():
sem()
size()
std()
sum()
var()
Forging ahead to figure out the number of genres represented in each book category brought me to refining the groupby query further:
This line of code gave me what I was looking for — the number of books in each genre in each book category:
A portion of the Different Genres in “Arts, Film & Photograph” Category
However, it would be more useful to get just the maximum value, not the whole list. Just for chuckles, I tried appending .max() to the end and got an answer for the book category with the maximum number of books in one genre as a result:
Appended .max()
‘Action & Adventure’ Category with 754 books in the “Action & Adventure (Books)” Genre
Okay, it’s a nice result, but not exactly what I was looking for. I’d was hoping for all 11 categories, not just the one with the highest value in the genre. | https://medium.com/@amenoren/brushing-up-on-pandas-groupby-848c94a33e65 | ['Annika Noren'] | 2020-12-22 17:49:17.049000+00:00 | ['Pandas Dataframe', 'Python Programming'] |
Case Study: Design to Address Racial Biases & Excessive Use of Force in Law Enforcement | 4 Pain Points:
1. Officers lack the social experience to do well in civilian interactions.
“You need social work & skills to work as a police [officer] or else you create walls during the interaction.” — Anynomous Officer
There needs to be more social interaction based training and practice. Here is one of my favorite quotes from an officer:
“What we do is customer service.” — Anynomous Officer
Most officers’ jobs orient around working with and responding to the people. Most of the time they are responding to small incidents and discourses, only a small percentage of these incidents are violent.
Good social skills are vital to their job. How they interact and respond to civilians directly determines an incident’s outcome, and dictates if the situation escalates or dissolves peacefully.
2. Officers have insufficient empathy and understanding for minority members of society.
Through our interviews, we found that only some cities' police training involves diversity training.
Officers reflected that learning about social issues like understanding race on textbooks simply does not achieve a degree of understanding that overcomes their pre-established biases.
Officers need more education and exposure to different members of the society that are not textbook-based.
3. Officers feel misunderstood and attacked by civilians
“ I am frequently attacked online, especially now.” “ It feels like I have to avoid mentioning my job because of the possible backlash. I feel more isolated in the job now more than ever.” “An immediate family member of mine is a cop. He’s angrier and more aggressive than usual.” (referring to the racial protests in U.S.)
— Anonymous Officers & online responses
Police Officers feel judged by the public when they have their uniforms on. Furthermore, they have difficulty discussing their experiences with others who are not officers because they believe others simply can not understand. The recent heat and protests around issues of police brutality have only increased their disconnect with the public and increased feelings of hostility between them. The conclusion we can draw from their feedbacks is:
Officers want to be understood
“The amount of force used on someone is and should be dictated by the subject.” “A lot of civilians know they are innocent so they don’t comply. When they resist, we have to move up the level of force being used because we don’t know that they are innocent. ”
— Anonymous Officers
Officers expressed that civilians often don’t understand protocols during incidents. As a result, they respond incorrectly without knowing that certain responses would require officers to move up on the “ladder of force” and use more aggression on the civilians. To conclude:
Officers want civilians to have more knowledge of the police’s job and incident protocols
4. Stress from the job can influence officer to civilian interactions negatively
“my work is not difficult 99% of the time but it’s that 1% that can break some people.” “A lot of us suffer from mental health issues. We are very afraid…terrified, during gunfire and the idea of someone trying to kill you will stick with you forever.”
— Anonymous Officers
Officers are very stressed
“Most of the time we have to deal with people when they are at their worst. It’s hard to stay postive after that. Some of us don’t know how to disconnect from that and become nagative. The negative people often make all of their interactions on the job negative.” — Anonymous Officer
When stress becomes severe and unmanageable, officers let stress influence their actions
From these insights, we can create a User Persona that accurately describes our user group and their needs. | https://medium.com/@bzhou01/design-for-racism-excessive-use-of-force-in-law-enforcement-4cd219cd4a8c | ['Bowen Zhou'] | 2021-02-11 16:36:03.948000+00:00 | ['Ui Ux Design', 'Law Enforcement', 'Police', 'Police Brutality', 'Racism'] |
You Are Already Perfect | You know best. What a revelation!
It is amazing to me (well, maybe not amazing …) how many “whole and healthy” people still treat the rest of us like gremlins.
I have friends (virtual and real life, thankyouverymuch…) who are so open-minded and helpful and compassionate. And yet, I’ve heard from more than one of them that I shouldn’t eat bananas, because of…. carbs??? LEAVE. ME. ALONE.
Listen folks. Bananas are good for you. Especially when baked into a luscious bread mix. Life is not complicated.
Should you be healthy? Of course! I wish great healthiness for you!
Should you try to be healthy? A little.
But listen… it is not a punishment. It is not a competition. And it should never, ever, be a comparison.
My body is different from yours in probably 1,000 ways. Therefore, it is impossible to say that what feels good to me will also feel good to you.
If your sleep is disrupted, or your mood is constantly in the garbage, then maybe you should change something or other. But what you change and how you cope is up to you. You know best. What a revelation!
We should all have constant reminders that Facebook ads, TikTok celebrities, and “health gurus”:
don’t actually know us, probably don’t care about us, therefore… cannot POSSIBLY decide what is right for us.
What is it that they say?…
You do you, honey.
xoxo
www.twitter.com/needsmorelemon
www.instagram.com/needslemon
www.facebook.com/needsmorelemon | https://medium.com/@needsmorelemon/you-are-already-perfect-cc750f65f8dd | ['Needs More Lemon'] | 2021-02-09 02:32:49.392000+00:00 | ['Self Care', 'Empowerment', 'Wellness', 'Food'] |
Visual Trends on Instagram | New year, new feed?
2021 is already on the doorstep, but first we should say goodbye to the current year. Let’s review what was the cool stuff on IG in the last twelve months!
Visual Trends on Instagram 2020 / 2021
In 2020 Carousel posts got increasingly popular, even combined with videos. We could also notice a spread of structured feeds. Besides the more well-known Row by Row Layout, other setups like Vertical Lines Feed, Diagonal Grid and Rainbow Feed gained ground. However, the biggest in 2020 was the Puzzle Layout, which brought even more success to those who managed to make the single posts look cool and stylish without having to post the 3-piece lines together.
All kinds of motion picture content were big as well in 2020, probably due to their pretty high reach. Instagram Lives were in the mainstream — as half of the globe was spending most of the time at home because of the pandemic, after a while many of us got kind of bored and started creating content to entertain ourselves and our followers as well.
But what should we expect for the next year? How will we keep our audience engaged and entertained? What are the visual trends for 2021?
There’s a high chance that videos and Carousel posts will remain on top and become even more popular. If this is right, then the need for something different will arise soon, as with more and more users creating these kinds of content it will be more and more difficult to catch the audience’s attention. What do you predict to emerge from this challenge? I say animated posts are definitely an option to create difference — they might even take the place of Carousels.
Looking at a few social media marketing experts’ forecasts, motion picture content trends are everywhere, from IG Stories being in the center of influencer marketing through the rise of Reels to GIFs becoming even more popular.
Do you have any thoughts on what to expect next year? Do you think animated content will become more prominent? I’d love to see your opinion in the comments! | https://medium.com/@dsgnhorf/visual-trends-on-instagram-7aed45e02096 | ['Ferenc Horváth'] | 2020-12-16 16:30:15.291000+00:00 | ['Instagram', 'Marketing', 'Visual Design', 'Motion Design', 'Social Media'] |
AWS Well-Architected and Serverless: Performance Efficiency | And just like that — welcome to the last part in our “Well-Architected and Serverless” series. We hope it’s been informative, insightful, and fun for you, to explore the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) with us!
Read the previous posts:
So let’s look into the last — Performance Efficiency (PERF) — pillar.
The Performance Efficiency Pillar
The PERF pillar is all about using cloud resources efficiently. This also includes efficient operation if the demand changes.
Do you deliver the most efficient solution to your customers?
This is a recurring question you should ask yourself a few times a year. This means selecting the right services for your requirements and thinking about what those requirements really are.
If you don’t communicate correctly with your customers, it could be that you want to deliver them something they aren’t interested in paying for. For example, if you can make a service deliver results in under 100ms time, but your customers would be okay to get them in a few seconds, you can save on engineering time and resource cost that such a high-performance system would otherwise require.
The PERF, COST, and REL pillars can be traded for each other to get the best solutions for your business.
Let’s look into the four parts that make up the PERF pillar, to understand how to achieve this.
Selection
There are many services in the AWS portfolio, so you should take some time to research before using one of them. A focus on serverless architecture removes a huge chunk of services from this list. But sometimes, it can be beneficial to use a non-serverless service for parts of your business. If you need real-time performance, an architecture based on Lambda functions may not cut it, and you have to look into containers.
These services also can be configured in different ways. Lambda alone comes in many sizes. So even if you only focus on serverless technology, think about how each of these services can be used most efficiently.
Maybe you need that DynamoDB Accelerator to meet your business requirement. Maybe, you need a global table to get latency down to an acceptable level. But maybe you don’t and can focus your optimization efforts on different aspects of your system.
Review
Use infrastructure as code and automated performance tests. This way, you’re able to review new options faster and see if they improve efficiency in a meaningful way.
You need well-defined technical and business metrics to measure things. As I said, it’s cool if you can deliver something in real-time, but if nobody wants to pay for it, don’t invest time into optimization here.
Paying for it includes all costs here. Not just the operational costs but also the costs of implementing the solution. More often than not, the engineering building the solution can be the highest price point.
Monitoring
Always monitor your system; otherwise, you don’t really know what it’s doing. This is true for every pillar. If you build your system based on some assumptions, it could still fail to meet your goals in practice. After all, they were just assumptions.
You have to gather production data about your efficiency and try to use this real data for your architecture’s next iterations. This might be a sobering experience, especially the first few times you do this, but remember, it’s all about getting the right result. It doesn’t help anyone but your ego if everyone just thinks you were right.
For small-scale serverless environments, AWS CloudWatch could easily do the job, as it provides just enough data for metrics for invocations, but doesn’t have the ability to deep dive into retries, cold starts, memory usage, or cost.
Dashbird was built to support and strengthen your serverless application through a single pane on glass view, out-of-the-box error and warnings alerts, and actionable best practice recommendations, no matter the size of the stack.
Integrating with your AWS account, Dashbird takes monitoring a step further with its AWS Well-Architected Insights engine proactively assessing your infrastructure, alerting you of errors, and highlighting optimization opportunities, and thus, helping your environment to always stay aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s pillars.
Trade-Offs
Sometimes you have to make trade-offs in your architecture. And with sometimes, I mean always. Jokes aside, this is what makes engineering work interesting. Maybe you can get away with eventual consistency and deliver much lower latency in turn. But maybe you run a bank, and making your customer’s accounts eventually consistent isn’t the best course of action here.
Maybe, you’re tight on personnel and simply can’t afford the complexity a multi-tier caching solution brings, even if the improved performance sounds awesome. Simplicity also has a business value in the long run. Always think about what you need and what you can pay for it regarding money, reliability, durability, and complexity.
Read more about how professional serverless teams manage software issues.
SAL Questions for the Performance Efficiency Pillar
Again, like with the COST pillar, there is just one SAL question for the PERF pillar.
PER 1: How have you optimized the performance of your serverless application?
There are a lot of ways to optimize a serverless application. In our experience, the majority of opportunities come from using the right mix of services and best practices and avoiding waste through bad architectural design decisions. For example, using the right databases and downstream services, not waiting in code, and instead of using Step-Functions to orchestration logic, selecting between API Gateway and ALB for APIS and such. Often, the majority of your serverless cost and performance overhead is accumulated in services other than Lambda functions.
An example of optimizing DynamoDB: depending on how predictable your traffic is, on-demand or provisioned capacity can be the right choice for your DynamoDB tables. The DynamoDB Accelerator could also be a way to get out that last bit of performance.
Optimising Lambda functions
If you are optimizing Lambda functions, there are multiple methods to identify the biggest opportunities for increased efficiency. The first thing we recommend doing is finding the highest latency and highest volume Lambdas, that affect the user experience the most and focus on them. Dashbird provides a breakdown of all the functions and their performance in a single pane of class and you can order your functions based on the highest throughput and lowest response times.
When you have identified a problem in any one of your functions, the next step is to dive deeper and understand where you’re struggling to perform. Is the function execution very processing-heavy and provisioning more memory would help speed up the execution? Or maybe it’s waiting most of its execution time after a third-party service, and adding more resources does nothing to speed up the performance? To understand the breakdown of an individual invocation, Dashbird integrates with X-ray and shows the list and duration of each individual activity executed within the function.
Understanding the situation within the execution enables developers to take further action and to either experiment with memory provisioning of an application or make changes to the services that the function is communicating with to optimize the performance or cost a specific function.
On top of helping you optimize your functions, Dashbird analyses the metrics and configurations of other managed services typically used in a serverless architecture and offers actionable recommendations on provisioning, configuration, helping you make informed decisions about your serverless stack. Dashbird also surfaces slow and increased-delay situation across databases, API Gateways, SQS queues, Kinesis stream, and others.
Wrapping up
The PERF pillar helps you focus on using your resources most efficiently. Serverless technology often includes optimizations mentioned in that pillar implicitly, but it’s not just about choosing the right services.
The PERF pillar is also about configuring the services you use correctly. Think about the memory size of your Lambda functions. Think about the deployment configuration of your API Gateway. And also, think about the capacity of your DynamoDB tables.
Make sure you define the right metrics when monitoring your system; this way, you can optimize the parts that matter. Also, review new releases every now and then. AWS releases new services every year and also updates its existing ones. Sometimes your systems just get faster or cheaper without you doing anything. For example, during re:Invent 2020, AWS announced strong consistency for S3 without any more cost or configuration, and millisecond-based pricing for AWS Lambda; your existing apps profit from that without you doing anything. But sometimes, you need to explicitly configure a service differently to get the benefits, like with the new 10GB memory size of Lambda.
And finally, remember that everything has a trade-off. Lambda can scale to thousands of parallel invocations in a matter of seconds, but it could be that your system needs more than 15 minutes of invocation times to do its work.
Well-Architected Series Summary
The WAF whitepapers are a good source of ideas to start improving the systems you build on AWS. They are very dense, so you might not understand everything right from the start, but you can always revisit them if you have the time or need to solve technical issues. Sometimes the examples from the whitepapers only make sense if you tried to build a system by yourself.
Or you can skip all that and let Dashbird’s Well Architected actionable insights, warnings and errors engine tell you exactly what’s going on in your system, what needs improvement, and where exactly, what’s about to break and what’s broken. Find out more or book a call — we love taking serverless and Well Architected.
If you’re building your architecture based on serverless technology, you will follow most of the advice given in the WAF pillars implicitly, and if not, the SAL focuses on the things that serverless technology might not solve for you out-of-the-box.
If you’re still curious to learn more about the WAF, how it came about and some more best practices for each of the five pillars, you can watch our recent session with Tim Robinson (AWS) here: | https://medium.com/@taavirehemagi/aws-well-architected-and-serverless-performance-efficiency-f4b31d12cfdd | ['Taavi Rehemägi'] | 2020-12-10 11:08:49.412000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Serverless', 'Cloud Computing', 'AWS Lambda', 'Well Architected'] |
The Strangest Thing Men Desire. (And how it can make him crazy for you.) | Have you ever felt attracted to a guy without knowing why?
Maybe you’ve even had feelings for someone you’d rather not be attracted to. Why does this happen?
How can you fall in love even though your conscious mind resists it?
Experiences like these hint at the hidden world driving our feelings of romantic attraction. That hidden world is all about emotional reactions. Emotional reactions we don’t consciously control.
The truth is, falling in love is not something we choose to do. It’s more like getting thirsty. You don’t choose to get thirsty. You just notice it. And the stronger your thirst becomes, the harder it gets to ignore.
What if I told you there is a kind of relationship “thirst” all men experience? A kind of thirst that’s impossible for him to quench on his own. Would you like to know what he’s so thirsty for?
To skip straight to the answer, check out this video
that reveals how you can trigger his thirst for something he needs and craves. Plus, I’ll show you how to ensure you are the ONLY person he depends on to satisfy this powerful longing.Click Here
Here’s why the man in your life can’t tell you what he craves most from his relationship with you…
… He’s embarrassed to admit the truth. And that’s because admitting to this desire actually moves him farther away from the goal. Here’s why…
Okay, picture a woman who feels frustrated that her man never does anything romantic. She finally breaks down and explains her desire to feel romanced and pursued by him.
But he acts like she’s being unreasonable, demanding she names one thing that’s missing from the relationship. So she gives him an example. “It would be nice to get flowers once in a while. Just simple things like that.”
The next day, he brings her flowers. But the magic of this gesture is missing. Because it doesn’t feel special to receive flowers when you had to ask for them.
It’s kind of like that with men, only with a completely different sort of relationship need. You see, men have an insatiable thirst for your admiration.
But he can’t ask for it. He can’t say, “Julie, I really like you, but here’s what’s missing in our relationship. You don’t admire me enough. You seem to have greater admiration for other men in your life, and that makes it hard for me to picture a future with you.”
He can’t say that because men believe you have to earn admiration. Asking for it is like trying to become popular by announcing you are a cool person. It doesn’t work like that.
He will only feel like your hero when you speak the non-verbal language of admiration. He has to read it between the lines of what you actually say and do.
Now, you might be thinking, “That’s not so crazy. I can understand why a man craves admiration.” But if you’re thinking that, there’s something important I need to tell you. Click Here
It’s not just that men crave admiration. It’s that he can’t sustain that “in love” feeling without it.
Nothing kills a man’s attraction faster than a relationship where he doesn’t feel needed. He wants to see himself as a provider. Someone who is admired because of his ability to provide.
You see, if he doesn’t feel needed, he feels like less of a man; emasculated. And that turns off his romantic drive.
And the worst part? You can’t just give him admiration. It only works if he believes he has earned your trust, admiration, and respect.
But here’s the good news. It’s both fun and easy to let him earn your admiration once you know how to set him up for success.
Just find ways to let him be your hero. Now, I should mention there is actually an art to doing that in a way that makes him crazy about you.
But I’ve seen women wrap a man around her pinky using this simple concept. As a relationship coach, I have seen what works and what doesn’t. But what it all comes down to is this…
You need to trigger his hero instinct.
Accomplish that, and you’ll be astonished by what happens next. He’ll become so loving, so attentive, so much more interested in a committed, long-term relationship, that you will never want things to go back to the way they were.
The hero instinct is a subconscious drive to gravitate toward people who make him feel like a hero. But it’s amplified in his romantic relationships.
Some ideas really are life-changing. And for romantic relationships, this is one of them. That’s why I’ve created an online video presentation so you can claim this secret as your own.
Because triggering his hero instinct is one thing. Learning how to do it over and over again requires a few tips and tricks.
The fact is, women don’t need someone to rescue them. Especially in this day and age. Yet here’s the ironic truth…
Men do still need someone to rescue. Because it’s built into their DNA to seek out relationships that allow them to feel like a provider.
This one tiny difference between male and female genetics creates a BIG difference in what attracts men to the opposite sex. He feels drawn to any woman who allows him to step into the role of a hero. Because his instincts naturally cause him to thirst for that social role.
Here’s the really cool thing about this. He won’t even know why he feels so drawn to you. Which is why you can use this method under the radar. It triggers attraction at a subconscious level.
He’ll feel the undeniable tug on his emotions. But if his buddy asks him why he’s so crazy about you, he won’t be able to put it into words. Click Here
There is a hidden world driving our feelings of attraction. No doubt about it. But we now have the power to see one powerful part of that hidden world. And it’s something you can actually control. | https://medium.com/@rajnishray1010/the-strangest-thing-men-desire-and-how-it-can-make-him-crazy-for-you-72e43e2ab776 | [] | 2020-12-22 11:28:15.953000+00:00 | ['London', 'Partnerships', 'USA', 'Relationships', 'Love'] |
Josef Fritzl: The Monster of Amstetten | Josef Fritzl
When Josef Fritzl applied for a permit to expand his basement in 1978, no one thought anything of it. Josef, a successful electrical engineer, was well known in the small Austrian village of Amstetten, where he was born and grew up. Everyone thought of him as an affable family man — he and his wife, Rosemarie, had seven children.
While some might have questioned how strict he was with his wife and children, the prevailing sentiment was, “if it’s not your business, stay out of it.” Only those close to the Fritzl family knew what a tyrant he truly was. He ruled the household with an iron fist, yelling at and beating the children for the slightest infraction. Rosemarie, too, was treated as one of Josef’s subjects, never allowed to have a say in anything, never given any money. If she didn’t obey his every command, she would be beaten. Josef often threatened to lock her in the house if she wasn’t obedient enough.
Yet it was his fourth child, Elisabeth, who seemed to bear the brunt of Josef’s abuse. He was extremely controlling of her, to the point of obsession. She was never allowed to have friends over or to do anything outside of his watchful eye — he even took her with him everywhere he went. He would go through her things and read her diary. He would beat her for any reason, or sometimes, no reason at all.
Beginning when she was about 11, Josef began exposing himself to Elisabeth and leaving porno magazines under her pillow. By the time she was 12, he began sexually abusing her.
With few friends outside of school, Elisabeth didn’t have anyone she could confide in. But her friends all say they knew the Fritzl home was not a good place to be, and that Elisabeth was deeply unhappy.
Meanwhile, Josef was working tirelessly on his underground “bomb shelter” — a labyrinth of tiny rooms connected by narrow passages. No one thought much of his project — through the 70s and 80s, the Cold War was still on, and many Austrians still remembered the last time bombs had fallen on their cities.
In fact, Josef himself remembered the bombing of his hometown. He was only 3 years old when Hitler marched on Austria, and his father had put Josef on his shoulders so he could get a good look at the Führer. Little Josef was enamoured of Hitler, despite his mother being arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp for three years.
Once she was back, now a single mother, she seemed to resent the burden of raising Josef. She was cold to him, showed him no affection, and left him alone for days and even weeks at a time. She beat him frequently. When the Allies bombed his city, his mother refused to take shelter, instead sending Josef alone to the air-raid shelters.
So Josef building a bomb shelter under his house seemed even more understandable than most. Concrete construction was his specialty, and of course he knew just how to safely install electrical systems. He hired a relative to help him with the construction tasks that he, a middle-aged man, couldn’t handle himself. Other than himself and the relative who helped him, no one was allowed in the basement, which he called “his kingdom.”
But there were certain details that didn’t make sense in a bomb shelter. Like that fact that the door to the shelter — reinforced with concrete — was hidden behind some rotating shelves straight out of a mystery movie. That door opened into essentially an airlock leading to yet another concrete-reinforced door. That inner door could only be opened with an electronic code, which only he knew, and could only locked or unlocked from the outside.
In early 1983, Josef was still working on his basement bunker, and Elisabeth was 16. It was then that she managed to escape her father’s abuse by running away with a friend to Vienna. However, since she was still a minor, police were able to take her into custody and return her to her parents.
In the car on the way back to their home, Josef told Elisabeth that he would never let her run away again.
The following year, after Elisabeth turned 18, she told her father that she had found a job and was going to move in with her older sister in a nearby town. But Josef was not going to allow her to escape from his control.
On Aug. 28, 1984, Josef lured her into his workshop to help him with a door. When Elisabeth entered the room, he came up behind her and chloroformed her. Once she was passed out, he handcuffed her and carried her down to his meticulously constructed basement. He chained her to a wall and left, locking her inside.
He then went to the police and played the distraught father to report her missing. Since Elisabeth had run away just the year before, many assumed she had simply done so again. But the police still investigated the young woman’s disappearance — and if there was any foul play, her father would be the prime suspect.
In looking into Josef’s past, they found some troubling details. When he and Rosemarie had first married, he would stay out late at night, riding his bicycle around and “peeping” at couples while they made out or had sex. He would expose himself to women on the street, and even masturbate in front of them. He attacked one woman in an attempt to rape her, but she was able to fight him off. Then, he followed another woman home from work. Later that night, when she was asleep, he broke into her house and raped her at knifepoint — with her infant son asleep in a cot beside the bed.
For that crime, he had been sentenced to 18 months, but served just 12 months. Back at home, no one knew of this crime; ever-obedient Rosemarie told friends and family that he had gone away to work on a project for his company.
After 15 years, the rape conviction was taken off his police record.
Now Josef knew the police were starting to dig around and turn up things best kept buried. So, about a month after imprisoning her, he went down to the basement and forced Elisabeth to write a letter. In it she stated that she was alive and well, had joined a cult, and instructed them not to look for her. He drove 100 miles away to mail the letter, beginning what would become his double life.
Now with the letter from Elisabeth, and with no other evidence to go on, her missing person case was closed. And Josef Fritzl was free to carry out his demented fantasies.
Elisabeth was kept chained to a wall in the dark, damp basement. Rats and insects infested the cave-like prison. Every couple of days, her father would come down and unchain her so he could rape and torture her. He would leave a little bit of food, just enough to last until the next time he came. If Elisabeth didn’t do as he told her, Josef warned, he would simply leave her there and let her starve to death.
By 1988, Elisabeth was pregnant with her father’s child. Josef gave her a medical book on childbirth, a towel, and some scissors, forcing her to give birth alone in the basement. Elisabeth named her newborn daughter Kerstin.
In 1990, she gave birth again, this time to a boy she named Stefan.
In 1992, she had another girl, this one named Lisa. But Lisa’s birth was different — she was born with a heart defect. Her constant crying — along with Elisabeth’s pleading for him to take her to see a doctor — convinced Josef to find a way to get the baby out of the basement without raising suspicions. So he had Elisabeth write a letter stating that she couldn’t look after the baby. He then put 9-month-old Lisa into a cardboard box and left her on the doorstep for Rosemarie to find. They took Lisa to the hospital, where she underwent emergency surgery for her heart condition. Later Josef and Rosemarie would legally adopt Lisa.
