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Tuesday, December 15, 2020 | Woke up 3:30 am
Can you write a letter backwards? like this Я, or this ⅃?
Yes you can.
There is a rule for that but what is the consequence for breaking it? What will happen if you’ll write a letter backwards?
People will probably understand it anyway, if it’s only one letter in each word. If you’ll write more letters backwards in each word, then some people might have a problem.
If you’ll write most or all letters backwards in each word then most people will have a problem.
But that’s the only consequence.
Most people will figure out that the letters are written backwards and if they’ll be curious what the message is, they’ll make the effort to read it. They’ll decipher it. They might even consider it a challange and be excited about it. After they’ll have deciphered it they’ll rejoice.
If you want to write it backwards, then write it backwards. | https://medium.com/my-author-journey/tuesday-december-15-2020-7f5ec66d8874 | ['Lukasz Laniecki'] | 2021-01-06 16:47:48.838000+00:00 | ['Thinking', 'Art', 'Artist', 'Rules', 'Writing'] |
These 10 Products Are What Seriously Save My Skin From Nasty Winter Weather | Pic:Blackpink
With several frigid winter months still ahead of us, often accompanied by a brutal wind chill, our skin needs a little more TLC to stay healthy and beautiful right now. Between being out in the cold and locked up in the house, our skin tends to get dryer and sadder.
When I was younger, I remember watching my mom moisturize her face with Oil of Olay, and she would tell me that you massage your face with an upward motion to prevent wrinkles. I thought it was fascinating. My grandmother was another great example — she told me how important it was to take care of yourself. Even at 80, she had amazingly smooth skin that could be the envy of most women.
I grew up watching women of my family take care of their skin. I thought it was amazing how there were little tricks they followed that kept them looking ‘younger’ than many other women their age. I’ve attempted to follow suit.
Ideally, I try to follow the 10-step Korean Skin Care Routine everyday. Some products may seem a little pricey, but it’s an investment — and they are always cheaper than a night out. Just invest in Birchbox, which is a great way to try new products, or make a little trip to a Korean store.
Here are my skin saviors for winter:
It has coconut oil, grape seed oil, and apricot kernel oil that gets rid of all your waterproof makeup, and gets your skin ready for the second cleaning step while keeping it hydrated.
This instantly brightens your complexion by getting rid of all the dead skin, leaving everything feeling baby soft and smooth. Over time, it is said to reduce fine lines and discoloration.
After cleansing your face, I love how the melacrusher brightening technology brightens your skin by reducing dark spots. It is a lightweight lotion that absorbs quickly to soften your skin texture. Honestly, I love the entire line from Laneige’s Bright Renew collection because my skin gets dull in the winter and this is a great way to combat it.
Probably my favorite PM serum, this light-weight retinol formula improves the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. After using it for a couple of weeks, my skin felt smoother and firmer. Every once in a while, I will use a tiny bit of Tretinoin Gel (0.025%), which is prescription retinol that I got from my dermatologist.
It’s like getting a mini-facial at home. It delivers 7-free essence to your skin and it feels great. Plus you have a ton of options — my favorites are Hyaluronic Acid (Moisturizing), Collagen (Skin Firming), Ceramide (Deep Moisturizing), and Strawberry (Brightening & Revitalizing). Just apply the essence-drenched mask on your skin and relax for 10–20 minutes. You can buy them in bulk all on amazon.
The skin around your eyes is the most sensitive and most likely to show early signs of aging. Using this eye cream helps you have less wrinkles and puffiness, along with firming the area. I dab it around my eyes twice a day with my ring finger for some extra hydration. And it also has pro-retinol.
I apply moisturizer after multiple layers (emulsion, serum, essence etc) and by this time, my skin feels and looks dewy and hydrated. Whether it is summer or winter (indoors or outdoors), I make sure to moisturize. I love this Garnier moisturizer because it has SPF 30 and hopefully it will ‘reverse’ the sun damage from the summer.
In addition to your face, you also need to moisturize your ENTIRE body. Many women take care of their faces but ignore other parts of the body, which also age. I love the dreamy smell of the JUARA Candlenut Body Cream. It has candlenut oil which is a natural hydrator and makes your skin velvety smooth. It is non-greasy and makes your skin stay smooth for a long time.
I have a weakness for face masks and you can put this on, go to sleep, and wash it off the next morning. This super-rich and hydrating mask has avocado and apricot kernel oil. It also has Japanese seaweed that repairs the skin overnight and slows premature aging by preventing future dehydration.
It’s a multitasking CC cream that hydrates, evens tone, controls shine while the light-reflecting particles give you a ‘glow’ — and it has SPF 35. You can also use it for a night out as it looks great day and night, plus great for pictures.
Sometimes, it takes a bit of trial and error to figure out what works best for you. The point is, you deserve to feel good in your own skin, and it’s a constant journey of figuring out what works. For more skincare information and product reviews, you can follow my Instagram account. Take care of you!
(This article was originally published on Thought Catalog on December 20, 2016. ) | https://medium.com/@anjyrajy/these-10-products-are-what-seriously-save-my-skin-from-nasty-winter-weather-7f9ff67a0ab9 | ['Anjana Rajbhandary'] | 2020-12-26 11:21:51.387000+00:00 | ['Winter Skin Care', 'Beauty', 'Skincare', 'Self Care', 'Skin Care Products'] |
Revolutionising Journalism Education in International News Reporting Via Zoom | Fast forward to 2020. COVID-19 lockdown has pushed all lectures online. It can be difficult enough teaching how to be an international reporter in-person, because the methodology involves sitting in sanitised surroundings.
A former senior BBC executive refers to this as air condition journalism. Quite how you impart emotion on the necessity of a risk assessment, should a missile come your way, is challenging.
One day VR of the kind, such as “Carne y Arena,” by Alejandro González Iñárritu will be common place. The experience puts the viewer in the moment. In this case the desert as Latin American immigrants find themselves under assault. Imagine being a reporter in this situation?
But until then, what?
In 2006, a decade from now I tell Apple Inc, in a presentation that yielded a profile on their front page, we will be streaming from our homes into businesses. You have become the brand.
Television has already given us the tools for this feat ahead. We’ll gladly watch hours of TV. What if online lectures became a personalised TV programme. This is what the Open University attempted did in the 1970s and perfected in the 90s and to date I still watch Bob Ross’ Joy of Painting on BBC Four. I watched it yesterday!
In lockdown can you provide a comparable experience for the next generation of journalists? I see fault lines, particularly in the pipeline. Zoom has become the default, but I can see a number of new features to make this process a better experience. Three key words here are: | https://medium.com/afterthought/revolutionising-journalism-education-in-international-news-reporting-via-zoom-e67c5ca4de89 | ['Dr. David Dunkley Gyimah'] | 2020-12-24 12:25:28.411000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Academia', 'Zoom Lectures', 'Media', 'Education'] |
Saving Santa’s IT architecture with AI and cognitive services | On the last few days of work before Christmas our internal architect team hosted a “Save Santa” hackathon where we were given some pain points that Santa and his elves may have to deal with in their IT system.
As these pains may be transferable beyond the North Pole, hereby my team’s complete Azure solution to automate and add AI capabilities to an email-triggered insight gathering pipeline.
YouTube video where I do the solution walkthrough
The pains we are targeting:
Overwhelming number of emails coming in that have to be answered / sorted / processed / dealt with. (Santa’s wish lists being sent over from all over the world)
2. Getting insights out of data at a first glance such as:
Dealing with data in different languages coming in (that needs to all be converted into one source of truth before further processing)
Understanding the sentiment of text (deal with sad kids first, or take different actions based on different readings)
Get a quick summary of important details in messages (if kids take forever to get to the point)
Classify images (picture attachments of toys kids might want)
Aggregate all these insights into one place, automate all these steps, have it all running in one platform with one authentication method (Azure Active Directory).
Overview of solution
Needed resources for this solution
Detect emails with attachments and key word “wish list” in subject. Process email to remove html and store the body (text) and images of presents Create a notebook using cognitive services & custom vision APIs to process the text and images of the email request. (A. Translate the email and gather more insights from the wish like sentiment, key phrases. B. Classification of the received image into pre-set gift categories) A. Connect the notebook to the data lake, and B. Run a blob trigger when new email items have been stored to start text. Centralize all information and create dashboard
example of an email from a kid that would trigger our pipelines
1 & 2: Email detection with Logic Apps and cleaning with custom Azure Functions
This section handles the email detection by monitoring my inbox (or Santa’s) for wishes from children.
We assume kids would send images of the toys they want, and use a type of language in the email subject. | https://iuliaferoli.medium.com/saving-santas-it-architecture-with-ai-and-cognitive-services-d001ac6027dd | ['Iulia Feroli'] | 2020-12-22 09:24:22.278000+00:00 | ['Cognitive Services', 'Automation', 'Azure', 'AI', 'Christmas'] |
Daily Journal Prompt — Do You React or Respond? | One Questions, One Quote, Every Day
Created by the author
“It’s like she’s Godzilla and a two-year-old toddler all at once! Full of rage and impossible to reason with!” “So, what do you do?” “I tell her I need to go to the bathroom!”
I laughed out loud. I was having a conversation with a friend who was telling me his strategy of surviving his wife’s hormonal rages when she was having her period.
“Works every single time! She just needs a moment to break the escalating rage.”
A light bulb when off in my head. I realized that this was something I already practiced frequently.
So, what was this magic emotional control trick?
It was simply to pause.
Society has conditioned us to think that we have to address every emotion we feel right immediately. Have a headache? Take a pill ASAP. Feel lonely? Join other lonely singles online right now! Feel hangry? Quick, eat a Snickers bar!
But this sense of urgency is unnecessary and often serves only to treat the symptom and not the cause. Not reacting works too, and it’s free from side effects, ghosting, and calories. Sometimes, all your body needs is a break from the escalating vortex of energy, and as soon as the cycle is broken, the emotion will dissipate and leave you.
Here’s the catch. I said it was simple, but I never said it was easy. Anyone who has ever been on a diet will tell you. Sometimes, not doing is harder than doing.
So, why do it?
Because there is so much freedom in knowing that your emotions do not control you. That you can choose to stop feeding them and they will leave you. All emotion is energy. The more energy we give it, the greater it intensifies.
So, give it a shot. If you don’t know how, here’s an article I wrote about how to do it.
Created by the author | https://medium.com/daily-journal-prompts/daily-journal-prompt-do-you-react-or-respond-63ddc8122071 | ['May Pang'] | 2020-12-11 11:01:07.296000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Self Improve', 'Self', 'Journaling', 'Life'] |
#WhereToBe 9.15- 9.21 | Each Friday, Epicenter features a special where to be post on our blog to make sure every day of the week has some sort of cultural event to check out. We hope that you all can come out into the community, learn, and commemorate some influential people and events around Boston! Have something coming up that you like to see here? Tweet us @epicentercom and follow the hashtag #WhereToBe.
Friday 9.15
“ …corrupted societal messaging, attitudes and media imagery have all attacked the soul, strength and creative integrity of black boys and men to something more fearful, aggressive and less valuable. With a large percentage of black boys and men succeeding in the arts, music, and entertainment fields, there seems to be underlying connections between the interrogation of black masculinity, being an artist/musician, telling one’s truth and uplifting underserved communities.
Join us for a panel discussion as we hear from Boston male artists, musicians and creative entrepreneurs discuss their ability to redefine black masculinity, and use their creative work to engage diverse audiences, shift culture and/or contribute to social movements across Greater Boston.”
When: 6pm
Where: Codman Square Health Center | 637 Washington St, Dorchester Center, Massachusetts 02124
Saturday 9.16
“TRILLFEST by trillfit, the city’s first wellness music festival for the culture, at Cambridge’s University Park Commons on 9/16.
Get hype for a day of our favorite fitness sessions, DJs, food trucks, and lawn games, plus, a wellness market and special #FORCREATIVESOULS meditation led by @nerdlikejazzy. Early bird tickets now available. More special guests to be announced!
THE LINEUP
9AM: #FORCREATIVESOULS led by Jazerai Allen-Lord
10AM: TRILLFIT Cardio Dance
10:45AM: TRILLFIT x Unnamed Run Crew 3 Mile Run
11AM: TRILLFIT Sculpt (Bring your own mat)
12PM: TRILLFIT Hip Hop Yoga (Bring your own mat)
1PM: “Fight the Power!” — TRILLFIT Boxing
2PM: DJ’s and Live Performances
When: 9am
Where: 65 Sidney St, Cambridge MA
Sunday 9.17
“Towns in Massachusetts currently have the opportunity to APPROVE, POSTPONE, or BAN retail marijuana establishment in their districts. Is your town on board? Join us at the Boston Freedom Rally for a discussion panel outlining the process communities must go through in order to participate in this booming industry, and how you can help bring these opportunities to your town.
Location: MassCann Education Village
Moderator:
Joe Gilmore (Students for Sensible Drug Policy)
Speakers:
Kamani Jefferson (Massachusetts Recreational Consumer Council)
Marion McNabb (Cannabis Community Care and Research Network)
Paul Brennan (New England Grass Roots Institute)
Leane Mysliwy (Active local constituent)
When: 3pm
Where: Boston Freedom Rally | Boston Common, Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Monday 9.18
When: 6pm
Where: Faimount Innovation Lab | 594 Columbia Rd, Dorchester
Tuesday 9. 19
“Join Mass Poetry for a series of readings at The Prudential Center in Boston. Maggie Dietz, Kathi Aguero and Anthony Febo will perform their work in the outdoor courtyard, Boylston Plaza at 800 Boylston St., Tuesday, September 19th from 5–7 pm.”
When: 5pm
Where: Prudential Center | 800 Boylston St, Boston MA
Wednesday 9.20
“Women In Music Boston is having a local music showcase at Spotify! Submissions were open to all genres and genders, after several rounds of voting, we narrowed it down to three performers, congratulations luhx., Jazzmyn RED, and Marcela Cruz!! Join us for this networking mixer September 20th 7–10PM at Spotify Boston. Free for WIM members, $10 for non-members”
When: 7pm
Where: Spotify Boston | 40–50 Grove St.,Cambridge MA
Thursday 9.21
“Vocalist, RoseLove opens up the return of Nina LaNegra’s AiLiLive on 3rdThursdays — Starting September 21st 7pm until 10pm. AiLiLive embraces Food, Art, Culture & Spirituality on a monthly basis. We will engage in hopeful dialog in these turbulent times and come away with strategies to have more joy, art and peace even in the age of chaos. On October 19th, 2017 AiLi Live will celebrate 12 continuous years at the Haley House Bakery Cafe.
RoseLove has an eclectic sound of Neo-Soul, Reggae, Jazz, R&B, Hip- Hop and Pop. She self-describes her style as Neo-Lounge. This Boston Native has performed all around her city and has many duo-collaborations with both Hip Hop, R&B and Spoken-word Artists. Her earthy, vibrant style is infectious and inviting. She’s currently finishing her EP of 5 songs called Experimental and has a popular video for her song “Magical Things” which has made its way on the web.
Open Mic & Dialog to Follow
When: 7pm
Where: Haley House Bakery and Cafe | 12 Dade St., Roxbury MA | https://medium.com/tcproject/wheretobe-9-15-9-21-6deb9bda5f6a | ['Transformative Culture Project'] | 2017-09-15 14:25:28.472000+00:00 | ['Community Engagement', 'Poetry', 'Music', 'Wheretobe', 'Boston'] |
Tools to build a prototype web app in one month without writing code | Tools to build a prototype web app in one month without writing code
Prototyping stack (for non-developers)
For non-technical people who have an idea for a digital product, I’ve noticed two reasons that keep them from pursuing: 1) anxiety towards sacrificing some aspect of their life to make the time, and 2) convincing themselves that they need a technical cofounder and/or funding to build something tangible. This essay aims to dismiss reason #2, by clarifying some free (or price-of-several-coffees) tools I’ve used to build a functional web application version-1; my prototyping stack. One key advantage of building a prototype is that it drastically improves how seriously you’re taken by peers in co-working spaces, potential cofounders, prospective mentors/angel investors, and target users. m = more information available,
v = vlad’s (my own) personal experiences
Organize
Although I was skeptical how a “visual idea board” would be different than just writing ideas into a notebook, I was surprised to find that it had a side-effect of helping jumpstart momentum for doing work [v.1].
The first idea board was used purely for brainstorming along several categories which I guessed at being necessary for the idea to become tangible — the foundational product idea was found in the resulting conversations [v.2].
This is also a great time to apply the Jobs To Be Done framework as a way to understand how someone’s life can be improved; as a a consequence, this frame of thinking helps surface ideas for product features that would impact those improvements [m.1]. The point here isn’t to get stuck in brainstorming-paralysis, but rather to settle on a hypothesis for one “job to be done”, and then continue through the rest of this prototyping stack.
First idea board (using the free tool Trello) was decommissioned after figuring out what to build
Design
The amount of incredible (and freely accessible) designs out there make the motto, “you don’t have to re-invent the wheel” valid. Since you’re still in the brainstorming phase — and probably don’t have a background in human factors — it’s a good idea to borrow inspiration from best-practice user interfaces [v.3].
At this point, I was primarily spending time bookmarking designs which looked like they could be used to be used to fulfill my “jobs to be done” hypothesis.
Dribbble showcases professional-level design choices for any kind of user interface
Mock-Up (& Iterate)
Have you ever played around with Microsoft Paint? Well, there are tools which are just as simple to use, except they let you create a “fake app” that you can click around to navigate to various screens.
At this point, I would take the inspirations from the “Design” phase, and build them in this mock-up tool [v.4].
These tools also export nicely into a mobile app, so this is a great time to hand your phone to prospective users and silently observe how they use your interface to gather feedback for design changes. The more times you can do this — build mockup, demo to target user, observe their hesitations with usability, re-build mockup — the more professional your user experience will feel.
The non-free (low cost) tool Proto lets you create multiple screens to experiment with user-interfaces
Functional App
What if you could use your Microsoft Paint skills to clone an app like Uber or AirBnB over a weekend [m.2]? That’s the main appeal to a new class of app building tools, which feel like the next evolution of tools used in the “mock-up” phase.
Although there is a steep learning curve [v.5], showing up to a cofounder speed-dating event / prospective investor coffee chat becomes a 10x better experience when you have the first version of a functional app.
The free tool Bubble.is is probably my favorite tool discovered in 2019, for building fully-functional web (and mobile) apps where writing code is not a necessity for producing the first-version prototype
Data (honorable mention)
Despite poor design choices, user experience, app load times, bugs, etc, one way to immediately stand out with a prototype is through the data that you are now able to collect — not just typical user info, but rather behavioral data [v.6] which helps describe a trend starting to happen in your market; this a conversation every angel investor wants to have (and wants to be the first to have). | https://medium.com/swlh/tools-to-build-a-prototype-web-app-in-one-month-without-writing-code-dcda1afda5dd | ['Vlad Shulman'] | 2019-06-08 16:01:42.533000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Product Management', 'Design'] |
My Eating Disorder Experience Revelation | My Eating Disorder Experience Revelation
I guess there is no need to start from the beginning. Many eating disorders start in the same way. You were a happy kid, didn’t worry about food or your body, and then, BANG, you didn’t know what you were doing and you were suddenly out of control.
This is not what happened to me. My friends and I were standing in the cafeteria line for our weekly fish and chips on Friday. My best friend, we’ll call her Charlie, for now, told us she didn’t want lunch and she went to find us a table. My whole group of friends followed her and began asking her if she was okay, convincing her that not eating one meal was dangerous and was the beginning of an eating disorder. Until this point, I genuinely didn’t know what an eating disorder was. Growing up as an only child, there are a lot of things that you miss out on.