That seemed to mark a turning point in the Fritzl home. While Josef had been living somewhat of a double life, going downstairs every day or so, sneaking food to his growing “downstairs family,” now the double life was really taking off. He quit his job and went into business for himself, so his whereabouts wouldn’t be questioned by anyone. He would drive to towns miles away to drop off their trash and shop for diapers, food, and other supplies that people in Amstetten would question. He also began bringing in a TV, toys, radio, and other things to make the smelly, damp basement seem almost like a home.
Elisabeth, too, tried to make the children’s lives as normal as possible, keeping them on a schedule and teaching them to read and write.
Two years after Lisa’s birth, Elisabeth gave birth to another girl, Monica. This time, Josef made Elisabeth record a short message giving the baby up, then went to a pay phone, called his home, and played the recording when Rosemarie answered the phone. Then he left Monica on his doorstep and adopted her too.
Realizing they needed more room, Josef put Elisabeth and the older children to work digging out soil with their bare hands. Eventually more rooms were created, expanding the basement to about 590 square feet.
But then in 1996, Elisabeth gave birth to twins, Alexander and Michael. Michael was having problems breathing right from the start. Ignoring Elisabeth’s pleas for him to take the baby to a hospital, Josef instead allowed Michael to die. He burned the tiny body in the furnace and scattered the ashes in his yard.
As for Alexander, Josef again forced Elisabeth to write a letter abandoning the baby, and again Josef and Rosemarie adopted this latest “foundling.”
In 2002, she gave birth to the seventh of her children, Felix. Josef continued beating and raping Elisabeth in front of the children, but now he was torturing his “downstairs family” in a new way. Besides his constant threats of abandoning them to starve, he would bring pictures of the three “upstairs” children to the basement with him. He would show the children — who had lived their entire lives in a windowless basement — pictures of their siblings playing outdoors in the sunlight, opening Christmas gifts, and taking gymnastics and music lessons.
Meanwhile, aboveground, over 100 different lodgers came and went from the Fritzl house. All were forbidden from going into the yard above the basement, and especially forbidden from going into the basement at all. While some tenants reported hearing strange sounds, Josef was always able to explain them away.
In addition, social service caseworkers visited the Fritzl home 21 times to check on the well-being of the adopted “foundlings.” None of them found anything suspicious, either.
But life in such a filthy, dark place could not continue forever. In April of 2008, Kerstin, now 19 years old, began having severe seizures and losing consciousness. Finally succumbing to Elisabeth’s pleas, Josef agreed to take her to a hospital. On April 18, Elisabeth helped carry her oldest daughter out of the basement — then turned around and went back downstairs to her other two children.
When Josef Fritzl brought his “granddaughter” into the Mostviertel-Amstetten State Hospital, she was in grave condition. Her skin was so pale it was translucent; her teeth were all rotten. She was suffering from seizures, in and out of consciousness, and her kidneys and liver were shutting down. The doctors couldn’t tell what was causing all these symptoms, but they pointed to severe neglect.
When questioned about what had happened to the young woman, Josef acted belligerent and angry, refusing to answer. He only wanted the doctors to fix Kerstin up and send her back home as quickly as possible.
Then the hospital staff discovered something else that rang alarm bells: Kerstin Fritzl did not appear to exist. There was no record of her birth, no school records, no medical records, nothing. As Kerstin slipped into a coma, doctors knew they had to find her mother so that maybe she could shed light on what was happening.
Josef claimed he had no idea where Elisabeth was; he said he found Kerstin dumped on his doorstep with a note like the others. So doctors and police went to the media, begging Elisabeth to come to the hospital and help them save her daughter.
Down in the basement, Elisabeth saw the news reports that everyone was looking for her. Somehow she managed to convince her father to let her go to the hospital, promising she wouldn’t tell anyone where she really had been for the last 24 years. On April 26, 2008, Josef allowed Elisabeth to take Stefan and Felix out of the basement for the first time in their lives.
When Elisabeth arrived at the hospital, she looked decades older than her 42 years. She was gaunt, pale, and her hair had gone entirely silver. The children were equally skinny and pale.
So police took Elisabeth in for questioning.
At first, she kept her promise to her father and said nothing of what had happened. But once she was told that she could be charged with being an accessory to a crime, she relented. Over the course of two hours, she told police of the living hell she had endured in that basement for the last 8,516 days.
Josef Fritzl was arrested that day. He would be charged with multiple serious crimes, including rape, incest, slavery, kidnapping, and the murder of Michael.
Word of the incredible story got out quickly, and media from all over the world descended on the small town of Amstetten. Only two years after the notorious case of Natascha Kampusch, such a similar and unspeakable crime in a relatively small country was big news.
After Kerstin’s recovery, Elisabeth and all her children — confirmed by DNA to be fathered by Josef — were taken to a psychiatric clinic in Amstetten. The officer who drove the boys there described how Felix didn’t talk, just kept his nose pressed against the car window, fascinated by the world outside.
They would remain in the clinic for a year, receiving medical and psychiatric treatment and learning to adjust to life outside.
Josef’s trial, which began March 16, 2009, was a sensation. Only 100 hand-picked journalists were allowed to attend. At first, Josef pled not guilty. His defense was that Elisabeth had been a wild, out-of-control teen, addicted to drugs and engaging in prostitution. He only locked her up, he said, to save her from such a destructive lifestyle.
But his court-ordered psychiatric evaluations disputed this. He told his therapist that he was “born to rape,” and had locked his daughter up so that he didn’t go on and rape other women. He was diagnosed with “severe combined personality disorder” including borderline, schizotypal, and schizoid personalities.
Before trial, Elisabeth’s testimony — over 11 hours long — had been taped in order to protect her. When the tape was played, the torture she described at the hands of her father was so awful that some jurors couldn’t stand to watch for more than two hours at a time.
Josef, who had been unemotional up to that point, broke down. He changed his plea to guilty, took responsibility for his crimes, and apologized to his family.
He was sentenced to the maximum allowed under Austrian law: life in prison. Once imprisoned, he had to be placed on suicide watch at first, and later he had to be segregated from the general prison population, as he was intensely hated and frequently attacked. At one point he changed his name to Josef Mayrhoff.
As of this writing, Josef is incarcerated in Garsten Abbey, suffering from Alzheimer’s and in failing health. If he lives long enough, he will be eligible for parole in 2024, when he would be 89.
As for Elisabeth and her children, they were given new identities and put up in a colorful house in a town known only as “Village X.” They wish to remain out of the spotlight, so their home is equipped with surveillance cameras warning if anyone trespasses. Their neighbors also serve as a kind of guard, as well, warning off anyone who comes looking for them. Reports are that they are all doing very well, and that Elisabeth has even found love and gotten married.
The basement where she and her children spent so many years was, for a time, a kind of gruesome tourist attraction. But in 2013, the city of Amstetten had it filled with cement, forever sealing it closed. | https://delanirbartlette.medium.com/josef-fritzl-the-monster-of-amstetten-e6ddea28a819 | ['Delani R. Bartlette'] | 2020-06-15 13:01:01.412000+00:00 | ['True Crime', 'Crime', 'Sexual Assault', 'Murder', 'Domestic Violence'] |
My Experiments with ‘Natural’ Data! | Well, that was that. So after scratching my head as well for years, I have developed a knack for using the sequence anywhere/ everywhere (yes, the inquisitor in me, wakes up intermittently).
Now, coming back to the title (the experiment). So last night I was going through the time series forecasting models & stumbled upon a weird coincidence, if it was!?! As I started reading about exponential smoothing model & how magnitude of weights decrease exponentially as the observations get older. Following equation explains the method for the forecasting:
t = no. of time period (t = 0 for the most recent one, t = 1 for the period before)
Y(t) = actual value in period t
Weight(t) = α(1-α)^t
n = total no. of time periods
Here, the value of alpha (α) varies between 0 & 1 such that sum of all the Weights approximate to 1.
The aforementioned inquisitor in me thought why not take the numbers in the fibonacci series & replace them with the weights. So i did precisely that & took first 15 numbers (excluding 0) in the sequence & normalised them.
So now, my weights from the fibonacci sequence are:
0.382, 0.236, 0.146, 0.09, 0.0558, 0.0345, 0.0213, 0.013, 0.0081, 0.005 ..
The first weight at t=0, from these normalised values, comes to 0.3822. Now i replace this value with first weight in the above exponential smoothing weight equation so that α = 0.3822 at t=0. Now lets substitute this value of alpha in the weights equation from exponential smoothing:
at t = 0, W(0) = 0.3822 * (1–0.3822)⁰ = 0.382
at t = 1, W(1) = 0.3822 * (1–0.3822)¹ = 0.236
at t = 2, W(2) = 0.3822 * (1–0.3822)² = 0.1458
at t = 3, W(3) = 0.3822 * (1–0.3822)³ = 0.0901
at t = 4, W(4) = 0.3822 * (1–0.3822)⁴ = 0.055
at t = 5, W(5) = 0.3822 * (1–0.3822)⁵ = 0.0344
See where i am going with this? Yep, the weights are exactly same as the normalised version of fibonacci sequence which means at a particular value of alpha (α) the exponential smoothing weights mimic the nature !?! And that value of alpha after taking 50 first numbers in the sequence is:
α = 0.3819966011
Here’s a sample forecasted exponential smoothing model at an alpha of 0.38199
Food for thought ..
Now, i just wonder if this could just be a coincidence or if this could be by design from the person who first suggested this model, Mr. Robert Goodell Brown?
With this alpha do we get the best forecasted model? Nope, not all the time.
Could this equation (approximated) have further applications with respect to time or a pattern with subsequent layers?
~ 0.38199 * [(0.618)^t ]
Now between 0 & 1, these are the only combination of values (0.38199 & 0.618) which satisfy the following equation:
α = (1-α)² which becomes α²-3α+1=0 (other root of this quadratic equation is 2.618) Also, α²-3α+1=0 is a mirror image of α²-α-1=0 (golden ratio equation) at y=1!!
So, the above equation can be written as
~ (0.618)² * (0.618)^t
~ (0.618)^(t+2)
Now we also know that the multiplicative inverse of 0.618 is 1.618 which is the golden ratio - phi(φ), so now the equation boils down to this:
~ (1/φ)^(t+2)
Could this pattern possibly be an alter ego of the fibonacci one for the micro world?
1, 0.6180, 0.3819, 0.236, 0.145, 0.09, 0.055, 0.0344, 0.0213, 0.0131 .. | https://towardsdatascience.com/my-experiments-with-natural-data-45eac01ef34f | ['Rishi Bhargava'] | 2019-07-12 05:23:08.446000+00:00 | ['Golden Ratio', 'Time Series Forecasting', 'Design', 'Data Science', 'Fibonacci'] |
Australian hypocrisy | The hypocrisy of the general Australian response to the separation of families at the U.S. border blows my mind. Yes, the policy of locking children in cages away from their parents is appalling, but the difference is that public outrage in the States became so overwhelming that even the Orange one ended up bowing to pressure and announcing the end of this horrendous strategy.
Why hasn’t that happened here?
Even if we put aside all the other atrocities and say that separating families is the line we can’t cross, refugees trying to reach Australia face treatment equally as inhumane or worse as those trying to reach the USA.
Even if we ignore the barbarity of a dying cancer patient being refused proper palliative care and the death rites of his religion, suicidal children being left to their fates, women in our care being subjected to sexual violence, if we ignore all of that, we are still deliberately separating families in an attempt to deter people from seeking asylum in our country.
Some pregnant women on Nauru have been brought to Australia to give birth while their husbands are still trapped on the island, up to five years later, wondering if they will ever have a chance to meet their children.
Others have been brought to Australia for medical treatment, after prolonged illnesses, sexual assault or the psychological scars of years of trauma. Their families have been left on the island as a cruel assurance that the patients will leave Australia after treatment and return to the torture of offshore detention.
Some families are split apart because they asked for refuge on either side of an arbitrary date, July 19, 2013, when our government brought in the heinous law that people arriving by boat could never be settled in Australia.
It seems particularly callous to take children from their parents, which has definitely happened here in too many cases over the past five years since the law has been brought into effect, but this doesn’t make the suffering of husbands separated from their wives any less, or sisters from brothers, or any of the loved ones torn apart because our government has lost its heart.
If the Americans could locate a faint pulse even in their cold-blooded administration, and end the practice of at least one example of blatant cruelty, we can do it too. While the abominations happening in Manus and Nauru are allowed to continue, all Australians are culpable. It’s time to make it stop.
Bring them here!
P.S. Right after publishing this I found out that the cancer patient has been brought to Australia! Maybe there is a little blood flowing in the vessels of Canberra after all. I hope so. | https://emmabriggs.medium.com/australian-hypocrisy-6d13d35b8809 | ['Emma Briggs'] | 2018-07-06 22:34:51.347000+00:00 | ['Separation', 'Nauru', 'Family', 'Manus', 'Refugees'] |
Episode 3 My first school bully | Every school has one and everyone has a story to tell. About a bully, that nasty child or children who try and make others lives a misery.
Day 1 of 2nd year of school.
Even as a child, and before I ever heard the phrase ‘I don’t get cross, I get even’ I knew that one day is one day, and that person will not like me but will respect me.
Veronica was the one. Horrible girl with long black hair kinda looked like a little witch. She would go around the playground kicking children in their shins, causing bruises, and children crying from the agony. Always denied what she did.
Well, she kicked my shins, and I kicked back, I had sisters, I knew how to defend myself, but her shoes were tough not like mine.
Day 2
I was sitting eating my soggy tomato sandwich and she was there, appearing before me like someone possessed, knocking my sandwich out of my hand she kicked my shin.
I stood up and grabbed her by the shoulders and kicked back. She yelped, and I felt a hand pull my arm so hard it turned me around. I came face to face with her equally horrible sister Jenna. Jenna was a year ahead, saw her walking with Veronica but had never spoken to her.
She pulled and shoved me, grabbed my hands behind my back so Veronica could kick my shins (Why they did this, escapes me). She kicked both my shins and boy was it painful, terribly, painfully, painful. They both ran off laughing while I was struggling to walk. I avoided them at every turn and spent lunchtimes in the restroom.
One day is one day.
The day came.
We started high school and after avoiding them for so many years, we met up again.
But…. This time was going to be different.
My parsimonious father told me how hard he worked to get money (not) and I should have these really, strong shoes, that would last me the rest of my school life. They were ugly. The ugliest shoes I had ever seen. Matron shoes with steel toe caps. I was going to be the biggest dork in high school. Mother took me shopping for the school uniform. A skirt that was down near my ankles, covering my hairy legs (I never knew how to shave my legs back then). Yip a right dork. My older sister, a hippy-type person would never have worn these clothes and shoes to school,. She even pulled her skirt way about her knees. I was different all right, I never cared what anyone said or thought back then. We never walked to school together is the truth.
I digress.
Spotted from a distance (I stood out like a Sherman tank) the two horrible sisters came walking confidently towards me with a nasty look on their faces. I stared at them, surely, they had grown out of their childish behavior. Apparently not.
Jenna grabbed my arm to hold me so Veronica could kick my shins, she kicked once and I broke free and kicked her with my brand new shoes. Down she went. Jenna was so angry that I had kicked her sister she kicked me, and I kicked her back. Down she went, and with the 2 sisters crying their eyes out, I said a quiet thank you to my Dad.
I think somewhere out there, these shoes are still alive, steel toe caps and all.
I don’t get angry……… | https://medium.com/@stillwingingitalltheseyears/episode-3-my-first-school-bully-bb32a9f30769 | [] | 2021-05-05 06:51:31.143000+00:00 | ['Schools', 'Children', 'Shoes', 'Bullying'] |
Encapsulation vs Orchestration: Dependencies in Agile | Written By LeadingAgile
Dependencies will stop Agility dead in its tracks. In the presence of dependencies, you’re never going to achieve the level of Agility you desire-unless you do something about them.
So you only have two choices when it comes to this. You can either encapsulate the dependencies within the team or within the value stream, or you can orchestrate them. Another way to say this is that you either must break the dependencies, or you must manage them.
Either way, if you have dependencies, you cannot pretend they don’t exist.
The Assumptions of Scrum
So, what does Scrum say about dependencies? It assumes you don’t have them in the first place. And if you look at the way that Scrum is architected, you’ll notice that it assumes a lot, including that each team:
Consists of six to eight people
Focuses on a particular business problem
Owns its technology stack
Has a singular input
Has a singular measurable output
In effect, Scrum assumes that you have encapsulated teams that can address any dependencies internally by self-organizing around the ceremonies of Scrum. They can then either resolve or prioritize dependencies in real-time to ensure that the team can deliver on their commitment by the end of the Sprint.
But what happens when the dependencies are outside the purview of the team?
The Reality of Scrum
Sadly, the reality for many large organizations is that when forming teams, it’s all too common for a select person or people to be jumping between multiple teams.
For example, a QA person is spread out over six teams. That’s six Sprint Planning sessions, six daily standups, six reviews, and retrospectives. At that point, there’s no room for QA work.
Each team then has to make sure that person is available to them when they need them to do the work. They’re no longer instantly available to that team, which means the team now has planning dependencies and coordination dependencies. There’s a dependency between one project and another based upon either project’s ability to stay on track.
Theoretically, you could have two teams that meet most of the criteria of an Agile team. But if you have only one QA person straddling the fence between two groups, you also have a dependency, and that’s going to limit the ability of both teams to achieve Agility.
Any time we inject a dependency into the system, we create something that has to be managed outside of the team. And that limits our ability to be Agile.
Failure Modes of Other Popular Methodologies
Many methodologies have acknowledged that dependencies are real and have come up with various ways of addressing them. But it doesn’t matter which methodology you choose because they’re all just ways to orchestrate dependencies at the end of the day.
Here is a closer look at how some of the most popular methodologies, Scrum, SAFe, and LeSS, can attempt to manage dependencies, yet usually still fail:
Scrum of Scrums
At one point in time, Scrum came up with this idea of Scrum of Scrums. The idea is that you have some number of teams, each with their own ScrumMaster. At some point, usually at the beginning of the Sprint, all the ScrumMasters meet up to coordinate the dependencies in real-time. This is a valid construct that works under some conditions.
The problem is that when you have two teams with a dependency, and you’re trying to mitigate them in real-time, you end up with late resolution of the dependency. And that tends to destabilize the velocity of the teams. When the velocity of the teams become destabilized, you end up unable to make and meet commitments.
A lot of organizations put buffering strategies into place, like setting aside extra time to deal with known dependencies. But it becomes very ad hoc and hard to manage as you try to scale the system. So, while Scrum of Scrums is a fine communication tool, it’s not a good strategy for eliminating dependencies.
SAFe
SAFe suggests that you need Program Increment (PI) Planning. Basically, you’re going to have some sort of early “big room” planning session on one end of the PI Plan and a closing ceremony on the other end. In the middle, you’re going to deliver features on some kind of cadence.
When you do an early planning meeting, the idea is that everyone’s going to get in a room and address the dependencies in advance, at least to some reasonable level of assurance. But they’re going to understand those dependencies at the beginning and hopefully front load them so that they can resolve the dependencies sooner. Or, if they’re going to fail the PI, then at least they’ll know that sooner and can pivot or reprioritize.
Where SAFe struggles in large organizations is when you have something like a banking platform. This platform is responsible for things like ACH processing transactions, reconciliation, bill payment, etc. Typically, these platforms are dealing with incredibly high volume, large, robust mainframes, and super-fast transaction processing.
Imagine if you have four products, each with seven to ten SAFe teams, and each value stream is potentially injecting dependencies into the platform So, what you’ve done is simply moved the dependencies one degree out. You haven’t done anything to break them. They’re still there, and they’re still limiting your ability to be Agile.
What if the dependencies are encapsulated within the value stream? If that’s the case, SAFe might work for you in your situation. But be on the lookout for the presence of dependencies to make sure that’s always a true statement. Because if you have value streams that intersect, meaning that you have dependencies across value streams, you might not have your value streams set up right.
Or maybe you do, and these dependencies actually exist, and you’ll need to manage them across value streams.
SAFe typically is set up with a 4-tiered governance model. But that model only works if each layer is orchestrating the dependencies for the layer directly below them. And that level of orchestration gets expensive, and you wind up with a hierarchy of teams.
Dependencies are not your friend. Even if you get to a place where you can effectively manage them.
LeSS
LeSS talks about team-level execution and the way it rolls up into bigger things. But to do a LeSS implementation, you’d have to have a tremendous amount of encapsulation at the team level and a very minimal amount of orchestration as you go up.
So, how would LeSS address dependencies?
Well, let’s say you have a few front-end teams and a few backend teams. You might have a PO team who is decomposing and sequencing the work across these teams and who’s operating off a dependency-aware backlog.
The PO team starts loading all the teams up with Feature 1 items. Then Feature 2 items. But where it gets interesting is when you get to Feature 3 and not all the teams have work to do on that Feature. What do you do with teams that don’t have work, yet have capacity? Do you move them on to Feature 4? If the teams that don’t have capacity for Feature 4 work, you can’t.
So, you wind up in a situation where each team can either be a bottleneck or starved for work. The inclination is to load up the teams that have capacity with non-value-added work just to keep them busy, but that’s probably not the best use of their time.
Ideally, what you’d want to do is move the capacity to the bottleneck. But, in reality, this often isn’t reasonable due to the distribution of skills across teams. The skills of one team might not apply to the work the other teams are doing.
So, why not just collapse them into one complete, cross-functional team that can service all the components?
What if the backend is in Cobol and the front-end is in .NET? You’d have a multiple technology problem.
On the other hand, what if you’re in an environment where it’s not just about technology and skillset, but the work is also mission-critical and can never break?
When you get into these pure-play LeSS environments where any team can touch anything, you have to ask yourself, do you have the right level of test-safety? Can you continuously deploy it? Can you be sure that it’s never broken?
Do you have the right architecture in place, the proper organizational alignment to operate this way, and do it safely? If the answer to any of these is no, then you have dependencies.
Compensating Controls
As you can gather from what you’ve read thus far, dependencies are a real thing that organizations are dealing with. And after seeing some of the common failure modes of the most popular methodologies, hopefully you’re starting to see that while most of them are attempting to address this issue, not all methodologies work in all environments. So, what do you do when your methodology of choice doesn’t prescribe a course of action for your particular environment?
To be truly Agile, by definition, you have to have encapsulated teams. That’s the ideal state, but it’s also probably not your current reality.
And if it’s not your current reality, then you know you need to manage the dependencies, but a lot of people don’t like that because it doesn’t feel very Agile.
So, there’s this tension that organizations are feeling, and they’re asking themselves what can I do about it?
The answer is you have to put some sort of compensating control in place. What’s a compensating control? A compensating control is any orchestration mechanism you implement on top of your chosen methodology to help you get to your desired end state.
How Agile Do You Want to Be? And How Quickly?
Understanding where you are today vs where you’re going and acknowledging that dependencies are going to get in the way means that your Transformation journey isn’t about implementing a methodology that’s too heavy for your future end state, or establishing a set of compensating controls that are going to hinder your Agility in the long term.
Instead, your Transformation journey is about creating the right conditions today that will help you begin incrementally and iteratively creating the right conditions for tomorrow.
The reality is that none of this Is going to happen overnight. But, knowing where you want to go and having a plan for the interim, allows your organization to decide which dependencies are worth the money to break. There will surely be dependencies that may never be worth the money to break, or aren’t economically viable enough to break.
So, you’re going to have to do something on top of your methodology to ensure you’re reaping the benefits of the methodology until it becomes reasonable to break the dependency.
When you start to view your Transformation through this lens of encapsulation v orchestration, you begin to see that each methodology is just a different way of attacking the same problem at varying degrees of heaviness.
As you begin to strike a balance between encapsulation and orchestration, you might realize that your ideal end-state is some sort of multi-methodology environment that depends on the needs of the teams and its application.
Either way, once you’re in this mindset, you can start to make better decisions to get you to your desired end-state, and you can make strategic decisions about which dependencies to break. Meanwhile, you have controls in place to maximize Agility in the parts of your organization where you still have dependencies until it’s time to deprecate those controls.
Organizational Impact of Dependencies
An organization that doesn’t understand how to balance encapsulation and orchestration doesn’t have a viable way of managing or resolving dependencies. So, they inevitably wind up doubling down on methodology as well as team-level and work-level practices. And they end up not being able to deliver on the other fundamental building blocks.
Because when you have unmanaged dependencies, you’re not going to be able to establish a stable velocity at the team level, so the organization isn’t going to know how much demand to put into the system, so the net effect is that the organization is going to overload it.
And when you can’t know the teams’ ability to deliver against the known backlog, it makes it very hard to make informed bets and tradeoffs as we go based on the known capacity of the system so that we can level the demand against it.
Then we get to the point where the teams just aren’t trustworthy, and so the organization has a hard time trusting them. Many Agilists say that we need to trust the teams, but what we really mean is that we need to put the team in a position where they can be trusted. This primarily means that we have to create the right conditions for them, which means we have to create an ecosystem in which they’re encapsulated.
Dependencies kill Agility, So, you have to either find a way to encapsulate them within the team or find a way to orchestrate them. | https://medium.com/@leadingagile/encapsulation-vs-orchestration-dependencies-in-agile-dae05755446 | [] | 2020-11-30 16:29:08.706000+00:00 | ['Agile', 'Agility', 'Agile Transformation', 'Change Management', 'Scrum'] |
How Can User Feedback Improve Your Mobile App? — Zesium | Source: thefinancialbrand.com
Bill Gates Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Mobile apps always tend to earn high average app store ratings but where many fail is using the qualitative feedback.
The best way for a mobile app to thrive is through user feedback as it is one of the main elements in improving user satisfaction and growing your business.
Although a high average rating can be really great, it can also shift your focus from quality customer feedback behind each star. Businesses also need qualitative data to provide context and insight — ratings are important but reviews are even more so as they help to maintain the health of your app.
Ratings don’t provide valuable information but only show whether your users like your app or not — in other words, you cannot identify the features for improvement or modify your product roadmap to make the changes quickly.
When used together, brands can really understand their customers’ needs and pain points.
Why is User Feedback Essential?
Gathering user feedback is the best method to understand what your users want and to improve the same in the app.
As competition is tough, it is vital for you to develop an app that provides value to its users and that is functional and engaging.
Once you receive the feedback from your users, you must act upon it otherwise, the users will feel like you’re not interested in creating a better experience for them.
Let’s list some reasons why it is essential to regularly receive feedback from your users.
Locates Features for Improvement
You know your product as each feature has been thoroughly thought and discussed. However, sometimes you cannot see all the imperfections.
It is extremely important to get insight into what your users like and what are their preferred functionalities.
Show that you truly listen to your users’ opinions since the app is made for them, so it should be as close to their preferences as possible.
However, take care to listen only to the most relevant feedback. Create a feedback system where users can express their concerns or opinions so that you can understand and decide which features to keep, which ones aren’t so relevant and which new features should be created.
Once you receive the feedback, don’t put everything into a feature backlog but rather in a ‘feedback bank’ — no matter how much you love the users for sharing their opinions, you have to be careful about applying them to product management. Each feature has a lifetime cost that includes maintenance, debugging, additional server load etc.
Stop and ask yourself: Can I afford this?
For example, a bug could sometimes take days to fix or adding a new feature could take a month to implement — investing your resources into something that is not relevant for your app could turn out to be a waste of time.
That’s why it is essential to filter the feedback and sort your priorities — only then implement a new feature and stay assured that your company will produce the app that meets users expectations.
Source: onlinetherapyinstitute.com
Makes Users Feel Involved
Taking feedback into account and asking for users’ opinion shows them they are valued.
By asking your users to provide feedback, you show them they are an active participant in making the app better for them. When users feel appreciated and heard, they start having positive connotations to your brand which they show by sharing their good experience to other potential users — the result could be more ‘sales’ in the future.
Make sure that you use collected opinions to make decisions about your app and communicate it to your users to keep them engaged. Not doing so, you risk your users to feel neglected or ignored.
A good try is to implement a customer feedback loop which is a strategy for constant product improvement based on users’ feedback.
Remember, communication should always be a two-way street — try to create in-app surveys and specifically ask about their pain points within an app — this way, users can state the issues they face in the app or rate certain services thus giving further understanding to developers what is needed in the app.
Such method provides a feeling of direct involvement of users within upgrading your app.
Source: companyfounder.com
Produces Personal Recommendation
Personal recommendations are the top reason for purchase decisions within users. Referrals are the most effective yet free way of advertising and it resembles word-of-mouth type of advertising.
Some other factors like advertising or price comparison influence users’ decision at some point, but referrals remain important during each stage of the purchase process.
It is said that over 8-in-10 purchases are influenced by a recommendation or word-of-mouth.
That means that on average, the majority of people who would make purchases with your company, would have received a personal recommendation from someone. Such face-to-face referrals usually come from trusted people like friends or family and it can be the most convincing tool.
If you wish to get users through referrals, first make sure that users’ feedback is positive. Do not forget to thank your users for making a referral — a good idea is to consider some appropriate way to reward them, through a discount for an upgraded package or unlocking a certain premium feature for them etc.
Source: zesium.com
Bad Feedback Will Do You Well
Do not worry if you receive some bad feedback — instead of being frustrated, try to see unhappy customers as a chance.
Bad feedback should be valued even more than the good ones ( as my colleague says, ‘I don’t want to hear good stuff. Tell me what’s bugging you?’) as those users stepped out to share their bad experience expecting from you to act on it.
Firstly, it is highly important to create an action plan to deal with the bad feedback. Contact the users, address the issue and advise them on the exact date when you will follow them up. If the problem is more complex to resolve, make sure to compensate the user for the unhappy experience.
You do not have to give your app for free, but a certain discount for premium upgrade or unlocking some features for the specific user can look much more positive to them.
In such cases, the user will give you another chance and treat your oversight as a minor mistake.
In case you don’t have such a plan, things can go sideways and turn out badly for you.
Helps with New and Existing Users
Whenever someone wants to download your app, the first thing they do is reading reviews and checking ratings. Although personal recommendations are more powerful than online reviews, the latter should not be underestimated.
You would be surprised that 90% of users read online reviews before deciding whether to purchase and 88% of users trust these opinions as if they are personal recommendations.
You should care about your online reviews — track the situation, ask your users for their opinions and react appropriately. This way, you can even prevent any surprises before appearing on the Internet.
Even when a user downloads your mobile app and tries it, it does not ensure they will come back. You can monitor various analytics and the market but keep in mind that there are some things that ONLY a user can bring your attention to.
Feedback may address some things you have not considered before, like free shipping, available customer support or a user-friendly website.
Even if you don’t get only positive reviews, such unique insight will help you to understand the concept of the users’ desired approach and result in regular users.
Source: insights.un.ga
Builds Loyalty for Your Brand
Asking for feedback from your users and responding to their opinions create a relationship that will make the whole experience more personal. Users will start to personalize your business and see it as a ( group of people) who care about their experience.
User-generated content (UGC) can be in the form of user reviews, testimonials or other visual content crucial to building your brand loyalty. Placing such content on your social media will make you more visible to the rest of the audience.
User reviews can be a potential goldmine of ideas on how you can separate yourself from competitors. For example, maybe your app is ‘ faster when loading’ or ‘ more reliable ‘ — the sooner you find your angle, the better.
One of the key things of building brand loyalty is being ‘real’ to your users — meaning, don’t be afraid to show the human side of your business. Not only to have a distinct tone but also try to be able to respond to callouts not because you ‘ have to’ but because you WANT TO.
Creating and maintaining such relationships will pay off — instead of being just an impersonal company (or an app), you create a connection between the users and your brand by becoming their favourite choice.
Source: digitaltechnology.institute
Combines Data for Better Results
You should combine data analytics and user feedback for developers to have a clearer picture on what caused the issues.
However, analytics can locate some issues like short sessions but you cannot know why the users are logging out unless we have users’ feedback. Users will be able to advise on too many ads popping out or if the app closes upon clicking on a certain button etc.
When you combine feedback with analytic data, you can gain deeper insight into a users’ app experience. It can help you answer some complex questions like: why are users abandoning my app after only one usage or why users leave from a specific app screen?
If you utilize your data analysis together with user feedback, you can improve your app easier than working on your own.
When talking about metrics, you should always track the right metrics:
Growth — the number of downloads
— the number of downloads Retention — monthly actives out of the total number of downloads
— monthly actives out of the total number of downloads Engagement (or stickiness) — how frequently users use your app
Source: datapine.com
How to Gather User Feedback
How you will ask the feedback from your users is one of the most important things — you should consider different ways to gather user feedback and decide which one can fits your app the best:
Contact Forms and In-App Surveys — this method is direct yet effective. Make sure for a form or survey to be located in an accessible area of your app not taking up too much space
— this method is direct yet effective. Make sure for a form or survey to be located in an accessible area of your app not taking up too much space Module Spots — they include in-page headers, footers or in the ‘About Us’ section within the menu. They are considered as low-effort and high-value options.
— they include in-page headers, footers or in the ‘About Us’ section within the menu. They are considered as low-effort and high-value options. Ratings — you can also ask a question (or a few) where your user can rank various aspects of your app with up to five stars. Try not to bother your users and make this feature optional.
— you can also ask a question (or a few) where your user can rank various aspects of your app with up to five stars. Try not to bother your users and make this feature optional. App Pop-Up — this method provides a pop-up on your app to users. It can be an option for gathering feedback, but keep in mind that pop-ups block the screen preventing users from whatever they were doing so some users can find them irritating.
— this method provides a pop-up on your app to users. It can be an option for gathering feedback, but keep in mind that pop-ups block the screen preventing users from whatever they were doing so some users can find them irritating. Targeted Questions — segment your users by functionalities they use the most in your app — ask them targeted questions about that certain section of your app. It will ensure your users are familiar with the questions you are asking them.
Source: tweakyourbiz.com
There are more ways to create successful feedback but how will you approach your users really depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
First, consider the type of app you develop to determine the appropriate method of collecting feedback, then make sure that your feedback request is not irritating or pushy.
Sticking by these principles will help you to find the balance between not bothering users and compiling the necessary data to determine which elements of your app need improvement.
FINAL WORD
Before starting with user feedback, define your objective clearly and take into account functions and costs to create a feedback form you need. Upon collected user feedback, make sure to conduct wide data analysis on your results and adequately adjust your mobile app roadmap.
Don’t forget to thank your users for their feedback and inform them on recent improvements.
If you try to follow these steps, the feedback automation will perform its magic and let users help in improving your mobile application. | https://medium.com/dataseries/how-can-user-feedback-improve-your-mobile-app-zesium-559b583cdc54 | ['Maja Dakić'] | 2020-12-03 10:58:41.752000+00:00 | ['Mobile', 'Feedback', 'User Experience', 'Mobile Apps'] |
Jmeter performance testing with different grant types offered by WSO2 APIM — Part 3(Implicit grant Type) | 5. Create Request to authorize endpoint.
To achieve this task, the following steps need to be completed.
Create an HTTP request using Jmeter GUI (Authorization_Code >Add > Sampler> HTTP Request) and rename it as “Send a request to authorize endpoint” In the HTTP Request window under the “Basic” configurations window following configs need to be provided.
Protocol: https Server Name or IP: localhost (Or Whatever the hostname of Gateway node) Port Number: 8243 (Or authorized port number of the server) HTTP Request Method : GET Path : /oauth2/authorize
3. Then Using GUI add the following parameters and their respective values.
client_id: [Extracted consumer key from Devportal GUI] redirect_uri : [ Callback URL which provided when generating keys with Dev portal GUI ] response_type: token scope : openId nonce: [ Any Random Number ]
After the above configs, the GUI of Jmeter should looks similar to the following image.
4. Add a response assertion to Above created “Send a request to authorize endpoint” HTTP request (HTTP Request > Add > Assertion> Response Assertion) and provide details as follows.
Apply to: Main samples only Field to Test: Response Headers Patterns to Test: HTTP/1.1 200
5. Add an XPath extractor to Above created “Send a request to authorize endpoint” HTTP request (HTTP Request > Add > Post Processor> XPath Extractor) and provide details as follows.
6. Create Request to Common Auth Login HTTP Request.
Create an HTTP request using Jmeter GUI (Authorization_Code >Add > Sampler> HTTP Request) and rename it as “Common Auth Login HTTP Request” In the HTTP Request window under the “Basic” configurations window following configs need to be provided.
Protocol: https Server Name or IP: localhost (Or Whatever the hostname of Gateway node) Port Number: 8243 (Or authorized port number of the server) HTTP Request Method : POST Path : /commonauth
3. Then Using GUI add the following parameters and their respective values.
username: [Admin username of that particlar tenant] password: [ Admin password of that particlar tenant ] sessionDataKey: ${sessionDataKey} ** (The value for this field is automatically extracted by previously added XPath extractor of previous request)
After the above configs, the GUI of Jmeter should looks similar to the following image.
4. Add a response assertion to Above created “Common Auth Login HTTP Request” HTTP request (HTTP Request > Add > Assertion> Response Assertion) and provide details as follows.
Apply to: Main samples only Field to Test: Response Headers Patterns to Test: HTTP/1.1 200
5. Add an XPath extractor to Above created “Send a request to authorize endpoint” HTTP request (HTTP Request > Add > Post Processor> XPath Extractor) and provide details as follows. Rename that Xpath extractor as follows for clarification when running these tests.
**The values extracted here will be a required body parameter for the next request to be made.
7. Create Request to Get Authorization Code.
To perform this task following steps need to be completed.
Create an HTTP request using Jmeter GUI (Authorization_Code >Add > Sampler> HTTP Request) and rename it as “ Get Authorization Code” In the HTTP Request window under the “Basic” configurations window following configs need to be provided.
Protocol: https Server Name or IP: localhost (Or Whatever the hostname of Gateway node) Port Number: 8243 (Or authorized port number of the server) HTTP Request Method : POST Path : /oauth2/authorize
3. Then Using GUI add the following parameters and their respective values.
consent: approve sessionDataKeyConsent: ${sessionDataKeyConsent}** (The value for this field is automatically extracted by previously added XPath extractor of previous request)
After the above configs, the GUI of Jmeter should looks similar to the following image.
4. Add a response assertion to Above created “Get Authorization Code” HTTP request (HTTP Request > Add > Assertion> Response Assertion) and provide details as follows.
Apply to: Main samples only Field to Test: Response Headers Patterns to Test: HTTP/1.1 302
5. Add a Regular Expression Extractor to Above created “Get Authorization Code” HTTP request (HTTP Request > Add > Post Processor> Regular Expression Extractor) and provide details as follows. Rename that extractor as follows for clarification when running these tests.
Regular expression to use: access_token=([a-zA-Z0–9-._]+)\&?
**The values extracted here will be a required body parameter for the next request to be made.
8. Using this extracted token now the user can create a request to invoke APIs in order to perform Jmeter performance testings.
References
https://jmeter.apache.org/download_jmeter.cgi. (Follow the https://medium.com/@cudakara/how-to-install-jmeter-in-ubuntu-20-04-7e4d30c42551 | https://medium.com/api-integration-essentials/jmeter-performance-testing-with-different-grant-types-offered-by-wso2-apim-part-3-implicit-grant-77af6713bf19 | ['Chamindu Udakara'] | 2020-09-21 04:07:14.652000+00:00 | ['Grant Types', 'Jmeter', 'Implicit Grant', 'Wso2 Api Manager', 'Performance Testing'] |
Embrace Change with Curiosity (and DON’T follow that hat!) | four4soaring | In these troubling times many of us have experienced change or loss.
While the sting of those losses, some professional, too many personal and all deeply impactful, remains with us, we find ourselves facing the winds of change, off balance and chasing who we used to be. In the aftermath, many of us find ourselves wearing a new hat or potentially multiple hats in whatever new paradigm we land in. This is probably exciting for some and scary for others. My bet is the majority of us feel both ways!
That is normal, that is OK.
I want to take us on a bit of whimsy just for today, as I am hoping that it is helpful.
Curious George of book and cartoon fame has a best friend. This man is called “The Man in The Yellow Hat”
That hat and his yellow outfit are a distinctive part of his identity.
That’s why the theme of one of the Curious George books is called “Curious George in Follow that Hat” (Rey and Rey). Curious George and his friend, The Man, are hanging out in the park one day and The Man decides to take a nap.
Suddenly Curious George sees the Yellow Hat scurrying away seemingly on its own.
It goes down the street, it lands on a street vendor’s head, and has several other adventures until George finally grabs it from the limb of a tall tree.
Spoiler alert: (don’t read any further if you plan on getting this book 🙂 )
When he discovers the hat on the tree limb, just before he snatches it up, he discovers it is chattering?
There was a squirrel under the hat the whole time!
In the story, George returns the hat to The Man and they whimsically live happily ever after.
The Man’s identity is intact and ready for the next book.
…but what if George never chased that hat? Would the man, George grew to love over the many decades, have truly been any different, just because he lost his hat or had to change hats, or wear more than one?
No, I suspect The Man, would go on saving George from his antics.
I suspect that if George had never spent the energy chasing that hat, and whether The Man ended up in a replacement yellow hat, with no hat, wearing two hats or sporting three, The Man was still the very same Man that he always was underneath.
I am willing to bet, that with or without your hat, you are too.
I am thankful for that and I’m glad that we get to go forward into the undiscovered country, together. | https://medium.com/four4soaring/embrace-change-with-curiosity-and-dont-follow-that-hat-four4soaring-c5a89a354633 | ['John Johnson'] | 2020-12-08 14:46:09.292000+00:00 | ['Change', 'Curious George', 'Covid 19', 'Change Management', 'Changing Careers'] |
Age of Empathy is planning to publish more creative nonfiction/memoir in 2021. | Age of Empathy is planning to publish more creative nonfiction/memoir in 2021. You all are contributing standout work and we are honored to be housing it. The following are exquisite essays you don’t want to miss.
We’re looking forward to reading and sharing more creative personal essays in the New Year. Cheers! | https://medium.com/everything-shortform/age-of-empathy-is-planning-to-publish-more-creative-nonfiction-memoir-in-2021-664f0e1a4ef1 | ['Aimée Gramblin'] | 2020-12-24 16:08:35.709000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Shortform', 'Memoir', 'Announcements', 'Age Of Empathy'] |
Decisions for Upperclassmen in High School | What do I want to do?
This is a really tough question — a lot of people will say follow your passions. Finding those can be really difficult, and oftentimes following your passion can be impossible and unrealistic when it comes to your career. I hear a lot about people beginning to hate their once beloved hobbies once they have to do it to stay afloat financially.
Ideally, you want something that you find fulfilling and are good at and or interested enough in to become good at. How do you find that? This will require a lot of research on your part, reach out to other adults you know in interesting fields, make a LinkedIn and connect with people. Ask teachers at school for directions.
Find a direction and see what possibilities it holds. What are the niche aspects of this career that could make or break it for you? Find all the potential directions it can hold and run with it. If you get somewhere you don’t like, walk away and find something new. None of this is permanent and you can always change directions, regardless of how far you are, where you have been, or how old you are. I have friends that are coming back to school in their 30s and 40s after making new decisions and discoveries.
Do your best not to burn out something that brings you joy — I have several friends who went into illustration and once it came with the business aspects, timelines, and customers, it became more of a hassle, less of something they loved. Find something that you can do, but retain other things you love. | https://medium.com/@l-olson/decisions-for-upperclassmen-in-high-school-2c175798e9a4 | ['L Olson'] | 2020-12-26 00:16:20.265000+00:00 | ['High School', 'College', 'College Application', 'Majors'] |
The Largest Charter School in the Country Will Get Even Larger | “A perfect example of what is wrong with the California law regarding charter authorizing.” - Scott Schmerelson
The average school in the United States has 507 students. Through the 2018–2019 school year, Granada Hills Charter High School is authorized for an enrollment capacity of 5,500 students. This is more than the total number of students in 86% of all school districts nationwide. Included in the charter renewal petition submitted to the LAUSD this summer, the school sought to grow even larger by adding TK through 8th grades and 1,425 more students. Before the Board voted on this proposal, I made my public comment detailing the problems that already exist at the school along with new issues that were raised by the proposed expansion:
“Resolved further, That a charter school be required to notify all parents, guardians, and teachers in writing within 72 hours when the District issues a Notice of Violations, a Notice of Intent to Revoke and/or for Notice of Non-renewal; and that the notification includes the District’s rationale for the action, if provided by the District. The school shall also be required to simultaneously provide proof of the notification to the Charter Schools Division;”
On March 3, 2017, the District issued a Notice of Violation to Granada but the school did not inform parents about this violation. This shows a refusal of the school to follow the rules.
Even worse, the Charter School Division (CSD) did not follow through. They state that a warning is only “required when the Notice of Violation is for charter revocation.” I just read you the resolution that you passed. Is that an accurate description of the resolution? Has the use of “alternative facts” now come to the LAUSD?
This notice detailed conditions that endangered “the Health and Safety of Students, Staff and Other Individuals.” If that is the case, then why wasn’t a revocation threatened if these conditions were not fixed? This Notice of Violation is still open. How can the charter be renewed when those issues have not been resolved?
Board Composition:
The Governing Board that approved this petition is not constituted according to the previously approved charter. The charter does permit a change without a material revision if there was a change in the law. Ask the CSD “what law was changed?” They won’t be able to answer because the school relied on a change based on their own “interpretation,” not an actual change in the law. If the law has actually changed, the CSD needs to explain why they have not cited Birmingham or Pacific Palisades for having employees on their Boards.
Parents voted to convert from a public school to a charter school based on the promise that they would be able to elect representatives to the Board. Like a banana republic, the school allowed that one vote and then canceled all future elections. Parent representatives on the Governing Board are no longer elected, they are appointed.
Funds:
The CSD states that the school has over$12 million in cash and cash equivalents. They then admit that a little over $6 million are in accounts that are insured, leaving the rest unprotected. However, only ten accounts are listed. If these accounts were in separate banks this would only provide a maximum of $2.5 million of protection. Since some accounts are held in the same bank, only $1,250,000 (of $12 million) is actually protected.
I would also like to know why they needed to issue over $5 million in bonds last year if they have claimed to have $12 million in cash. The bond ratings for this issuance was a less than stellar BBB-. What do the bond markets know that the CSD is ignoring?
Special Education:
The CSD stated yesterday that 9% of Granada’s students required Special Education services. The Board informative states that the actual number is 8.36%. The SARC report from last year states there is 7%. Is this more Trump math? What is the actual number?
They also compare Granada to a “similar school” and then use a magnet school for comparison. Granada is supposed to be a neighborhood school, not a magnet. They are supposed to serve the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, this is where my three-minute allotment of public speaking time ran out. Had I been able to continue, I would have pointed out that the school that they used for comparison is a magnet for “enriched studies” that is allowed by law to cherry-pick their students. Does the use of this school as a “similar school” demonstrate that the CSD is acknowledging that Granada is doing the same?
The CSD’s use of “Trump math” continued throughout their response. The data presented for the neighboring schools did not match the SARC reports that have been provided to the state. In comparing the populations for nearby schools, they used the number of students in each subcategory even though the other schools had far fewer students. Only a comparison of percentages provides relevance.
The fact that Granada serves a much lower percentage of students with special education needs was also waved away with the statement that “in the absence of evidence of discriminatory intent or practice, the GHCHS demographic gaps by themselves cannot fairly be considered affirmative evidence of discrimination.” Decades of civil rights case law would state otherwise. Asking for IEPs prior to enrollment against the rules established by the charter is also evidence of discriminatory practice.
The CSD also tried to remove responsibility for serving students with extra education needs by pointing out that Granada is a “school of choice.” This ignores the fact that only 51% of the school’s students are from within the District’s attendance boundaries. This suggests that the school is not meeting the needs of the neighborhood and is failing as a neighborhood school. Granada has an obligation to provide services that the neighborhood students need. If it is not meeting this objective, it must add programs that will attract ALL students.
Facts also show that iGranada forced at least one student into Independent Study without it being specifically allowed in the IEP. This violation of the education code does not seem to have been addressed by the District.
Unfortunately, none of the Board members asked the CSD to bring clarity to any of these issues. Board Member Scott Schmerelson did address the Notice of Violation, the school’s low reclassification rate for English learners and problems with reporting methods in his comments prior to the vote on renewing the charter. Kelly Gonez brought up the ongoing problem of resident students being forced into the iGranada program against their wishes and the discrepancy between the demographics at Granada and the neighboring public schools. The charter renewal was still approved by acclamation.
The request to expand the high school to include a TK through 12th-grade school district was considered on a separate vote. Schmerelson detailed the ways that this would disrupt the existing, high performing public schools within the area. He also noted that the expansion would allow non-resident students to bypass the high school lottery for 8th graders who reside outside of Granada’s attendance boundaries. However, he was the only vote against the proposal. The millions spent on School Board elections by the California Charter School Association paid off once again.
The District now has the responsibility of overseeing the 7,000 students who will be attending Granada. If the CSD was already unable to enforce the rules on the smaller version of the school, it is unclear how they will be able to do the job with additional students spread over additional grades. The fact that the CSD relied on faulty data and logic to explain away questions about the school’s operation, might be an indication that they have other motives and the will to hold charters accountable within the District does not exist.
____________________________________________
Carl Petersen is a parent and special education advocate, elected member of the Northridge East Neighborhood Council and was a Green Party candidate in LAUSD’s District 2 School Board race. During the campaign, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action and Dr. Diane Ravitch called him a “strong supporter of public schools.” Opinions are his own. | https://changethelausd.medium.com/the-largest-charter-school-in-the-country-will-get-even-larger-870fe06d0a61 | ['Carl J. Petersen'] | 2018-10-07 18:53:42.895000+00:00 | ['Special Education', 'Public Education', 'Accountability', 'Education', 'Charter Schools'] |
Tesla Phone Screen Cache Problem. Least Recently Used (LRU) Cache is a… | Least Recently Used (LRU) Cache is a very common problem asked in interviews. The key to the problem is to realize that a hash table and a doubly linked list can be used to solve it efficiently. Another variant of the LRU problem is the priority-expiry cache. The Educative’s course on Big-O Notation for Coding Interviews and Beyond solves this problem using two heaps and two hash-tables, but isn’t conclusively the best solution. If you have a better solution, we’d love to hear from you and share your solution here with due credits. This questions has been asked in phone-screens at Tesla, Oracle, Salesforce, Google, Facebook and a bunch of other Big Tech according to various online interview forums.
The problem statement requires us to design a cache with the following methods:
get(String key)
set(String key, String value, int priority, int expiry)
evictItem(int currentTime)
The rules by which the cache operates is are follows:
If an expired item is available. Remove it. If multiple items have the same expiry, removing any one suffices. If condition #1 can’t be satisfied, remove an item with the least priority. If more than one item satisfies condition #2, remove the least recently used one. Multiple items can have the same priority and expiry.
You’ll enjoy the mental gymnastics with data-structures to solve this problem :) | https://medium.com/double-pointer/tesla-google-facebook-phone-screen-cache-problem-4e24f5b886f8 | ['Double Pointer'] | 2020-12-18 20:54:12.134000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Tech', 'Tesla', 'Codingbootcamp', 'Technology'] |
Foodie Gift Guide for Teams | Gifts for the whole team can often be a little difficult and with December here, it might have crossed your mind. With many companies going remote, what better way to surprise your team and show a little love than the gift of food. Here is a list of delicious ideas to treat your team to, all under £30, yes even the hampers.