At this point, Charlie did not have an eating disorder, but I believe that she enjoyed the attention that all her friends gave her when she decided to skip a meal, and this became a regular thing for her, and for me. I began thinking in depth about how Charlie was losing weight while we were eating our lunch, and how we were gaining weight. However, I couldn’t just skip lunch as well, it would look as if I were copying her. So my lunchtimes changed drastically. Many days I would spend the ‘eating’ portion of lunch in the bathrooms, and then meet my friends afterward. Other days, I would join them in the cafeteria, grab a tray, and only put bread on my tray. Of course, I would barely eat anything and sometimes my friends would point this out.
You would think that with all this lost lunch, I would be losing weight rapidly and I would be gaining the reputation of being the Anorexic who was afraid of food. But no. I began supplementing my diet in other places, turning one bad habit of skipping lunch into a different kind of disordered eating. The one that nobody seems to notice. And I will point out that this developed gradually throughout the years and went through many phases: one burger patty for dinner, 2 bags of Mini Eggs on the way to school, Haribo Tangfastics at break time, no breakfast, 1 apple cut up into tiny slices so it feels like I am eating more, calorie-free drinks, and so many more that I cannot even list them. Throughout this experience, I will not say I was either anorexic or a binge-eater, I really hopped between the two. Until after a while, my mind was constantly forcing me to grab food and stuff it in my face. I feel completely out of control when I am eating. As soon as I finish a meal or snack, I immediately feel the urge to eat more, and although I am telling myself that I am not hungry and that I will become obese if I eat anymore, I continue to eat. My brain is on a high, and my stomach is trying to endure the pain of expansion. Every day I tell myself that I will change. But the problem keeps getting worse. Now, it is not ‘eat when you bored,’ it is: the only time you eat is when you’re watching TV or Youtube, so you end up wasting an entire day staring at a screen and stuffing food into your face.
I know, one day I will end up obese if this continues. There appears to be nothing I can do. I have asked loved ones to help me, but they have not even tried. Maybe I have not expressed to them the seriousness of the matter. It is tough to do so, especially because all my mum sees in me is the little girl who is afraid to eat any food. And that is true, but that fear is because I know that if I eat one bite of food, the eating will never stop and I will die in my grave at an extreme weight, alone. | https://medium.com/@kaanonymous/my-eating-disorder-experience-revelation-511a7ef2913e | [] | 2020-12-21 11:21:08.790000+00:00 | ['Mental Illness', 'Eating Disorder', 'Mental Health', 'Eating Disorder Recovery'] |
How to get the best from your Marketing Agency. | As a Marketing, Branding or communications Manager, one of your biggest headaches will be justifying your marketing budget and constantly answering the question regarding value for money for most of your Advertising, Public Relations, and Marketing campaigns.
For the past four years, I have been working with agencies to execute campaigns and one thing many of my professional peers note is that agencies are the most preferred partners to execute Advertising, Public Relations, and Marketing. Agencies play a very big role in ensuring our marketing calendars are being executed in creative ways but one thing you will learn quickly is that there can be a disconnect in what you want or desire, from what you’ll receive.
As someone who has worked for an agency before, I do understand how they operate. Their work culture, customer service, pressure, and deliverables are very familiar to me but that may not be the case for you who encounters them for the first time.
So, you’ve just landed your marketing, branding or communications gig and the company wants you to do a campaign for a new product or service, how do you go about it? This is not a strategy article but its simple tips and tricks on how to get the best out of your marketing agency without overspending, fighting the agency and not under delivering the campaign.
UNDERSTAND THE OBJECTIVES OF YOUR CAMPAIGN.
Understanding your campaign is the number one most important rule when working with a marketing agency. The confidence of saying yes or no to agency proposals will be purely based on how well you understand your campaign and what deliverable you expect. Create a project plan that allows you to crosscheck if everything is according to plan, meeting budget goals and simply delivering as you desire.
FAMILIARISE WITH YOUR AGENCY STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
To achieve your goals, you need to understand the people you are working with. Depending on your budget and the frequency of jobs you give your agency, you will have the opportunity to make mental notes of specific capabilities of your agency. You will realize the pitch and deliverables can differ but knowing how to manage them will allow you to get favorable results for your campaigns. One simple trick is to categorize their services into Digital, Web, Artworks, PR, printing, Events, and Launches.
Communicate areas where you feel they need to improve as per the services they are offering you because if they keep sending you things you don’t like, issues will come up that will affect your overall campaign goals.
DO NOT ACCEPT MEDIOCRE WORK
Unfortunately, due to time constraints and approvals issues, agencies are constantly working under pressure to deliver miracles for clients but this does not mean you should accept anything sent to you. Follow your gut, if you don’t like work sent by the agency, reject it with reasons. Call your account manager and explain to him/her why the work sent is unacceptable.
To avoid such issues, I have learned to do the following,
Communicate very clear copy to the agency, use illustrations, drawings, pictures if possible. Request the Art Director or creative working on the project to be part of the meeting. This allows the creative to hear directly from the source. Once they have a meeting to discuss the brief, he/she will have an easier time understanding what to execute. Explain the objective of each campaign to everyone involved with your project in the agency. Do not assume they will understand what you want at the end of the day.
FIND COST CUTTING OPPORTUNITIES
Don’t accept every quote sent to you. If you work with many suppliers for different jobs, request for quotations and compare. Question why there is a huge difference if any. If you work with printers on other bigger jobs, find out if the agency can work with your existing printers to reduce the cost for the printing of the flexis. Your executives want you to execute a dope campaign but at the same time want you to not spend every single coin simply because money has been allocated.
UNDERSTAND YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY CLIENT.
This is more of a mental note than anything else. You must understand the agency isn’t working on your job alone. They have other clients they are servicing. Depending on how much you pay in agency fees, you can actually figure out where your company has been placed in their priority list. Find out how busy they are and when they have scheduled your work. You could be expecting a response within 5 hours but your job has been scheduled for the following day.
IMPROVE ON YOUR SKILLS.
If you forget any of the recommendations above, don’t forget this one, improve your skills. I personally live by this code. Over-reliance on marketing agencies can at times work to your disadvantage if you don’t handle them well.
Below is a list of skills that you need to have and always work at perfecting them:-
Graphic designing — Important Softwares to learn Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Presentations — Powerpoint (Your presentations must stand out) Digital Marketing — How to execute an entire social media campaign from start to finish and how to generate reports.
If you’ve been following hiring trends, you’ll note the above skills feature in the requirements section among others. You will quickly learn that very few schools will teach you the above skills but depending on your goals, Youtube, udemy, https://www.lynda.com and many similar skill sharing platforms will teach you skills that will help you improve your overall skills.
The above skills allow you to be part of the process, you will understand everything being pitched to you by the marketing agencies and most importantly, you will be able to communicate easily with your executives/management team in the business language they understand, ensuring you get the necessary approvals for your campaigns.
Probably you don’t have the time to learn new skills or you’ve seen it all and prefer to manage the agency without getting your hands dirty or you prefer to hire junior staff who will do the above for you, more power to you, but remember, we live in a fast-paced career era where what you bring on the table matters. Don’t leave the fate of your trade to brokers.
Question the broker, push the broker, support the broker until you achieve the goals you desire for each year’s campaign goals.
I will be sharing more insights on how you can improve as a Marketing, Branding, and Communications professional and you can also let me know in the comments section what specific areas you’d like me to tackle in this competitive Marketing, Branding or communications jungle.
BE DOPE AT WHAT YOU DO. | https://medium.com/@MUTINDA/how-to-get-the-best-from-your-marketing-agency-73071fc4a185 | [] | 2019-11-14 07:33:05.975000+00:00 | ['Public Relations', 'Marketing', 'Communications Strategy', 'Marketing Agency', 'Branding'] |
In 2021, Don’t Deprive Yourself | In the Before Times, I wrote a column called Optimize Me, about the most bizarre things people did to their bodies in the name of health. Occasionally, these “wellness hacks” were scientifically backed, but more often they were misguided and even concerning at times. Some of them were efficiency tricks to get more time out of the day — using electric shocks to fast-track a workout or accelerated listening settings to consume more content. Others involved injecting substances into people’s bloodstreams and, ahem, backdoors.
Looking back on these articles now, after a year of hardship and suffering, some of these optimization trends, particularly the ones focused on deprivation, seem downright perverse.
Why would you ever intentionally deny yourself of the fleeting moments of joy life offers you? (And by the way, that’s not how dopamine works.)
Why would you commit to an all-meat diet and starve yourself of fruit and vegetables, the source of so many essential vitamins and minerals needed to maintain optimal immune health?
And what could possibly inspire anyone to stop drinking water, a literal life source?
Life is hard enough as it is. In 2021, go easy on yourself and indulge a little bit. | https://elemental.medium.com/in-2021-dont-deprive-yourself-6f09021d300d | ['Dana G Smith'] | 2020-12-30 06:32:39.989000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Happiness', 'Body', 'Life', 'Science'] |
Finding Your Joy in the Season of COVID-19 | Finding Your Joy in the Season of COVID-19
There’s a secret that I’ve learned and I want to share it with you.
It’s something that I keep running into in various forms through my reading and conversations with people. It’s something, that when I began to understood its meaning, I began to practice. And that’s part of the key, it takes practice, lots of it.
Are you ready to learn this secret? Once I tell you, I can’t un-tell you and you will never be the same. Like Neo learning about the Matrix, your entire existence will change. You may find yourself completely questioning life.
Do you want to know this life altering secret?
Before I tell you, I want you to make a choice between being happy or not. You choose happy, right? Me too, but there is a catch.
In order for you to choose to be happy, you need to choose to let go of everything that is bringing you down. All you fear, all your worry, all your anger, let it all go and choose to be happy.
That’s the secret. Life is a choice. Every action you take daily is a choice. Every word you utter is a choice. Your silence is a choice. The way you drive to work is a choice. Getting drunk or worse every day because you are out of work because of a pandemic is a choice. EVERYTHING IS A CHOICE.
When you woke up this morning, what did you do? Did you get out of bed or hit snooze on your alarm? What did you eat for breakfast? Did you brush your teeth? Everything you did from the moment you woke up was a choice. Hopefully, you are continuing to read, that’s a choice.
Take a minute to think about it, how many decisions have you made today? Start writing them down, I’ll wait.
If everything you do is a choice, they you can logically assume that your happiness is a choice too.
I never said these decisions were easy. In fact they are difficult and most of our choices are so engrained in us that we don’t even realize we’re making choices. We call those unconscious choices habits or addictions.
I’m don’t want to get into the chemistry of it because that’s way too much for a short blog post. I’ll just say this, there are biological factors that cause you to make unhealthy decisions, be it physiological or psychological.
Regardless of your circumstances, something no one can take away from you is your power to choose to be happy and rise above the things that are happening to you.
In one of my favorite books, “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl, he describes the atrocities of the Holocaust as he witnessed it from the inside. He speaks about finding meaning the harshest of situations. He comes to the conclusion that his captors could not take away anything he was not willing to give them. Namely, his ability to choose his happiness.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
I you haven’t read Man’s Search for Meaning, pick yourself up a copy. I can promise, if my writing is making you think at all, Frankl’s will make you cry and make you a different person.
Are you convinced yet that everything you do is a choice? It’s a beautiful thing choice, isn’t it? It means you have the power to carve out your own destiny. Dr. Benjamin Hardy breaks it all down in his book “Personality isn’t Permanent” . I highly recommend you read it if you want to learn the nuances of making your way in the world today.
Your world changes when you understand you are not who you think you are, but rather who you want to be.
We are in the middle of the holiday season during a pandemic. It’s something the world hasn’t seen in 100 years. It is a difficult time for many folks. If we all pay attention to what the CDC and WHO are telling us, we won’t be spending time with extended family this year. Some of us may see families together or see news stories about people not staying in their bubbles. That may make you angry or upset.
Remember you can choose your response. Choose to be happy. You can choose to be kinder and gentler this season. Be more generous with your time and patience.
But most of all, enjoy the holidays the best you can.
If you order the books I mention in this post using the links above, I may earn a small commission from Amazon. | https://medium.com/@kenkaus/finding-your-joy-in-the-season-of-covid-19-dcdafd096743 | ['Ken Kaus'] | 2020-12-13 03:01:28.758000+00:00 | ['Finding Joy', 'Covid 19', 'Happiness', 'Joy'] |
Feminal superhero movies which should be made now | Feminal superhero movies which should be made now
Superheroes are one of the most loved characters of fictional movies among the audience and the viewers. Specially the male superheroes that leads in the movies are the ones which are appreciated by most of the people who love watching fictional films.
Masculine superheroes such as Superman, Batman, Hulk and many other characters have gained immense attention from the public and now they are one of the most prominent figures. But then why the female superhero characters are being ignored? Why there are no movies based on the female superheroes that can really dominate the screen.
We always have beautiful superhero female characters such as Wonderwoman, Batgirl, Supergirl and many such which really has a connection with the male superheroes and also have helped them in many ways to defeat the super villains.
Why can only male superheroes dominate the screen and not female? It’s just because male superheroes are muscular and male or is it that female superheroes are being ignored from the scenario? If it’s so then now, all the filmmakers need to understand that even female superhero can dominate the big screens.
Who will not love a female superhero movie, where the lead is played by a beautiful female superhero character? Everyone will. So now, movies should be made on female fictional artists apart from the male ones.
Below mentioned are one of the most famous and beloved female superheroes on which the movies should be made as soon as possible:-
1) Batgirl — Batgirl has her appearances in most of the DC comics where she first appeared in Batman (April 1961) and is also depicted as the female counterparts to the superhero Batman. Batgirl as depicted by several comic books resembles an important character where she acts as a detective and solving mysteries and also helping the people around her whenever it is possible for her. Batgirl was basically written by Bill Finger and graphics were done by Sheldon Moldoff. Apart from the character of Batgirl, we also find that Batgirl belongs to the Gothic city and the Batman Family where she should also be treated equally as the Batman. Her several appearances in the fictional books also shows her importance in the batman series and therefore there should be a movie definitely made on Batgirl.
2) Wasp (Janet Van Dyne) — Wasp is a fictional female superhero which appears in most American comic books published by Marvel comics. Written by Stan Lee, this female character was first appeared in the comic book of Tales to Astonish. Wasp is one of the female superhero who is the first female Avenger and also a long time leader to the team. She was one who was also the founder of the team when it was first formed. The character of wasp is usually depicted as having wings and ability to shrink herself and also has the power of bioelectric energy blasts. Apart from having some amazing super powers, Wasp was also ranked as the fifth greatest avenger of all the time by Marvel creations. So by looking at her powers and her role, she surely deserves to get a good shot on big screens.
3) She-Hulk — She-hulk is the female superhero that belongs to the Hulk family. Created by Stan Lee, She-hulk mostly appears in the Marvel comics, where she plays a role of a cousin to Hulk. As per the series, she-hulk was the character who received blood from her cousin hulk when once she was injured, which also led to her acquiring of special powers from her superhero cousin Hulk. as depicted in the series, She-hulk is a prominent figure which acquires a huge feminine power. She is super-strong, indestructible and very powerful covered with those green body same like Hulk. She-hulk also has been a member to the Fantastic four, Avenger, Heroes for life and many more. Her role is powerful but with it, she also resembles her personality as well. By looking at her powers and role, She-hulk definitely needs a chance to showcase herself in the big screens as well.
4) Storm — Storm is a fictional superhero character which has her existence in Marvel Comics from a pretty long time. Her first appearance can be traced in Giant-Size X-Men in May 1975 and this character is created by Len Wein. Storm is also the first woman superhero of color, which determines her existence which is not related to color and also depicts that how she is important to both X-Men and Marvel lore. Storm is meant to be born with superhuman abilities and her character is depicted as the woman superhero who has the ability to control the weather and fly and also she is member of the X-men group. In the comic series, Storm is also married to superhero Black Panther and then becomes the Queen Consort of the African nation of Wakanda. This character is very interesting on the series and therefore she needs definitely a shot to get appear on the screens.
5) Black Widow — Written by Stan Lee, the character of Black Widow was first introduced in the Tales of Suspense in April 1964. Published by the Marvel comic Books, Black widow is also a part of Avengers, Iron Man, S.H.I.E.LD and many other series by the Marvel Creations. Black widow had her existence since the 60’s and then later became a prominent figure in the Marvel Universe. She is usually depicted as the founding member of Avengers and a fictional spy agent in most of the series. The series also shows that first she was introduced as the villain but further she transformed herself and made her appearance in Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D by leaving her past behind. She was also seen in the latest movie named Captain America:Civil War, where her role was largely appreciated. Henceforth, by looking at her role and transformation, she should be definitely portrayed on the big screens.
If movies are made on this female superheroes then it would surely work wonders because every movie with good fictional characters and story, definitely works on screens. | https://medium.com/@FictionPulp/feminal-superhero-movies-which-should-be-made-now-25a5a781c25e | [] | 2016-10-10 05:29:58.632000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Comics', 'Woman', 'Marvel', 'Fiction'] |
Containerizing a Node.js Express + React App with Docker | In this tutorial, I am going to be taking you through the process of containerizing a Node.js Express backend and React frontend. We will be containerizing the sentiment analysis app, a project that I have been working on with Dan Murphy that aims to provide users with sentiment analysis of their tweets through NLP. This is the GitHub repo for the project if you wish to follow along: https://github.com/dylane1999/SentimentAnalysisApp.
Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.
The process of ‘Dockerizing’ any application begins by creating a Docker Image for each of the sections of the app. In this example, we will be creating an image for the express server first, and then the React app.
A Docker image is a read-only template with instructions for creating a Docker container. It provides a convenient way to package up applications and preconfigured server environments, which you can use for your own private use or share publicly with other Docker users.
Creating the backend image
we will start the image for the backend by creating a Dockerfile inside of the Backend directory
A Dockerfile is a text document that contains all the commands a user could call on the command line to assemble an image. Using docker build users can create an automated build that executes several command-line instructions in succession.
the Dockerfile is used with the docker build command to create the image from which our express server can be run
inside of the Backend’s Dockerfile add the following code
FROM node:12.18.3
#specify version of node that was used in the projects development LABEL version="1.0"
LABEL description="This is the base docker image for the Tweet Sentiment Analysis backend API."
LABEL maintainer = ["<[email protected]>"] WORKDIR /app
# create a directory for the image filesystem COPY ["package.json", "package-lock.json", "./"]
#copy into image file system RUN npm install --production
# Run the command inside your image filesystem. COPY . .
# Copy the rest of your app's source code from your host to your image filesystem. EXPOSE 5000
#Expose port CMD ["node", "backend.js"]
# Run the specified command within the container.
create the frontend image
now we move into the frontend directory, and create another Dockerfile in the root of the frontend folder
this is very similar to the backend image because they both run using node.js, the difference is the exposing of port 3000, instead of 5000, and a different description
FROM node:12.18.3
#specify version of node that was used in the projects development LABEL version="1.0"
LABEL description="This is the base docker image for the Tweet Sentiment Analysis frontend react app."
LABEL maintainer = ["<[email protected]>"] WORKDIR /app
# create a directory for the image filesystem COPY ["package.json", "package-lock.json", "./"]
#copy into image file system RUN npm install --production
# Run the command inside your image filesystem. COPY . .
# Copy the rest of your app's source code from your host to your image filesystem. EXPOSE 3000
#Expose port CMD ["npm", "start"]
# Run the specified command within the container.
Building the image
We can build an image from the one of the Dockerfiles we created using this command:
make sure you are inside of the directory that you want to build
docker build -t image-name .
the -t tag allows us to specify the name of the image
we add “.” after naming our image to let docker know that the directory we want to build from is the current one we are inside of
now that we have created the image, we can verify its success by using:
docker images
to run an image use the docker run command like so, specifying the ports desired, and the image name you want to run
docker run -p 5000:5000 -d image-name
to display current running docker images, use the command:
docker ps
Setting up for Docker Compose
building an image would be enough to deploy our app if we only had one image, but because we have 2, we need to use docker compose to allow our images to talk to each other via Http requests through the proxy middleware in the frontend
to do this, we will create a docker-compose.yml file in the root of our project
/App
/frontend
/backend
docker-compose.yml
.gitignore
inside of our docker-compose.yml we define
version — version of docker you are working with
services — the two images that we want to run
each service contains a build which consists of:
context: identifies where this build is in reference to the location of docker-compose.yml
dockerfile: identifies this images Dockerfile is in reference to docker-compose.yml
next, we reference our respective image for each build and map our apps default port to your desired port number
after define context, we can reference our image as if we were inside of the frontend or backend directory
version: '3' services:
backend:
build:
context: ./backend
dockerfile: ./Dockerfile
env_file:
"./.env"
image: "dmurphy1217/twitter-sentiment-backend"
ports:
- "5000:5000"
frontend:
build:
context: ./client
dockerfile: ./Dockerfile
image: "dmurphy1217/twitter-sentiment-frontend"
ports:
- "3000:3000"
links:
- "backend"
Note that because the frontend uses a proxy to communicate with the backend, we add a link to the frontend service so that we can connect to the backend using the specified link name.