Baking + DIY Kits
Drinks
Hampers | https://medium.com/@mkhalildesign/foodie-gift-guide-for-teams-6d015fc3750f | ['Marwa Khalil'] | 2020-12-09 21:39:01.449000+00:00 | ['Drink', 'Food', 'Gift Guide', 'Christmas', 'Team'] |
Notice Me, Senpai! | Two things about me might have been evident by now. First, I really love cats. Please tell me if there is a potion that turns humans into cats so I can sleep all day and have furry friends. Second, I am quite an introvert. No wonder I prefer books over people. I am an ardent book lover which is one of the reasons why I write. Books made me realize how powerful words can be. Few of my other obsessions are Harry Potter, minions, and BuzzFeed quizzes. Currently, I am working for Restronomy.com, a website that emphasizes on recent updates and resources for the restaurant industry.
As a kid, I was very shy and silent. My family was worried if I will ever talk. Always watched T.V. or played alone. It took me some time to open up. The reason I was like that is that my mother, sister and I left my abusive father’s house when I was almost 5 years old. We started our lives from scratch in a different city with the help of my mother’s family.
My mother worked for many years in the world of accountancy but now that my sister has grown up and taken over the steering wheel, she is living her best life. My sister is a Chartered Accountant. I am pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Hotel Management. My end goal is to have my own food truck and flourish as a writer. I love the idea of being my own boss.
Living in an all-female house, knowing how our previous life was, has encouraged me to learn and read about intersectional feminism and activism every day. It inspired me to make my voice heard. One of the best ways to express oneself is to write. So, I started writing poetry on Instagram. But now that I have my own personal space here on Medium where people would really want to know and read what I have to say, there’s no going back.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
To sum up what you can expect from me as a writer, I wrote a little poem. | https://medium.com/illumination/notice-me-senpai-1b8c67417ea1 | ['Swagata Deshmukh'] | 2020-09-08 07:23:07.026000+00:00 | ['Introduction', 'Writer', 'Illumination', 'Feminism', 'Poet'] |
With pen in my hand I was pondering on what to write Then I thought to first pen All the blessings God has bestowed on me. I thought I will finish in no time. And set my pen on other topic… | With pen in my hand
I was pondering on what to write
Then I thought to first pen
All the blessings
God has bestowed on me.
I thought I will finish in no time.
And set my pen on other topic.
But I am still writing !!
Pavneet Kaur | https://medium.com/@pavneetkaursuri54/with-pen-in-my-hand-i-was-pondering-on-what-to-write-then-i-thought-to-first-pen-all-the-6d9ed0827907 | ['Literature Learners'] | 2020-12-23 18:25:57.217000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Positive Thinking', 'Better Living', 'Literature', 'Poetry'] |
Is there an Absolute Truth in Buddhism? | In his book, What the Buddha Taught, Walpola Rahula has a chapter on the Third Noble Truth — Nirodha. There, he discussed the notion of Absolute Truth in Buddhism:
Now, what is Absolute Truth? According to Buddhism, the Absolute Truth is that there is nothing absolute in the world, that everything is relative, conditioned and impermanent, and that there is no unchanging, everlasting, absolute substance like Self, Soul, or Ātman within or without. This is the Absolute Truth.
This is a relativist position, one that many conservatives detest. The problem with this position is that it could be self-contradicting. Rahula made this statement: “The Absolute Truth is that there is nothing absolute in the world.” But if this is an absolute statement, then the statement refutes itself — since it is a statement of absolute truth. It would be the same as saying, “The Absolute Truth is that there is no Absolute Truth.” Many Christian thinkers, especially Christian apologists, love to use this charge of self-contradiction to refute the Buddhist position and the moral relativist position. By refuting the no-Absolute-Truth position, they conclude that there must be Absolute Truth. But that is a non sequitur. For it presumes a false dichotomy — that there is either Absolute Truth or there is not. No everything in life is binary. Take the statement that “Francis is a boy.” If we establish that Francis is not a boy, then is it necessarily true that Francis is a girl? Today, we know that gender is not binary. In fact, many people identify their gender as “non-binary.” What if the Absolute cannot be classified as either existent or non-existent? A binary classification is not appropriate in many situations. For example, is a table male or female? Clearly, the male versus female classification is inappropriate for a table. It is a big assumption to take for granted that Absolute Truth has to be either existent or non-existent. Even the meaning of existence is not clear.
So, what is the Buddhist position? What would we consider as Truth in Buddhism? We know the Three Marks of Existence:
1. All conditioned things are impermanent.
2. All conditioned things are unsatisfactory.
3. All dharmas (both conditioned things and unconditioned things) are without self.
The Three Marks of Existence can be interpreted as a version of the no-Absolute-Truth position. Instead of saying that there is no Absolute Truth, the Buddhist position can be restated in a milder manner, more consistent with the scientific spirit, to avoid apparent contradiction. We can say that no absolutely true statement ( i.e. a statement that is not relative, conditioned, and mutable) has ever been discovered. There is no reason why we cannot make this statement if it is an empirical fact. Through the ages, no one has come up with a statement that is not relative, conditioned, situational, and subject to change. The no-Absolute-Truth position should not be stated with absolute certainty or finality. Rather, it should be stated as a report of empirical experience. It is essentially an agnostic position.
Can the Three Marks of Existence be falsified? According to Karl Popper, an unfalsifiable statement cannot be a scientific statement. The answer is “Yes.” If someone can find an example of something which is permanent, then it would falsify the statement that “All conditioned things are impermanent.” Similarly, if someone can find an example of something which can exist on its own and not dependent on other things, then the statement that “All dharmas are without self” would be falsified. All we need is one counterexample. But so far, no one has produced one.
To sum up, the statement that “There is no absolute truth” may be self-refuting or it may not be. It all depends on how it is interpreted. Certainly, the statement should not be asserted absolutely, for it would make it another absolute statement. The key is to assert it as a provisional statement, and as a statement of empirical experience. We can say, “So far, we have found nothing absolute; everything we have seen has been relative and conditional.” This would be enough to represent the Buddhist position, which is a relativist one. It is also a truthful one. | https://medium.com/@kleong54/is-there-an-absolute-truth-in-buddhism-af62a976103d | ['Kenneth Leong'] | 2020-12-13 02:15:48.671000+00:00 | ['Paradox', 'Absolute Truth', 'Self Reference', 'Buddhism', 'Three Marks Of Existence'] |
Time Worm | [girl on swing]
I always wondered whatever happened to you
god it was so long ago
how many lifetimes ago
I don’t think I’ll ever know
I always used to write about you
and then I went away in my mind
and you didn’t come up that often
sometimes I still write about you
Super strange how I saw you in the mirror
I thought I was done with you
good riddance to bad rubbish
that’s what I always say
I always wondered well maybe if we
you know like these days how they are
I don’t know really, just seems like
if I said yes, you’d say yes | https://medium.com/@letsfly2000/time-worm-40c1c27adcd | [] | 2020-10-19 10:08:46.012000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Dreams', 'Journalism', 'Lyrics', 'Poetry'] |
Breakup Letter I Won’t Be Sending | There was one thing I wanted to tell you but never did.
When we had our first date at my patio, my roommate came to me afterward and said, with a nasty leer on her face, “I listened to every word that you and your friend said on the patio last night.” Then she told me she could hear every noise in my room.
That’s why I didn’t feel comfortable having you over to spend the night. I felt bad, because we were always having to meet at your house, and you did the hosting and cooking mostly. Although you are a wonderful hostess, so I didn’t feel too bad.
I used to have a lovely house and cooked for my friends and could have anyone over without worrying about being spied on by the strangest woman ever.
Oh, and one other thing. You don’t get to decide what the definition of “blowing out of proportion” is. Proportion is a relative concept. You like speaking in absolutes. Also, you only like me when I’m happy. That means you don’t really like me, because I’m not happy that much.
So, I read this article about how to get over a broken heart, and one of the bullet points was, “just because it isn’t real now, doesn’t mean it wasn’t real then.” And just in case you have a broken heart, I wanted to give you a list of stuff that was real between us that I will always remember: | https://medium.com/the-junction/breakup-letter-i-wont-be-sending-7497c8ceab92 | ['Flannery Meehan'] | 2020-10-09 19:52:37.277000+00:00 | ['Broken Heart', 'Loneliness', 'Romance', 'Love Letters', 'Breakups'] |
I Had Finally Created my First Social Media Accounts in Early 2019 | I am a private person, so posting my picture and name as profile information on a social media account would be a major step for me. Even for years prior, I had no interest in having a social media account.
But this was the first time in my life, back in May 2018 when I graduated from undergraduate studies, where there was not structure in my life, in terms of being in school. I’d allowed self-discouragement and external distraction to halt my original gap year plan (study preparation for the MCAT, taking the exam, and applying to DO medical schools).
With this freedom I did not do what I planned for my gap year to involve. I ended up doing a lot of surfing the internet. This included watching a lot of youtube videos, joining email lists, and binge watching tv shows I’d missed when they regularly aired during the school semesters. From my perspective I was being unproductive because I was not using my time wisely to work toward anything specifically now that I was completely neglecting my plan. My deviation from my intentional plan was just me wandering without a sense of direction (absorbing more and more information from the internet).
But, thankfully, during this time of endless web surfing, the idea of blogging began to interest me, and in all this googling, I discovered and explored Medium.
But, what topics would I write about?
In my short life so far I did not feel I had any “expert knowledge” to contribute. In my mind I had not attained anything that would inspire, empower, or encourage other millennial women distinguishingly different from what others similarly already accomplished and shared about. Also, what opportunity was there for me to add perspective when I was still figuring out what I was now doing since my gap year was off-course?
Not only this, more pressing in my mind was I would have to create my very first social platform account on Medium to write here.
I would never post anything which would jeopardize myself in the future. In spite of this thought of mine, I was gripped and hesitant to have my name or face floating anywhere on the internet.
But in January 2019 I did just this.
I had read about while surfing on the internet, in order to create a successful personal brand, one has to be willing to put oneself out there. I’d browsed Medium and saw people were using their names and photos. I assumed this was what I had to do if I wanted to achieve success, too. There was no alternative I thought.
I believed I would just have to get over my aversion to this required step. So I did it even though my hesitancy was waging a great internal battle.
But there is always more than one way to achieve success, I remembered.
An obvious thing, which was not so apparent to me at the time as I was trying to figure the Medium platform out.
When I hit save and it became live, in January 2019, I felt exposed although I had not written and published a single post on Medium yet. I felt the reminder of the permanence of my decision.
Though I eventually deleted it and replaced it with a brand name months later, so I would feel way more comfortable, delete was not really delete. Somewhere in their internet database, my initial Medium profile was hanging out.
When I created a twitter account in January 2019 and a pinterest account in February 2019 I copied the profile information I had in my original Medium one. Although it is not visible in a google search anymore, it is lingering on their databases, too.
I wished I’d had the more than one way to success epiphany before ever creating my original profile. Nevertheless, I have to live with this decision I made, but I have learned from it.
I had put my real life self out on these social platforms hoping it would reach individuals who might be interested in reading my weekly blog posts on Medium. It was solely to help me build a community through engagement with introverted young women millennials who share my interests.
It is not to connect with my family or my small circle of friends.
People connect with people faces. And this term “personal branding”, people putting their faces with their stories is the transition from faceless brands to face brands.
I thought putting my real photo and name out here, people will trust me. But if I hid behind a brand name, people would think I am trying to hide something.
Could I not be doing personal branding just exclusively through my stories? Is my transparency and authenticity lessened by the exclusion of a visible image of myself? Would I be making it more difficult for myself to appear legitimate to others and for people to engage with me because I am faceless and nameless? Maybe I am putting way too much thought into this and it does not matter at all.
It just felt awkward revealing and having myself on my Medium, twitter, and pinterest profile pages. I felt in the spotlight even though probably, hardly anyone even glanced at my newbie profile information.
I realized creating something which is a community, I personally think now does not rely on my name and a visual of myself. This is my experiment I hope proves right. These two elements may not be important or essential at all for building an online community.
I do not want to be known, I just desire to serve.
I want to build a community organically and not have anyone know about it. By anyone I am referring to my already established personal relationships not having any knowledge I am blogging. This would be impossible if I continued using my photo and name because as new content is published on the internet google will index it. Therefore, returned google search results for my name or any related related terms would eventually start populating posts I post across twitter, pinterest, and Medium. I want my success to be based on my content only and I believe anonymity allows me to maintain this.
I have many interests and want this to be the spotlight of myself, not my name or my appearance. Also I am not into praise and acknowledgement, so this will help me develop something, which are sharing stories in my authentic written voice. This is the primary focus.
I could care less about my name or face being known. I just want my message to resonate with individuals who are seeking a resource for inspiration, graduate student life, faith, creativity, and social and environmental consciousness. I do not have it all together, but want to write stories to share my learnings on my journeys and connect with introverted young women millennials.
All of this led me to arrive at this decision with peace in my heart and mind that I am okay with a logo being my internet representation. | https://byrslf.co/i-had-finally-created-my-first-social-media-accounts-e5fcce9d6fd5 | ['Life Not Abrupt', 'L.N.A.'] | 2020-12-14 15:44:54.966000+00:00 | ['Inspiration', 'Social Media', 'Life', 'Millennials', 'Beyourself'] |
[FREE] Read Online Wiley CIA Exam Review 2013: Part 1, Internal Audit Basics Full Pages | [FREE] Read Online Wiley CIA Exam Review 2013: Part 1, Internal Audit Basics Full Pages Vishal Sep 14, 2019·1 min read
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The most comprehensive Certified Internal Auditor Exam preparation guide available One exam, three volumes of preparation. Here is the best source to help you prepare for the Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) exam covering the new syllabus, effective 2013. Wiley CIA Exam Review, Volume 1: Internal Audit Activity’s Role in Governance, Risk, and Control addresses topics such as international standards, internal control and risk, and internal audit engagements, including audit tools and techniques.Includes fully developed theories and concepts, as opposed to superficial outlines found in other study guides Offers indicators that help candidates allot study time based on the weight given to each topic on the exam Indicates the level of difficulty expected for each topic on the exam as either “Awareness” or “Proficiency” so more time and effort can be assigned for the proficiency topics than for the awareness topics Presents highly comprehensive coverage of theory with glossary of
Download Here -> https://7library.com/book/1118120590 | https://medium.com/@vishal_53778/free-read-online-wiley-cia-exam-review-2013-part-1-internal-audit-basics-full-pages-8f7f81e0a00a | [] | 2019-09-14 10:41:38.129000+00:00 | ['Certification'] |
The Best Travel Apps and Flight Status Apps. | Travel Apps That Make Airport An Actual Joy
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For all the frequent travelers, an airport is a place that matters the most to them. An airport is just not rushing to the doors or listening to songs if the flight is delayed. Reading novels, magazines are a great company to kill time at the airport. But to make sure your wait is worth it and an airport can be an actual joy, we got something really interesting here.
Dig into the blog and get to know these 7 crazy yet quirky Travel apps that simply make an Airport an actual joy. Read on now, download the Best flight apps after reading and thank us later.
1. Google Translate
Though google translate is not a pure Travel apps, but it really helps when in a new destination. When you are in a different place with a different language, it comes to your rescue. Just to make sure what the signs and instructions at the airport indicated, just surf google translate and it gets super easy for you to understand and know what the sign means.
2. Grab
For all the food lovers, Grab is the only known food app that should be there always. Have a look at what to have, and place your order. Grab is a really famous travel apps and at the same time is also known to serve the best delectable dishes and make the airport an actual joy while searching for food and then ordering it.
3. Next Flight
Next Flight is one mostly used Travel apps. There are many times when the person is late for the flight or miss the flight or any reason. In case, you miss your flight, this app will help you out. As the name suggests, Next Flight will help you with all the next flights available to your destination.
4. My Radar
No matter what the destination is or where you are going, you can always have a weather check about the destination. My Radar is a very useful Travel apps and Best flight app that simply makes the airport joy as many people are busy checking out the temperature. It allows you to plan your vacation accordingly.
Recommended Reads: Tips For Booking Cheap Flights
5. My TSA
The long security lines can be avoided now that gives you the potential to save your time and energy with The Travel Apps. If you have My TSA application, half of your time is saved there and then. This travel apps gives intel on TSA wait time and tells you which TSA lines are the shortest and fastest at the different airports. Best flight app also lets you aware of what all things should be there in your carry on, what all you can take through the security check and what not to pack.
6. Service
Service is an app that simply eases out everything for you and makes Airport real easy and convenient for you. Not many of you know this, if a flight is delayed or canceled, often you get compensated. If your flight is delayed, canceled or even if you miss out on your luggage, there is a hassle-free solution to it if you the Service and Travel apps. They take responsibility and make sure to deal with your problems themselves. Also, in case of canceled flights, they automatically file your compensation on your behalf.
7. Airline’s App
Whatever airline you are traveling, it is always suggested to have its specific travel apps on your phone. This allows you to get complete knowledge of the airline and know about their policies and status. travel apps would also help you to know about your flight status, scanning boarding passes, flight information, upgrading on the seat and the list goes on. | https://medium.com/@sajidflightsbank/the-best-travel-apps-and-flight-status-apps-cb140358fd72 | ['Sajid Flightsbank'] | 2019-11-18 12:50:05.386000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Best Travel Apps', 'Travel Tips', 'Flight Tracker App', 'Flight Status App'] |
5 Reasons Mobile Click-to-Call is #1 (Say It Like Nacho Libre) | When we talk about mobile marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is consumers constantly talking, texting, and app-ing via their anytime-anywhere devices.
But that is only a part of mobile’s story and portrays only half of mobile’s tremendous marketing potential.
Here’s the funny thing. In addition to all the new fangled uses of smartphones, these phones are actually being used to make phone calls. (Crazy huh?)
Busy moms, dads, professionals click-to-call so they can do things on the go. So what does that mean to you and your business?
It means these mobile users will be valuable when they call your business because you get them at the right time and right place to increase revenue.
Let’s take a moment and think how valuable these mobile callers and why. Mobile is an anytime-anywhere device that provides your business with new ways to create, develop, and sustain ROI-rich relationships. Here’s why Nacho Libre thinks mobile callers are number 1.
1) They Will Be Calling the Most
As of 2012, 70% of all mobile searches result in action within 1 hour. BIA Kelsey says mobile calls to businesses will grow from 20 billion to 70 billion calls. DudaMobile reported that mobile websites generate high call volumes. This is one of the primary ways that mobile users contact businesses for relatively obvious reasons and nearly 20 percent of visits to a mobile-optimized website result in an immediate call to the business.
2) Mobile Callers are Locally Relevant
Seventeen million mobile subscribers, including 76% of the smartphone owners, used location-based check-in. A report portrays that 94% of mobile users have searched locally on their smartphones. From pizza to plumbers, 70% of searches have connected with a business after searching it.
3) Mobile Callers Are Time Relevant
70% of mobile searches lead to action within one hour. It takes one month for the same percentage of desktop users to take action. Here we have some surprising facts. An average person takes 90 minutes to respond to an email but It takes only 90 seconds to respond to a text message, 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of being delivered and 91% of all U.S. citizens have their mobile device within reach 24/7.
4) Mobile Callers Are Ready to Buy
Mobile callers are more likely to buy than any other sources. Nearly 80% of smartphone users use their phone to help with shopping, with 74% ultimately making a purchase as a result. Also mobile coupons receive 10 times higher redemption rates than print coupons.
5) Re-marketing Opportunity is AWESOME
Reports indicates that mobile ads perform 4 to 5 times better than online ads in key metrics such as brand favorability, awareness, and purchase intent. Brands using SMS and MMS can reach nearly 95% of mobile phone subscribers on both smartphones and non-smartphones alike. Additional marketing-based activities are even more popular, including receiving special offers by text message (54%) or scanning a QR code (58%).
Mobile is not just for texting, calling and app-ing but its a powerful device for you to catch your customer at the right place and time.. Stats shows that more than a third of U.S. adults own a smartphone, 95% smartphone users search for local business and customer attention span is only 7 sec long. Be ready for the mobile caller. They are number 1. | https://medium.com/call-marketing-optimization/5-reasons-mobile-click-to-call-is-1-say-it-like-nacho-libre-694f86df9d52 | ['Jonathan Rodriguez'] | 2015-08-24 20:45:29.861000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'Mobile'] |
Secure Your Future With Reliable Financial Planners | Tips To Settle On Top Financial Planning Firms
Management of finance is something a private should personally look out of; however, sometimes it becomes impossible for people to manage their finances. To help people manage their finances, there are professionals called Personal Finance Planners who can efficiently handle financial problems with people. They will help people with matters concerning insurance, investments, and budgeting. Some financial planners offer advice; however, many of them work to sell some financial products. Therefore, Top Financial Planning Firms should be selected, and here are some useful tips for selecting a planner:
Set Your Goals
When an individual wish to hunt a financial planner’s assistance, it’s better to clear himself of his objectives. He will need to decide whether he’s getting to continue his work or getting to do some business to decide on his future finance requirements. Before arriving at a choice concerning the financial planner, it’s better to urge friends and relatives about the simplest Top Financial Planning Firms. It is better not to accompany the primary found planner; rather, you’ll find some two or three planners, interview them and choose an individual who can clearly understand your financial requirements and future financial plans.
Expectations of Small Business Owners When Hiring proper Financial Planners
It is better to decide whether to urge a private personal financial planner or a firm’s assistance. When selecting a firm, for that matter, they’re going to be having quite one professional; however, the fee charged by these companies are going to be higher as compared to a private planner. Credentials of Best Financial Planners near Me can clearly explain my ability. Only licensed personnel is chosen; he will be able to supply advice on different financial topics.
It’s better to gather information beforehand concerning the fee to be paid to them. Some planners would be aggressive when it involves investing your money, while some could be conservative. Regardless of their nature, they ought to be efficient in offering advice suitable for your financial situation. After all, most folks wish to secure our hard-earned money by clearly planning our finances, and Best Financial Planners near Me offers this service to us.
Keep business owners updated with the new trends
Reliable Financial Planning Detroit can also help business owners be updated with the new financial industry trends. These updates are essential in providing better solutions for company owners. Additionally, these improvements also allow business owners to form better plans and decisions for their company. As a result, you rest assured that you simply can avoid financial risks and problems.
Provide solutions specifically for the business
Lastly, business owners hire Financial Planning Detroit to get solutions specifically for his or her business. Of course, your company features a lot of competition. However, problems in each company may differ. Planners can provide you with the proper solution to affect your business’s specific problems to assist you in creating your ventures successfully. By hiring the proper financial planning experts, business owners can make sure that the financial tasks are often done properly and efficiently. | https://medium.com/@jwellingtonfinancial66/secure-your-future-with-reliable-financial-planners-be7394c7effb | ['J. Wellington Financial'] | 2020-12-14 19:12:09.852000+00:00 | ['Detroit', 'Financial Advisor Detroit', 'Financial Planning'] |
Love Text Chemistry | How can I get him interested if he won’t even talk to me?
I knew it was coming but when I heard that question, I immediately cringed. I knew she could see it on my face. It’s the one question that I’d been trying to answer my whole career, and I’m not the only one.
Janine was one of the most beautiful, loving, intelligent women I’d ever met and I knew she was this guy’s perfect match but NONE OF THAT MATTERED because he wouldn’t even talk to her.
She was still staring at me. Tears were beginning to form in her eyes and beyond that, she was looking for answers. But I was speechless. Then something amazing happened.
I felt my phone buzz in my pocket and suddenly everything fell into place.
If you’re reading this, I know you’ve run into this problem that feels like a brick wall. I know plenty of women who found the guy of their dreams and lost him because a breakdown in communication made it impossible to get close to him.
Without fail they all eventually cut their losses. They had no choice but to move on and settle for someone else.
FOR MORE DETAILS ABOUT LOVE TEXT CHEMISTRY CLICK HERE
But you don’t have to.
Because after years of research I’ve found the foolproof way to break through this barrier.
You can send him texts that will make him feel like you’re the only woman in the world that exists because you’re the only one who truly understands him.
I can teach you the magic words that will make any guy go from just passing by to completely lovestruck in seconds.
It doesn’t have anything to do with what you look like, how smart or interesting you are, or even if you think you’ve already messed things up with him beyond repair.
You can get the man of your dreams to break the silence and go from a crush to your lifelong partner. I’m going to tell you exactly how.
I’m also going to tell you why that coaching session with Janine was the most important of my career because it unlocked a secret for me that forever changed my understanding of how women and men interact.
The answer to both of these secrets is actually the same, and it has to do with text messaging
WHAT MEN WANT OUT OF TEXTING
To understand why men text (and why they don’t) you have to understand what men want. First, stop listening to men on this subject. The truth is that men have no idea what they want. That means you can safely ignore the idea that the man you like is looking for the perfect, independent woman who loves sports and beer and will bend over backwards to please him in any way.
Think about it.
How many women do you know with huge hearts, big brains, and amazing looks that can’t seem to get a guy to stick around?
It’s because, while these things are nice, they won’t make any difference to a guy if she doesn’t give him
what he really wants. And what men really want is actually hard wired into their brains.
Men want to chase you
Playing hard to get isn’t as simple as some people make it out to be. If you’ve ever played with a cat and a string you’ll understand this principle. You need to bring the string close enough to them to get them interested but just out of their reach.
Men thrive on challenge and proving themselves. They often don’t know what to do when a good thing just falls right into their lap.
Men want to provide
Men have an innate need to provide for women. These days, this doesn’t mean that they want to bring you home a wooly mammoth but it means they want to be useful to you in some way. Whether it means giving you a ride to work, mowing your lawn or just providing you with some information, it’s important to feed these ancient provider instincts that are deep in the heart of every man.
FOR MORE DETAILS ABOUT LOVE TEXT CHEMISTRY CLICK HERE
Men want a committed relationship
Even though many women find it difficult to get a guy to settle down, that is what men actually want. It’s not that they don’t want a relationship, or even that they haven’t
met the right woman yet. It’s that the women they’ve been dating haven’t given them exactly what they want and need.
So what does any of this have to do with texting? Everything
This is actually way more important when you’re just texting a guy than when you’re seeing him face to face. In person you have access to body language, pheromones, and all the non-verbal aspects of flirting and seduction.
But when you’re texting you have to use language and verbal behaviour to get him interested.
When I applied this information to Janine’s situation, it changed everything.
First, let’s talk about Janine and Ethan. She was a graduate student in music and a virtuoso piano player. She was extremely fit and a former gymnast so she was able to put both legs behind her head without breaking a sweat.
Janine’s dream guy was Ethan. Ethan started as her hot TA in undergrad. They hit it off right away. She’d always stay after class to talk to them and more than once they ended up hanging out in the empty classroom for hours.
Then, one night, at the department mixer they were together outside the campus pub. The sun was setting and there was no one else around. Janine saw that Ethan had that look in his eyes. When he leaned in to kiss her, it was like the whole world stopped turning just for them.
Janine got his number that night and they texted a few times but, somehow, that was as far as things ever went. He’d respond to her messages a few hours late if at all.
They’d pass each other in the hallways and make small talk but every conversation was awkward and fell flat. She felt like she was talking to some distant relative.
Where was the sexy, impulsive Ethan that had held her in his arms the night of the party?
WHY MEN DON’T TEXT YOU BACK
This is the real question we have to answer to understand what is happening here and how to change it.
There are several reasons men don’t text back and they’re all very simple. He knows what you’re going to say.
FOR MORE DETAILS ABOUT LOVE TEXT CHEMISTRY CLICK HERE
Texting, like conversation is supposed to be exciting. If your every answer is predictable and boring then why should he even text you at all? If a guy is feeling this way then he has no motivation to text you back, much less ask you out again.
He doesn’t think you’re interested.
This problem comes up time and time again. Playing hard to get is important but HARD is the operative word here. Not impossible. If he thinks that you either don’t know he exists or hate his guts then why would he want to send you a text message? Make sure your teasing doesn’t cross a line.
He’s just not excited about it.
There are plenty of women I’ve talked to who say “I suck at texting”. Sorry ladies, that’s not an excuse any more.
I can tell you what to say and when to say it to make a guy dive for his phone in the middle of an
important meeting. This is the kind of excitement you need to create to keep a guy interested and excited about talking to you and seeing you as soon as possible.
When I felt my phone buzz in my pocket that day with Janine, it hit me like a bolt of lightning: I’d been ignoring the very thing that was the key to helping her win Ethan’s heart, and the very reason that he’d cooled off in the first place. The answer was in her phone.
Texts Men HATE
This is where we get into the juicy stuff. Not only are there texts that can make any man yours with just a few taps, there are a few that turn off almost every guy and make him want to delete your number. And they’re frighteningly common. I bet you’ve sent a few of these yourself.
FOR MORE DETAILS ABOUT LOVE TEXT CHEMISTRY CLICK HERE | https://medium.com/@amaan302015/love-text-chemistry-4ed85f3e00cc | [] | 2020-09-23 15:05:58.151000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Quotes', 'Love Yourself', 'Lovestory', 'Love'] |
PART TWO: Embracing our truths; Reflections a year after the death of George Floyd | BLOG SERIES
Last May the death of George Floyd stung many across the country and around the world. Although incidents of racial injustice are not novel, the timing of Floyd’s murder in the midst of a global pandemic and economic uncertainty brought new pain. Fortunately, they also sparked deeper conversations at home and in the workplace. Like many other companies, we at Equinox Media were challenged to examine our own record both internally and in the larger community we serve. This process has been rewarding, difficult, at times uncomfortable, but necessary. In a 4-part blog series we give you a look into how we at Equinox Media have been affected by the murder of George Floyd as well as how we hope to be a part of affecting longlasting change toward racial justice.
PART TWO: OUR DE&I EFFORTS
Written by: Madeleine Merchant
Following the murder of George Floyd last summer, there was a collective urgency around diversity, equity and inclusion — especially among US corporations. We at Equinox Media saw this as a moment of hope and an opportunity to reckon the past and the future. Recognizing Black people in this country have been fighting against systemic racism and racial terror for centuries, we hope that the collective response to George Floyd’s death is not just a moment, but a movement. And that the momentum from the Black Lives Matter movement could be a catalyst for deep, meaningful, and long-lasting change — not only at Equinox Media, but more broadly across every industry and organization in this country.
As the Equinox Media leadership team met following George Floyd’s murder, there was a desire to move quickly. To roll out a plan, to respond immediately, to rush to action. It was hard not to get caught up in that, but the more we spoke to each other and others across the organization, we realized we needed to slow down and make sure that anything we rolled out was not reactionary, but thoughtful and foundational. We wanted to ensure that we were building DE&I and anti-racist practices into the DNA of this young organization.
To begin, we shined the light on ourselves. We recognized that we had to continue to “fix our house before we attempted to fix the neighborhood.” While we were extremely proud of what we were building together and the importance we had placed on diversity, equity and inclusion in our first year of existence, this movement challenged us to acknowledge where we needed to do better, and to be better so we could work urgently on steps to improve.
As we approach DE&I across the organization, we used a framework focused on four pillars: compositional diversity, cultural competency, inclusion and accountability. In the past year we’ve invested in each of these pillars in a number of ways:
Compositional diversity — By re-examining our recruiting processes and broadening our partnerships, we’ve significantly improved Black representation across our organization.
— By re-examining our recruiting processes and broadening our partnerships, we’ve significantly improved Black representation across our organization. Cultural competency — We’ve created robust programming and forums to foster tough conversations. In the past year we’ve celebrated, educated, and elevated Black culture and diversity through nearly 50 DE&I events including, Juneteenth, Women’s History Month, Black History Month, AAPI Heritage month, and Pride.
— We’ve created robust programming and forums to foster tough conversations. In the past year we’ve celebrated, educated, and elevated Black culture and diversity through nearly 50 DE&I events including, Juneteenth, Women’s History Month, Black History Month, AAPI Heritage month, and Pride. Inclusion — In addition to creating programming, we’ve also rolled out manager trainings for more than 40 of our people managers, launched a mentorship program, and created six employee resource groups (ERGs), including “Black at Equinox Media.” We want inclusion to permeate our culture at every level.
— In addition to creating programming, we’ve also rolled out manager trainings for more than 40 of our people managers, launched a mentorship program, and created six employee resource groups (ERGs), including “Black at Equinox Media.” We want inclusion to permeate our culture at every level. Accountability — We created a number of explicit commitments to our teams that we report on each six months.
Although this work is never enough, and never done, we are proud of the foundational work we have begun this past year and are excited to continue investing in these pillars. | https://medium.com/equinox-media-tech/embracing-our-truths-reflections-a-year-after-the-death-of-george-floyd-52d5a12002a9 | ['Equinox Media Technology Blog'] | 2021-06-09 22:09:46.938000+00:00 | ['Justice', 'Blm', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'George Floyd'] |
Happy Holidays: Gift Yourself A Break | Job hunting, during a “normal” year, is an enduring, tedious, and, at times, humiliating process. Job hunting in 2020 is all of that, plus being sensitive towards employers dealing with the pandemic, understanding the weight and magnitude of unemployment and how you fit into it, etc. Plus, if you’re like me and looking for an entry level job for which you are qualified via certification, the applicant pool and competition is steep.
Job hunting in 2020 during the holiday season? Forget about it.
I haven’t written much about my academic expertise or previous professional field due to the sheer fact that I find them inherently disparate to what I’m looking for now. I was an American Studies/Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies scholar in college, and went on to work at some lovely nonprofits the year after graduating. Aside from writing, this line of work doesn’t put as much emphasis on hard skills as the tech industry does. What’s important in the nonprofit world is the ability to relate to others — finding similarities between different communities; being able to translate what someone wants into action; creating the best way to reach those who you wouldn’t reach normally; and so on and so forth.
Although a shift to more balanced priorities is definitely in the works, the tech world values hard skills over soft skills, and for good reason, too. When hiring a programmer, employers are usually looking for a solid grasp and understanding of computer science theories and an expertise in one or two programming languages.
What I’ve come to realize, though, is that you actually do need soft skills to excel in the tech industry. Sure, you need to learn and deeply understand at least one language, but once you do, the possibilities for yourself are endless, as long as you keep your critical thinking, ability to find similarities, and adaptive nature sharp. The ability to solve problems intuitively and the capacity to adapt what I know to what I have to accomplish are all skills I developed without a BS in computer science.
Why is this related to the job hunt, you might ask? Because, if you’re shifting career paths like me, you might feel like your previous experience is worthless; I felt that way, too. This past month I was able to understand that it’s not worthless, but it actually makes me a more interesting and dynamic candidate. I wouldn’t have been able to make this realization without giving myself a week’s worth of rest and reflection, considering where I’ve been, how it’s shaped me, and what the current version of myself can offer to the tech industry.
Not only can I master any language I set my mind to, but I also have the ability to speak about it and its inner workings with others. Sure, I can iterate through an array to find the largest number, but I can also take that algorithm and adapt it to an entirely different situation, based purely off of minute similarities between the two problems. My communication, collaborative, and problem solving skills are important to any industry, and so are yours.
So, this pandemic-holiday-season, gift yourself a break. Whether that means a full-week hiatus, like myself, or giving yourself more slack than usual, take the time to acknowledge just how far you’ve come. | https://medium.com/@rebecca-ap-rosenberg/happy-holidays-gift-yourself-a-break-bd9ab1b0a7c0 | ['Rebecca Rosenberg'] | 2020-12-15 17:03:10.511000+00:00 | ['Job Hunting', 'Job Hunt Tips'] |
Working for Free Needs to End | Working for Free Needs to End
Photo by Studio Republic on Unsplash
When I first saw this tweet by US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last year, I thought that there finally would be a labor movement to stop unpaid internships. But upon seeing some of the responses, I realized that the United States has an uphill battle. However, we aren’t the only ones.
Beth Kirkbride, founder of The Indiependent, is in the UK and just tweeted a thread about writing for free. She delves into the costs for running her publication, the angst and dismissiveness from paid professionals as well as the appreciation by journalists new to the field.
My own journey includes unpaid internships, but the lack of change mixed with archaic excuses for keeping such traditions is frustrating. Work is work, and it should be paid.
After college, I worked at a professional theatre for six months as an unpaid intern. That experience didn’t grant me special access into another theatre job. Instead, I worked at a Blockbuster (it was 1998) for six months as I stayed with my sister, and then I returned home to my parents.
I later returned to professional theatre, starting again with an unpaid internship (though housing was provided). I worked in theatre for five years, but the internships didn’t assist me — it was the fact that I didn’t say “no.” During the two busiest years, I didn’t even get two full weeks off. I was constantly working, and I burned out.
A few years later, my father offered to bring me into the business he had built over the decades. But he didn’t want to pay me. My own father used the excuse that his knowledge and the experience would benefit me and therefore didn’t need to pay me. I quickly stopped working for him.
Twenty years later I earned my second master’s degree, this time in journalism. The professors in the program pushed for internships — unpaid internships. In other words, students would pay tuition to have the opportunity to work for free. The rationalization is that the student would earn a degree as well as gain experience. In reality, it’s an academic institution taking money for services they are not providing while the student provides their service to a business for free.
This needs to stop.
As The Washington Post reported, CEO earnings keep going up — so why is unpaid work still okay? Clearly there is money to be paid to those truly doing the work.
When I was a union president, I thought that the unpaid internship was a domestic issues and low wages a global issue. But now I understand that both are a global issue. The notion that such a system needs to exist is a lie, and it’s a hopeful sign that the next generation is angry and willing to fight to get rid of it.
However, the ability to express one’s self and practice one’s passion should not be dissuaded. People such as Beth Kirkbride provide a platform for others to do this and she should be applauded for her efforts. I wish my own colleagues in my master’s program had such enthusiasm to lift each other up while fighting an oppressive system. | https://medium.com/not-all-there-publication/working-for-free-needs-to-end-1742a77c3f34 | ['Jeff Ehren'] | 2020-12-08 16:01:37.254000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Alexandria Ocasio Cortez', 'Internships', 'Progress', 'Unpaid Internships'] |
Divine Justice: Majesty in the Margins | In full disclosure, this is not a book I would normally read; I rarely read popular religious titles nor do I read history and this book is both. Why did I buy both the Audible and Kindle versions of the book? The author asked me to read it, and he is a friend. I purchased the Audible version because I prefer to listen when I can, and I purchased a Kindle version because I wanted access to the 60 plus illustrations. I found the story of the “Wise Thief” intriguing and the storytelling by the author compelling.
After partially reading the book I queried the author on his reason for taking on such an arduous task as telling the story of the Penitent Thief. Mark’s response was, “I have long been fascinated by Dismas as I see him as a symbol of hope for those who have transgressed in diverse ways. I find it fascinating (and deeply moving) that he did not ask to be saved, merely to be remembered.” That put the story and storytelling in context. The author reaches back into history for a story of divine justice in a time when social justice is needed.
The orator in the Audible version shares with us the biblical and historical sources of the story of the “Good Thief” from diverse voices. The moment of redemption is told with an emphasis on grace and divine justice. During several moments in the book we almost feel the pain of the three on the cross; see the gruesome Crucifixion, and are asked where would we be in these mystical witnesses of Jews and Gentiles?
The author tells a compelling story of the relationship between St Dismas and worldwide prison ministries. Examples are cited of support for those who are in the margins of society needing grace and support to live rehabilitated lives. Perhaps the takeaway from this unique book is that in the “Paradise” of our own existence we can become believers in the “goodness” of humanity.
While I purchased both formats, it is in the Kindle version that I appreciated the many visual illustrations of the divine justice moment. This is a book that is worth time and reflection for all on our moments of grace and the life to come.
As 2020 comes to a close, and we globally have suffered many losses, reflection on books that remind us that we are all flawed, hurt, and have suffered pain in many ways help us to define, re-frame, and build a better future. As we look forward to 2021 we might learn from the patron saint of prisons to ask to be remembered for the moments that give us peace and tranquility as we cross over to the uncertainty of a new beginning. | https://medium.com/@jdrolle/divine-justice-majesty-in-the-margins-a8e6d564d7b2 | ['Joann Rolle'] | 2020-12-22 14:34:10.213000+00:00 | ['Penitent Thief On Cross', 'Crucifixion', 'Christianity', 'Prison Reform', 'Christian'] |
Announcement No. 26: Vietnam Launch | Dear users,
We have always emphasised on going global with BNS. And for an icon to be recognised globally, the first step is cross-border expansion. Apart from being India’s largest crypto exchange, Bitbns facilitates crypto trading in 4 more countries — UAE, Thailand, USA and the latest one was Indonesia.
Announcement №26 adds a 5th name to the list — Vietnam! Yes, Bitbns is launching its services in Vietnam effectively from today.
In terms of ease of crypto trading and holding, Vietnam has been one of the crypto-friendly countries with no restrictions on trading or hodling of digital assets. In fact, a couple of months back, Vietnam government even established a research group to evaluate policies for these digital currencies. Since the very beginning of our crypto journey, we knew we had to be here. Just a reminder, our long-term roadmap of global expansion includes extending our services to 30+ countries, and with the insights we collect from the Indonesian and Vietnamese markets, the Asian part of the mission seems closer.
Initially, we are launching VND/USDT pair, through which our users in Vietnam can buy USDT right away using their FIAT currency VND. We decided to launch with USDT pair because a lot of users from this region already trade on Bitbns in USDT markets. Plus, USDT can readily be used for trading over 80 cryptocurrencies on Bitbns.
Over the coming months, we have a plan in place to boost the Vietnam launch, where we will collaborate with the most renowned brands for driving more users. Starting today, Vietnam folks can start depositing VND, get USDT against it, trade on USDT markets, and withdraw VND straight to their bank accounts.
Belong from Vietnam? Sign up, complete KYC, and start trading!
Join our Telegram community here: https://t.me/bitbnsidr
Onwards and upwards towards the future of finance
Team Bitbns | https://medium.com/bitbns/announcement-no-26-vietnam-launch-c84628051cce | [] | 2020-09-03 10:38:34.912000+00:00 | ['Vietnam', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Cryptocurrency News'] |
Read delicious books | I’ve had two different friends reach out to me recently saying they really want to get into (or back into) reading this year. One said she knows she loves to read, but hasn’t finished a book in a long time. The other has a lot of half-finished books on her nightstand but keeps falling asleep.
Welcome to the rut. It’s real for people who once loved to read and people who always meant to discover their passion for reading. I know lots of people who like the idea of reading. They buy books and want to talk about it, but they also aren’t motivated to finish a book. That’s not my style, but I get it. I have those really good intentions and very little follow through in plenty of other areas of my life.
I told both friends the same thing- find a delicious book.
Don’t worry about the current book club pick or the business book you *should* be reading or the classic that you never got around to in high school. Those will come in time.
You need something irresistible to jump start your reading and it’s very likely that might be something easy or silly or paperback. To rekindle the flame and rebuild or establish the habit in the first place, you have to find a book you don’t want to put down.
A series would be even better so you’re ready to grab another as soon as you put down the first.
You need to want it. You need a book that will keep you up past your bedtime and have you reading instead of scrolling when you’re waiting at the dentist’s office. Get one you’ll gobble up, even if it’s not high brow.
Let the book draw you in, instead of carving out time to read everyday like a chore.
We do this with TV, and it’s called binging. I think that’s an unhealthy word for an unhealthy practice, but I’m guilty of doing it with books. I’m hungry for more info, more drama, more story. It’s not about the writing or the craftiness (usually), it’s more about more.
Get a book to binge. Eww, still don’t like that word. Find something you’re hungry for, even if it’s not on your nightstand yet.
I suggest some YA (Young Adult). It’s written at a lower reading level, so it’s going to read faster than that Pulitzer-winning novel you can’t seem to finish. There is so much out there right now. They aren’t all dystopian fantasy- although there’s tons of that if you love it. I fly through these and love to think about what 15-year-old Shannon would feel when reading them.
If that’s not your speed, have you ever read romance? As a genre, it’s not given much respect but don’t be shy. There are all different levels of spice, but as a whole they are quick reads. Get a recommendation since it’s a huge genre, I’m sure there are some duds.
If you’re looking not ready for romance, get as close as possible. I hate calling this “Chick Lit” because that is rude. Many of these are love stories with happy endings (does that technically make them Romance? I don’t know). Can I call them RomComs? I know that’s a movie term, but I think we can bring it to reading too. The books are lovable usually because the characters are so stinking lovable.
The last corner of the bookstore I’ll suggest is suspense or thrillers. Some of these are so good you HAVE to turn pages as quick as you possibly can read to figure out who the killer is or if they’ll survive the chase. These are often the reason I show up to work looking rough after a late night finishing “one more chapter.”
I guess the main thing I want to emphasize is that if you’re reading for fun, it should be, well, fun. No one should be pressured into lofty, old or hard books. Read what you like. I like a toughy now and then, but I’m going to sandwich it with lighter, faster novels.
I don’t mean to belittle any of the genres mentioned above or books listed below. They are great! I read them and enjoyed it, hence why I am suggesting them to you. It’s ok that they aren’t being discussed at length on NPR or in your book club. I’ve found that high brow stuff doesn’t read fast enough for me when I’m in a rut.
Some suggestions to get you started:
YA
Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling- Even if you read it as a kid, it’s fun and good and fast!
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins — Maybe another reread, maybe you saw the movie, but the books are quickies.
Pawn (and the Blackcoat Rebellion series) by Aimee Carter- This is similar to Hunger Games in my mind. I read the whole series in a couple days.
On the Come Up and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas- Calling these YA is both true and unfair. They both deal with some big topics, but from a teen perspective.
Tell Me Three Things by Julie Buxbaum- This is a teen love story that is partly told through emails and gchat.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han- Honestly, it’s so cute I could squeal. I love the treatment of the sisters in this one.
Romance
The Duke and I by Julia Quinn- Have you ever read romance before? My friend Julie talked me into this and I read the whole series so fast. She really builds up the tension and gives you just enough steamy scenes to keep you coming back.
Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston- This is another romance novel, but about two gay men. It’s funny and heartwarming, I promise.
RomComs
Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes- This one will probably be a Netflix Original Movie in the next year. It’s lovable because you want the characters to win so badly.
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan- This is just plain fun. Also, a love story, but mixed with travel and in-law drama.
The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory- More great characters in a silly set-up involving a wedding, naturally.
Seven Days of Us Francesca Hornak- This is more about a family lock-in than a love story. You know all these people.
Suspense
Timeline by Michael Crichton- This author is one of my all time favorites, and this is the fastest one. Jurassic Park is also wonderful.
Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter- All of Karin Slaughter’s stories are MESSED UP, but in the best way.
Dark Matter by Black Crouch- This one is so quick you and your husband can both read it and still get it back to the library a week early. | https://medium.com/booked-solid/read-delicious-books-634f42d333a | ['Shannon Whitney'] | 2020-01-16 19:25:57.275000+00:00 | ['Readinglist', 'Book Review', 'Books', 'Reading', 'Book Recommendations'] |
Creating a React Calendar Component: Part 3 | Section 1: Styling the calendar header using Flexbox
Before we begin, let’s add some CSS to the main BaeCalendar component so we can see it on the browser and normalize some HTML element styles.
.bae-calendar-container {
box-sizing: border-box;
box-shadow: 0 0 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
height: 100%;
width: 100%; h1,
h2,
h3,
h4,
h5,
h6,
p {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
line-height: 1;
font-family: 'Varela Round', sans-serif;
}
}
As you can see, elements with a class called bae-calendar-container is given a 100% height and width of its parent element. This allows any users importing the component to wrap it in a different container so they can specify the height and width themselves. For now, it will take on the body element's height and width property so we can see it on the browser.
Aside from this, you’ll notice that we are taking advantage of SASS’s capability of nesting to style the h1, h2, h3... elements to normalize its default styles. Without going into great detail, nesting will translate this into a CSS code that will look like this:
.bae-calendar-container h1, .bae-calendar-container h2 {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
line-height: 1;
font-family: 'Varela Round', sans-serif;
}
// And so on...
Above is the component with no styling that we will transform into the following.
Let’s take a moment to look at the HTML layout of the CalendarHeader component.
<div className="bae-calendar-header">
<div className="left-container">
<h1>{getReadableWeekday(selectDate)}</h1>
<h1>{getReadableMonthDate(selectDate)}</h1>
</div>
<div className="right-container">
<h3>{getYear(selectDate)}</h3>
</div>
</div>
All of the elements we see here are block elements which by definition is an element that starts a new line. So how do we end up with 2 columns? Thankfully, flexbox is a very useful CSS property we can take advantage of.
.bae-calendar-header {
display: flex;
}
The display: flex property defines an element to act like a flex element. A flex element acts differently. Essentially, the outer element is still a block element, but any inner elements take on a more fluid form. Unless display: flex is specified, we're not able to apply any other flex based CSS properties.
Here is an example of the component with display: flex .
Notice how the inner elements are no longer acting as block elements? The container itself wrapping the contents will maintain its block behavior, but this gives us freedom to control the layout of the inner elements. Let's make it so that the readable dates and the years end up on opposite sides by adding justify-content: space-between .
.bae-calendar-header {
display: flex;
justify-content: space-between;
}
Self-explanatory right? When flex is in a row format (e.g. left-container and right-container ), justify-content modifies the horizontal layout. Keep in mind, that if you are working with a flex element in a column format, justify-content will follow the new change and affect the vertical layout. The option we provide space-between does exactly what the name states. It provides an even spacing between all elements, but no spacing on the edges.
We’re making progress, but let’s see if we can provide some space to the edges and a border to show where the CalendarHeader component ends.
.bae-calendar-header {
padding: 15px;
box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
display: flex;
justify-content: space-between;
} | https://medium.com/dev-genius/creating-a-react-calendar-component-part-3-a69740dd8d43 | ['Elbert Bae'] | 2020-07-12 22:09:59.780000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'CSS', 'React', 'Sass'] |
Upcoming Graphene Airdrop Updates | As we await the release of the most exceptional and versatile Blockchain in the world, with a progressive Blockchain engineering that utilizes sharding technology. The expected uses for Graphene are boundless, Graphene can uphold complex decentralized applications (dApps), plans of action, and allow the creation of customized shards that are optimized for different use cases.
There will be 6 Snapshots taken at different times as follows:
1st Snapshot will account for 16.66% of the Graphene supply.
2nd Snapshot will account for 16.66% of the Graphene supply.
3rd Snapshot will account for 16.66% of the Graphene supply.
4th Snapshot will account for 16.66% of the Graphene supply.
5th Snapshot will account for 16.66% of the Graphene supply.
6th Snapshot will account for 16.7% of the Graphene supply.
As we await the unveiling of Graphene make sure to buy and hold $PHR in your wallet to participate in the upcoming Graphene Airdrop.
For more information on Graphene works read this article:https://getgraphene.medium.com/graphene-airdrop-information-7214f101cb36
#Phore #Grapnene #Airdrop | https://medium.com/@awosmp/upcoming-graphene-airdrop-updates-dbb13a10be9d | [] | 2020-12-19 17:03:27.282000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Phore', 'Phorecrypto', 'Airdrop'] |
Exponentially Weighted Average for Deep Neural Networks | This algorithm is one of the most important algorithms currently in usage. From financial time series, signal processing to neural networks, it is being used quite extensively. Basically, any data that is in a sequence.
This algorithm has been mostly used to reduce the noisy time-series data. It’s also called “smoothing” the data.
The way we achieve this is by essentially weighing the number of observations and using their average. This is called as Moving Average.
Example: Temperature θt over days, calculate the moving averages
Math Notation “sub: subscript”, “sup: superscript”
Vt: Moving average value at day ‘t’
Vsub00 = 0
Vsub1=0.9Vsub0+0.1θsub1
Vsub1=0.9Vsub1+0.1θsub2
..