We also add our env to the application by specifying it under env_file in the backend service.
in the frontend, we alter our proxy middleware to include this new “backend” link before the port
const { createProxyMiddleware } = require('http-proxy-middleware'); module.exports = function(app) {
app.use(
'/analyze',
createProxyMiddleware({
target: `http://backend:5000`,
changeOrigin: true,
})
);
};
Composing the images
now that we have our docker-compose set up, and our frontend is ready to proxy the image, we can actually build the app
navigate into the root directory and run this command to build the docker images together as a container
docker-compose up -d
the -d, can also be used as ( — detach) tells docker to run the container in the background so that we can continue to use out terminal
to check the status of our application we can use:
docker-compose logs
when we want to stop our containers from running we can use this command to kill the process
docker-compose down
if we have changed something in our code, and want to rebuild the docker images to run again we can specify — build in our compose command | https://medium.com/@dylanedwards290/containerizing-a-node-js-express-react-app-with-docker-779abb721620 | ['Dylan Edwards'] | 2020-12-20 22:30:56.473000+00:00 | ['Docker', 'Software Engineering', 'Expressjs', 'JavaScript', 'React'] |
‘color theory’ by Soccer Mommy: Sadness in Different Colors | The earnest reverie displayed by Sophie Allison in her music under the veneer of Soccer Mommy is one of the characteristics that made her click with the emotionally distraught teenage demographic she is particularly known for on her past projects.
It is always a pleasant treat hearing new material from the young Nashville-based bedroom pop artist, but diving deep into her psyche is an entirely different story and one that I wouldn’t describe as an experience one would voluntarily seek out by looking at a record — or any piece of art in general — from the outside in through a vague précis or a synopsis for the film enthusiasts out there.
color theory is another bright entry to Soccer Mommy’s catalog, following the critically-acclaimed Clean from 2018. Cheerful as it may seem on the surface, ‘colorful’ as the title may suggest, the album is brooding, lovelorn, and full of despondency.
PHOTO: Brian Ziff
Juxtaposing the elements within the concept from which the title takes inspiration, color theory capitalizes on the complementarity of the three primary sensibilities displayed across the album’s tracklisting: pain, sadness, and disease— with each being assigned individually to a color from the primary colors in the color wheel (red, blue, and yellow) and are fused together in to create something entirely new, something that makes the listener feel separate emotions at the same time.
bloodstream, which kicks the album off, represents the color red in the album’s conceptual framework and reveals what seems to be tendencies or fleeting thoughts of the young artist to commit acts of self-harm. In the song, Soccer Mommy goes into excruciating details explaining how she would end up “swimming through her bloodstream”, envying other people who are living happier lives than her, thereby leading her into believing that happiness is a short-lived emotion.
We are just at the first track, barely scratching the surface, but the subject matter the album brings forth already raises a lot of trigger warnings.
circle the drain, albeit having a more uplifting beat and a general sound palette, giving off a soft vibe of Britpop with a tinge of pop ala Tori Amos, is melancholic in its theme, with Soccer Mommy mentioning hints of depression in the lyrics, emphasizing instances of suddenly feeling down “even when everything is fine”.
royal screw up, on the other hand, is an unabashedly painful and vulnerable moment in the album, wherein Soccer Mommy accepts that she is a perpetual failure of a person, especially when it comes to keeping a special person close, and blames herself for the conundrum that she has put herself into. It is one of the many tracks in “color theory” that represents the color blue (sadness), which is already a given since the album is a really depressive one.
yellow is the color of her eyes is perhaps the most beautifully structured songs in color theory, with fantastic crescendos and decrescendos in the chorus, and luscious instrumentation and singing, all weaved seamlessly by gentle transitions. Even with the song blooming with joy, its gloominess is still apparent in the lyrics and is incorporated very well.
For as colorful as the album is, the resolution of the inner turmoils explored on color theory by the self-aware Soccer Mommy is a rather dilapidated one as the album never truly ends on a high note. During the final moments of the closing track, gray light, it is shown that she is finally reaching her breaking point.
The inner demons that she’s been facing are still there, struggling to win. And it seems that she is faltering.
8/10 | https://nikolai-dineros.medium.com/color-theory-by-soccer-mommy-sadness-in-different-colors-ef13fcefcbd6 | ['Nikolai Dineros'] | 2020-04-06 18:10:19.250000+00:00 | ['Soccer Mommy', 'Music', 'Album', 'Bedroom Pop'] |
Python Dataclasses With Properties and Pandas | Constructing a pandas DataFrame with a “classic” class
The code snippet below is an equivalent data-centric class definition with all the “interesting” features we wanted using a standard Python user-defined class structure. Now, granted there are a few ways this could have been done, but here we’ll keep things simple and make it as close to a basic user-defined class as possible.
At first glance it is clear that this took a bit more work (and it is in fact incomplete as we’ll see shortly). Note how we had to treat the list initializer and how we had to provide our own __str__() method. We didn’t however need to provide the dummy setter for attr5.
In the code-snippet above, one should see that we are using the special from_dict constructor method. This is because we are using the __dict__ built-in method for the DataClass_Classic objects to get the attributes. This looks simple enough, but what does the DataFrame actually look like using this similarly terse approach?
pandas DataFrame construction with “classic” objects
Two problems:
_attrHidden is being exported. We didn’t want that. Not surprising because __dict__ will indeed include “hidden” attributes (i.e. those starting with an underscore). In case you are wondering, a dunder (double-underscore) doesn’t help. In fact, the name-unmangled version (with full class-name prefix) is exported to the DataFrame Where is attr5 ?? Nowhere to be found it seems. This is because __dict__ is a dict of class attributes when called on an object. The attr5 attribute is in fact an illusion. It is simply a method decorated with syntactic sugar as an alias for the getter() method. Note that adding a dummy setter method does not help. Creating attributes this way is a very common pattern in Python because it can provide a data-processing layer with attribute (vs method-calling) semantics
It turns out that in order to fix the above two issues, we actually need to write a custom method to export a controlled dict instead of using the __dict__ built-in. This is not a huge deal, but now we need to customize and maintain this method which was totally unnecessary when using dataclasses. The full example showing the custom method is contained in the following project:
https://github.com/sebastian-ahmed/python-etc/blob/main/dataclasses_pandas/example.py
Having said this, in order to have very advanced control of exporting a user-defined class to a DataFrame, the classic approach is still more powerful if you want to do things like control which attributes are not included during construction at run-time or provide object handles as a pandas column (but this is beyond the scope of this article). | https://medium.com/swlh/python-dataclasses-with-properties-and-pandas-5c59b05e9131 | ['Sebastian Ahmed'] | 2021-02-21 01:47:23.804000+00:00 | ['Object Oriented', 'Python Programming', 'Python Dataclass', 'Data Science', 'Pandas'] |
The direct effects of racism on mental health | Image of Sailor Mooods staring into the void pondering the direct effects of racism on mental health
I am a mental health advocate for Black and Brown womxn. Therefore, I cannot continue to discuss mental health and wellness without discussing the effects of racism on mental health. Society grossly neglects this topic. Like intersectional feminism, mental health needs to be intersectional.
From my own experience, I can see how growing up in a predominately white environment has negatively impacted my life, even today. I will never forget one of my first days in Kindergarten, the first time I was not in the house all day with my family. Naturally, I gravitated towards the only other Black child in the class, a boy. One time, I decided to be polite and tell him I had to go to the bathroom while we were playing. His response, “I don’t care”. This was the beginning of a harsh reality and a long road of self-hate, doubt, and the spiral of my mental health.
Racism itself is a mental health issue
“Racism is a mental health issue because racism causes trauma. And trauma paints a direct line to mental illnesses, which need to be taken seriously.” Racism And Mental Health, https://www.mhanational.org/racism-and-mental-health
This is where we will start. Young Black children do not have the privilege of not knowing racism. We live with generations of trauma and violence. We see images and videos of our murdered brothers and sisters every other day. Then we also have to witness the fear we see in people’s eyes as they pass us on the sidewalk. Many of us experience depression, PTSD, suicidal-thoughts, misdiagnosis, and addiction from these experiences. Most of the time, it goes unreported.
The trauma that is inflicted on Black bodies in America is widely accepted. It is so deeply rooted that some may not know what America would be without it. Because of this, we face the consequences of hate and prejudice. Not a day goes by when my community can just breathe and be. This is so much stress and worry just because we exist.
The experience of oppression leading to low self-esteem
We hear it all the time now, but representation matters. We see the world and its possibilities through media while we absorb our surroundings. Living in a white world, young people of color do not always see themselves portrayed in a positive light if a light is shown on them at all. For example, if you are growing up and see the epitome of beauty is a thin white, or now racially ambiguous woman, chances are you are going to compare yourself to that. As a result, that is now your standard.
Growing up, the world tells young Black girls (both directly and indirectly), that our skin and hair are not pretty. This conditioning sticks. We will go through life feeling less than and not desirable leading to low self-esteem and little to no self-worth.
I find it extremely upsetting as an adult to remember how much I hated my Black/Afro features. I hated my hair, my nose, my lips, my skin, even my butt and muscular built. It was a different world in the early 2000s. Not me wishing I had thin lips and a flat backside…whew. We are conditioned to prefer Eurocentric features. This conditioning encourages self-hate, anxiety, and depression.
How oppression leads to imposter syndrome
Living in a white world it is easy to fall into feeling like the “other”. We can change many things about ourselves in the hopes to fit in. Many things, except our skin. Being a Black woman in the workplace, I can say that we have to try twice as hard to achieve the success of White cis men, all while seeming that we don’t try. We are constantly challenged to determine if we really belong in spaces.
From our hair to our attitude, we are always questioned. In turn, this eventually can make us question ourselves. We can have multiple degrees, years’ worth of experience, and live being invalidated. So invalidated that we can sometimes lose ourselves completely feeling like a stranger in our own body.
The feeling of never feeling good enough or there’s nowhere you belong is devastating and can lead to mental health issues including depression and anxiety.
The angry Black womxn
This one….this one sets me off. Black womxn always have to have a smile on their face. If not, we are automatically unapproachable and angry. We experience endless microaggressions in our places of work, and young girls experience it while trying to get their education. It is almost as if, for us to exist, the Euro-centric world demands us to make everyone comfortable except ourselves.
First, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being angry. We have a lot to be angry about. To be honest, I am subtly angry on a daily basis. Second, it is insulting, tiring, and flat-out racist to pass these judgments and stereotypes onto Black womxn.
When a person is told something enough, guess what, they will begin to believe it. Also, this misconception being projected onto us fills us with doubt. It prohibits us from speaking up in fear of creating conflict or a tense environment. We even begin thinking that, maybe we are angry about everything. Maybe that unprofessional comment our white coworker made was appropriate and I’m just always looking for an issue. These are the effects of racism on mental health.
The importance of mental health advocacy in the Black community
It is great that now, many influential Black people are stepping up and using their platform to illuminate the importance of mental health. But we are far from ideal. I grew up believing that depression was “a white people thing” and that is something that still echoes in our community. Mental health care is not easily accessible, and many in our community suffer from generations of trauma and do not have the help they need or deserve.
Our Black children are labeled as “bad kids” because they do not have the emotional support needed to succeed. Our elders walk around chronically depressed because they have not had the space to process their grief from the years. Caring for our mental health is not a weakness. The first step we can do as a community is to continue having the conversation. Bring awareness to the importance of mental health and wellness. Let’s have an open dialogue on the effects of racism on the mental health of our community. Also, shine a light on all of the options people can rely on in their time of need. There is also a good NPR article that gives an overview of the effects of racism on our health as well as ways to care for yourself while facing racism every day. | https://medium.com/@sailormooods/the-direct-effects-of-racism-on-mental-health-c29214cd62d3 | ['Sailor Mooods'] | 2020-12-18 17:02:42.132000+00:00 | ['Oppression', 'Mental Health Awareness', 'Black Mental Health', 'Racism', 'Mental Health'] |
Mediocrity: Is There A Cure To The Other Pandemic? | Mediocre — to be of moderate quality, value, ability, or performance — has this suggested origin:
from the Latin medius “middle” + ocris “rugged mountain.”
So in being mediocre, one is “somewhat mountainous.”
To be “somewhat mountainous” sounds pretty good, but in the context of Mount Everest and K2 (the world’s largest mountains), “somewhat mountainous” — e.g., Mount Wycheproof, a mountain but one of the smallest — doesn’t sound quite so impressive. This is mediocrity in our world … a crowd of somewhat mountains, a range of small Wycheproofs.
Day after day, mediocrity underwhelms the landscape. Our world is a world of “just enough” and “no more.” At “no more,” organizations reach for less than exceptional; they follow the pack, championing the box checked and the standard met. At “no more,” employees turn off, they disconnect, they offer their average instead of their best. All “somewhat mountainous,” which, in the shadow of Everest, is nothing more than an ant pile.
The Mediocrity of Machine Living
Frank Lloyd Wright said:
Mechanization best serves mediocrity.
“Mechanization” is the “introduction of automation into a process, activity, or place.” That’s the technical definition, but in life, mechanization is the automation of everyday doing … our robotic response to standards, herds, and tasks. These things all create a ceiling …. the standard upheld, the herd followed, the task fulfilled … and once the ceiling is reached (like the Wycheproofs of the world), “somewhat mountainous” refuses to reach any higher.
Understand that “somewhat mountainous” isn’t the opposite of success. Big pay days don’t necessarily negate small (i.e., mediocre) governance. The rich, the powerful, the titled … many of them are mediocre, and their yield — ideas, ethics, vision — proves it. Privilege, luck, likability … these upward thrusts sit external to mediocrity; even the “somewhat mountainous” can ride a wave (fool their way) to the top.
Likewise, “somewhat mountainous” isn’t the opposite of perfection. In fact, perfection is often mediocrity disguised as superiority, perfection being its own ceiling, one that masquerades as a “higher,” yet impossible, standard.
Perfect is the enemy of good. — Voltaire
Many companies and employees sacrifice the good — the broad, evolving good — for the imprisonment of perfection. And in so doing, they perfectly place themselves amongst the “somewhat mountainous.”
And while status and perfection won’t abate mediocrity, the opposite is sometimes true of the imperfect, the powerless, the untitled. Base position doesn’t automatically lend to Wycheproof status. Within the ranks of the uncelebrated, there are many amazing people — foot soldiers “stuck” by circumstances but still diligent, still passionate, still striving. It’s foolish to think that mediocrity dissipates with rank, salary, or status. Rather, the dissipation of mediocrity — at any level — hinges on passion, risk, humility, and creativity.
Mediocrity: Distancing Isn’t So Easy
I worked for a legal research company where leadership was tasked — every year — with a 2% increase in revenue. Here, mechanization best served mediocrity, and instead of ideas, imagination, and vision, leadership chose job cuts to increase revenue. These “leaders” — highly degreed and well payed — lacked the resourcefulness and desire to grow through growth; they chose instead to grow through simplicity and negation, which was artless, dull-minded, and “somewhat.”
“Somewhat” — defined as “to a moderate extent or by a moderate amount” — is encompassing. It’s above you, beside you, and in front of you. It’s in the herd, and the herd is big. It’s in things echoed, things repeated, things copied. It’s in the unstretched mind, the unstretched day, the unstretched self. It’s in the “somewhat” mountains that we climb … every day, over and over.
So if one can be a mountain by being “somewhat mountainous,” then why not? A job done or a customer served “somewhat” is still a task reached, a box checked, a requirement fulfilled (though unexceptionally fulfilled). So why not? Why not sit in the flabby middle where just enough is enough?
Advising Against Mediocrity: A Difficult Plea
Why not?
Sadly, there’s not a convincing “because.” Preaching against mediocrity is a plea for blistered fingers, extra hours, and mental exhaustion. It’s a plea for above-and-beyond, a demand of the self that’s more than the horde. In life, above-and-beyond is to strain for “extra,” to consciously push past the mechanization and automation of everyday doing. It is, in the simplest sense, to fly against a hurricane when the flock glides with it. But if you’re willing to face the headwinds and turn away from herd, consider these three things:
#1. Abhor mechanization
“Mechanization best serves mediocrity” because mechanization is the rhythmic poison to creativity and originality. Mechanization promises a dim output … words, paths, actions done a “certain way.” Companies and people hide in mediocrity because they fear the “uncertain way” … new words, new paths, new actions … all of it different and unproven but all of it unique and daring. And it’s in the unique and daring that mediocrity lacks air and eventually suffocates.
Here’s how to kill off mechanization:
“Whatever’s normal, do the exact opposite.” That’s from Jesse Cole, president of the Savannah Bananas, a baseball team that sold out every game from 2017–2019. While other teams prioritize baseball (because that’s “the rule”), Jesse Cole prioritizes fans, fun, and entertainment. Jesse “un-mechanizes” by defying the rules of normalcy. He takes a page from the legendary Bill Veeck, who once said, “I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity.”
Ramp up, and risk up. Mechanization has both a leveling effect (i.e., dull, repetitive, and predictable) and a sedative effect (safe, proven, and serene). One way to break this machine is to put some stress on your output, to churn faster than the machine of mediocrity. The other way is to put some stress on your routine, to risk higher than the soft slope of “somewhat mountainous.”
#2. Embrace villainy
The Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is less an enthusiastic goal, more a soulless acronym. KPI’s — dull, numerical checkmarks — generally don’t inspire. They might push, they might pull, they might pressure, but do they arouse?
Mediocrity takes root in the goal pulled to vs. the goal inspired to. The former is a world of KPIs; the latter is the tiny space of KVIs … the Key Villain Indicator. Yes, it’s another stupid acronym, but let’s fight fire with fire.
The KVI is the key villain in your world, the one you set your goals against. It’s the company you want to outgain, the rival you want to outperform, the competitor you want to outshine. Working towards a KPI … this stirs mediocre desire; competing against a key villain … this spawns a hunger to win.
Here’s how to choose your villain:
Find something/someone you can put a face to. It might be a rival business or a rival service. At the task level, it might be a rival staff doing better work.
Choose above you — make yourself the underdog. Mediocrity lives in playing small (but don’t overshoot).
Tap into your fighter’s attitude, your winner’s mindset. As your villain toils in mediocrity, you’re playing to outthink, outperform, and outcompete … to win! For you, the battle is a reality, and “Winning means you’re willing to go longer, work harder, and give more than anyone else.” — Vince Lombardi.
Benchmark against your villain … you vs. their quantity, quality, or risk. If the battle is one of quantity, bury your villain beneath output. If the battle is one of quality, bury your villain beneath value. If the battle is one of risk, bury your villain beneath resolve.
#3. Avoid over-analysis
Anything that thwarts doing has the potential to busy you with mediocrity. For individuals, this is especially true of “analysis” or its close cousin “learning.” Some might call it blasphemous, but learning … book after book after book … podcast after podcast after podcast … report after report after report … impedes people with its soothing sense of growth.