Vt=0.9Vt−1+0.1θt
if β = 0.9
Vt=βVt−1+(1−β)θt
What does and means
Vt: averaging over 1/1−β days (approx)
For ex. , For β =0.9, 1/1−β~=10 ;
β = 0.9 averages over 10 days (smooth curve: Red Line)
For β =0.98, ~=50 ;
β = 0.98 averages over 50 days (smoother curve: Green Line) — Not very accurate representation
For β =0.5, ~=2 ;
β = 0.5 averages over 2 days (alterations: Yellow Line) — Much more noisy
The right value of is β calculated using HyperParameter Tuning
Going backwards from V100,
Vsub100 = 0.1θsub100 + 0.9Vsub99
Vsub99 = 0.1θsub99 + 0.9Vsub98
Substituting Vsub99,
Vsub100 = 0.1θsub100 + 0.9(0.1θsub99 + 0.9Vsub98)
or, Vsub100 = 0.1θsub100 + 0.9(0.1θsub99 + 0.9(0.1θsub98 + 0.9Vsub97))
Generalizing,
Vsub100 = 0.1θsub100 + 0.1∗0.9∗θsub99 + 0.1∗(0.9)²θsub98 + 0.1∗(0.9)³θsub97 + 0.1∗(0.9)⁴θsub96+…..
Vsub100 is basically an element-wise computation of two metrics/functions — one an exponential decay function containing diminishing values (0.9, 0.9²², 0.⁹³, ……and another with all the elements of θt.
Implementing Exponentially Weighted Average
Vsubθ: v is computing exponentially weighted average of parameter θ.
day 0: Vsubθ = 0 day 1: Vsubθ=βv+(1−β)θsub1
day 2: Vsubθ = βv+(1−β)θsub2
…
Algorithms: Vsubθ =0 Repeat: {
Get next θt
Vθ := βVsubθ+(1−β)θt
}
Single line implementation for fast and efficient calculation of exponentially weighted moving average.
Bias Correction in Exponentially Weighted Moving Average
Making EWMA more accurate — Since the curve starts from 0, there are not many values to average on in the initial days. Thus, the curve is lower than the correct value initially and then moves in line with expected values.
Figure: The ideal curve should be the GREEN one, but it starts as the PURPLE curve since the values initially are zero
Example: Starting from t=0 and moving forward,
Vsub0 = 0Vsub1 = 0.98Vsub 0+0.02θsub1 = 0.020θsub1
Vsub2 = 0.98Vsub1 + 0.02θsub2 = 0.0196θsub1+0.02θsub2
The initial values of Vt will be very low which need to be compensated.
Make Vt = Vt/1−βsupt
for t=2, 1−βsupt= 1−0.9⁸² = 0.0396 (Bias Correction Factor)
Vsub2 = V2/0.0396 = 0.0196θsub1 + 0.02θsub2 / 0.0396
When t is large, 1/1−βsupt =1, hence bias correction factor has no effect when t is sufficiently large.
Credits:
Andrew Ng | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/exponentially-weighted-average-for-deep-neural-networks-39873b8230e9 | [] | 2020-01-10 13:17:20.580000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
Thanks for yet another story on Writing. | Thanks for yet another story on Writing.
But Mayank, disappointed at not getting some guidance I had sought from you in my earlier comment, even after you posted 2 new stories on same subject thereafter !
I had hoped you would have covered them in your following post(s). I guess other readers who clapped on my comment & follow you, also expect this.
Time you begin, Sir, going into specifics and nitty-gritty of the topics & ideas you deal in your stories, to better help admirers
Like mountaineering students dreaming to climb the Everest, need first to reach the base camp -no less tricky block. Wish you become that Sherpa :) | https://medium.com/@faengvykm/thanks-for-yet-another-story-on-writing-827b0d56b28a | ['Mahesh Shroff'] | 2020-12-13 18:57:10.473000+00:00 | ['Writing Life', 'Writing Challenge', 'Writing Tips', 'Ｍedium', 'Writing'] |
50 Best Political Science Project Topics in PDF 2021 | Free political science project topics and research materials in PDF download for final year undergraduate and postgraduate students 2020 and 2021. NCE, BSC, MSC, PGD, and Ph.D.
Searching for comprehensive topics in political science? Do you need well researched and approved project topics? If you do, this platform would guide you through, with materials that include abstract, table of content, chapters 1 to 5, references, and questionnaires. See the link below!
CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL TOPICS WITH MATERIALS>>
List of Free Project Topics In Political Science
1. Counterinsurgency In Northern Eastern Nigeria 2009 Till Date
2. Youths and Post-Military Democracy In Nigeria
3. An Appraisal Of The Transnational Cooperation And The Niger — Delta Region On Peace
4. Domestication Of International Terrorism In Nigeria: Study Of Boko Haram And Niger Delta Insurgencies, 2000–2012
5. Voter’s Turnout and Democratic Consolidation: A Case Study Of 2015/2019
6. Conflict Resolution Strategies and Headteachers Administrative Effectiveness In Ikot Ekpene Local Government Area
7. Ecowas Protocol On Free Movement Of Persons, Residence And Establishments: Implications For West African Security (1999–2018)
8. The Use Of Social Media In Political Mobilization During The 2019 General Election In Nigeria
9. The Role Of U.S. In World Affairs After Sept 911 A Case Study Of African Politics
10. Legislative Oversight And Good Governance In Plateau State
11. Formation Of Political Parties And Ideology In Nigeria: Comparative Analysis Of APC And PDP
12. The Effect Of Vandalization On Socio Economy Development A Case Study Of Kwara State
13. The Policy Of Privatization And Commercialization Of Public Enterprises In Nigeria: An Appraisal Of Telecommunication
14. The Role Of Private Agencies In The Promotion Of Mass Literacy (A Case Study Of Oredo Local Government Area, Benin City)
15. The Niger Delta Crisis, It’S Impact On Nigerian’S National Security
16. Gender Inequality And Women Participation In Politics: The Nigeria Experience
17. An Appraisal Of The Role Of The Government In Poverty Alleviation In Nigeria
18. The Politicization Of Religion In Northern Nigeria And Its Effects On The Nigeria Federalism
19. Marginalization And Youth Unrest In The Niger-Delta Region Of Nigeria
20. Godfatherism And Political Conflict In Nigeria An Opinion Survey Of Voters In Oredo Local Government Area, Edo State
21. The Influence Of Godfatherism In Nigeria Politics In The Fourth Republic (The Role Of Education)
22. Political Development In Nigeria
23. The Relevance Of Traditional Rulers In Contemporary Nigeria As Governance
24. Nigerian Foreign Policy Under General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida
25. Effect Of Political Instability On Implementation Of Nigeria Policy On Secondary School Education
26. The Socio-economic Implication Of The Boko-haram Insurgence In Nigeria
27. Resource Control Agitations And Political Stability In Nigeria (a Case Study Of South-south)
28. Public Policy And Grass Root Development In Nigeria
29. Revenue Allocation And Political Stability In Nigeria
30. The Impact Of Public Opinion On Public Policy In Nigeria: An Appraisal Of 2010–2012
31. Contributions Of Multi-party System In Nigeria Political Development
32. Godfatherism And Electoral Polities In Nigeria
33. A History Of Corruption In Nigeria From 1979–2015
34. Nigeria Judicial System, Problem And The Way Out
35. Impact Of Leadership Crisis On Nigeria National Development Of Fourth Republic
36. Insecurity, A Threat To National Development
37. Federal Character/Quota System And Productivity Of Nigeria Public Service: A Study Of National Planning Commission, 2004–2014
38. Political Elites And Development Crisis In Nigeria.A Case Study Of Southern Ijaw Lga Of Bayelsa State
39. Democracy And Political Participation In Nigeria ( A Case Study Of Asaba, LGA)
40. Federalism And The Problem Of Minority Question 2007–2014
41. Inec And Challenges Of Monitoring Political Party Campaign Financing In Nigeria
42. The Effect Of Card Readers On Election Credibility In Nigeria
43. The Effect Of Language Of Propaganda On Persuading Voters In Nigeria: A Study Of Adamawa State
44. Godfatherism And Credible Electoral Process (The Case Study Of Imo State)
45. The Electoral Process And National Security In Nigeria: A Comparative Study Of The 2011 And 2015 Elections
46. Efcc And Fight Against Money Laundering In Nigeria Between 2013 And 2016
47. Nigerian Government And Politics (A Case Study Of 1999–2007 Politics)
48. The Functions Of Local Government In Rural Development
49. The Structure Of Nigerian Government And Politics
50. The Impact Of Local Government In The Society
CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE TOPICS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
In Conclusion
These political science project topics PDF above are the best topics from 2020 to 2021. we also have their complete materials ready for instant download. | https://medium.com/@projectpdf24/50-best-political-science-project-topics-in-pdf-2021-ae8f8c34ce18 | [] | 2020-12-12 09:50:45.529000+00:00 | ['Final Year Projects', 'Political Science', 'Final Year Project Topics', 'Projects', 'Project Topics'] |
Think as… a Dev | From QAs to QAs & Software Developers
In the day to day of a Software QA Engineer, many ideas make our tech skills grow; ideas that come to us through courses, webinars, workshops, or simply from experience. This new knowledge enables us to be more effective as we learn different test approaches, testing techniques, or new methodologies. We are referring to practices such as Shift Left or Continuous Quality, but in this article, we want to let you know about a new paradigm, a new challenge. Maybe you have heard of it before; it’s not new, but certainly, it is gaining more and more attention, especially when working with high-performance teams.
We are talking about the developer side of a QA. In this article, we want to explore how we can take that side and leverage it, how to take advantage of it, and how to use it to improve the QA process in high-performance teams.
Where does this idea come from?
Nowadays, even in small companies and small projects, it is pretty common to have a QA mindset spread across every team member, especially when working on interdisciplinary teams. That means every member is involved in the QA process and has a responsibility for the product under development. This mindset has several advantages while creating software because it enables developers to think in test scenarios rather than just checking that the software works.
But… Why not think the other way around as well? Why not ask QA Engineers to have a developer mindset? Hmm… interesting! This brings us to a new door, and several questions come up, such as:
How much can a QA Engineer think as a Developer?
What does a QA Engineer have to do to achieve this new goal?
What do developers think about it?
What are the challenges QA Engineers are going to face in this practice?
To respond to such interesting questions, we gave ourselves the task of collecting data from different sources, such as doing interviews with frontend and backend developers, tech leads, discipline leads, digging on the internet, and putting our experience on paper.
Why thinking as a Dev is important?
If you are a Developer, you know how easy it is to have a conflict or a misunderstanding with a tester; indeed, this is expected. Both have different mindsets, and each perspective fulfills a skill required to achieve a high-quality product.
Even though both, Developers and QAs, have the technical knowledge, it is sometimes difficult to identify the root cause of an issue and its consequences. Let’s read about a funny experience that can help us learn about a common situation that occurs in our daily work:
“One day, I was trying to merge my changes, but the test in the QA environment was failing. However, the same testing scenario was successful in the dev environment, so I decided to reproduce the same steps manually in QA environment, they worked fine. The error code returned by the automated pipeline indicated that the issue was related to the code, so I am supposed to fix it, but there was nothing to fix from my side!”
Natalia Puente del Valle | Application Management Engineer
In this example, we can clearly see how easy it is to fall into a situation where we are doubtful about many things, and the reasons are numerous:
The lack of information when a bug ticket is raised.
Different configurations exist in different environments.
Third-party software is failing.
The steps to reproduce the issue may be different among environments.
Preconditions may not be clear enough.
A module of the system is having an outage.
The Think as a Dev practice intends to provide more tools and knowledge to QA members. In this way, they can help at each stage of the SDLC in tasks such as finding bugs as early as possible, enabling the technical team to increase their productivity, reducing risks, and, why not, even proposing out of the box ideas.
“It would help that QAs have a deep enough understanding of the code so that they can detect the weakest parts of the system and are able to test them.”
Joaquín Bravo | Engineering Discipline Lead
Advantages and disadvantages of thinking as a Dev
As with everything in the world, there are good and bad things that we need to take into consideration when starting a new practice, so, let’s discuss the advantages and disadvantages we can face:
Advantages
Thinking as a Dev may be really helpful for QAs; it gives a clear idea of what and how to test. Some of the advantages are:
Understanding the code makes it much easier to help the Developer find issues earlier.
QA gets enabled and helps to take better technical decisions.
Two eyes are now available to do static analysis by doing PR reviews when needed.
It gives the QA a better idea of where the weak points of the system are.
Less lack of communication between Devs and QAs as they start working closely.
Getting familiar with the architecture helps the QA to make better tests.
Better estimations can be made during the grooming sessions because the QA has a wider view.
QAs help to reduce debugging time because they provide better and more accurate info.
“A QA Engineer can contribute like any Developer in the team.”
Victor García | Software Engineer
Disadvantages
However, thinking as a Dev might have some consequences for the QA team. The following are some of the disadvantages that we have to consider:
The QA might try to test many things and pay little attention to the essential stuff.
The QA might face a high learning curve. It’s hard to juggle learning specific project technologies and creating manual/automated tests.
As you noticed, there are more advantages than disadvantages, which means this practice is a GOOD option if we want to go further and move the QA process to the NEXT LEVEL.
OK, we want to go further… What is the first step?
First of all, we need to understand the following…
→ What are the challenges in this journey?
QA challenges in Thinking as a Dev include:
As different points of view exist, communication between Developers and QAs can become challenging.
A QA Engineer might not have the same Developer’s expertise in using a specific technology or programming language.
A QA Engineer might not be familiar with many of the technical terms and coding methodologies.
It’s hard for a QA to allocate time to understand the technologies, architecture, languages, etc. and at the same time maintain their current responsibilities.
→ What are some terms and concepts used by Developers?
Developers often use some terms and concepts that the QA engineer might not be familiar with., That’s why it is important to start looking more into them.
The first concept is Technical Debt and it is the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over good code creation. When an already working functionality needs to be refactored because it was not properly coded, we are talking about technical debt.
To start thinking as a Dev, it is also important to keep in mind the techniques and principles of clean code, such as:
KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
YAGNI (You Are not Gonna Need It)
DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
SRP (Single Responsibility Principle)
When we asked Developers about the most common programming principles they follow, they mentioned:
“We always have Clean Code in mind, also DRY and SRP. You don’t want the code to surprise you.”
Joaquín Bravo | Engineering Discipline Lead
“They all are Programming Principles, and they are not associated with a role, so it makes sense that a QA uses them too.”
Álvaro Laguna | Tech Lead
When the QA Engineer is familiar with those techniques and principles, it is easy to identify the situations that can end in refactoring, and they can be fixed at earlier stages.
→ How do Devs achieve good quality code?
If we want to think as a Dev, then we need to extract words directly from Devs, and that’s exactly what we did. In the following, we discuss what developers think about code quality, how they test their code, and what their concerns are when coding.
High-quality code can be reached by using code standards, creating unit tests, and peer-reviewing my team’s code.
As a wise man said: “If someone is doing something very well, then you have to replicate the same”
The following are some tips we collected from our interviewees that, for sure, Devs and QAs must follow:
“Document the PR and the ticket, list the scenarios to test beyond unit testing”
Iván Galaviz | Software Engineer
“If I’m going to do a unit test, although I know my code, I review line by line to find more test scenarios and the different ways my code can react to certain value or data“
Víctor García | Software Engineer
“Define the best practices for our project, and look for an agreement across the team, focusing on Clean Code”
Joaquín Bravo | Engineering Discipline Lead
→ How do Devs debug?
Debugging is the process of locating bugs and fixing them.
In high-performance teams, Developers take the debugging process very seriously. To have an idea of what they think about it, we can start by saying that the bug report is the first step for them to fix a bug, and they have high expectations on what a QA should do when creating bug reports, just take a look at the next comment:
“The basis is that it (a bug report) should carry clear information that enables identifying it (the bug) and replicating it; it is especially helpful to replicate it in different environments.”
Álvaro Laguna | Tech Lead
Most of us already know that the information provided in bug reports should be complete, but let’s take a look at the next comment, which went even further:
“Normally, it (the QA process) would be just to detect and communicate bugs, but maybe that should change, and everyone must be proactive in identifying and fixing bugs.”
Francisco Tejón | Software Engineer
It aligns exactly with what the Think as a Dev practice is looking for: enabling everyone to be able not only of identifying bugs but also fixing them.
Why start reviewing PRs is important for a QA Engineer?
Usually, reviewing PRs is a task associated with Developers or people who have coding knowledge, but why should a QA Engineer learn a little about the code and help with PRs reviewing?
The QA Engineer does not need to be a coding expert to participate in this activity; it is enough to have the basic knowledge of the language used by the team, as Iván Galaviz, a Wizeline software engineer, said to us:
“It’s good when the QA Engineer knows the coding language. Personally, it’s even better when they know only the basics. If they are able to understand my code, then it means it is well designed”
So, if you are not an expert in coding, then you can focus on reviewing this:
Read and understand the task before reviewing the code.
Keep programming principles in mind and ensure the code is easy to understand.
Review the unit test related to the change.
Review variable names to ensure they are accurate.
Once your review is completed, ensure that your message is clear. You can use this example of emoji use when you are reviewing code https://gist.github.com.
And one extra tip, always promote respect!
Ok, Ok.. then, which are our action items?
Improve communication
Part of the fact that we are one team
Communication is the first thing we should improve in this new adventure. Remember that HOW is always more important than WHAT. As the ISTQB points out in its psychology of testing section, Developers love their code like it was their child; we must always remember this when talking about their code. Since the Thinking as a Dev approach encourages a close relationship with Devs, to be able to comment on their unit tests or PRs, we need to understand their field, their language, and their pace of work.
Help with the debug process
This can be achieved by providing better and clearer information when raising bug’s tickets. Sometimes the expected and actual results are not enough because they don’t give Developers a chance to be more effective when debugging. Thus, you can start by providing better logs, attaching logs from different environments or comparing good and bad logs.
But what really can help the most is: If you know which subsystem is involved and can recall another previous/current bug, then try to determine if they are related, so that you can direct the Developer straight to the affected area and, why not, even start suggesting how the bug could be fixed on an extra note.
Tip: If no pressure, a highly recommended suggestion is to make pair programming sessions with developers when working on a bug fix.
Understand the programing language
If the time allows, try to take a basic course on the programming language your team uses. You don’t need to become a master (we don’t want you to become a developer and abandon us!), so, as Álvaro Laguna said:
“The QA Engineer’s increased knowledge becomes a new tool for the team.”
Understand the project’s architecture
If you want to be more confident with what you are testing, then you must understand the system’s architecture. Ask your tech lead for diagrams. It’s also a good idea to ask your Manager for access to the infrastructure systems like AWS, GCP, or Azure and tools like Kibana, Consul, Splunk, Grafana, or any other Developers in your team commonly use.
Sometimes, even in high-performance teams, it’s pretty common to find out that there is not enough documentation about the infrastructure. If that’s the case, then it is an excellent opportunity to take the initiative and start creating more docs.
Start doing cross-review of PRs
You can start by asking Developers to take a look into your automation PRs by adding them each time you open a new one. This will be very helpful as they start suggesting changes, refactorizations, and challenging you with new proposals.
If you don’t feel comfortable reviewing PRs, then you can start by asking them to add you to their PRs but just as a viewer. You can move ahead later after you’ve learned the basics of the code and feel comfortable to start doing Formal Reviews.
Tip: We highly recommend to take a look at the Code Clean Principles so that you can make better PR reviews.
Be an active participant of technical discussions
Always attend and participate in the technical discussions. To start doing it, a good recommendation is to ask your Devs to think of you as another Developer, so that they add you to their private developer slack channels, to their developer specific meetings, and to their developer shared folders.
Tip: Make sure the Developer and the rest of the team are aware about your intentions to implement the “Think as a Dev” practice.
And last but not least… What can Devs improve to help QAs reach the dark side?
Try to encourage QAs to participate in technical discussions by asking their opinion and being respectful, QAs need to learn too much technical stuff to build a strong opinion.
Try to take a look at the automation repository of your QA teammate; make suggestions, and try to review their PRs whenever possible.
A walk-through of your code would be highly appreciated by a QA Engineer.
At Wizeline, we focus on quality when it comes to an understanding of our clients’ needs. This is why the Wizeline QA Team concentrates on delivering quality and comprehending and applying the best practices to all the product’s building steps. | https://medium.com/@wizelineqateam/think-as-a-dev-1e85f20b7c3 | ['Wizeline Qa Team'] | 2021-01-14 22:23:41.993000+00:00 | ['Testing', 'Team Building', 'Development', 'QA', 'Wizeline'] |
Keep Going Quotes Sayings for When Hope is Lost | It’s a very thrilling thing to achieve a goal. If you’re battling with the idea of giving up, remember that if you give up, you could be giving away a wonderful thing — your best future. You may be fearful and uncertain of the future, but it’s crucial that you drive to keep going. After all, if you quit now, you’ll never know how close you were to succeeding. There are many things that can help you overcome your anxiety and fear.
If at any point you think you are going to fall or lose hope, here are some Keep Going Quotes that will help empower you to never lose hope.
If you have gone through something traumatic and you don’t feel like living anymore, don’t lose hope. There are many people who have faced major accident and burn injuries and still are doing great in life. For example, the national burn injury firm, Walker Morgan, has provided legal services for persons who have suffered severe burn injuries, helping them to get compensation for their medical expenses.
There are many incidents that will make your life change and some of them you may not even remember. Regardless, they have been instrumental in helping you grow.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill
How do you deal with success? Remember that envy is a regular human feeling and that in some people, even those who are pleased with you, your success is bound to motivate negativity.
“Our greatest glory is in never failing, but in rising every time we fall.” — Confucius
No matter how many times you’ve failed, no matter how many times you fell down, nothing will stop you from trying again.
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we are curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney
Always try to explore new things.
Don’t just waste time; invest your time doing something productive.
Don’t lose hope and never give up. Your time will come. And you will ace it.
Originally published at https://www.yourselfquotes.com on December 23, 2020. | https://medium.com/@yourselfquotes/keep-going-quotes-sayings-for-when-hope-is-lost-92ad02ebc187 | ['Yourself Quotes'] | 2021-01-05 12:13:04.018000+00:00 | ['Quotes'] |
Part 3(b) — Search Functionality. In Part 3(a) we created a GET request… | Now, let’s create a route for the path to ‘/categories’ we made in our “getDropDown” GET request.
In our server.js file declare a route that, for now, responds with a status of 200. You always need to respond to a request. Even if you have no data to respond with you can respond with a status. Look here for all status codes.
server.js file
Next, we’ll need to create a controller function to help us get the data from our categories.json file. Controllers are middleware (functions) that perform tasks on a route. In this case, the task will be getting the requested data (the list of categories) and returning that data as a response object
Create a folder in the Server folder called “Controllers”. In the Controllers folder, create a file called “categoriesController.js”. In the categoriesController.js file, declare a variable called “categoriesController” that is assigned to an empty object. Each controller we create in this file will be added as a key to this categoriesController object. We will export this entire object.
Create a key called “getCategories”, assign this key to an arrow function with req, res, and next as parameters (representing the request object, response object, and next function respectively).
In this function, destructure the categories object from the categories.json file. Use the “fs.ReadFileSync” method to get data from that file. Be sure to parse the data from that file using the JSON.parse method.
Store the categories response object you get from the categories.json file to res.locals. Then, return next. You can also add a conditional to throw an error if the categories object is empty.
**Note: Res.locals is an object that contains response local variables scoped to the request. It’s values are available only during that request / response cycle.**
**Note: Returning next moves response data from one controller to the next controller (if any) and then back to the route. Without returning next you’ll never leave the controller function.**
categoriesController.js file
Add the controller to the ‘/categories’ route in the server.js file.
Once the data from the categories.json file is saved to res.locals, you can modify the route to respond with that data in addition to the status.
server.js file revised
Now our GET request to ‘/categories’ in SearchBar.jsx can be completed. We are now querying data stored locally on our computers! | https://medium.com/how-to-build-a-full-stack-app-from-scratch/part-3-b-search-functionality-c68756da20e6 | ['Chloe Aribo'] | 2020-05-06 20:02:21.156000+00:00 | ['Full Stack', 'JavaScript', 'Expressjs', 'Nodejs'] |
“A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face” -Maya Angelou | Photo by Ilyuza Mingazova on Unsplash
I woke up to severe foot pain on my 34th birthday. As I could barely take a step, I went to urgent care for help. Waiting for the doctor after an x-ray blessed me with some precious “me time” when I flipped through the photos from last year on my phone. I could see the seasons changing, a big lot of nature, screenshots of interesting life quotes from the social media but above all, my frumpy selfies with a downright smile in each one of them. This got me into introspection and some recollections from the last year.
When the COVID lockdown started in early 2020, I felt secured and happy to have my family around at home. In a few months, the experience became exhausting and brain-draining. A friend and I who were in the same boat started weekend hikes to take a break from routines and family. In no time, the morning walks began to stretch out until noon and eventually past sunset. We would still return home with umpteen topics left to discuss.
Once, this friend told me, “You always interact with an impermeable glass around, encaging yourself.Why do you need that?”
That was an eye-opener to me about myself. I pondered over it day and night and still do. I became skeptical about my interpersonal skills, tried out several justifications for situations but finally convinced that it was true. I have always interacted with people setting a boundary. There have been very few people who have crossed that boundary and seen me closer. But no one has ever told me this.
The fair and upfront comment started loosening me up day by day. I started sharing my thoughts, nostalgic memories, everyday life situations, and almost everything with this friend without any restrictions. This constant exchange of ideas, perceptions and actions gradually made me realize that my attitudes and views have been altering ever since. I started to think and speak out loud from my heart, unlike before when the shield around me would filter my thoughts and transform them into a socially acceptable format. I contemplated several life situations where things happened in a way that was approved by everyone around me but not my heart. It is not a state of wisdom to understand that “You wouldn’t be heard unless spoken” but it is practically not always the easiest to do. This revelation enabled me to travel down the lane, build on my memories, show me what my interests were and what my heart really says. Above all, big confidence to implement them step by step.