Accumulating knowledge only suggests action, sinking people into the inward and the easy at the expense of the outward and the scary. A good book on a soft sofa contains potential energy, but good book(s) on a soft sofa defer the starting line, each new title, lesson, or study being a sponge-like choice to quietly absorb instead of anxiously run.
Here’s how to free yourself from the learning trap: | https://medium.com/@tburchart/mediocrity-is-there-a-cure-to-the-other-pandemic-e382605b5d7f | ['Travis Burchart'] | 2020-12-20 18:35:17.168000+00:00 | ['Mediocrity', 'Performance', 'Success', 'Growth', 'Work'] |
Community Engagement Technology: Data Driven Decision Making for Human-in-the-Loop based NLP processes | At Zencity, our primary goal is to transform data into clear and actionable insights for our local government clients. To do so, we must have high quality data and lots of it. This can be especially challenging because of the wide range of cities, counties, and law enforcement agencies we work with — each generating unique data and each with their specific needs and interests.
Human-in-the-Loop at Zencity
In order to take on this challenge, we use Human-in-the-Loop training for our Natural Language Processing (NLP) sentiment and categorization models. Our sentiment model is used for gauging satisfaction, dissatisfaction, or neutrality towards a given issue — and our categorization model sorts items into one of our specialized 80+ local government-related categories like public safety or road maintenance.
For each data item we process, such as a social media post or comment, or an article on a news website, the relevant model will give a prediction label. Some of the items are then passed along for human review, in which the human annotator will either approve or change the label. These approved labels are used in our product, ensuring high quality data, and are also used to train the model, helping the model learn from its own mistakes. By using this method, we enhance our model accuracy which is key for bringing greater value to our clients. High model accuracy allows us to be confident in our conclusions.
However, one challenge of this Human-in-the-Loop approach is knowing the exact contribution of each human annotator — and knowing this information is essential for efficiency and ultimately bringing greater value to your clients. You need to “stay in the loop” and make sure the annotation process is as efficient as possible.
Assessing the Human Contribution
The most common way to assess the human contribution is by just checking the annotators’ accuracy, although, this approach is not always enough. That’s why we also incorporate additional, helpful metrics into our work such as Robustness Index (RI) and model confidence scores to evaluate and enhance human contribution to our system.
Robustness Index as a Measure of Annotation Quality
Robustness index is a simple metric that allows us to quantify the annotators’ contribution from an additional perspective. This is a general statistic for robustness that, in our case, takes into account the number of positive contributions versus negative contributions of the annotation step. A positive contribution occurs when the annotator is correct while the model is wrong, meaning the annotator ‘helps’ the model. Whereas a negative contribution occurs when the model is correct and the annotator is wrong, meaning the annotator ‘hurts’ the model’s performance rather than improving it. All other cases, when both the model and the annotator are correct or both are wrong, are ignored.
Examining the amount of negative and positive contributions can help us get the complete picture of each annotator’s performance and evaluate each annotator’s contribution in detail. The Robustness Index itself is calculated by:
RI values range between -1 and 1, where -1 means the annotation has a completely negative contribution to the system, 0 means there is no contribution, and 1 means a completely positive contribution. Notice RI of 0 can be received from either the same exact predictions, or by having n+ equal to n-. The desired robustness scores for each of the annotators is of course a positive one, and the higher the score the better. As each annotators’ contribution is calculated by correcting inaccurate model predictions, the score remains limited by the number of model mistakes. To simplify the calculation, labelling only items where the predictions of the model and the annotator differ is an option, which makes it easier to calculate compared to accuracy.
Using this metric, we’ve been able to evaluate and compare our annotators’ contributions — which has played a key role in deciding which data to display to our users. As shown in Table 1, we can be sure that 7 out of 10 of the annotators provide quality annotations due to their positive RI. For the 3 annotators with a negative RI, we simply ignore their annotations in the product dashboard and exclude their annotations from model training datasets.
Table 1: Robustness Index values of different annotators
Using Model Confidence Scores to Improve Accuracy
Model confidence scores provide information about the reliability of each of the model’s predictions. This is usually a decimal number between 0 and 1, which can be interpreted as a percentage of confidence — or how confident the model is about its prediction.
An additional approach to assess annotation quality is examining the accuracy of the Human-in-the-Loop system described in Diagram 1 above with regards to the model confidence scores. By measuring the accuracy received by letting the annotators annotate only up to a certain confidence score, an optimal confidence score threshold can be found. The accuracy should be calculated by combining the two parts — below and above the threshold. The total accuracy is reached by merging the annotator accuracy below the threshold and the model accuracy above the threshold.
In the example shown in Graph 1, the accuracy reaches a plateau and does not increase from a certain confidence score equal to 0.6, meaning the annotation step has no contribution for high-confidence items. This score can be set as a threshold, so that model predictions with a higher score than this threshold will not be manually annotated. Instead, the model prediction itself will be used. While maintaining the same accuracy, we reduce the efforts of annotating items with confidence scores higher than 0.6.
Graph 1: Accuracy for different model confidences; accuracy reaches a plateau from a certain score
The above example shows us that setting a threshold based on our data can save us time and prevent unnecessary annotation efforts. In some cases, it can also result in a higher total accuracy of the combined system, as can be seen in Graph 2. The latter will occur in cases where the model’s predictions for the high confidence items are more accurate than the annotators’ results for this group. This is a great example of the impact we can make by creating data driven results based on our own data.
Graph 2: Accuracy for different model confidences; accuracy reaching its peak for a certain mid-score
In the example shown in Graph 2, the accuracy reaches its peak for a certain confidence, and decreases when annotators tag high confidence items. In this case, the annotation process has a negative contribution if it includes high-confidence items! This means the annotators hurt the performance of the system, but it is visible to us only if we check the accuracy as a function of the model confidence scores.
At a first glance, it seems the annotators’ total contribution is positive, as the annotators’ accuracy is higher than the model accuracy alone. But practically, a negative effect is present for high confidence items, and we can use a threshold to get higher accuracy as well as reduce annotation efforts. This way, we benefit in two major ways: we get a better user experience and we save time, increasing efficiency. As can be seen in the graph, if we use a threshold of 0.7 we get the highest accuracy possible for this system, and in addition to that, we save the costs of annotating items with confidence higher than 0.7.
By further investigating annotation quality using model confidence scores, we can adjust the system to enhance our models’ performance and better utilize annotation efforts.
Metrics for Higher Quality Community Engagement Data
To sum up, using Robustness Index and model confidence scores are strong ways to pulse check where a human-in-the-loop is helping, plateauing, and even potentially hurting the client experience. Once you identify these points, you can adjust in order to drive operational decisions with data.
At Zencity, we use this type of analysis to determine the model confidence threshold at which our human team stops actively contributing and to ensure that the model simply handles all the items beyond their plateau threshold. You may use this information to recruit annotators with high contribution scores altogether, as we also do, or perhaps it can be an indication that the human annotators need more training around certain types of data items.
In any case, using diverse metrics to make sure humans-in-the-loop augment the models can help free up resources, ensure higher accuracy, enable more efficiency in your work as a whole, and most importantly, improve the client experience. By utilizing our knowledge around the model confidence threshold, for instance, at Zencity we managed to max out on accuracy at each point. This means better quality data for our clients. When your workforce spends their time where it matters most, your clients will thank you. | https://medium.com/zencity-engineering/community-engagement-technology-data-driven-decision-making-for-human-in-the-loop-based-nlp-4b96cbdc13b3 | ['Shiran Golan'] | 2021-06-01 08:25:17.698000+00:00 | ['Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Quality', 'Sentiment Analysis'] |
Find your own way | I think therefore I write. I have an MA in Creative Writing. I write fiction and short thought pieces. There is more about me and my other work on LinkedIn.
Follow | https://medium.com/house-of-haiku/find-your-own-way-d273ec5137e5 | ['David Hope'] | 2020-11-29 16:01:55.805000+00:00 | ['Flow State', 'Water', 'Haiku', 'Tao', 'Evolution'] |
Sundar Pichai Net Worth | Sundar Pichai is an Indian-American business executive. The real name of Sundar Pichai is Pichai Sundarajan. He is the CEO of Alphabet and Google. He was born on 10 June 1972 in Madurai India. On 3 December 2019, He replaces co-founder Larry Page as CEO of Alphabet but still, Sergy and Larry remain Alphabet’s largest shareholders.
Sundar Pichai net worth is $1.5Billion after taking control of Alphabet(the parent company of Google). The annual salary of Sundar Pichai is $2.5 Million. The monthly income of Sundar Pichai is 1.5 crore rupees per month. He added 200% in his salary from 2020. In, 2015 Sundar Pichai receive $652,500. His current salary is $100 Million.
Sundar Pichai was first attached to Google in 2004. At his starting Sundar Pichai work with small tools of the company with his small team. When he worked for Google, a new idea invent in his mind that Idea was developed his own web browser.
Sundar Pichai shares his Idea to create a web browser, but that time CEO of Google said that the project was too costly, and he says no to Sundar Pichai. But he does not accept his loss; he discusses his Idea with other Google members and makes them ready to join him.
In 2008 with the help of Sundar Pichai, Google launches a browser named Google Chrome.
In today’s world, Google Chrome is the most used web browser in the world. This is the turning point of Sundar Pichai in Google company. Sundar Pichai’s hard work and passion for his career, he got top in every product of Google.
At this time, Sundar Pichai also got an offer from other companies like Microsoft and Twitter. Still, due to Sundar Pichai’s hard work, Google gives a big bonus to Sundar Pichai and doesn’t let him go. On 10 August 2015, Sundar Pichai becomes the CEO of the Google company. Sundar Pichai becomes an inspiration for billions of people all over the world.
Sundar Pichai wife name is Anjali Pichai. Together they have 2 children. | https://medium.com/@akshayakky/sundar-pichai-net-worth-490a2c123fe4 | ['Akshay Akky'] | 2020-12-18 18:41:40.694000+00:00 | ['Alphabet', 'Sundar Pichai', 'Google', 'Net Worth', 'CEO'] |
Set the default branch on your Azure DevOps Repos | Existing Repos
I will share here few commands to set your Azure DevOps default branch. There is a popular way to do that through Git cmdlet by renaming the master branch, I will share here another approach which consist in creating a new branch and locking the old one through Azure DevOps CLI extension.
In order to proceed you will need the following prerequisites :
Set up variables
Since these variables are re-used, a locals block makes this more maintainable.
organization=”https://dev.azure.com/organization_name/" targetBranch=”main”
Connection
Connect directly through Azure AD or use a Personal Access Token that has the minimum privileges :
Read privilege a the Projet and Team level.
Full privilege at the Code level.
az login # OR az devops login
Script & Workflow | https://faun.pub/set-the-default-branch-on-your-azure-devops-repos-e929b97de112 | ['James Dumont Le Douarec'] | 2020-12-25 09:24:14.981000+00:00 | ['Main', 'Repos', 'Azure Devops', 'Git', 'Azure'] |
In Arlington, a Can-Do City Connects and Communicates with Data | In Arlington, a Can-Do City Connects and Communicates with Data
2019 Certification Level: Silver
By Kristin Taylor
Last year’s dry summer in Arlington, Texas came as the City reached the halfway point in a 10-year project to install remotely read water meters throughout the community. Soon a controversy emerged, largely driven by posts on social media: Some households had been receiving higher water bills, and residents wanted to know if it was a result of the new technology.
The short answer was no, but officials knew that overcoming such speculation would demand a longer explanation. The City immediately set about to pull historical data showing that increased water use and, thus, higher bills were in alignment with seasonal fluctuations during warmer months. The City also ensured residents had a greater understanding of how their bills are determined, including that the cost of water per 1,000 gallons rises as residents reach higher levels of consumption.
The City’s Know Your H2O website connects residents to data on water usage
But Arlington didn’t stop with an explanation — it also looked to empower residents with information. The City launched the Know Your H20 website so that residents can view their billing history over the past two years, compare usage across temperature changes, and monitor their consumption on a daily basis. The City also released new data on its open data portal, allowing residents to see water usage by zip code and filter by the type of meter the information came from. And they got the word out about these new tools via a Know Your H20 communications campaign.
Arlington’s helpful video shows residents all the Know Your H20 website has to offer
Making Data Relatable
Look across nearly any of Arlington’s efforts, and you’ll notice a similar trend: Fostering transparency and building an effective local government only scratch the surface of the City’s goals for using data and evidence. Beneath that is a desire for helping residents find and use publicly available information to ask questions, understand, and engage. Arlington’s open data progress goes beyond both policy and portal to people, and the key to making that leap has been the City’s extensive communications efforts.
Director of Communication and Legislative Affairs Jay Warren doesn’t mince words when he says, “Just to be blunt, data can be boring.” But he and his team are undaunted as they turn to stories, graphics, and other digestible and engaging forms of content to make data interesting. Moreover, communications isn’t an afterthought in the City’s data-driven strategy; Communication Coordinator Susan Schrock sits on the City’s data governance committee, for example, and this integrated approach has great support from city leadership.
“When we talk about innovation and open data, a lot of people think this is rocket science, but it’s really not — it’s really basic,” explains City Manager Trey Yelverton. “So if we can take the data that come out of complex systems, simplify the messaging, then relate it on a human level to our residents, to me that’s what it’s all about.”
Arlington’s open data progress goes beyond both policy and portal to people.
Breaking Down the City Budget
One thing practically every resident relates to is how their tax dollars are being spent. As a well-managed city, Arlington makes budget allocations based on whether data show there’s “a business case for the investment,” as Mayor Jeff Williams puts it. He knows that’s fundamental for building the community’s confidence in City Hall. “In a world where citizens have a built-in mistrust for government, data is great evidence of what we are doing,” he says. “It takes the emotion out of it.”
The City’s budget portal allows residents to drill down into investments, and Arlington bolsters its transparency with efforts to help residents fully understand the City’s finances, such as the recent Budget in Action campaign. The campaign included assets such as a video inviting residents to get to know the 2019 operating budget and a Taxpayer Investment Value Guide that made the budget’s large dollar amounts relatable by comparing them to the average household’s expenses. By the end of the campaign, a quarter of the population had engaged with budget content in some way. And Arlington is continuing to provide regular updates on the five City Council priority areas outlined in the budget through newsletters, videos, social media, and more.
Arlington’s budget video invites residents into the City’s spendings through relatable comparisons
Public Transit Takes a Fresh Turn
Data analysis has also helped the City make informed decisions about when to stop funding initiatives. Until six years ago, when Arlington launched its single-route MAX bus, the city was the largest in the country without a public transportation system. Officials anticipated that the bus would be used for around 600 rides each day, but actual numbers only reached around half that. As it turned out, because Arlington’s 400,000 residents are spread out across the city’s nearly 100 square miles, the community lacked the density necessary along the bus’s corridor to drive ridership to a level that would offset the investment. The bus service was discontinued, but the need for public transportation remained.
An Arlington resident taking advantage of the City’s rideshare partnership with Via
Identifying a creative way to meet that need, the City partnered with Via, an on-demand rideshare company. Residents can use the Via app to instantly book a seat in shared vehicles with flexible routes that currently cover about one third of the city and are due to expand. (For residents without smartphones or who don’t wish to use a credit card, the service has alternate scheduling and payment options.) In one recent week, residents took more than 4,500 rides using the service. Because of the City’s ability to provide data collected with Via, Arlington is one of the only cities in the country receiving Federal Transportation Administration grant funding to support its Via public transit alternative.
Residents Using Data
Finding this innovative, data-driven solution is just one demonstration of why city officials call Arlington “a can-do city.” And residents are following their lead. They’re using their Amazon Alexa-enabled devices to ask questions, such as where to find their voting location, that are answered via open data. A group of teens participating in an Arlington Public Library coding program recently borrowed an idea from Code for Anchorage, creating an online game, based on city data, that lets players guess the most popular dog names in town. And Matthew Taylor, a local developer, has used city data to create a site that allows residents to quickly determine their trash day.
“I’m 100 percent in favor of every city doing this,” says Taylor of Arlington’s open data initiative. “It could change how people live. If someone can find that one application that really does improve someone’s life, that can make a difference. And Arlington is supporting that.” | https://medium.com/what-works-cities-certification/in-arlington-a-can-do-city-connects-and-communicates-with-data-326cf03a1f69 | ['What Works Cities'] | 2020-03-03 20:35:23.126000+00:00 | ['Arlington', 'Cities', 'Local Government', 'Open Data', 'Data'] |
Strapi GraphQl CMS | Our community enforces to keep innovation open-sourced and share the mindset that any profession should spread ideas in order to keep growing us as a society. | https://medium.com/@danmatlam/strapi-graphql-cms-437fbd9a49f7 | ['Daniel Arellano'] | 2020-11-06 01:45:01.610000+00:00 | ['CMS', 'Español', 'Strapi', 'GraphQL'] |
Merry Chanukah from Beverly Hills | At a very young age, I remember celebrating Chanukah. I’m not sure if we lit the Menorah or if we even had one. What I remember most is looking forward to receiving a gift every day. My favorite year was the boxing glove one when my brother David and I would stop fighting long enough to put them on before we lit into each other. Each year after that there was one less gift until there was one and then none. I’m pretty sure we had a small tree once or twice but nothing special. It was set up in the corner of our playroom, and it was adorned with some silver tinsel wire without a single ornament. I never knew I was missing the smell of gingerbread baking or latkes or even ham because my mother never cooked except for assisting our live-in housekeeper by tossing the salad. Of course there wasn’t any help on Christmas Day, so we would go to the country club, The Beverly Hills Hotel or the Beverly Wilshire. I didn’t think it was different in anyone else’s home in Beverly Hills until I spent the night one Christmas Eve at my friend Mary Lynn’s house. She had the most beautiful tree — — the kind in magazines and in storefront windows on Wilshire Boulevard. And the presents! There were hundreds (at least that’s what I remember) all around the tree, and I was told I could stay a little while after breakfast to watch my friend open a few. Their tree was the centerpiece of the magnificent living room, and the Christmas Carols and laughter as both sisters took turns opening their gifts made the most joyous music. I’m not sure if anyone noticed as I said my goodbyes and slipped through the back door where I would walk home across the alley to my house with no signs of it being a day any different than any other day. I think I’ve been sulking ever since about Christmas and all the other winter holidays that begin after Halloween. And when my daughters were growing up, they wanted so badly to celebrate, and I tried. But not nearly hard enough. There were several years of Christmas trees interspersed with Chanukah, but I never got into it. Except for Lawry’s every Christmas Eve for prime rib and yorkshire pudding. And those sides! Christmas Day there was always a movie and Chinese food. I prefer birthdays. | https://medium.com/p/a66b3d7f3c5e | ['Danna Reich Colman'] | 2016-12-02 01:04:24.539000+00:00 | ['Beverly Hills', 'Holidays', 'Christmas'] |
Look on algorithms behind Natural Language Processing (NLP). | Natural language processing (NLP) describes the interaction between human language and computers. Human language is different than what computers understands. Computers understand machine language or we can say the binary codes. Computers don’t speak or understand human language unless they are programmed to do so. And that’s where NLP comes into picture.
How does natural language processing works?
There are two main techniques used with NLP , the first one is syntax analysis and the second one is semantic analysis. Syntax is the structure or form of expressions, statements, and program units. Syntax can be used for assessing meaning from a language supported grammatical rules. There are some of the techniques used in syntax analysis which includes:
I.) parsing :- which is a grammatical analysis for a sentence.
II.) word segmentation :- which divides an outsized piece of text to units
III.) sentence breaking:- which places sentence boundaries in large texts
IV.) morphological segmentation:- which divides words into groups
V.) stemming:- which divides words with inflection in them to root forms
Semantics is the meaning of those expressions, statements, and program units. There are algorithms which NLP applies to know the meaning and structure of sentences. There are some of the techniques used in semantic analysis which includes:
I.) word meaning disambiguation:- which derives the meaning of a word supported context
II.) named entity recognition:- which determines words which will be categorized into groups
III.) natural language generation:- which will use a database to work out semantics behind words
Also, we can divide NLP field into two camps:
Linguistics camp Statistics camp.