I recollect skipping opportunities to acquaint with this friend on purpose several years ago. That was due to my busy work and family schedules back then and multiple social groups that I was already a part of. But destiny made us meet through a common friend and from then, we have never looked back.
Sometimes people walk in as strangers and fill in your life.
As it was my Birthday, the same friend gifted me the book “Letter to my daughter” by Maya Angelou. I meditated over the chapter, ”Bob and Decca” which concludes with the line, “I learned that a friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face”.
How coincidental! | https://medium.com/@growingindreams/a-friend-may-be-waiting-behind-a-strangers-face-maya-angelou-e07d0f928cfd | [] | 2021-05-08 01:48:33.378000+00:00 | ['Introspection', 'Birthday', 'Friendship'] |
My Year In Review | Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” — Helen Keller
It is fair to say that, unlike in previous years, I entered this year with a remarkable level of motivation. And my motivation was sponsored by a number of factors.
First, the awareness that it was the beginning of another decade, and particularly a decade where the manifestation of a new generation- of which I know I happen to belong, will mostly take place. I didn't want to be left out.
Second, it dawned on me that the next ten years will somehow launch me into the most formidable phase of my life, and realizing the gap between my present self, and the quality of person I would want to become, I decided there was no two way to bridging the two realities, other than making necessary, and immediate choices.
Lastly, besides all the aforementioned reasons, I just wanted to stretch myself, explore opportunities, learn new things, and grow.
I thought of many ways to achieve my goals for the year, and chief among them was the intentional consumption of books.
Here I am, virtually twelve months after, seeking to honestly detail the results of the choices I made in 2020 -how they have both shaped and changed me - the lessons I have learned, and the few discoveries that came with them.
You may not necessarily be inspired, but giddy up, you could learn a thing or two, if you care.
My Monthly Journal
January
I read four books - all on leadership.
I have always been a fan of books, but all my life, I had never read as much as I did in January. I read four bulky books in 29 days.
Leadership has been one aspect of life that makes my heart sing, and gives me a larger-than-life feel. And really, I have always been a leader. Fundamentally, as the first of four children in my nuclear family.
However, nobody needed to tell me how much growth I had to undergo to become an effective leader, when I listened to a sermon by Dr. Sam Adeyemi of Daystar Christian Center - where he mentioned that, if you wanted to be versed in any subject, you needed to read as many books on that subject, as the number of your age. So if I was 19, and I wanted to be especially sound in leadership, I needed to read 19 books on the subject of leadership. Those words stuck! And I was propelled.
I intentionally threw myself into John Maxwell's books in the months to come, and they have helped me grow in amazing ways.
As I committed more than half of my daily life into studying, what I figured was, the exercise expanded my brainpower. School happened to be in session at the time, and exams were approaching.
The mental exercise rubbed off on my academics, and the result was that my studying intensity leaped, and reading for a protracted amount of time, became normal for me, even without a tinker of interference from boredom.
February
My CGPA shot up
I read two books
Due to some happenstances that I tried to control, but didn't give in to control in my first year, I got a result that, although was okay for normal, I wanted to turnaround.
With the momentum that my resolution to voraciously consume books in 2020 had set me in, I was able to carefully soak up my school textbooks as if exams were tomorrow - even when they were still weeks away. I had started preparing in late 2019, we started our second year in October.
I wouldn't say the exams were a walk in the park, though, but smart preparation with God's help made the walk worth it, anyway.
I couldn't read more than two books this month, because I needed to sit tight for school exams.
March
I began writing a book
I read three books
My phone developed an irreparable fault in late March, and in the wake of the lockdown, writing a book looked like the only way to engage myself. Although, I received an instruction from God to write a book this year, getting myself to start had been a Sisyphean task. But maybe the absence of a phone was what it had to take me to follow through.
Because I do most of my reading on my phone - which had just developed a fault, I had to switch to the hardcopy books that, although weren't what I would normally read, were available at home. And the truth I would realize with settling for books I wouldn't read on a normal day was, every book, when studied with an open mind, has a golden takeaway or two.
The goal was to sleep every night knowing what I did not know, when I woke up in the morning, even if the knowledge was as minute as the meaning of a new English word.
April
I completed the book
My absence from the rush of social media, I guess, helped the new book enjoy my unrivaled energy. I could feel myself exhausting an important part of my life on white sheets.
The writing was a pure product of passion, and I imagined the bright smiles it would create in the faces of people who will eventually read it when published, for it is a book predicated on the amazing inspiration that comes with hope.
May I add, sadly, that I recently misplaced some of the drafts? And I have found them to no avail.
May
I got a web content writing certificate
I read four books
Teens Meet Outreach, a blog in which I have been a volunteer author since 2018, organized an in-house content writing course for writers, in which I participated.
It was an expository experience and one that would give me a major advantage in my writing career, in the ensuing months.
I got a new phone and continued with my daily habit of reading.
June
I studied Corporate Governance from a virtual college.
I sharpened my people skills by reading books like How to Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, and 5 Levels of Leadership by John Maxwell, to mention a few.
With no end to the ASUU strike in sight, I searched online for great courses to study, and corporate governance made a lot of sense.
The course basically revolves around the executive dynamics of an organization. I learned the how-to of organizational politics, and the principles that guide the effective running of businesses, and firms.
As an introvert, an extreme one for that matter, I have always tended toward seclusion and social aloofness - which are not all that unhelpful but were things that, I knew, needed to be worked on because, in the long haul, nobody thrives alone.
The books I highlighted up there were of immense help to me, and I have watched my relationships with people get tremendously better, since then.
I have met tons of people this year and sustained qualitative relationships with a few. And if you ask me, that was progress.
July
I read four books
I started a digital marketing class on Google digital garage
I took three leadership courses on YALI
I subscribed to learn digital marketing, for no reason other than, I wanted to know how possible it was for businesses to flourish in a virtually connected world. And well, know did I!
The duration of the course was 20 hours. I thought I should finish it in three days, for maximum. But I was wrong. I lost the spark along the line, and yes I didn't like that I did, but I didn't bite myself for it, anyway.
What I, instead, did was put a flexible and workable system in place - I planned to take a study daily, rather than bog myself down with three studies, that I wouldn't end up completing. And that was it.
I spent almost four months on it. But the experience taught me more than I subscribed to learn - that it is okay to not feel like it, at times, and that a different approach to the same challenge can be all the motivation one needs, when the going gets tough.
As for the YALI courses, the durations were brief, and so I was able to complete them at respective sittings. The brevity did not water down the quality, however. I took with me, even with the short time, lessons of inexhaustible value.
Oh, I landed my first paid writing gig, too. Thanks to Isa, a friend I met on LinkedIn who mentored me on how to monetize my writing skill. He is one of the many blessings God gave me in right relationships, this year.
August
I read books
I applied for a handful of writing gigs - none of which was successful
August was my birth month, and nothing much happened. I just read books, and having recently built a CV and cover letter, applied for as many writing gigs as came my way. None of the trials, however, came to fruition.
But I wasn't dejected, and why should I be? Five months ago, I was a writer with no iota of a clue about paid gigs, let alone apply for them. Now, I have taken my career a step further, by learning how to monetize my skill, even building a resume, and marketing my - if I could say - expertise. That simple shift in consciousness, meant progress, for me.
September
I read books
Landed a paid writing gig
Being in school was the only credible reason my parents could pump enough money into my pocket, and now that it was closed and I have been home for 7 months, my account was getting redder than red.
I thought of tutoring waec students and university aspirants, at first, but most of the students in my environment seemed to have grown reluctant, as the tiniest of hope that waec and universities would conduct exams anytime soon, looked bleak.
An Uncle linked me with a private secondary school proprietor, not long after, and the terms they introduced to me were not compelling at all. I would teach all the senior classes Physics, Chemistry, and English language, every day of the week, for 12 thousand naira per month.
I needed money, truly, but certainly couldn't afford to deliver that much service for such a rate. I was appointed but didn't show up on the first day.
Four days after, as God would have it, I got a client who hired me for a job that took less than 3 days, at a quite nice rate. And this made way for subsequent gigs.
The Proprietor called three days after, to ask why I didn't show up, and after registering my dissatisfaction about the pay to him, he said to come for a remuneration. But I had completely lost interest.
October
I read books
Got a permanent freelancing job
My financial status sort of took a turn this month. I landed a much more flexible job, at an even nicer rate, and this gave me a kind of independence that I am truly grateful for.
There's a peace that comes from being able to foot basic bills with your own money. Of course, my parents still gave me stuff, but I felt a proportionate pride by not having to worry them with certain things.
It was one of the notable experiences 2020 gave me, and that I am grateful for.
November
I read books
By November, I discovered I was leaving self-help and leadership books, and gravitating towards books about complex topics like racism, modern politics, political history, and gender injustice.
Reading Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, felt like the alarm that woke me up from a sociopolitical slumber, and it brought to the surface and the ambiance of self-criticism, many personal beliefs - some of my own, some of the larger society.
I have since then given myself to absorbing necessary materials, and been particularly and actively following US politics. And it makes sense that it was the month that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris became the President-elect, and Vice President-elect of the United States.
December
I read books
December has just been a time to brood on the many things that have happened, over the months. I have read books, no day of this year passed without my reading a book. I have written a book and several articles. I have met folks. I have tried to achieve a number of things, some I succeeded with, others I did not.
I have failed this year, as much as I have succeeded, and that's the truth. Only that I have learned lessons that will increase the success of my voyage in the years ahead, and that's the difference, and that's what matters.
I have learned to trust God when it makes sense, and when it doesn't. I have seen Him come through for me in ways beyond my brain. Of God, I say that he has been mind-blowing.
Like I stated earlier in this content, books were major things I did this year, and below is an attached picture of the books I have read so far, this year.
2020 got me to understand the terrific power inherent in the resolute, unyielding, decisions of an intentional man! I’m not even saying that I was intentional enough, but rather that I am better than I was when the year started.
And I know here's not where my story ends…...
© TFO | https://medium.com/@theferanmioyedele/my-year-in-review-6b033a48dfd5 | ['The Feranmi Oyedele'] | 2020-12-25 07:14:56.833000+00:00 | ['Review', '2020', 'Reflections'] |
The power of the Centurion Bridge | The Centurion Bridge swap incentive and utility
Since the inception of the Polygon network (previously the Matic network), most Defi users have been left scratching their heads on how to access and use Polygon. The Polygon team launched the Polygon wallet bridge essentially allowing users to switch tokens from the Ethereum network to the Polygon Network.
However this has caused a major hindrance to users exploring Polygon and its Defi projects. It’s no secret that the Binance Smart Chain was born out of a desire to circumvent the high Ethereum network gas fees, it’s a daunting experience for users who pay unrealistic high gas fees (depending on network congestion). This has cause the Ethereum Network to be regarded as a whale network as the fees are insignificant in value for whales, but expensive for low volume traders.
The Binance Smart Chain and Polygon present fantastic alternatives to the Ethereum network, the Binance Smart Chain has kicked off with incredible growth and adoption, mainly due to the fact that users could easily buy tokens on the Binance Exchange and withdraw to their BSC wallets. Binance also launched a bridge allowing ERC20, BEP2, BEP20 & TRC20 swaps, providing users multiple options for entry. This made the Smart Chain gain popularity as users did not have to go through the Ethereum network, to access Smart Chain tokens.
The Polygon network has also seen significant growth and adoption, but not as much as the Binance Smart Chain, due to most users having no way to access the Polygon network and its projects and tokens, because the Polygon bridge had only one option for swaps, all incoming tokens to the Polygon bridge had to be from the Ethereum Network. This meant users needed to buy Ethereum network tokens and send them to the Polygon bridge to receive equivalents on the Polygon network. This made many users who would rather never use the Ethereum network due to its high cost gas fees to remain committed to the Binance Smart Chain.
THE CENTURION BRIDGE ENABLES DIRECT BINANCE SMART CHAIN TO POLYGON SWAPS AND VICE VERSA
The centurion bridge has come to the rescue, essentially giving BSC and Polygon lovers and users an avenue to switch tokens seamlessly, quickly and safely without using the Ethereum network.This bridge provides an essential use case for the CENT token, making the CENT token, the go to token for swapping across BSC and Polygon.
Users can purchase CENT tokens with their desired tokens (on popular BSC DEXs e.g Pancakeswap, Apeswap), and swap their BSC BEP20 CENT tokens on the Centurion Bridge to Polygon ERC20 CENT tokens, then exchange their CENT tokens to any token of their choice (on popular Polygon DEXs e.g Quickswap) and voila, they have moved their tokens from BSC to Polygon or vice versa, without using the Ethereum network hence avoiding high gas fees.
It is no news that the Binance Smart Chain and Polygon have some of the lowest gas fees of any Ethereum EVM, Centurion is here to bridge the gap between these two chains | https://medium.com/@centoracle/the-power-of-the-centurion-bridge-791175da0157 | ['Centurion Oracle'] | 2021-06-23 09:59:10.958000+00:00 | ['Binance', 'Ethereum', 'Bridge Protocol', 'Polygon Network', 'Binance Smart Chain'] |
Intro to Modern Web Development | Tools to start developing the front-end website
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
It is standard markup language used to design web pages displayed in web browser.html is written in form of basic tags like heading tag(<h1> to <h6>), paragraph tag(p),table tag(<table>),form tag(<form>) e.t.c as shown below
Source:https://images.app.goo.gl/RpTNiyh73bXm3JrQ6
CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)
It is the language which defines the style of an HTML document and used for designing purpose. It enhances the presentation of the webpage used in better interaction with the user.it includes layout, colours, styling, fonts. The script tag is used to define CSS in HTML file
JS (Javascript)
It is just-in-time compiled programming language well-known to provide the functionality to the content of a webpage. It allows users to create dynamically updating content, control multimedia e.t.c
Source: Google
There are many other libraries/framework to use in front-end like Angular, Vue, React, Ember and more to better manage the codebase.
Tools to Start Developing the Back-End
Node + Express
It is a server-side scripting language used to produce dynamic webpage content before the content is sent to web browser.js in node.js represents javascript code. It allows the creation of web server and networking tools using javascript and other modules like nodemon-npm, express, e.t.c.
Django
It is an open-source python based web framework used for rapid- development and clean design.it is used to program logic to implement fastly and efficiently.it helps a developer to avoid common mistakes.
You may use a flask for the smaller version of Django apps. | https://medium.com/javarevisited/intro-to-modern-web-development-d714563c87e | [] | 2020-09-03 06:32:14.381000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'CSS', 'Full Stack Developer', 'HTML', 'Web Development'] |
AI EXPLAINED: Non-technical Guide for Policymakers | “Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last unless we learn how to avoid the risks.” Stephen Hawking
An AI sent the first warnings of the Wuhan Coronavirus.
Google’s AI bested doctors in detecting breast cancer.
Microsoft has created a tool to find pedophiles online.
An AI-powered app is helping China’s remote villages fight poverty.
Leveraging AI to fight wildfires.
This secretive company might end privacy as we know it.
Top AI researchers fighting deepfakes.
Those are some of the many articles that attracted our attention since the beginning of this year. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a futuristic vision anymore, but rather something that is here today, transforming the way we work and live. There are already significant AI implementations in medicine, health care, pharmaceutics, finance, transportation, security and criminal justice. AI in healthcare is already enabling better diagnosis and treatment predictions, freeing medical staff from administrative burdens, saving doctors and nurses 17–20 percent of their time and potentially creating $150 billion in annual savings in US healthcare. AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy, and up to 26% boost in GDP for local economies by 2030. AI could contribute to all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, helping hundreds of millions of people in both developing and developed countries.
At the same time, AI created with good intentions can create unintended negative consequences. AI built-in bias can create discriminatory recruiting algorithms or chatbots that become racist. While many jobs will be created by AI, many will be lost as well, which will require effective support systems to help workers transition to new positions. Although initially seen as a potential remedy for the climate crisis, more and more academics, researchers and practitioners are raising alarms because of the computing power and energy required for AI-enabled technologies, increasing the fear that the technology will deepen the climate crisis.
Current AI developments raise fear and hope, and with it some important policy, regulatory and ethical issues.
How should we enable and promote data access and at the same time protect privacy?
How do we protect against biases in algorithms?
How do we introduce and practically implement fairness, accountability, transparency and ethical creation and implementation of AI?
How do we strengthen trust in AI?
How do we avoid pitfalls while benefiting from AI promises?
All of them are important questions, to be answered in a timely and informed way and many of these necessary discussions are already happening at the highest levels of government.
Earlier this month the White House announced 10 principles that federal agencies should consider when formulating laws and rules for the use of AI, with the main message to keep limiting regulatory “overreach”. The announcement follows an agenda set by the White House in February last year, when President Trump issued an executive order launching the American AI Initiative and telling federal agencies to channel more of their current investment in AI related applications. OECD AI Principles, the first intergovernmental standards for AI, were also adopted last year, introducing principles and recommendations for governments. AI regulations are determined by various governments to allow both effective and safe interactions and developments. Stopping the fast pace of AI development will hardly be beneficial and in many fields not even possible.
The development of AI needs to be supported by the appropriate policy framework and regulatory oversight to be able to enable fast and sustainable development. Informed policymakers are the crucial element for creating this framework for facilitating the best possible AI implementation.
Why write a non-technical guide for Policymakers?
Our work showed that the AI discourse can often be intimidating, the science hard to understand, and the ideas difficult to comprehend. However, it is undisputed that many fields of our lives are already augmented and changed through AI, and AI already has and will have major implications for our society. This is why there is an urgent need to better comprehend this field and its implications. How AI is created and implemented has to be clear, explainable, and understandable.
Our aim was to create the Policymakers Guide to AI with a human-centered approach and explain in an engaging way AI basics to an audience of policymakers and all interested individuals who don’t have expertise in this field. Our goal is to demystify what AI is, and demonstrate how it is already altering our lives and societies we live in. We present the state of the art of AI, its applications across different industries and fields, with examples from medicine, the automotive industry and education. We discuss its cross-cutting challenges and explain its transformative power. The Guide offers explanations and additional resources, videos, articles, papers, and tutorials, to help policymakers prepare for the current and future AI developments and impacts. It serves as an open resource, welcoming all comments and suggestions to make it better and inviting, continuing dialogue in explaining AI and keeping up with its developments.
“As AI develops and its applications grow, there is a great opportunity, but also a great responsibility to make sure it contributes to public good and benefit to all, with fairness, reliability, security, and where appropriate transparency and privacy are ensured.” Branka Panic, AI for Peace Founding Director
Bridging the gap between artificial intelligence and policymaking
AI is already changing how we live our lives, but we as humans also influence how the AI is being built and implemented. Policy is crucial in shaping this relationship and making it positive both for future AI developments and the future of humanity.
There are no policy professionals who are proficient and have many years of experience in building this relationship. There are experts who did versions of it, like tech policy experts who shaped early internet governance, or experts who considered privacy issues related to technologies, but nobody previously had a chance to tackle challenges as the ones posed by AI today. This field is new to all of us, bringing different types of questions and issues that evolve every single day, and faster than anything we’ve seen before.
This calls for a new generation of AI policy experts able to tackle problems of this new era. And although AI has become part of a public narrative and recognized as an urgent topic to deal with, there is still a dire need for more people to think about it from different perspectives in various sectors. There is an urgent need for developing professionals who are “bilingual” in both artificial intelligence and policy. Even though some important programs were piloted to bridge this gap, like Aspen Tech Policy Hub, Tech Congress or Open Philanthropy AI Policy Careers, which we highly welcome and recommend as an approach, there are not enough AI experts who want to get involved in public policy.
This is why we are approaching social scientists as well, engaging them as expert parties of AI policy dialogue. They are crucial in helping us as a society to understand the developments of AI, to distinguish hype from real impact, what AI can and cannot do, in order to accordingly advance public policy goals.
Hopefully, this Guide will bring us closer to bridging the existing gap between AI and policymaking. This Guide aims to help better understanding of AI and contribute to ensuring that the outcomes driven by AI technologies are for the benefit and not the detriment of humanity.
You can download the Guide here.
This blog was originally published as part of AI for Peace Blog Series. | https://medium.com/citrispolicylab/ai-explained-non-technical-guide-for-policymakers-e51366cb681f | ['Branka Panic'] | 2020-02-06 07:44:43.878000+00:00 | ['Government', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Ethics', 'AI', 'Policy'] |
Mouse-free data science. Detect your cat’s prey with a Raspberry… | Detect your cat’s prey with a Raspberry Pi and a Google Coral Edge TPU
Photo by Author
My neighbor Emma has a real love for animals. A little hedgehog family shows up frequently in her garden. She buys special hedgehog food that is highly appreciated by those heart-melting little guys. She has set up four feeding places with daily refills. In a recent conversation over-the-fence, Emma proudly told me about the large appetite of her animal friends and I congratulated her. But as I walked from the garden into my house it dawned on me … Emma’s special hedgehog food may well be a welcome nutritional supplement for the local mouse community.
Video by Author
For months our two out-door cats carried dead, living and partially living mice into our home at night. Dead prey found on the carpet in the morning quickly took a ride down the ceramic subway in our bathroom, that was not the big deal. What impressed me more was the agility of the living species. Some tried to settle under our couch. It would take an average of 45 minutes for my wife Lisa and me to locate and chase these little rodents out of the house. Our cats started to reach a high score of four mice per night and our dismay at the increase of rodents found in our living room was not acknowledged at all by our cats. They seemed to consider this as a necessary exercise to train our poor mouse hunting skills and enjoyed delivering more and more “gifts” every night in order for us to do so. The unwelcome roommates left urine stains on our parquet floor and ate parts of our tablecloth as they prepared for a new long-term stay inside of our living room furniture. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when the rodent started to nibble holes in the cat food bags.
Lisa and I started to think of a preventative approach. The first discussion circled around a nightly curfew to prevent our animal surprise gift baskets. We decided to replace our old pet door with a smart cat flap including a programmable curfew allowing our cats to leave the house at night but preventing them from re-entering before the morning. We abandoned this approach after the first night. Having woken up to the sound of our cats knocking their heads against the locked flap door, causing us to feel miserable about our egocentric behavior. This smart cat flap was not smart at all.
While I do not consider myself as a nerd, Lisa observed that I devoted (in her terms) “a disproportionate amount of time on a technical pursuit in order to develop a solution”. The plan to create a smart-er cat flap that prevents cats unwanted gifts turned into an “idée fixe” that received a subdued smile from my wife.
Photo by Author
My second approach involved a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, a motion sensor and an infrared camera. Over a timeframe of four months I selected 1532 night vision images of our cats entering our cellar window and uploaded these images to an AWS S3 bucket. 415 out of the 1532 images were images with prey. I created a mobile app that displayed notifications when a cat entered the house and allowed me to label the images “with-prey” and “with-out prey”.
Video by Author
I used YOLO to train an object detection model and triggered the cat flap API which was reverse engineered by rcastberg. The object detection took c. 2–3 seconds, in addition I needed to take into account the duration for the cat flap API call which took c. 2–12 seconds. The cat’s trip down the cellar window takes c. five seconds. Moving the object detection to an edge TPU based on Google Coral with a TFLite MobileNet V1 SSD, reduced the inference time to 7ms and helped to collect enough data to calculate a prey detection score with a very good prediction precision. However 8 out of 10 detections resulted in the cat flap locking after the cat had already passed through. At least now I knew when to start the mouse hunt.
Photo by Author
I tried to shorten the delay with a by-pass to the API service of the cat flap. Then I tried to connect my Raspberry to the cat flap via ZigBee. This was a proprietary encrypted protocol. I saw on Github that a bunch of experts (definitely not nerds) keep cutting their teeth on that issue. If someone at Sure Petcare reads this: your product is awesome, I like the mobile app, I would love to have a way to communicate with the Connect Hub locally with a documentation of the API.
I decided to take the easy route and soldered a relay on the lockout button of the cat flat. This reduced time-to-lockout to below 1 second. Tada!
Photo by Author
This whole pursuit was a continual process that took more than seven months. The source code to create and run the model on your Raspberry is available on Github. | https://medium.com/@gerrito333/keep-your-home-mouse-free-with-an-ai-powered-cat-flap-a67c686ce394 | ['Gerrit Bojen'] | 2021-03-22 07:56:51.113000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Cats', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Raspberry Pi'] |
A few practices I have found helpful for #remoteworking | With many shifting to #remoteworking , I thought it might be helpful to share some of my own personal practices I have learned over the past 6 years. If you find these helpful, please feel free to pass along! If you have a question, just let me know. A thread of quick tips /
Practice 1
Set your working hours and clearly communicate these to your team, as well as your family members. Try to stick to these hours 97% of the time. It helps me to focus during working hours, as well as reduce confusion and frustrations from all other humans, at work + home.
Practice 2
If at all possible, work in a separate room from other people in your house, preferably a room without any TVs. If a separate room is not possible, wear large over the ear headphones. It’s nearly impossible to focus on your work if you see and hear everything around you.
Practice 3
Communicate more than you think is necessary with your team. Post updates on what you're working on, what you need from others, what your timelines are, etc.
Practice 4
Use the best quality, and most easily accessible tools at your team’s access. @Zoom , @google docs, @InVisionApp and @SlackHQ are SUPER helpful.
Practice 5
Also an occasional @zoom_us call “just because” can be a nice reminder that we are more than text on a screen. Share a joke, a story, a good cry or just gaze at another human face in real-time.