The idea of NLP started in the early era of AI. In fact, it came into existence during the time of Alan Turing, who is considered to be the founder of both AI and computing in general.
The challenge was to create a machine that can converse in a way that is indistinguishable from human which is also known as Turing test.
“ELIZA” one of the earliest famous AI program that can be considered as an attempt to beat the Turing test. As we know that there were no such algorithms that could really understand the human language at that time. So, we can say that ELIZA and other chat bot programs at that time used to be programmed manually crafting lots and lots of rules to respond the human conversation. So, it can be said that those programs never had the capacity of actually understanding the natural language rather we can say that they were the result of psychology, to fool humans.
So, the concept of linguistic arose which can be viewed as the science of how language is created. A pattern is searched in a language and the rules for constructing and interpreting all natural language utterances are formulated, which is done by linguists. And some models or grammars are generalized on the basis of that rule. (Linguistic rules are also used to parse and recognize the artificial language when building a compiler). The way of parsing natural language is also very much similar except that Context Free Grammars are limited so instead Context-Sensitive Grammars are used.
Then in the 90’s, a different perspective was approached to the NLP problem by a statisticians. After that essentially all the Linguistic theories were all thrown out. A simple model of language was introduced which was called “Bag of Words ” model. This model is very simple, it assumes that sentence is nothing but just a bag of words. This model doesn’t care for the order of words. For example, “I go for walk” and “walk I go for” are not dissimilar under this model, though one of these two sentence has a higher probability. When using this model, there is no necessity of meanings, it assumes that whenever it sees these four words, it likely has a similar meaning.
Why would anyone wants to use “Bag of Words” model when there is a sophisticated Linguistic model. What advantages does this statistic camp provides?
The statistics camp wants to avoid manual programming of rules to and look for automatic interpreting of language just like supervised fashion, by feeding in large amount of labelled data and learning patterns.
Let’s talk about some of the existing algorithms:
Algorithms can be simple as Vector Space Model where text can be represented as vector and data can be obtained by vector operations. Embedding is one such use case.
Inference driving algorithms such as Frequent item set is one such use case, where you can look into text corpus and try to make inference about what would come next.
Relevance ranking algorithms used in search engine such as Tf-IDF, BM25, pagerank, etc.
There are algorithms which are used understand meaning out of texts. Like Latent semantic analysis ( LSA) , Probabilistic Semantic analysis (pLSA) and Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) .
LSA) , and . There are algorithms which try to derive sentiments, context and subject of written text. Like sentiment analysis is very popular as it tries to associate some sentiment value to the unknown words.
Also, in recent time there are deep learning models/algorithms which uses statistical methods to process tokens using multilayer ANNs.
As we can see there is no one type of algorithm for NLP. Various approaches to NLP information retrieval can be drawn from below image:
Coreference resolution:
“Adam stabbed Bob, and he bled to death!”
It’s huge problem in NLP to determine whether “he” in the above sentence refers to Adam or Bob.
It is very well-studied problem in NLP and also has a fancy name “Coreference Resolution”. In linguistics, coreference, sometimes written co-reference, occurs when two or more expressions in a text refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent, like in above sentence.
Back in 2001, machine learning algorithms was approached (paper). The proposed classifier was decision tree, which classifies given candidate pair of words as either “Coreferential” (meaning refers to the same thing) or “Not Coreferential”. Following features were used for each candidate pair:
Distance : which can be computed as number of sentences between the two words. (more the distance we can say the words are less coreferential).
: which can be computed as number of sentences between the two words. (more the distance we can say the words are less coreferential). Pronoun : determines whether candidate pairs are pronouns, one of them is, or none.
: determines whether candidate pairs are pronouns, one of them is, or none. String Match : which can be defined as the overlap between the two words. ( “Prime Minister XXX” and “The Prime Minister” can be considered coreferential).
: which can be defined as the overlap between the two words. ( “Prime Minister XXX” and “The Prime Minister” can be considered coreferential). Number Agreement : which defines whether candidate pair of words are singular, both plural, or neither.
: which defines whether candidate pair of words are singular, both plural, or neither. Semantic Class Agreement : which defines whether candidate pair of words are of the same semantic class, if any. (“Person”, “Organization”, etc.).
: which defines whether candidate pair of words are of the same semantic class, if any. (“Person”, “Organization”, etc.). Gender Agreement : can be defined as whether candidate pair of words are of the same gender, if any. (“Male”, “Female”, “Neither”).
: can be defined as whether candidate pair of words are of the same gender, if any. (“Male”, “Female”, “Neither”). Appositive : defines whether candidate pair of words are appositives (Say, If a sentence starts with “The Nepali President, XXX said…”, then “President” and “XXX” are appositives and are probably coreferential).
: defines whether candidate pair of words are appositives (Say, If a sentence starts with “The Nepali President, XXX said…”, then “President” and “XXX” are appositives and are probably coreferential). ..and a few more similar features.
References | https://tmilan0604.medium.com/look-on-algorithms-behind-natural-language-processing-nlp-e06f18b6c31d | ['Milan Thapa'] | 2020-10-30 06:36:09.990000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Algorithms', 'Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Turing Test'] |
What’s new for documentarians in Snagit 2021 | I ran a live stream a while back where I looked at new features in Snagit 2021 and how they can help those writing technical documentation or explanatory content generate great screenshots. And then I had a deadline, another deadline, and all sorts of other chaos, and somehow I only got around the blog post to accompany that livestream… now. Well, on the positive, in the meantime, I have had much more time to get my hands on Snagit 2021 in a real-world context. So, if you need to create, edit, and manage screenshots, how can Snagit 2021 help you?
Watch the full livestream
When to upgrade your screenshot tool
Wait! I hear you say. I can already take screenshots with macOS/Windows/Linux/command line/some other random tool! Why do I need Snagit? That’s a good question, and there is a possibility you don’t need something like Snagit in your screenshot toolchain. Here are some reasons you might want to consider an upgrade to your screenshot tool if you:
Need better management of screenshots beyond keeping them in folders in your desktop environment
Want to be able to edit changes, overlays, and annotations to a screenshot
Want to remove window chrome or simplify other UI elements from a screenshot
Need to take screenshots larger than a window allows
Themes
Frequently when using other screenshot or image editing tools, you forget which style of annotation you used last time. Was it an arrow or a line? And what color or font did you use?
Snagit 2021 lets you create multiple themes that define the colors (up to 8) and style of annotation elements that you can toggle between for relevant screenshots. You can export and share these themes around a team.
Creating a theme (font)
Creating a theme (colors)
Simplified user interface (SUI)
Coined and created by TechSmith, the SUI concept has grown beyond the company. It refers to the abstracted interface you often see (more) in the documentation for GUI-driven applications to remove distractions from the concept you are currently explaining. A SUI is not relevant in every use case, and sometimes a cluttered user interface looks cluttered no matter how much you abstract it.
Snagit 2021 brings tools that attempt to generate a SUI automatically from a screenshot and new tools to touch up that automatic generation.
Below is an auto simplified screenshot from Discord and Spark on the Mac. As you can see, there’s a little work needed to make the SUI useful. For Spark and Discord, I removed the simplification from the main interface elements and left it for the emails and messages.
Discord SUI
Spark SUI
Creating animations from images
I have typically used Snagit to create animated GIFs from video recordings of my screen (Snagit is one of the few tools that makes this easier), and Snagit 2021 brings new features to do the opposite, create videos and animated GIFs from static images. You can add a voiceover as you step through the images created, flip back and forth between the images and a webcam, add a background, and trim and cut segments. I will probably still record animated GIFs and video myself as it feels more “natural,” but it’s a good way to repurpose images you already have.
Animation created from static images
Combining images into instructional handouts
I have always worked documenting developer software, so I never had much of a need to create one-pager type docs that people can print out or send to customers. But if you do work documenting that kind of product, then Snagit 2021 offers a set of templates (and you can create your own) that you drag images to and add any relevant text. The fixed page sizing can be limiting, and as you can see from the rough example I assembled below, you need to ensure that the images fit the spaces predefined for them. I have no real need for this feature, but I can support and customer success teams finding it useful to hand to customers to handle common questions.
Template of images
Management
In addition to your manual organization and tagging of screenshots, Snagit 2021 automatically organizes images for you by application and source (for example, animated GIF, from a template, etc.). I have found this increasingly useful to filter images I forgot I had taken.
Organization options in Snagit 2021
Miscellaneous
Not necessarily related to the 2021 release, but other features I frequently find useful are the following.
Presets for screenshots
Taking a screenshot or recording in Snagit allows for a dizzying array of effects, parameters, and post-processing options. If there are combinations you use frequently, you can assign them to a present, and even better, trigger a preset from a custom keyboard shortcut.
Presets in Snagit 2021
Taking screenshots of menu items
While I found that Snagit couldn’t handle some menus (probably more due to however the application was programmed), it’s generally straightforward to grab a neatly isolated screenshot of a menu by selecting the appropriate selection option from the Snagit Capture panel.
Share options
Inter-application sharing extensions are one of my favorite features of macOS that few developers leverage. Snagit supports that feature and also adds a plethora of customizable other sharing destinations that you use frequently. | https://medium.com/@chrischinchilla/whats-new-for-documentarians-in-snagit-2021-24ce729fa87e | ['Chris Chinchilla'] | 2020-12-18 10:37:10.475000+00:00 | ['Snagit', 'Documentation', 'Technical Writing', 'Image', 'Screenshots'] |
Results of the Champions League of the Altcoins 2020 | Good morning, good evening, everyone!
We (Rapids Network) would like to thank you all for allowing us to live this great adventure organized on The Crypto Hero’s Twitter.
In the quarter-finals, our community gave us a great victory, we were in Group B, with
ASAFE allsafe coin
RDD reddcoin
KYDC know your developer
Voting started on January 15, 7 days later we reached the semi-final, with 46.6% of the votes in our favour.
For the semi-finals, which started on January 31, we were competing with ECA electra, after 734 voters, we won with 71.8% of the votes for RAPIDS, propelling us directly to the final, we just had to wait, who from TEZOS or XRP would win the semi-finals, to play the final versus RAPIDS.
On February 5th, the announcement of the 2nd crypto qualified in the final, is announced, RAPIDS will face XRP for a grandiose final.
On 13 February, the Grand Final of the Champions League of the Altcoins 2020 begins.
Who from XRP, 3rd biggest capitalization of cryptocurrencies (dated 13/02) with $14.18 Billion, a huge community, or RAPIDS, 815th capitalization (dated 13/02) with $660k, with its active and committed community going to win?
I think many would have bet on XRP, because it’s a known crypto, which has proven itself, and is one of the most famous for cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
I don’t hide the fact that at the beginning we were a bit afraid, XRP had already started from the first day to dig a considerable gap (from memory), on February 14th there were about 70% of the votes for XRP, and only 30% for RAPIDS.
BUT! Rapids community responded very well, we solicited all of our communities around the world, we pushed the Social Networks, we motivated everyone on Telegram, without respite for a week we did our best to solicit as many people as possible, and we also thank the Uptrennd Community for helping and supporting us.
Today the final vote has arrived, after 1411 votes.
XRP wins with 51% of the voters in their favour
RAPIDS finishes big second with 49% of the results
It was a close call for RAPIDS to finish first, BUT we don’t experience this as a defeat, but as a great victory.
We know that we can count on all our communities and networks to make a difference.
Losing by such a small margin (XRP 51% vs. RAPIDS 49%) is just an exceptional result!
Here’s how a young and small crypto is making its mark in the history of cryptocurrencies, by accomplishing such feats, we competed against one of the biggest crypto community, and we have emerged stronger!
It is now time to celebrate this VICTORY for RAPIDS (Defeat for the Champions League of Altcoins 2020), and tomorrow we will accomplish other great things
Once again, we can never thank you enough, because of you we are living great events, and we hope to live them again in 2020 and for the years to come.
We are proud of you, and we will continue to do our best to always satisfy you.
See you soon for new adventures
Join us on Social Networks:
But also
Rapids Network
Resources | https://medium.com/@rapidsnetwork/results-of-the-champions-league-of-the-altcoins-2020-3849344943fe | ['Rapids Network'] | 2020-02-20 21:58:45.994000+00:00 | ['Rapids', 'Ripple', 'Rpd', 'Altcoins', 'Rapids Network'] |
Using Compose Middleware | An introduction to Compose Middleware and a practical use case
Photo by Daniel von Appen on Unsplash
What is Compose Middleware?
Compose Middleware is an NPM library that allows a user to combine multiple Express middleware functions into a single Express middleware handler. Compose Middleware also supports inline error handling. In other words, with Compose Middleware you can create a single middleware function that performs all of the functionality of several middleware functions, including error handling, rather than calling all of those functions separately.
But wait, what is Express Middleware?
To take a step back, Express lets us build websites using middleware functions. Any time we mount a function with app.use, the thing we mount is a middleware function (e.g., app.use(middleware) ). Every Express middleware function understands the same function signature: function(req, res, next). In other words, each middleware function has access to the request object, response object, and the next middleware function.
On additional requirement, is that if a middleware function does not end the request/response cycle, it must call `next`. You can imagine each middleware function as a link in a chain, with each link passing along the request and response objects to the next link.
How do I get started using Compose Middleware?
First, install Compose Middleware:
npm install compose-middleware –save
Then, create a new instance in your project. Note that you should have already installed and created an instance of Express.
var compose = require('compose-middleware').compose
Next, create your item of Compose Middleware. The compose function takes an array of Express middleware functions. Note that the functions in this array must follow the middleware function signature (i.e., req, res, next). The below example assumes that you will be creating and using your middleware function in different files.
module.exports = compose([ function (req, res, next) {}, function (err, req, res, next) {}, function (req, res, next) {} ])
Now, in the file where you would like to use your newly defined middleware function, require this function and then insert the function in to your chain of other Express middleware functions.
const myMiddleware = require(./myfilepath) . . . app.use(/myroute, myMiddleware())
When would I want to use Compose Middleware?
I came across Compose Middleware recently, while building an NPM library of my own that allows a user to visualize and test out SQL queries against the data in their current project. My goal was to architect the library so that applications using my library can mount a new route within a user’s project, and that route would host my query visualization page. To achieve this goal, I needed a mechanism to combine the necessary aspects of my project (including the API routes and html, bundle.js and other static front-end files) into a single express middleware function that could be published as an NPM library. Compose Middleware fit the bill exactly!
You can see my resulting library and code here and here.
And if you’d like to read more about publishing a middleware function created with the Compose Middleware library as an NPM library, hop over to this article written by my colleague Riley Butterfield, about the next step in our SQL visualization project. | https://medium.com/@lmmcampbell/using-compose-middleware-250bb5197972 | ['Laura Campbell'] | 2020-12-18 14:57:13.471000+00:00 | ['Expressjs', 'Middleware', 'Npm Package', 'Express'] |
Guardians Unite: How Decentraland, PancakeSwap, & Elrond Supports the ChainBoost Ecosystem | Guardians of The NFT Galaxy!
What’s one of the biggest challenges developers face when launching a project? Simple, a lack of collaboration with other projects and networks. Whether it’s NFTs, cryptocurrency, AI, or launchpads, the success of any early-stage DeFi venture relies heavily on getting the necessary exposure to reach contributors and build a supportive community.
Fall short in this area and you’ll be in for a turbulent ride, especially during a bearish market. But luckily for NFT developers, ChainBoost has an ace in its pocket and it faces the issue of lack of networking head-on.
Decentraland, PancakeSwap, & Elrond: The Game Changers
Projects that are boosted by ChainBoost have the advantage of benefitting from reputable networks ChainGuardians utilizes within its ecosystem, such as Decentraland, Elrond, and PancakeSwap. These alliances have benefitted the NFT marketplace in several ways. While all three share in common enormous communities and high numbers of active daily users, they do provide unique advantages that will serve as valuable assets for the ChainBoost ecosystem.
Decentraland
Decentraland’s network features a 3D world that allows its users to use the tokens LAND (NFT ERC-721 token) and MANA (ERC-20 token) to purchase goods and services on the platform. The Decentrland Foundation was also created to help spread awareness and attract more users to the NFT space. Content creators and developers are eligible for rewards through games, prizes, and raffles.
PancakeSwap
PancakeSwap is one of the most utilized decentralized exchanges on the Binance Smart Chain. It’s fast, offers extremely low fees, and taps into user-generated liquidity pools that allow users to swap between crypto-assets. The DeFi farming opportunities offered to liquidity providers have helped Pancakeswap generate over $1 billion in total value and in some cases over half a million active users in a single day.
Elrond
Elrond is a standalone crypto project that combines the power of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. It features a thriving ecosystem of developers, DeFi exchanges, validators, and businesses to help build a new and exciting online economy.
Boosting NFTs on the World Stage
The utility for ChainBoost in relation to these platforms is the ability to deliver NFT projects across an expansive market of contributors, raising awareness for project developers and allowing their creations and the entire NFT market as a whole to flourish.
Join Us
Twitter
Telegram
Website
Blog | https://medium.com/chainboost/guardians-unite-how-decentraland-pancakeswap-elrond-supports-the-chainboost-ecosystem-e66ccdd2db54 | ['Humza Nasir'] | 2021-09-07 00:56:46.568000+00:00 | ['Decentralized', 'Chain Guardians', 'Pancakeswap', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Elrond'] |
Star Atlas Announces NFT Loot Box Rewards Drop for ReBirth Meta-Poster Collectors [Updated] | As a genesis moment for next-gen metaverse gaming experiences, Star Atlas offered its community worldwide an opportunity to take part in the inaugural journey with the release of a series of 14 ReBirth Meta-Poster experiences between April 24 and July 24 2021.
The collection blurred the lines between the real and the virtual, the present and the future, and brought mood-altering AR experiences with interstellar collaborations by world’s top talent such as deadmau5, Blond:ish, Jason Silva, The Fabricant and many others.
Collecting Meta-Posters also meant unlocking a treasure chest of exclusive metaverse rewards and perks, obtained by holding increasingly valuable Meta-Posters up to the top of a given ReBirth Tier.
After the final ReBirth meta-poster experience, the time has come to drop bountiful rewards into wallets of eligible Meta-Poster owners. The drop will happen in two steps.
The first step will be on August 25, 2021 at 8 AM PDT (Pacific Time), when an official snapshot of all meta-poster holders will take place by capturing the meta-poster contents of their wallet.
Before the snapshot, the meta-posters should be put in wallet and not for sale on the Galactic Marketplace on StarAtlas.com or other DEX marketplaces. Any meta-poster that is in either an “Open order”, “Unclaimed”, or “Unsettled” status in the inventory or on a DEX Marketplace will not be captured in the snapshot. All open orders should be closed, all unsettled balances claimed, and the meta-posters should be in a single wallet in advance of the snapshot time.
The second step will follow in two phases:
To allow ReBirth meta-poster collectors to fully benefit from the token sale, the snapshot will have stored their wallet address to claim benefits in the token sale.
Second, on September 2, 2021 (Pacific Time), seven days after the snapshot, the entire inventory of all assets will be dropped into respective wallets of holders based on the snapshot taken on August 25. Holders will receive all the appropriate rewards in their wallet inventory.
This time frame gives meta-poster holders enough time to prepare for the snapshot and rewards drop as well as to benefit from the token sale. For the meta-posters to count towards Tiers for the rewards drop, holders only need to hold them in a single wallet address to receive the snapshot distribution. They do not need to do anything else with their meta-posters in order to receive the drop.
The drop will also include the rewards for the owners of the Legends Series’ Armstrong Forever meta-poster.
Users who have purchased ReBirth Meta-Posters from #1 to #5 on OpenSea are strongly encouraged to consolidate their meta-posters into a single wallet address, contact the Star Atlas Discord community moderators and migrate them to a Solana wallet through the Wormhole Bridge when it becomes available.
OpenSea holders will need to migrate their meta-posters through the Wormhole to take advantage of their further use.
In case of questions while preparing for the snapshot and drop, visit our Star Atlas Discord server for guidance and walkthrough with our community.
Owners of Meta-Poster Tier collections will remain eligible for surprise NFT drops and treats in the future.
ABOUT STAR ATLAS
Star Atlas is a next-gen gaming metaverse emerging from the confluence of state of the art blockchain, real-time graphics, multiplayer video game, and decentralized financial technologies.
Real-time graphics technology using Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite allows for cinematic quality video game visuals. Blockchain technology using the Solana protocol established a largely serverless and secured gameplay experience. Non-fungible tokens obtained and traded within Star Atlas creates an economy that replicates the tangibility of real world assets and ownership. To learn more, visit StarAtlas.com.
JOIN OUR COMMUNITY
Twitter | Discord | Telegram | Youtube | Instagram | Reddit | Facebook | Linkedin | Medium | Tik Tok | Twitch | https://medium.com/star-atlas/star-atlas-announces-nft-loot-box-rewards-drop-for-rebirth-meta-poster-collectors-8de3c7909fc6 | ['Star Atlas'] | 2021-08-25 17:37:48.776000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Blockchain', 'Metaverse', 'Mmo', 'Playtoearn'] |
It time to grow | Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
We all have the right to have feelings to be angry, Sad and everything else. We are human its okay. You’re not perfect. It okay to be let down and it okay to be happy it okay to uplift people it okay to be HUMAN. Aren't we all.
This is probably the most hypercritical thing I have ever said but to my girls and my guys. It time to be selfish. It time to make yourself happy again. It time to forget the toxic stuff ,Time to forgive and forget. It time to stop putting others before you. It time to heal and be who you truly are supposed to be because you deserve it more then anyone. Like Rubi Kaur said “Accept yourself as you were designed” It time to love every part of yourself it time to be SELFISH it time to grow to your full potential. Wake up make your bed, Read a book, Let them toxic people go you CAN DO IT! Remember I love you forever and always it your year to grow and manifest your life so lets stay positive and do it. | https://medium.com/@marizasanchez/it-time-to-grow-e4db412e3943 | ['Mariza Sanchez'] | 2020-12-23 06:34:06.749000+00:00 | ['Growth Mindset', 'Manifestation', 'Self Improvement'] |
Getting there | So, today was slow going for me. My focus was in other areas today but I will be catching up this weekend. My goal is to have my mobile game done and published by the end of the weekend. I am absolutely loving the way this game is coming together and can’t wait to see it finished. I still have so much to learn but I feel I have come such a long way in just a few weeks in my knowledge and skills with Unity and C#.
I had a proud moment as a game developer the other day as well. I was told by my daughters teacher that she has been going around school telling everyone that would listen that her Dad makes video games. She told them all about the games I have made so far and was talking like it was the coolest thing in the world. I know she is only five, so the bar for her level of cool has not been set to high yet, but it made me proud to be doing what Im doing. To tell you the truth, I feel the same way she does. This is a really awesome thing to be doing and I am proud to tell people that I am doing it. I absolutely love it and love the potential it has that I haven’t even scraped the surface of.
To top it all off, I have a live in game tester as well. My daughter sat at my computer playing one of the games I made and would not leave it for a good half an hour. She was getting so excited, throwing hands up, some ‘woohoo’s, and really loving playing it. She even tried out the mobile game I am working on now. It was great to see the excitement and even greater to see my daughter playing one of the first games I have made in what I hope is a long career in game development. I took a video of it so I can look back with her 10–15 years from now and watch where I came from.
That being said, I need to get to work and get this next game done and looking and playing good so I can publish my first game on the play store. I worked on the attack system today and will be moving into the loot system tomorrow with a shop and shop keeper, and the main menu and Unity ads. Hopefully I will be wrapping up the game by tomorrow evening if all goes well. I hope to be able to link to my new game on the play store in my next post! | https://medium.com/@aaron-black/getting-there-206c3c99009e | ['Aaron Black'] | 2020-12-12 07:03:15.555000+00:00 | ['Unity', 'Game Development'] |
My Year in Gaming: COVID-19 Edition | My Year in Gaming: COVID-19 Edition
Looking back at the games released throughout 2020
At the start of 2020, I promised myself that I’ll spend this year a little differently than the previous one. I promised myself I’d spend less time with games and do things I’d previously avoided…
… that didn’t go well, in the end. So, back to square one, I guess.
Backlog: I choose you!
We all live in an age where your back catalog of games is so big, tackling them all is simply impossible. We gamers just like to accumulate hoards of video games both old and new in hopes that one day we’ll be able to finish them.
So when I first heard that my city would be locked down and all my favorite restaurants and stores along with it, I figured that there was no better time to finish my backlog.
Or so I thought…
Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Source: DualShockers.
March
Back in March, right before my city entered a lockdown, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released. I picked up my copy on day one, and just like everyone, I was farming 30 iron nuggets.
The game stuck; I’ve spent a stupid amount of time in it. My current file is 200 hours long and still counting. This is more than enough to beat several smaller games that just keep piling up (looking at you Ori, Streets of Rage 4, and Steamworld Quest), yet I am still somehow glued to it.
Then came another time sink for the PS4. Yeah, you know which one. The one with waifus and husbandos, Persona 5 Royal. Jokes aside, this is an incredible re-release with tons of quality of life improvements, new music, and a true 4K presentation (no checkerboard here). I’m still playing the game, beating Futaba’s palace, and I’ll probably stick to the end.
Ion Fury. Source: Popzara.
May
After Persona, I had hoped releases would slow down a bit, to no avail. In May we got Ion Fury, a 2020 Build Engine game. I couldn’t believe it, this was like 1996 all over again, the game a throwback to simpler times when FPS games largely ruled the landscape. Even though the game destroyed weak single-core CPUs found on current (or rather last) gen consoles, it was still a blast to play. I love such projects and here’s hoping we get more of them in 2021.
June
June was somewhat of a disappointment. As developers were still learning how to work from home, releases that were scheduled for June were rushed to market. We first saw Little Town Hero from Game Freak (and kinda Toby Fox) which failed to impress, and then we got the Outer Worlds as well. Let’s not talk about that one. Still, that month we were graced by Persona 4 Golden on PC as well as Valorant.
Ghost of Tsushima. Source: Gamer Network.
July
This was the month when things started to improve on the technical side of things, minus Deadly Premonition 2 of course. We got Ghost of Tsushima, a Sucker Punch production that managed to make open-world games and badass samurai work together. We also got Crysis Remastered on the Switch, so I guess the meme can finally die now. And hey, Superhot: Mind Control Delete, was the best DLC I ever played.
August
I knew August was going to be slow. The weather finally hit the sweet spot, some restaurants offered takeaway food, and gaming took a backseat, even for developers. The only notable releases I can remember were Risk of Rain 2 finally hitting its 1.0 version and Fall Guys. We did get Mortal Shell, and even though I’m a Souls fan, I’ve yet to play it so I can’t comment on it yet.
September
September was the month of Stadia. Hitman 1&2, Hello Neighbor, Serious Sam 4, Marvel's Avengers, and even Mafia: Definitive Edition all released on the platform. A rather impressive showing considering that it failed to gain mainstream appeal. For new games, we got the super-inspired Genshin Impact which is actually a decent game at the very beginning, but only at the beginning. Elsewhere, Spelunky 2 came into existence and was more Spelunky.
No More Heroes 2. Source: ShackNews.
October
October is my birthday month so you bet I was going to get the shiny new releases. Turns out publishers thought otherwise as we had an influx of old games being slightly updated and re-released as brand new ones. Sure, some of them were good, like Pikmin 3 Deluxe and Ys Origin, but you know what really surprised me?
No More Heroes 2.
I know it is one the safest sequels out there but it was previously stuck on Wii and we all know that 480p doesn’t do the game justice. It is such a great game, so if you haven’t played it, give it a go, as it’s a bargain at $20 on the eShop. It runs at 60 frames and looks absolutely bonkers in handheld mode.
November
November saw the release of new consoles, which meant that supply and pricing proved to be problematic. I am a firm believer that cross-gen is the sweet spot in that you don’t need to spend a small fortune to get the new system as most good games will still be released on the previous generation. Miles Morales, Horizon: Forbidden West, Halo Infinite, and more are all currently out for both systems or are going to be released as cross-gen games.
December 2077
You know where this is going. Cyberpunk 2077. How the hell is the game that was developed for such a long time running at 12 frames per second on PS4 and Xbox One? Don’t even get me started on how people are walking in the sky and police are reacting with a minute-long delay. It’s broken.
But you know what’s not broken? Hades. Ever since it left early access and hit the consoles, I can’t put it down. The combat, the visuals, the music, all combine into one heck of a release.
On to 2021
Despite having a global pandemic ongoing, this year was great for gamers. We had a ton of new games, a reasonable amount of older games being touched-up and re-released, and new bold ideas went mainstream. Who would have thought that Among Us would be such a phenomenon? I certainly didn’t.
Anyway, I want to hear from you folks. What games did you play? What helped you combat boredom? Are there any games that you think I should pick up? | https://medium.com/super-jump/my-year-in-gaming-covid-19-edition-f132373c99b9 | ['Ernest Sheptalo'] | 2020-12-29 04:55:58.837000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Year In Review', 'Features', 'Videogames', 'Digital Life'] |
FACE OF LABOUR IN PANDEMIC | BY CAROLINE WILSON
The world has been on testing times (quite literally), with the corona virus pandemic creating intense pressure on the economy impacting both the formal and the informal sectors immensely. With several regular nine to five jobs being lost in multiple sectors a lot of workers are now resorting to flexible freelance work offering a wide range of services, from data entries from home to delivering meals and other essentials.
Several companies and industries received a severe blow during the economic slowdown that began slowly but surely way before the Covid 19 came into picture and no doubt the profit margins further declined considerably during the global pandemic. With several restrictions and laws coming into place like social distancing, the Disaster Management act and The Essential Commodities act along with several state government rules along with the imposition of IPC Section 144 in several regions and the ridiculous initiative of dilution of labour laws in certain parts.
The restrictions on inter-state movement of labour and materials along with the announcement of a sudden lockdown without adequate preparation, made thousands of migrants to leave the cities the very next day out of sheer panic leading to disastrous consequences(the death of several migrants on railways tracks, roads, some without adequate food and water) . The large scale migration of labourers from the core centres of production along with a global downfall of demand, negatively impacted sectors that employ huge numbers of migrants namely the garment, construction sector and other production houses like brick making, cement industries etc.
Out of the different sectors, one area that seems to have survived and continues to sustain to an extent is the gig economy. For the majority of the lot, the gig economy which largely operates on the ecosystem of freelancers seems to be at a better receiving end. There are several reasons as to why the gig economy seems to be effectively working as compared to the other areas like garment or construction within the informal economy and one of the primary reasons being that of cost effectiveness. The gig economy largely plays on advanced digital technology and operationality of logistics. On the one hand the gig economy employs individuals with marked deadlines and performance based wages. On the other hand the individual benefits through the scope of choosing his/her interest area with flexible working hours and inculcating skill sets for a neo liberalized world.
However everything is not all black and white either as a large number of employees even in the gig economy seems to be facing the brunt of the situation with several being paid lesser wages, not having adequate safety measures and some even testing positive and getting hospitalized leading to a higher out of pocket expenditure on health. The situation is worse in countries that don’t have effective government health initiatives.
With schemes like Aatma Nirbhar Bharat (the actual expenditure is just 1% of GDP) coming into place and government making announcements of large packages for the vulnerable sections, some respite seems to have come into place but that is not enough to lift the poor, especially within the informal sector. The existence of an uncertain future looms over the Indian economy further leading to lower GVA across different sectors of agriculture, industries and service. With incomes falling, people will cut down expenditure and so will government and industries leading to a further drag on the ongoing economic downfall with sluggish growth leading to a severe hit on the supplies and the labour that is involved in the production and manufacturing process.
The need of the hour is to acknowledge the interconnected nature of the global economy and not treat the formal and the informal economy as separate as any scheme or policy on labour affects both the sectors though not on equal footing. Secondly, the health and safety of the workers should not be compromised in the process of regaining profits as inadequate health measures and equipments will only further deplete the process of getting the economy back on track. Furthermore, the pandemic has surely put light on the living conditions of the majority of Indians which needs to be acknowledged and the lives of thousands should not be put on stake only for the gain of a handful of ruling ideologies and vote bank politics. | https://medium.com/@carolinewil/face-of-labour-in-pandemic-db88fca758d5 | [] | 2020-11-20 07:04:59.594000+00:00 | ['Migration', 'Pandemic', 'Labour'] |
Livejournal archives | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/livejournal-archives/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B8-%D1%83%D0%BC%D1%86%D0%B0-%D1%83%D0%BC%D1%86%D0%B0-9c1a8209cb71 | ['Orion Nebula'] | 2017-07-02 21:21:49.829000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Tribute', 'Baroc'] |
The Great Reboot | COVID-19 has forced a reboot of the entire world by bringing all the countries, industries, individuals, and groups to a grinding halt. Humanity and the Earth as a whole were long overdue for a reboot to fix the various errors. Everyone (individuals, organizations, countries) was missing an opportunity to sit back and reflect on their activities’ outcomes. They are all running their races to keep up with changing demands which have long been diversified, and failing to unite efforts even when needed.
If there is one significant positive outcome from World War II, the last major global reboot, it is the globalization framework developed to avoid future conflicts. Being interdependent on one another, leveraging what one can do best compared to others has helped ensure peace without significant disputes. The creation of the European Union and various other global organizations such as UNO and related groups helped provide a space for dialogue and growth opportunities. The more significant theme emerged from humanity’s last reboot: peace, harmony, economic well-being, healthy lifestyles, and mutual support in crisis times.
Humanity always looks hopeful it has reemerged from major global events strong and proceeded ahead with more positivity, strength, and rigor. With the same positive spirit, humanity has to take advantage of this common crisis to initiate a dialogue about humanity’s future. Many things are taken for granted or haven’t changed or stayed stagnant for many years, but COVIDgave a wake-up jolt to all such beliefs and age-old ideologies.
Many organizations are reluctant to let the employees have flexible working arrangements like working partly from home, working in split hours, and analyzing business travel. Individuals spend extravagantly on celebrations over 5X their annual earnings, failing to plan for future financial low points, ignoring the health and personal hygiene. Governments worldwide neglected the healthcare sector for many years, lacking planning to handle any pandemics or any contingency plans to offer essential medical services during a major crisis event. Rents have risen, unsustainably, over the years in many metropolitan cities in the name of urbanization, making the average middle class unbearable.
It is time to think and reflect on day-to-day lives as an individual, an organization, a government, and the planet as a whole at a global level. This is an opportunity to change our actions towards a more sustainable, resilient, happy lifestyle at every level. We are slowly emerging out of crisis and getting back to normalcy. This is an opportunity to re-define what normalcy is and what it means to build resiliency into our way of life. This COVID pandemic may be one of a kind large-scale occurrence. Still, there may be other global events that will affect everyone, like Climate change, food scarcity, fresh drinking water across many growing metropolitan cities. | https://medium.com/@gopusandeep66/the-great-reboot-397b2021983c | ['Sandeep Gopu'] | 2021-03-08 09:33:36.938000+00:00 | ['Sustainable Development', 'Reboot', 'Covid 19', 'Sustainability'] |
How you feed your Ecosystem | All of us are potential teachers and learners — in a collaborative environment we are both.
Ecosystem has been a topic I have covered off and on here both in the context of enterprise communities as well as social communities. Social communities continue to grow with various popular examples popping up everyday ala Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Likewise, Enterprise Communities landscape continue to change and grow as well enabling collaborative and self learning Ecosystems. Few examples in the Higher Education space includes Sakai, Kuali and uPortal groups. In the Enterprise product space a good example is Act! from Sage and others that continue to make inroads. The paradigm shift include:-
Old ParadigmNew ParadigmParticipantsBusiness PartnersVarious (Partners, Customers, ISVs, Developers, System Integrators, VARs, etc.)PurposeMeans to an end (Sales, Service and Support)Way of life (Innovation, More Product, Reach and Scope, etc.)RelationshipBusiness, FormalTrusted, CollaborativeCommunicationMostly one wayDialogueKnowledge SharingTrainingPeer Learning beside necessary TrainingProblem solvingMostly individual groups; limited sharingWork with peers to solve the problem; and share learning with the world to follow suitProcessProvide necessary steps to deal with the fiefdomsTransparencyTechnologyPhone, Email, FaxWiki, Blog, Forum, Bulletin Board, Youtube, etc. beside conventional meansUse of WebLimitedSocial. Can one live without it now?World viewWorld is roundWorld is flat
For a software product company, regardless of the camp it lives — closed/traditional source software or open source software — the need to foster and harness collaborative, learning ecosystem help achieve sustainable growth as well as nurture innovation avenues. | https://medium.com/aloktyagi/how-you-feed-your-ecosystem-a3c494019ec9 | ['Alok Tyagi'] | 2017-03-08 21:02:25.478000+00:00 | ['Agile', 'Blogging', 'Community Sourcing', 'Enterprise', 'Erp'] |
Why Documentation Matters | Why Documentation Matters
Documentation is often an afterthought when you’re working in the tech industry. Whether it be cloud security, application development, or even system administration, no one wants to make documentation a priority. But what happens if key personnel leave, get sick, or even pass away? You’ll be left with what could be a big can of worms that might take months — or at worst, years — to unravel. This likely scenario is not only scary to imagine, but poses serious threats or issues for your organization or company in the future.
Let’s first start by defining why documentation is important. There are three key reasons: auditing, continuity, and transformation, or ACT for short.
ACT
Auditing is just what it sounds like: If a stakeholder wants to see how a process is done or you want to take a look at how something could be done more efficiently, you’ll need documentation. It’s the ultimate insurance policy. Should a system fail, you need to comply with a certain standard, or your organization is acquired or goes through a major change, you’ll need it. With documentation, you can easily and readily show how to do things without having to track someone down or redocument an established system or process.
Continuity is more important than ever in today’s world. People constantly change companies and positions. When someone gets a promotion or takes another job, how will you know exactly what they did without having them spend their final two weeks backtracking in order to prepare their replacement? More importantly, how can you help make sure the critical path of the process that was created by a consultancy or temporary team is sustainable and able to be supported? Documentation allows for continuity in your operations and processes to ensure you don’t miss a beat.
Transformation rounds out the list. One of the biggest blockers to migrating a system or process is not knowing how it works in the first place. Imagine if you picked up furniture from Ikea and there were no instructions (or even pictures) to guide you through the process of making those parts into furniture. You would probably not know where to start. This often happens when you try to migrate or transform a system towards something better. The transformation requires that you spend a lot of time upfront understanding where everything is and how it all works together so that you can easily make the changes you want to make.
Make it Useful
So, now that you know why documentation is useful, how can you make sure it’s done well? There are four key things to remember when creating useful documentation: create organized buckets for your information, write everything down, understand your audience, and be consistent.
Mise En Place
The French have a concept in cooking called mise en place, which translates to “everything in place.” It refers to setting everything up so that you can be more efficient with your time and movement in the kitchen. If you were going to document putting together a dresser, you might have a section or bucket on parts included, tools needed, instructions, and safety precautions to take while assembling the dresser. Creating buckets for your documentation allows you to easily dump information into the appropriate area. An example of a bucket in tech documentation is the resources required to run a system. This would include configuration information or permissions needed for each component to run the system. When you’re ready to finalize everything, you can spend your time cleaning things up instead of rewriting everything from scratch.