Practice 6
Take regular breaks and step outside a few times a day. Even a 5 minute walk can do wonders. Or a few minutes with a foam roller / yoga / etc
Practice 7
Take a shower each day, fix your hair and get dressed for work… each day. Don’t wear your pj’s or sweats. Remind your body and brain when it’s work time
Practice 8
Put events on your calendar outside of working hours (Tip #1) that you really look forward to. Whether it’s as simple as a walk with the family, or something more involved… I’ve found that the combo of a regular routine + planned events can keep me in the moment more. | https://medium.com/@jonathanbowden/a-few-practices-i-have-found-helpful-for-remoteworking-94eefca1bb6d | ['Jonathan Bowden'] | 2020-03-12 23:00:40.285000+00:00 | ['Best Practices', 'Zoom', 'Coronavirus', 'Remote Work', 'Remote Working'] |
Demystify your ML model with SHAP | What is ML model explainability?
With exception of simple linear models like linear regression where you can easily look at the feature coefficients, machine learning models can often be a bit of a blackbox. It can be very difficult to understand why the model predicts a particular output, or to verify that the output makes intuitive sense. Model explainability is the practice that attempts to address this by
Disaggregating and quantifying the key drivers of the model output Providing users tools to intuitively reason about why and how the model inputs lead to the output, both in the aggregate and in specific instances
Why is it important to explain your ML models?
Humans tend to distrust that which we cannot understand. The inability to understand the model often leads to a lack of trust and adoption, resulting in potentially useful models sitting on the side lines. Even if the stakeholders and operators get over the initial hurdle of distrust, it is often not obvious how to operationalize the model output. Take a churn prediction model for example, the model may be able to tell you that a particular customer is 90% likely to churn, but without a clear understanding of the drivers, it’s not necessarily clear what can be done to prevent churn from happening.
Of course, the magnitude of the hurdles depend on the specific use case. For certain classes of models like image recognition models (often deep learning based), it is very apparent if the output is right or wrong, and it is also fairly clear how to use the output. However, in many other use cases (like churn prediction, demand forecasting, credit underwriting, just to name a few), the lack of explainability poses significant obstacles between models and tangible impact. The most accurate model in the world is worthless if it is not being used to drive decisions and actions. Therefore it is crucial to make model as transparent and understandable to the stakeholders and operators, so that it can be leveraged and acted upon appropriately.
How do I explain ML models?
There are quite a few different approaches (some of which are model type specific) to help explain ML models. Of these, I like SHAP the most, for a few different reasons
SHAP is consistent, meaning it provides an exact decomposition of the impact each driver that can be summed to obtain the final prediction SHAP unifies 6 different approaches (including LIME and DeepLIFT) [2] to provide a unified interface for explaining all kinds of different models. Specifically, it has TreeExplainer for tree based (including ensemble) models, DeepExplainer for deep learning models, GradientExplainer for internal layers to deep learning models, LinearExplainer for linear models, and a model agnostic KernelExplainer SHAP provides helpful visualizations to aid in the understanding and explanation of models
I won’t go into the details of how SHAP works underneath the hood, except to say that it leverages game theory concepts to optimally allocates the marginal contribution for each input feature. For more details, I encourage the readers to check out the related publications.
I will instead focus on a hands on example of how to use SHAP to understand a churn prediction model. The dataset used in this example can be obtained from Kaggle.
Model setup
Since the model is not the main focus of this walk through, I won’t delve too much into the details, except to provide some quicks notes for the sake of clarity
Each row in the dataset is a telco subscriber and contain metadata about the location, tenure, usage metrics, as well as a label of whether the subscriber has churned
Before model training, the dataset is pre-processed to convert boolean features into 1 and 0, categorical features into one-hot encoded dummies, and numerical features into Z-scores using the sklearn StandardScaler (remove mean and normalize by standard deviation)
(remove mean and normalize by standard deviation) Minutes and charges features are found to be perfectly co-linear, so the minutes features are removed
The sklearn GradientBoostingClassifier is used to model the churn probability and GridSearchCV is used to optimized the hyper-parameters
is used to model the churn probability and is used to optimized the hyper-parameters The resulting model has a 96% accuracy in cross-validation
The code that performs the above is as follows
Explaining aggregate feature impact with SHAP summary_plot
While SHAP can be used to explain any model, it offers an optimized method for tree ensemble models (which GradientBoostingClassifier is) in TreeExplainer . With a couple of lines of code, you can quickly visualize the aggregate feature impact on the model output as follows
explainer = shap.TreeExplainer(gbt)
shap_values = explainer.shap_values(processed_df[features]) shap.summary_plot(shap_values, processed_df[features])
Image by author
This chart contains a ton of information about the model at the aggregate level, but it may be a bit overwhelming for the uninitiated, so let me walk through what we are looking at
The individual dots represent specific training examples. The y-axis are the input features ranked by magnitude of aggregate impact on the model output. The colors of the dots represent the value of the feature on the y-axis. Note that this does not mean the top feature is total_day_charge for every subscriber, we will get to explaining individual examples. The x-axis are the SHAP values, which as the chart indicates, are the impacts on the model output. These are the values that you would sum to get the final model output for any specific example. In this particularly case, since we are working with a classifier, they correspond to the log-odds ratio. A 0 means no marginal impact to the probability, positive value means increases to the churn probability, and negative value means decreases to the churn probability. The exact relationship between overall odds-ratio and probability is log(p/(1-p)), where p is the probability. SHAP adds a bit of perturbation to the vertical positions of points when there is a large number of points occupying the same space to help convey the high density. See the large bulb of points for total_day_charge
What we can we learn from this plot
Similar to what you can get from traditional feature importance plots from classifiers, we can see that the top 5 drivers of churn are total_day_charge , number_customer_service_calls , international_plan , total_eve_charge , and voice_mail_plan We can see how each of the feature impact churn probability — total_day_charge impact is asymmetrical and primarily drives up churn probability its value is high, but does not drive down churn probability to the same extent when its value is low. Contrast this with total_eve_charge which has a much more symmetrical impact. We can also see that subscribers who have international_plan are much more likely to churn than those who do not (red dots are far out on the right and blues dots are close to 0). Conversely, those who have voice_mail_plan are much less likely to churn than those do not.
Explaining specific feature impact with SHAP dependence_plot
The impact of international_plan is very curious: why would subscribers who have it be more likely to churn than those who do not? SHAP has nice method called dependence_plot to help users unpack this.
shap.dependence_plot("international_plan", shap_values, processed_df[features], interaction_index="total_intl_charge")
image by author
The dependence plot is a deep dive into a specific feature to understand how the model output is impacted by different values of the feature, and how this is impacted by interaction with other features. Again, it can be a bit overwhelming for the uninitiated, so let me walk through it
Dots represent individual training examples Colors represent value of the interaction feature ( total_intl_charge ) y-axis is the SHAP value for the main feature being examined ( international_plan ) x-axis is the value of the main feature being examined ( international_plan , 0 for does not have plan, 1 for have plan)
We can see, as before, those with international plan seems to have higher churn probability. Additionally, we can also see from the interaction feature of total international charge, that the red dots (higher total international charge) tends to have higher churn probability. Because of the bunching of points, it is difficult to make out what is happening, so let’s change the order of the two features to get a better look.
shap.dependence_plot("total_intl_charge", shap_values, processed_df[features], interaction_index="international_plan")
image by author
Now this plot tells a very interesting story.
As a reminder, the x-axis here is total international charge transformed to the z-score, 0 = the average of all subscribers in the data, non-zero values = standard deviations away from the average value. We can see that for those who have international charge less than 1 standard deviation above the average, having an international plan actually lowers churn impact of international charge (red dots to the left of 1 have lower SHAP value than blue dots). However, as soon as you cross to the right of 1 standard deviation of international charge, having international plan actually significantly increases the churn impact (red dots to the right of 1 have much higher SHAP value than blue dots)
It is not that people who have international plan are more likely churn, rather it is that people who have international plan and also high total international charge are a LOT more likely to churn.
A plausible way to interpret this is that subscribers who have international plans expect to protected from high international charges, and when they are not, they are much more likely to cancel their subscription and go with a different provider who can offer better rates. This obviously requires additional investigation and perhaps also data collection to validate, but it is already a very interesting and actionable lead that can be pursued.
Explaining individual examples with SHAP waterfall_plot
In addition to understanding drivers at an aggregate level, SHAP also enables you to examine individual examples and understand the drivers of the final prediction.
# visualize the first prediction's explanation using waterfall
# 2020-12-28 there is a bug in the current implementation of the waterfall_plot, where the data structured expected does not match the api output, hence the need for a custom class i=1001 class ShapObject:
def __init__(self, base_values, data, values, feature_names):
self.base_values = base_values # Single value
self.data = data # Raw feature values for 1 row of data
self.values = values # SHAP values for the same row of data
self.feature_names = feature_names # Column names
shap_object = ShapObject(base_values = explainer.expected_value[0],
values = shap_values[i,:],
feature_names = features,
data = processed_df[features].iloc[i,:]) shap.waterfall_plot(shap_object)
This plot decomposes the drivers of a specific prediction.
the x-axis is the SHAP value (or log-odds ratio). At the very bottom E[f(x)] = -2.84 indicates the baseline log-odds ratio of churn for the population, which translates to a 5.5% churn probability using the formula provided above.
the y-axis is the name of features being represented by the arrows, along with their respective values.
The impact (SHAP value) of each individual feature (less significant features are lumped together) is represented by the arrows that move the log-odds ratio to the left and right, starting from the baseline value. Red arrows increase the log-odds ratio, and blue arrows reduce the log-odds ratio
This particular example has a final predicted log-odds ratio of -3.967 (or 1.8% churn probability) largely driven by relatively average total day charge, and the low number of customer service calls. Contrast this with the example below, where the final predicted log-odds ratio is 1.667 (or 84% churn probability), and is largely primarily by the very high number of customer service calls.
Takeaways
ML model explainability creates the ability for users to understand and quantify the drivers of the model predictions, both in the aggregate and for specific examples
Explainability is a key component to getting models adopted and operationalized in an actionable way
SHAP is a useful tool for quickly enabling model explainability
Hope this was a useful walk through. Feel free to reach out if you have comments or questions.
Reference
[1] https://slundberg.github.io/shap/notebooks/League%20of%20Legends%20Win%20Prediction%20with%20XGBoost.html
[2] https://github.com/slundberg/shap#methods-unified-by-shap | https://towardsdatascience.com/demystify-your-ml-model-with-shap-fc191a1cb08a | ['Yifei Huang'] | 2020-12-29 22:03:20.037000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Editors Pick', 'Churn', 'Explainable Ai', 'Python'] |
The Nature of Things: American Flags & Black Lives Matter | I recently encountered a debate regarding the choice to fly the American flag vs. the Black Lives Matter flag. I was first struck by the rhetorical fallacy in comparing the flags as equals, since the Black Lives Matter flag doesn’t claim to be the national flag, nor does it alter the American flag in order to relay its message. In fact, Black Lives Matter wasn’t originally a flag at all. But, despite the false equivalency, I was willing to examine my conscious decision to fly a 12 inch garden Black Lives Matter flag, as well as my unconscious choice not to fly an American flag.
It was easy for me to determine why I chose to fly the Black Lives Matter flag. I am a white woman living in a predominately white neighborhood. I’m surrounded by racism-skeptics. Being a white ally doesn’t just mean protesting and engaging people on social media. It also means putting yourself in a position that can led to a conversation. My flag led to a conversation.
It wasn’t as easy to determine why I have unconsciously chosen not to fly an American flag outside my home. For starters, I don’t own one, and I don’t decorate with American flags outside of Independence Day. I wasn’t raised on the bread of nationalism. Do not misunderstand me — I’ve shed tears during the National Anthem, felt immeasurable pride over America’s best achievements, and I’ve always supported the men and women who fight and die for this country. I have nothing against the American flag, I’m just not very proactive about it. The philosopher in me recognizes the American flag as but a symbol, and we can’t control the nature of symbols.
This uncontrollable aspect, this remainder outside of intention, accompanies all symbols. It was this intangible shadow of meaning that made me hesitate before installing a Black Lives Matter garden flag. I knew flying this flag meant more than just my white allyship. It meant offending neighbors who don’t understand or agree with the Movement for Black Lives. It meant opening myself up to the unknowable shadows of objects and symbols. For example, it never occurred to me that a Black Lives Matter flag could be compared to an American flag. That’s the thing about objects and symbols, they have power outside of our intention or use for them.
In her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, American philosopher Jane Bennett calls this ability for objects to produce subtle or dramatic affects “thing-power.” An object, a thing, doesn’t identify itself — it is given an identity by those who create or objectify it. Things don’t have meaning until they do. The non-identity of a thing is that which remains after the identifiable parts are attributed. There will always be a remainder, a shadow that nettles those who seek to fully identify the object.
The American flag has been identified as a symbol of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American Dream. Therefore, the American flag’s most overwhelming “thing-power” is freedom. However, the flag we wave today was adopted in 1960, four years before the Civil Rights Act. The American Flag waved over a nation that bought and sold slaves; it waved over a nation that gave citizenship to black people but continued terrorizing them; it waved over an institutionally segregated nation. The American flag of today waves over a nation that still refuses to acknowledge the trauma and multi-generational impact of slavery. The American flag has never meant freedom for all Americans, therefore the “thing-power” of the American flag is also oppression.
In a piece he wrote for Time last year, Damon Young demonstrates the oppressive “thing-power” of the American flag. In his article, he details a bike trip he took with his wife and another black couple. As they traveled farther outside of Pittsburgh and moved into more rural areas, they started to notice an influx of American flags. They saw so many American flags they joked about it being “a flag orgy.” However, as they trekked through rural Pennsylvania, Young and his group stopped laughing when they noticed a stark increase in something else: Racism.
And then, after stopping at the B&B, showering, changing and venturing out that night to find some food, that peculiarity shifted to a latent menace. We were reminded, through the stares, the whispers, the pauses and the glares, of who we were. Of where we were. Of course, we didn’t need the reminders. We didn’t forget. But they were sending a message — a reminder in case we forgot to remind ourselves — and the flags were the first dog whistles.
In his article, Young demonstrates that the American flag doesn’t represent liberty for everyone, at least, not when it’s in the hands of the people most likely to wield it.
But what about the shadow “thing-power” of the Black Lives Matter flag? What remainder exists outside of justice?
From personal conversations, I’ve learned that remainder consists of a desire to move on from talking about race. I’ve learned that those who dislike the Black Lives Matter flag tend to believe that racism doesn’t exist, and that black people are exactly where they want/deserve to be based on their individual behavior. Some people who oppose Black Lives Matter do so because they live in fear that their non-black life will somehow decrease in value if they validate the value of black lives. Sometimes they mention violence committed in the name of Black Lives Matter (especially violence against police). This argument is why the Blue Lives Matter flag began to fly, a flag that is more, but not directly, comparable to the Black Lives Matter flag. Therefore, the “thing-power” of the Black Lives Matter flag is not just justice, but also incredulity, fear, and anger.
I can empathize with the idea that violence against police makes the Black Lives Matter flag less sympathetic, because there is evidence to prove this violence has occurred, but the violence of few should not erase the voice of many. As for the other reasons the Black Lives Matter flag is shunned, there is no such evidence to support the beliefs that leave the opposition feeling incredulous or afraid. In fact, the evidence points in the opposite direction. However, because statistics are most often met with the argument that “black people are where they are because of their own choices,” there is no point in providing statistical evidence of inequality among black and white Americans. Instead, those who wave a Black Lives Matter flag must find a way to connect to the people who don’t understand it. The very fact that my garden flag was conflated with my absent American flag proves that there is much to learn from one another, and in the process of learning perhaps we can find common ground.
Outside of philosophic musings, some symbols are so destructively powerful they need not be questioned (ex. the swastika or burning cross), but in most cases Bennett urges us to become comfortable with a thing’s “non-identity” or the shadows of things. The more we understand what a thing doesn’t mean to us, or can’t mean to us because it is unknowable, the better we can understand the thing itself. The more comfortable we are living in a state of aporia when it comes to the nature of things, the less emotionally driven our response to things become. It is not without consequence that we attach ourselves to objects that merely reflect our beliefs and intentions. Therefore, if we must find our reflections within an object, we must also make room for the reflections of others. | https://nd-gantz.medium.com/the-american-flag-the-black-lives-matter-flag-and-the-nature-of-things-c880868a125f | ['Nicole Gantz'] | 2020-08-05 23:59:04.684000+00:00 | ['Protest', 'Philosophy', 'Politics', 'Social Justice', 'BlackLivesMatter'] |
Social Media Burnout. The emotional toll managing a museum’s… | B urnout: “the reduction of fuel to nothing through use or combustion”
It can affect people in any position and sector but running social media for museums (usually alongside other duties) offers the perfect emotional cocktail for burnout to happen. Here are just a few of those ingredients.
GUILT
Social media is 24/7; it doesn’t stick to a 9 to 5. You’re always on, sneaking online “out of hours” and unable to switch off. Replying to every question is already a challenge, never mind engaging with comments and shared stories (the meaningful bit). The guilt builds unhealthily: you’re sure you’re doing as much as you can, but it’s not enough.
PRESSURE
In addition to representing every aspect of the museum, “going viral” has been an unreasonable management desire for years. Now it’s actually happened, the pressure is truly on. Despite these recent viral moments relying heavily on luck, too many people are waiting expectantly for their social media managers to make it happen. For those still feeling the pressure, Adam Koszary unpacks going viral at MERL beautifully.
BITTERNESS
Your peers’ work is always right there. While it’s useful to benchmark, it’s hard (but unavoidable) to constantly and unrealistically measure yourself against others. You see your contemporaries doing well, and you’re happy for them, but there’s a nagging voice in your head: “Why didn’t mine do as well?” Or you find unoriginality tiresome: “Someone already did that…and better.” Or, worse, the more conflicting: “but that’s…basic. Why is it getting praised?” Feeling bitter might be natural, but it feels bloody shit.
VULNERABILITY
Managing social media effectively rests on investing a lot of yourself and your personality. I’ve already written about this and I still believe it. But putting your heart on(the)line leaves it exposed; every cruel jibe, negative comment and complaint aimed at your organisation cuts you like a knife, especially because you usually can’t fight back. If you’re doing your job well, feeling vulnerable will likely be par for the course.
A pleasant Twitter exchange
Like many people working in museums, social media managers go beyond their job descriptions and pay scale, and their mental health is put to the test every day. Instead of risking burnout in your colleagues running social media, offer them space, time and support. Without these, they’re running on fumes.
A shorter version of this article was originally published in the June 2019 Museums Journal | https://medium.com/@RussellDornan/social-media-burn-out-be31286a4d59 | ['Russell Dornan'] | 2019-06-11 13:45:41.893000+00:00 | ['Burnout', 'Culture', 'Social Media', 'Museums', 'Emotions'] |
BEST OF THE TEST | Hi all, this time in this article I will show you about the essential things of software testing as software developers, software tester, and quality assurances usually do. And I will give you the short tutorial with the example. Are you strongly want to know more? So, please enjoy! :)
The Definitions
Many people that worked in this path as software developers, software testers, and quality assurance do this task to detect any gap, bug, defect, error, and mising requirement where it can be a trouble in software development later. Actually, everyone that worked in industry especially on IT industry don’t want to find them in their products. But, nowadays no one dare to claimed that a software totally free of those although we have been tried to fix it. So, we should be use a special method to solve the problems. And everybody knows that software testing having various type of testing to support in handling bugs, defects, and errors on a software. According to ANSI/IEEE 1059, testing can be defined as — A process of analyzing a software item to detect the differences between existing and required conditions (that is defecs/errors/bugs) and to evaluate the features of the software item.
Then, occur a question in our mind. When we start and stop the testing? Most of practicians, they will be started the testing depend on the software development model that is being used. For example, if a company using waterfall model, the testing conducted on testing phase. But, an early start to testing can be reduces the cost and time to rework. And when we stop the testing? We can stop testing when the deadline of testing is over, completion of text execution, completion of functionality, bug rate falls bellow a certain level, and management decision. And you only have 2 options: pay less for testing or pay more for maintenance later. So, the decision in your hands.
Bug, Defect, And Error
As I explain above, the problems in software testing consist of bug, defect, and error. And we will tell you about who they are. Following the definitons of them:
· Bug is an activity of software testing when the tester finds any missmatch in the application or system. And the people widely know that as defect informally.
· Defect is an activity of software testing when the tester finds an issue and corrects it by himself in development phase. And the variation of expected results and actual results also known as defect.
· Error is an activity of software testing when the tester get an unsuccessfully results in running a program.
The Kind of Testings
As you know, many variations of testing that is being used in software testing activites. So, I will tell you more about of them. Following the kind of testings:
· Smoke testing is the activity of testing that performed after the software build to check any bug or not to fixed it.
· Sanity testing is the activy of testing that performed after the sotware build with minor change of code and fixed the bugs.
· Functional testing is the activity of testing based on the specificatons of the software that is to be tested.
· Unit testing is the activity of testing that performed by developers formally.
· Integration testing is the activity of testing as known as the testing of combined parts of any applications to checking if the sofware working well. Integration tesing divided in 2 ways are bottom-up testing and top-down testing.
· Regressing testing is the activity of testing to verify if a fixed bug hasn’t result more bug in the other functionality.
· Performance testing is the activity of testing to identify any bottleneck or performance issues.
· etc.
The Example
In this example of testing I will tell you less about how to make a test and I will tell you more about that in the next chapter for details.
· The requirements:
o Eclipse emulator to write a series of code and execute the program. You can download in this following link: https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
o Selenium webdriver to load the test on machine. You can download in this following link: https://www.seleniumhq.org/download/
o Chrome webdriver to load the program on browser. You can download in this followng link: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/
· The Results:
Image 1. The series of c[ode.
Image 2. The execution of code.
Image 3. The execution of code.
Ok, that’s all about testing this time. And I will tell you about the interesting topic of testing in the next article. So, thanks for reading, have a great weekend and see ya! :) | https://medium.com/@agung251295/best-of-the-test-667ea3292619 | ['Agung Nugroho Reds'] | 2019-04-27 03:31:15.241000+00:00 | ['Selenium', 'Software Testing', 'Software Development', 'Quality Assurance'] |
Not Today | The word no never used to be in my vocabulary. For years I said yes to everything. Yes to that dinner out, sure to that work event, why not to helping someone around the office with a ‘fun’ project that really wouldn’t add any value to my day-to-day job. The more I said ‘yes,’ the more my to-do list grew and grew. The more that list grew, the more burnt out I became until one day I had to step back and take a breather. Why was I pushing myself so hard?
Learning to say ‘no’ to people was a tough lesson to learn. As a woman, I was taught from a young age to share, not to be ‘bossy’ (a word I HATE) and to always be appeasing. Saying yes is ingrained into us from a young age. Although I cannot talk about the male experience, I’ve heard from my counterparts they were often told the similar things (aside from the bossy stuff, that was saved for us!) While I’m slowly learning to say not to specific things, I think this will always be a struggle for me as it is for many of my friends and counterparts. Fear of missing out or FOMO is real, when really sometimes we should be embracing JOMO, the joy of missing out. There is a certain point however that you need to start looking out for number one. This is why I began formalizing a set of criteria for myself to decide what I say yes or no to. While items don’t have to check off all five boxes, I try to hit at least three before I commit to something. Here is what worked for me:
1. Will this help my career or personal growth?
Growth whether personal or professional is essential. To succeed you need to grow, learn new skills and bring those back home. When I’m looking at an opportunity, I ask myself what I will learn? Am I going to grow my skills to level up? Am I gaining something from this? For years I’d volunteer to do things out of the kindness of my heart. I’d work for free to help someone else achieve their goals without thinking of what my goals were. Now when I begin working on something I ask myself and them: what am I getting out of this relationship. I believe it’s important to be upfront about what you want and need out of a project. Get everyone aligned and ensure that you are on the same page. That way at the end of the day you can evaluate if something makes sense for you at that time.
2. What is the time commitment — do I have it?
Time is precious. You only have so many hours in the day to accomplish everything. When looking at a new opportunity, it is vital to ask yourself: do I have time for this? While everyone dreams of being a super-person and taking on the world, having the time and energy to do everything is impossible. I like to break down my time commitments and figure out if I can either do it thoroughly, offer some help or not commit at all. For example, recently I wanted to work on a project. When it came down to it, I realized this project was going to suck up at least 12 hours a week. I thought hard about this and realized it was just not the right time. I did, however, agree to be an on-call resource where they could call me when need be to bounce ideas off of or ask questions. I knew what could work for me and worked within my limits.
3. Does this help my community or ecosystem?
This is a personal one for me. Given that I’ve created a career around community and culture, giving back to these elements is crucial to me. These might not be what is important to you. Find what your key motivators are and fill in the blanks.
4. Who am I getting into bed with?
Everyone has that story where they began a project that was going to be remarkable only to end up feeling used or getting into bed with the wrong people. Before I go in deep with an organization, I like to do a bit of background snooping. Don’t be afraid to look up someone on LinkedIn, find your common friends and ask them about the person. Trust your instincts. If something doesn’t feel right then, it might not be. When in doubt I ask the person. Ninety percent of the time it’s a misunderstanding, however better to know from day one what you are getting yourself into.
5. Will I regret not doing this in five years?
FOMO is real, but FOMO fades! The true test of time is will I regret not doing something? This test for me is usually more useful when it comes to larger items such as working on a project or a career change. Will I regret saying no? There is also the flip side to consider: will I regret saying yes? Truly think long-term and figure out what you want for yourself. Five years seems far off, but one little change can make a world of difference.
Saying no will probably never come easily to me. Deep down I want to jump at the opportunity to do everything. This is unrealistic. Now, I take my time with decisions. I don’t jump at opportunities and check in with myself before saying yes. Your time and energy are not infinite resources. You must treat them as such. | https://medium.com/@katelgrant/not-today-3a283853524 | ['Kate Grant'] | 2020-12-15 17:20:40.588000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Life Lessons', 'Startup Life', 'Self Care', 'Startup Lessons'] |
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