Write It All Down
The next concept is super logical, but also difficult to do: write it all down. No matter how big or small, put your thoughts, changes, and everything else into those buckets you created. This is difficult because it requires you to actively remember to do something else while you may be busy making a change or fixing something. A helpful tip for writing things down is to keep a notepad, real or virtual, next to you while you work so that you can record what you’re doing. Alternatively, you could just record everything you’re doing like YouTubers do and go back and outline the steps you took to make something happen.
Understand Your Audience
Understanding your audience is key for a few reasons. Firstly, you don’t want to write or produce something in a fashion that is difficult for them to understand. Next, you don’t want to make it difficult for them to access. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself when you’re creating documentation:
What is the goal of this documentation?
Who is the intended audience?
Where and how do they typically consume documentation?
What am I trying to communicate with this documentation?
How can I make this easier or clearer?
Be Consistent
The last and most important point is to be consistent.
If you’ve ever watched tradesmen work, you’d notice they have a routine. They come in, set up, work systematically, and clean up at the end of the day. Your process should be similar; you can simply record or add to the documentation you have started every day. This way you can build a habit, which allows you to always make sure that you’re documenting everything and create an example for others in your company or organization to follow. You have to be the change you want to see.
Create a Process
The last item is how to help make sure others in your organization buy into documentation. One of the best ways is to create a process with templates. A popular example is a Slack bot that is set up every week to remind the team to fill out a template with the work they’ve completed. This lets you jump in to help organize their thoughts and also allows for audit capability. Templates make it easy and accessible for others to quickly and consistently add information in an organized fashion, allowing you to transform it as you see fit.
Documentation for Success
Documentation can be a difficult thing to keep track of and tedious to keep up with, but you can be consistent and successful by using the following tips:
Documentation is important for auditing, consistency, and transformation (ACT).
2. Get better at documentation by:
Creating organized buckets for your information
Writing everything down
Understanding your audience
Being consistent
3. You can get more buy in to documentation at your organization by creating templates and helping facilitate the process. | https://blog.scalesec.com/why-documentation-matters-4d29e88c1de1 | ['Michael J Flanigan'] | 2020-12-03 14:22:40.291000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Organization', 'Project Management', 'Documentation', 'Process Management'] |
Lightning Bitcoin (LBTC) Monthly Report — August 2019 | Core Development Progress
1. The brand new iOS Wallet ‘Ibiza’ has been officially released. Ibiza is a decentralized wallet; the users may keep their private keys. User experience has been greatly optimized, new features including “send all”, “scan to pay”, displaying pending transactions and transaction fee. Meantime the transaction fee has been lowered, and errors will be recorded in the system log. In addition, according to the LBTC team, more features including customized token issuance and anonymous transaction with privacy protection will be introduced.
2. Android Wallet
Nickname feature added and consistent with the iOS version
News section and background data rules modification
3. iOS Wallet
iOS system super signature feature added, performance and compatibility issues fixed
Nickname feature added and consistent with the Android version
4. Underlying functions and expansion of the main net
Modify the nickname rules to adapt to the nickname format in mobile wallets
Transaction confirmation mechanism and irreversible block parameters optimized
5. Official Website Update
News interface nginx configured
News section launched
6. Bug fix
iOS wallet: conflicts in click event optimization and replication solved
iOS wallet: smoothness optimized
iOS & Android wallets: nickname repetition problem solved
iOS & Android wallets: data loss (when modifying the mobile wallet to resynchronize) issues solved
iOS & Android wallets: error message when removing all addresses solved
Developer Community
1. Thebes (a third-party block explorer for LBTC): mining node error fixed
2. LBTChome.com (a third-party news site for LBTC): image upload bug and plug-in bug fixed
3. Discord market: price bot added
4. Mobile wallet development: a new application from a community developer received
Community News
1、 In response to the recent 2GB network upgrade failure of the BSV blockchain and its problems, recently W.H.H, the core developer of LBTC, expressed his opinion on Twitter: BSV’s plan to increase block size to 2GB will cause severe centralization, raise the requirement of full nodes, and lower the efficiency of blockchains. Any bitcoin scaling based on PoW inevitably compromises to centralization, with a very limited marginal benefit.
2、 The U.S. LBTC community has built a major partnership with CryptoMico (www.cryptomico.biz), one of California’s major cryptocurrency communities. Recently CryptoMico has accepted LBTC as a new payment method, in addition to BTC, BCH, ETH, ETC and XRP. LBTC has a high-performance network architecture, with extremely fast transfer speeds, this is the main reason why CryptoMico is willing to accept LBTC payments.
3、 The U.S. LBTC community has established a partnership with University Express (https://www.uniexpresschina.com), a leading education consulting agency in North America. University Express has now accepted LBTC as a new payment method, in addition to BTC, ETH, ETC, LTC, XRP and USDT. Located in Los Angeles, University Express specializes in providing high-quality services to Chinese students applying for U.S. universities. LBTC’s global payment service, and high transfer speed as quick as Visa credit cards, is very convenient for both international students and local users in the U.S.
4、 According to the on-chain data, the number of active addresses and on-chain transactions of BTC continued to break its own record in August. By August 23, the average number of new addresses per day was around 100, and the total number of active addresses reached 46,874; and the number of transactions per day during the week was around 1,500, and the average number of transactions per day was over 31,000. Both of these data are close to the well-known on-chain governance project Decred (DCR) and cross-border payment project OmiseGO (OMG).
Social Media Data
Twitter: 5,100+
Telegram: 15,000+
WeChat: 6,300+
Weibo: 7,200+ | https://medium.com/lightning-bitcoin-blog/lightning-bitcoin-lbtc-monthly-report-augst-2019-5ac109543f40 | ['Lightning Bitcoin', 'Lbtc'] | 2019-09-06 07:18:17.626000+00:00 | ['Lbtc', 'Bitcoin', 'Crypto', 'Lightningbtc'] |
Inclusive Design and Why Product Managers Should Care | What Can We Do As Product Managers?
No one wants to create biased products or miss a big part of their audience. But that will very likely happen when we don’t consider diversity in our process. There are few things product managers can do to mitigate bias.
Image source: Aseel Hamarneh
First, start with yourself and acknowledge you’re biased
None of us sets off to discriminate, but we all grew up in a biased society, so whether we like it or not, some of that bias gets internalized. This is referred to as unconscious bias, which forms involuntarily from our experiences and exposure to media, and in many cases, goes against the beliefs and values we hold consciously. Because we are unaware of our unconscious beliefs, they sometimes end up driving our behaviors. Research has shown that most of our decisions regarding people are heavily influenced by our biases and that our assessments of others are not as objective as we think.
Think of five people you trust/admire most at work. On your list, add next to each person their gender, race, ethnic background, English as a first or additional language, rough age group, sexual orientation, and whether they are able-bodied or have a disability.
Examine your list. How diverse is it? If it’s not, why? How come the people you admire most are all similar? Could it be bias? (Exercise adapted from Circle of Trust exercise by Include-Empower.com)
One common reaction when we recognize our own bias is to judge ourselves. But that’s not helpful. It’s more productive to pause on judgement and reserve the energy to acknowledge bias and disrupt it. Challenge your assumptions and ask questions like these: Would I have interrupted my colleague if they were a man? Would I have supported them in their promotion if they were a different race?
Again, don’t judge your answers. The point is to be mindful of those thoughts and not let them drive your actions. If you pretend they’re not there, you’re more likely to act on them.
Second, look at the teams around you
How diverse are they? It’s likely that they’re not. So next time you’re involved in hiring, make diversity a priority. Having a diverse team equals diverse opinions and more creative solutions. There is a lot of research on removing bias from the hiring process and improving diversity. There are things you can do to write inclusive ads, reach out to diverse networks, and remove bias from interviews. Here is a good article from HBR to get you started.
Third, address bias in your product
Examine your default user(s): Your priorities might look different if you deliberately consider diverse users. If for example, Google maps explored the needs of their female users or those with limited mobility, then perhaps safe routes or ones with step-free access would’ve been addressed early. Include different voices in the development process: Think about product decisions and how they’re made. List the voices represented in the room and make sure it’s a safe environment for everyone to contribute (aka create psychological safety). If you’re lacking diverse voices in the team, find alternate ways to include diversity, such as co-design sessions. And when your team comes up with solutions, take the time to examine the unintended consequences of these ideas. Check if you are negatively impacting some groups and look into ways to mitigate the risk early. An awful example of these consequences comes from abusive partners who weaponized smart home devices and used them to monitor and intimidate their partners.
I put together this table to summarize the questions you can ask at different stages of the product development process: | https://medium.com/better-programming/why-should-product-managers-care-about-inclusive-design-45bd13b7411a | ['Aseel Hamarneh'] | 2020-09-12 12:28:43.886000+00:00 | ['Diversity And Inclusion', 'Product Manager', 'Accessibility', 'Diversity In Tech', 'Bias'] |
The Dangerous Influence of “Chinese Privilege” in Singapore | When I met UK Member of European Parliament (MEP) Daniel Hannan in 2019, he curiously inquired about Chinese Privilege in Singapore.
I was somewhat taken aback by the fact that a UK MEP would be interested in the racial relations of a small city-state. But what I told him was that “Chinese Privilege” is mostly a hackneyed importation of “White-Privilege”-style social justice arguments from the West, propounded by a minority group of young radical Lefty activists that spent a little too much time reading Marx when they should be reading Hayek instead.
I’ve followed discussions on Singapore’s “Chinese Privilege” closely for several years now. I still think the notion of Chinese Privilege is one that is prevalent mostly in the minds of a younger minority.
Yet, I’ve slowly observed the nascent usage of the term that once exclusively existed in the marginal corners of Facebook slowly trickling into sociopolitical discourse.
The latest wave of Chinese-Privilege-style posts follows in the wake of the George Floyd riots in the U.S. Although this was an American media story, it has prompted no shortage of local activists, public commentators and social media influencers coming out the woodwork with public condemnations of racism and their own social commentary of racism in the Singaporean context.
I try to read many of these with an open mind. But in my years of following the “Chinese Privilege” discourse, I’ve given up on finding an original and persuasive argument. It wasn’t any different this time round.
What I do find, when I decide to sieve through social media posts, are emotionally-charged anecdotes of racism. Alfian Sa’at — arguably the loudest cheerleader of the Chinese Privilege brigade — is particularly effective at recycling these stories. So when I saw him pummeling the emotional console in another one of his viral Facebook posts this week, I rolled my eyes. Then I cringed, because he had to reach as far back to an incident in 2016 to say something relevant in order to capitalise on the ongoing media hype.
What’s wrong with “Chinese Privilege”?
The problem I have with the Chinese Privilege ideology is not because I think race doesn’t affect a person’s lived experiences, or that racism doesn’t exist in Singapore. Of course they do, on both counts.
Rather, the issue I take is that the rhetorical volume of race activists when they make their grand proclamations of widespread systemic racism does not accurately reflect the historical facts and reality of racial relations in Singapore.
Consider Sangeetha Thanapal, a prominent voice in the Chinese Privilege brigade (she insists on intellectual property ownership for “innovating” the term “Chinese Privilege”) who loudly proclaimed that “Singapore is a terribly racist country” before diving into a series of wild conspiracy claims of Indian construction workers being killed due to “lax labour safety laws” and buried underneath skyscrapers.
Or take for example journalist Kirsten Han (whose activism on the death penalty I have much respect for) who goes so far as to say in her recent blog post that “if we’re still at the level of debating whether systemic racism exists in Singapore, then we’re contributing to the problem”.
No end of scattered blog posts with incendiary titles like “To My Dear Fellow Singaporean Chinese: Shut Up When a Minority is Talking About Race” will turn up if you Google “Chinese Privilege”. All to remind us how deeply racist, and Chinese-chauvinistic Singapore is.
Where does Singapore stand on racial relations in the world?
No matter what you believe about racism in Singapore, it’s indisputable that we’re doing much better relative to the rest of the world.
These inconvenient facts are widely substantiated in empirical studies that have attempted to measure “racial discrimination” across countries. Yet they are consistently ignored or downplayed by the Chinese Privilege crowd.
According to the Global Creativity Index 2015, Singapore ranks 6th in highest number of natives when questioned on “how nations stack up on the openness to and acceptance of racial and ethnic minorities”.
In the Legatum Prosperity Index of 2015, Singapore ranks at number 1 (yes, one) in the category of “tolerance of ethnic minorities”, while Egypt comes out last.
In a 2016 study by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, there is an overwhelming consensus of Singaporeans that see multiculturalism as an ideal; 91% stated that they enjoyed social cohesion among a diverse ethnic matrix; 96% respected people from all races; 95% held the view that all races are equal and 96% that people of all races should be treated equally.
This is the perspective that is sorely absent in the rhetoric of the race activists when they get carried away with their racial justice crusade.
This reality didn’t come about by chance. Why are none of the achievements of Singapore’s racial relations ever celebrated, mentioned or appreciated by local race activists?
If the goal is to cherry-pick and pinpoint isolated instances of explicit or casual racism, and then proceed to extrapolate that to extravagant claims of widespread systemic racism, you can easily achieve that in any community of a thousand people — let alone a city-state of 5 million people.
Unfortunately, that is the kind of partisan activist hackery that passes for a “productive conversation on race” these days, rather than one that constructively and genuinely advances discussions around racial relations.
Malay-Muslim discrimination in the Army
There are a few often cited policy examples that supposedly “proves” systemic racism and Chinese Privilege in Singapore. The most popularly mentioned is racial discrimination against Malays in the Singapore Armed Forces.
Yet, racial discrimination in the armed forces doesn’t apply to other minority groups in the army, most notably Indian minorities. Therefore, “Chinese Privilege”, by definition, cannot be true. At best, it is “Chinese, plus sometimes Indian and other minority groups Privilege”. Not the most snazzy term to embark on a racial justice crusade with.
But if the “Chinese Privilege” ideology were true, then all other non-Chinese races in the army would face similar racial discrimination. It is not, and already we find the first gaping hole in the Chinese Privilege ideology.
The standard PAP justification for the policy is that Singapore, being situated next to several Muslim-majority nations, would put Malay-Muslim Singaporean soldiers in a prickly situation during military deployment.
I’m not a geopolitical analyst. But even the most hardened sceptic of the PAP’s explanation here must concede that there is some credence to this policy given how closely synonymous the Malay race and Muslim religion is (something like 99.6% of Singaporean Malays are also religious Muslims).
This doesn’t mean we should ignore the disadvantages of Malay men in the army. What it does mean however, is that geopolitical realities — namely Singapore’s diplomacy within the ASEAN bloc — are extremely complex and deserve serious study.
Yet, race activists conveniently gloss over these complexities while forcefully sweeping the Armed Forces policy under the rubric of “Chinese privilege” and systemic racism.
The Ethnic Integration Policy
Another prominently mentioned policy as “evidence” of institutional racism is the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP), which mandates racial quotas in public housing where the majority of Singaporeans live. According to its critics, the EIP was aimed to reduce ethnic clustering so as to reduce the political clout of racial minority groups and the potential emergence of a pro-Malay political party.
This is a truly incredible argument. You would think that the EIP was damning evidence that policymakers were intentionally trying to facilitate racial interaction and social cohesion. After all, the PAP’s rhetoric of racial harmony and equality is something heavily perpetuated through our education system, our politics, and all manners of political messaging.
Are we supposed to believe that the PAP has intentionally plotted to scatter racial minorities throughout public housing, all in pursuit of a grand scheme to subjugate minority groups and create a Chinese racial majority in every neighbourhood?
If the objective was to suppress racial minorities, why was the group representation constituency (GRC) system modified in 1988 to mandate minority representation? Why was the Presidency reserved in 2017 for a Malay candidate?
Why has the Singapore government explicitly gone out of the way multiple times to recognize the Malayan origins of Singapore? For instance, written into the Singapore Constitution is the infamous Article 152 “Minorities and special position of Malays”, which explicitly states that Singaporean Malays possess a privileged status and protection above the other races:
(1) It shall be the responsibility of the Government constantly to care for the interests of the racial and religious minorities in Singapore. (2) The Government shall exercise its functions in such manner as to recognize the special position of the Malays, who are the indigenous people of Singapore, and accordingly it shall be the responsibility of the Government to protect, safeguard, support, foster and promote their political, educational, religious, economic, social and cultural interests and the Malay language.
That in fact sounds a lot like privilege for the Malay race.
Does Alfian and his peers wish the EIP be abolished, so Chinese, Malays, Indians and other minority groups could accordingly cluster into their own racial enclaves? Because that seems to me like a recipe for social disaster. Racism exists, and to that end, it is best combated via social contact and exposure, not by increasing isolation.
The removal of the EIP would move Singapore’s racial relations in the philosophical direction that the most hardened racists among us would prefer—the segregation of people based on the colour of their skin.
Moreover, even if both GRCs and the EIP were abolished, enabling racial minorities to form concentrated racial communities, there is no reason to believe that racial minorities would possess some semblance of “political hegemony” — which is what critics suggest they lack.
An electoral parliamentary system would not magically improve the political bargaining power of racial minorities. If anything, the problem here lies in the nature of democracy where the rule is commanded by the tyranny of the majority. As the Minister for Law K. Shanmugam said here:
After separation from Malaysia, Chinese groups pressured the Government to make Mandarin the main language, he recalled. Mr Lee resisted, telling them that he would never allow the Chinese majority to lord it over the minorities in Singapore.
It is nothing else but strict constitutional rules and an independent judiciary that will protect all manner of minorities from majoritarianism.
Yet, race activists have somehow managed to manufacture a twisted interpretation of the EIP to fit their racist narrative.
A brief history of Singapore policy on racial relations
I don’t deny that certain policies such as the SAP schools have benefited the Chinese majority. But the reverse is also true. The Singapore government has on many occasions taken measures to ensure racial privilege for minorities, to the extent of large discomfort for opponents of affirmative action.
Our Group Representation Constituency (GRC) system has a racial diversity quota to ensure minority representation in Parliament, and the last presidency was controversially reserved for a Malay candidate. The Presidential Council for Minority Rights was set up as a government body to safeguard minority interests by scrutinising laws.
The Malay-Muslim community enjoys their own fully tax-funded state courts. Two government institutions, the Council for the Development of Malay-Muslim Children (MENDAKI) and the Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP), are dedicated to assisting Malays through tuition subsidies at the tertiary education level.
In From Third World to First, Lee Kuan Yew spoke about the early PAP leaders’ reluctance to initially organising these welfare groups along racial lines as this went against their race-blind meritocratic ideals. PAP pioneer and Singapore’s first Minister for Foreign Affairs S. Rajaratnam objected to it, seeing it as “backsliding” from Singapore’s multiculturalist “ideals of a colour-blind policy”. These self-help groups were so successful it was eventually extended to the Indian, Eurasian and Chinese groups, as I have wrote elsewhere.
The theme of racial equality is consistently reflected in the Singapore National Pledge and the annual Racial Harmony Day celebration in public schools. Thanks to the previously mentioned EIP, racial quotas are enforced in the public housing system, ensuring that the socioeconomic problems of any given racial group is not clustered and isolated from general society.
Strange policies for an allegedly racist government.
Students of Singapore’s history will also be aware of the country’s past conflicts between the Chinese high schools and universities of the day and the early days of the PAP. In the 1970’s, the Chinese daily newspapers Sin Chew Jit Poh and Nanyang Siang Pau saw dozens of their staff arrested under the Internal Security Act because they “reacted brashly to the prime minister’s warning that it should not play up Chinese language issues.”
In sum, if activists can point to one instance of discriminatory government policy to support their warped ideology, there are several more that blatantly contradicts it.
An elephant occupies the room, but race activists only notice the furniture.
This doesn’t mean that policies that disadvantage minorities are in any way excusable. What it does mean is that the Chinese Privilege ideology rests on an intellectually bankrupt foundation.
Conclusion
A well-meaning friend told me that even if the ideology was exaggerated, racism does after all exist. To that end, raising sensitivity and inoculating more people against racism would be a net benefit.
The problem with that train of thought is that it ignores the long-term harms and costs of perpetuating overblown claims on how the government handles race issues.
The younger generation (millennials and Gen-Z) are being sold a patently false narrative that the political scales in Singapore are tipped against racial minorities, without any appreciation for the thorny history of Singapore’s development.
The continued perpetuation of these overblown claims of “institutional racism” threatens to undermine the strong fabric of racial relations that Singapore currently enjoys. As the adage goes, repeat a lie long enough and it becomes true.
If you can’t appreciate the progress that Singapore has made, I invite you to observe Malaysian or Indonesian politics, and see how explicitly politics are formed along racial lines. In fact, being a politician in these countries necessarily means that you would have to take a public stance on racial issues.
Was it an international conspiracy that Singapore’s Prime Minister won the World Statesman Award in 2019, an award that recognises a country’s achievements for facilitating the peaceful coexistence between different cultures (especially in one like Singapore with high religious diversity?)?
That is taboo in Singapore politics, and that’s a good thing. I don’t think that political democracy is a productive way to address society’s problems to begin with, but at least in Singapore, attention in political discourse is directed at addressing more substantive issues, and not have to be saddled with partisan, racial bullshit.
Nuance is desperately lacking in Singapore’s racial discourse. Racism exists in Singapore, and it’s a good idea to call it out when we witness it. But recognizing the evils of racial discrimination also means calling out the overblown demagoguery of many Chinese Privilege activists. The two are not mutually exclusive. | https://donovanchoy.medium.com/the-dangerous-influence-of-chinese-privilege-in-singapore-29ced060b4c7 | ['Donovan Choy'] | 2020-12-29 18:56:32.963000+00:00 | ['Chinese Privilege', 'Singapore', 'Racial Justice', 'Race', 'Racism'] |
Crypto Weekly | Hi guys and welcome to another lovely week and also another new month, opportunities never end, and thus this new month will be far better than previous ones.
Welcome once again to Crypto Weekly, a weekly writeup hosted by TokenPocket that gives a brief insight into the crypto market structure with reference to BTC, ETH, and EOS.
For those not familiar with TokenPocket, it is a multi-chain wallet that allows users to easily manage their crypto assets via a mobile device and also a PC.
BTC
As the year comes to an end, it’s fun to look back and just say thanks. The economy was hit with recession unlike any we have ever experienced but for some reason, BTC and altcoins were able to withstand it all and when other financial institutions went down, BTC simply climbed from a low of $5k to a new high of $13k where it currently stands.
If this doesn’t boost your confidence in this digital currency (BTC) I doubt any other thing would.
While uncertainty continues to push each day, BTC has managed to stay above the $13k mark for a few days and this has over time created a sense of adjustment and thought moving that the next rally would be $15k.
From a weekly low of $12k+, BTC was able to rally to $13k+ and it seems the news of PayPal adding BTC as a form of payment is still very much new to the entire crypto space at large, many just like myself begin to wonder how high can BTC go while the news continues to spread?
Well, do leave your thought on this below.
ETH
I wouldn’t call the price movement on ETH the previous week all that great, a few weeks back we saw ETH climbed to $400 and more after BTC broke the $12k resistance but for some reason, ETH was unable to perform much but rather it was mainly stuck around the $380 mark and few movements which later led to further price fall.
Many are linking the low performance in price action to Defi, saying Defi is no longer a major focus in crypto space and rather individuals are majorly interested in BTC right now, and thus money is gradually changing the focus of interest.
Starting the previous week at a price of $389, ETH was able to climb to a week high of $406 before plunging to $386 where it currently trades. Well, this is a new week and new expectations ahead, what are your price predictions for ETH this week?
Leave your thought on this below.
EOS
ETH wasn’t the only low performing coin this past week as we observed a straight downtrend price movement in EOS over the past couple of days moving to a low further that we have experienced for some weeks now.
Starting the week at a price of $2.63, EOS was able to achieve a top price of $2.69 before its sudden and steady decline in price moving to $2.44 where it currently trades.
While the entire crypto space continues to observe a downtrend in price, hope still continues and we all hope that this new month brings something better than previous months.
What are your thoughts about the current crypto price movement? Do you see a continuous price drop? Or a pump is simply waiting to happen.
Leave your thought on this below.
As usual, Crypto Weekly is for entertainment and educational purposes, individuals are advised to do their own research before investing in any digital or offline platform. | https://medium.com/@otemzi/crypto-weekly-ef71058ad9ca | ['Oteme Eghele'] | 2020-11-02 16:42:31.236000+00:00 | ['Eos', 'Cryptoweekly', 'Eth', 'Tokenpocket', 'Btc'] |
Go See Your Mother | Go See Your Mother
Family photo, a few years ago (image provided by author)
I can sum up this story in four words: go see your mom.
Don’t have time to read this story? Fine, just go see your mom. The story doesn’t really matter. She does. And tomorrow may be too late.
My husband and I just spent a couple of weeks caring for my mother. I’m one of eight children, and we were raised on the San Francisco Peninsula, in a graceful, many-gabled house that predates the 1906 earthquake.
One brother has passed away. Another is too ill to travel, but six of us take turns coming to see Mother.
Most of us moved away as the area grew too expensive. The voracious tentacles of Silicon Valley spread north swiftly over the past fifty-plus years, driving up the cost of homes. The homeless crisis expanded rapidly, into the suburbs.
The neighborhood where I grew up is zoned for single-family homes. But, as I point out to Mother, that’s a polite fiction. There are too many cars on the streets, too many homes with deceptively small Craftsman-type facades that widen into three-story mansions, tucked behind ancient sequoias and eucalyptus trees.
Two houses nearby are being enlarged. The workmen politely leave room for us to pull up and help Mother get out in front of her home.
Our block is lined with giant magnolia trees and bougainvillea hedges. Many have been there for more than a hundred years, graceful hedges entwining onto ancient gnarled branches in symbiotic beauty.
This sweet-scented tranquility is shattered by BART trains thundering by, just a block away. The conductors lean on their horns as they pass through, from early morning until late at night. Planes at SFX take off over the bay, leaving our neighborhood in peace. But the trains are loud and insistent, reminding us how much the area has grown.
My youngest brother, who lives and works nearby, brings Mother food every week, making sure her refrigerator is well-stocked with fresh produce from his garden across the Bay. Youngest sister lives in the house, but she’s gone 12 hours a day and often travels. Other siblings live 3–5 hours away. They make the trip two or three times a month, staying overnight to read the mail, run a few errands.
“Have you had any falls lately?” My older sister is good at getting at the truth. And sometimes there are bruises Mother can’t hide.
It becomes clear she can’t be alone much longer. Macular degeneration has stolen her sight, so she can no longer read, or drive or even walk across the street safely. At 95 years old, she still plays piano trios with a group of friends and advises a secular Franciscan fraternity as their much-loved formation director.
But she walks at a snail’s pace. She can’t safely cross the street alone.
My husband and I scrutinize the budget — can we manage more frequent cross-country visits? My oldest brother juggles his own finances — can he afford to cut back his work hours? Should he retire earlier than he’d planned? His wife has not been well. Oldest brother needs to spend time with her as well.
“But Mother needs me too.” Two other siblings drive long distances to visit and spend the night every month.
When we come, we spend a couple of weeks cleaning and making repairs. We take Mother out to dinner, help her run errands, drive her down to the cemetery an hour away, to visit Dad’s grave.
“Oh, I love to get out,” she says, gratefully. Because we stay for a longer block of time, we can take more time to listen, encourage friends to visit. We organize things so Mother can find them by touch.
I stare, appalled, at the oven that hasn’t been cleaned in a year.
“We need to come out more often,” I tell my husband.
“Why won’t she hire someone?”
With seven surviving children, surely we can take care of her. But we can’t take care of this big house. Older homes need ongoing maintenance and a good cleaning service. And Mother should have a daily companion.
We introduce these ideas every few months. Soon, we will have to insist on them.
I invite her to come live with us in New York, but she has given up flying.
“Those long lines,” she explains vaguely.
Her primary care physician notes her decline with a swift glance.
“Let’s get a visiting nurse over there, twice a week,” he declares. “And a physical therapist.”
Mother agrees, reluctantly. She likes her peaceful mornings.
We help Mother make funeral arrangements.
“It’s really just like planning a family reunion. Everyone won’t be wondering ‘what would Mother want?’”
We meet with the same funeral director who planned Dad’s funeral years ago. Mother picks out a similar casket, some favorite hymns and delegates oldest brother to handle the details.
“I’ve wanted to get that done,” she comments, feeling more in control for a moment.
As we clean out her office, I see a list from the convent school she attended. Her 80th reunion is coming up this year. Nearly all of her classmates are deceased.
How lost she must feel, these days.
Alone, unable to read or even watch television, she listens to the news or pushes the familiar button on her cd player, listening to audio books. Sometimes, when she feels strong enough, she plays the piano. But the huge sheets of piano music, greatly enlarged, sit untouched on her grand piano. Last year she could read them. This year, it’s too hard to make out the notes.
At home, she gracefully touches one piece of furniture, then another, relying on familiar tables and chairs to get around the house safely.
“Everything hurts,” she admits. Arthritis has left her hands untouched, but settled in her hips and calves.
Last year, she refused to carry a cane, now, she relies on one whenever she leaves the house.
I set up her rebounder, the most gentle exercise I can find.
“Oh, I haven’t used that in years,” she muses, pleased I’ve cleared a space for it.
“This won’t compress your skeletal system,” I tell her. I watch as she bounces for a few minutes. I give her a few mild exercises and she performs them with growing confidence.
“That seems too easy,” she protests.
“But it will help,” I respond. “Just a few minutes a day and you’ll grow stronger. And it’s fun.”
“It is,” she agrees, adding, “I’ll be stronger next year.”
Next year. The words reverberate in my head as we reluctantly board a flight for home. Oldest brother is with her and youngest sister will return in a few days.
Next year seems too far away. All we have is right now.
Go hug your mother. Please. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/go-see-your-mother-258e95f185bb | ['Barbara Carson Todd'] | 2020-01-19 15:40:12.822000+00:00 | ['Elder Care', 'Mothers', 'Life Lessons', 'Family', 'Parenting'] |
The Little Boy Discovers His Home Is Gone | There comes a time when after all that you’ve been through, you realize that you’ve accomplished nothing at all. You have kept your hopes up. You have endured the night. You have decided to be strong. But in return for all of your efforts, all you could see is that you have failed. This was exactly how the little boy in our story felt the moment they were able to see what happened to his old home.
“Is this really your home?” the firefly asked.
“It used to be,” the boy sadly replied, for all they could see were the remains of his old house and his old garden. Where there used to be a house, they saw only a big hole. Where there used to be a lovely garden, they saw only dead plants here and there, unable to tell them whatever happened to his home.
“I–I thought I could see Mama again,” cried the boy. “I thought I could hear her say my name.”
The firefly could not think of anything to say. After all, what do you say to someone who has lost his home twice? What do you say to someone who is now left with only a big hole instead of a home?
Speaking of holes, neither the boy nor the firefly was prepared to see big rocks suddenly being thrown down the big hole where there used to be a house. After a few moments, they saw two more coming, and they ducked as they tried to see where the rocks were coming from.
“Look!” exclaimed the firefly.
The little boy turned and saw a very big man holding very large rocks. Without any effort at all, the big man was able to crush the rocks. He was about to throw what was left of the rocks when the little boy suddenly spoke.
“Were you the one who destroyed my home?” asked the little boy, clenching his fist and almost bursting into tears.
The big man, on the other hand, was a bit surprised. You’d think he’d get angry at the boy but he just stopped what he was doing, looking quite puzzled with what he saw and heard. After a while, the big man replied, “No, I was not the one.”
“Then why were you throwing those rocks? And why is there a big hole where there used to be my house?”
“I don’t know. When I came here, there was no house; there was just a big hole.”
With this answer, the little boy clenched his fist even harder. Was the big man telling the truth? If he was, who is now to be blamed?
“I hate you!” cried the little boy. “I just–hate you!”
The big man didn’t know just what to say. He was even more amazed now at the boy.
Meanwhile, the firefly flew about in circles, frantically thinking about what to do. He wanted to convince the boy to just let it go. To forget everything. But he has never seen the boy like this before.
“Why?” the boy suddenly asked. “If you did not destroy our house, why are you here? And why were you trying to destroy everything?”
The big man still didn’t know what to say. For a time, he looked at the sky as though he could see the answer there. Then, he sat, and he looked at the rocks he has just crushed with his hands.
“This was all I could do,” the big man finally said.
“What–what do you mean?” the boy asked.
“This was all I could do,” the big man repeated. “I’m really good at crushing rocks. I’m good at throwing them away. So I do what I can do. I can’t do anything else.”
Although the boy still felt angry, he couldn’t help but see the big man in another way. Somehow, the big man reminded him of himself. He was just someone who wanted to know he was good at something.
“Aren’t you good at anything else?” the little boy asked.
The big man merely shook his head. He was a bit ashamed and a bit sad also.
“But–but even if you’re good at this, are you happy with what you’re doing? I’m sorry that you couldn’t find anything else to do. I guess we’re a bit the same. But even if you’re good at crushing rocks, I think it won’t make you happy. You’re only destroying things. You’re not building anything.”
With this, the little boy and the big man spent some time in silence. It was almost dark when the little boy and the firefly decided to leave the big man, still deep in his thoughts, thinking about what he could possibly do.
You may also want to read: | https://medium.com/the-inspirer/the-little-boy-discovers-his-home-is-gone-d5966fc96c59 | ['Jocelyn Soriano'] | 2019-11-01 11:36:01.542000+00:00 | ['Flash Fiction', 'Childrens Books', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Children'] |
‘Ava’ is Full of Problems | But it’s not all that bad.
Ava movie poster | Vertical Entertainment
I am one of those who are inclined to believe that Jessica Chastain can do no wrong. Even when I don’t enjoy a movie that she’s in, she still gives a great performance. And that’s what we see in Ava, a film that is somehow equal parts action film and family drama.
Ava centers around a troubled female assassin who has to battle her own demons, her family’s past, and those seeking to take her out. The story is entirely predictable and doesn’t do anything new or ground-breaking. It’s a film that’s entertaining enough to have on in the background while you’re doing something else — I’m really glad that I didn’t pay money to go see it in theaters.
Chastain, of course, holds her own in this. This film, for all its flaws, really shows off her range as an actress, from flirting to get close to a target, to weeping with her family, to beating up a whole room of bad guys, she did a great job. I was willing to go through the weirdly complicated plot just to spend more time with her.
I’ve read some reviews where Ava is compared to John Wick, saying that this film is just as good or bad as that one, but I have to disagree. While I did grow frustrated with the John Wick films just because I didn’t want to keep seeing Keanu Reeves in a constantly concussed state, I do think those films are better.
Jessica Chastain in Ava | Vertical Entertainment
Ava Tries to do Too Much
One of the beautiful things about John Wick is its simplicity. A well-trained assassin who is dealing with the death of his wife is set over the edge when his dog is killed. That’s it. He goes on a whole killing spree in order to get revenge on the guy who killed his dog. Then, from that simple premise, we’re brought into an elaborate and creative world of elite assassins.
Ava, on the other hand, has a ton of other plotlines going on. We learn about the death of Ava’s abusive father, her neglectful mother suffering from OCD and other health issues, her gambling ex-fiance who is now engaged to her sister who also happens to be pregnant. That’s in addition to her addiction and her attempts to stay sober, her relationship with her stand-in father figure Duke (John Malkovich), and the criminal enterprise that she is part of.
One of the beautiful things about many action films is their simplicity. The protagonist has a singular mission and as they’re trying to execute that, we can learn a ton about the characters and the world they live in.
If Ava had tried to do a little less, I think it could’ve been a lot better.
Jessica Chastain in Ava | Vertical Entertainment
The Choreography is Only Okay
What amazed me about the John Wick films is how incredible all of the fights are. Honestly, I still think about the knife fight in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum from time to time, it’s that good. The fights in that series are so tight, every move so perfectly timed, and is all done where I can clearly see the people fighting. I hadn’t seen that wide-spread level of precision in action films before; the creative fights blew me away.
John Wick raised the bar when it comes to the quality of fight scenes in action films and Ava couldn’t keep up.
Ava just didn’t have as good of choreography, though there were moments of genius. These, largely happen when Ava is on her own, improvising when something goes wrong in the field. Like when she reacts to the Germans in Riyadh. I could watch her plowing through tons of bad guys all day long. Or when she leaps out of that fountain to take out the assassin who tried to kill her, I shouted at my TV — it was so great! It’s not only an exciting moment of action, but it shows a level of ruthlessness that made me really respect Ava.
The problem was that I found the larger fights to be boring. I was thoroughly uninterested in watching Duke and Simon (Colin Farrell) duke it out. It was hard to watch a bar brawl between two guys past their prime after watching just how smooth Ava fights.
And then, when Simon finally confronts Ava, I just wanted him to turn around and go back home. He makes it clear that he’s out of practice, yet he goes to try and kill his top assassin. This felt like an important reminder to stay in your lane.
Ava is an okay movie, which, sadly, isn’t enough because female characters are judged more harshly than male characters. It’s not right, but it’s where we currently find ourselves. An “okay” movie about a female assassin is always going to be seen as a massive letdown. Hopefully that won’t always be the case.
In the meantime, I’m glad that studios are trying new things and giving women the opportunity to be action stars. As more and more of these types of films come out, I hope that they get better and better. | https://medium.com/the-strategic-whimsy-experiment/ava-is-full-of-problems-e13716e30b05 | ['Sarah Callen'] | 2021-01-18 01:59:47.426000+00:00 | ['Movie Review', 'Ava', 'Movies', 'Film Reviews', 'Film'] |
Smart Contract Developer in Gwalior +919870635001 Nadcab Technology | Direct Whatsapp- https://bit.ly/2op0VQr
Website Visit- https://bit.ly/2nJJwBV
Smart Contract Development Process
Of course, let’s look at the blockchain documentation from the developer’s point of view. This is not a tutorial on how to develop blockchain smart contract development services, but general information to understand the step-by-step operation. You can also use this guide to choose the right technician for your project.
smart_contract_developer
Plan
Just as investigating to understand the project’s goals, developers conduct their own investigations to gather up-to-date information about smart contracts for similar purposes. The code is open source and changes daily. That’s why keeping track of the news is very important.
Development
You already know what security means on the blockchain, so give the developer time to get all the details of the smart contract right and set all the nuts and bolts in the right place.
Testing
They say that off-the-shelf smart contracts are like spacecraft. Once fired, there is no way to reverse it. As we know in web development, all bugs are temporary and can be handled quickly by experienced technicians. Blockchain Smart Contract Development Company is not the same. It cannot be changed upon request. The final product should be fully armed and ready to respond to malware attacks. This is the main reason there is so much talk about the security of smart contracts. Initially, the developer checks the product through the local blockchain.
Deploy to Testnet
Testnet is another level of protection for smart contracts. Here, the developer can double-check everything and see if the contract is ready or not while playing with real cryptocurrencies. For Ethereum, this is a principle that can be used by a team hired by Robstens or Rinke by. Here the developer works with Testnet Ethernet. You can get it for free on the platform.
Deploy to Production
The blockchain smart contract development services should only be activated after all necessary verifications have been completed. If the developer needs more time for testing, it’s okay. This can help reduce gray hair later. When everything is ready, the contract is deployed to production. It is the last step in this procedure
How does Smart Contract Development Work?
Smart contracts work in a very simple and fair process. It mainly follows three steps:
· In the first step, the contract is written in code for several parties and published on the blockchain platform.
· Second, events are triggered by contract execution.
· In this case, the contract is executed.
Upon completion of the process, both parties will receive funds, tokens or assets as promised. If the conditional protocol is not met, the smart contract returns the product to its owner. In addition, the smart contract ledger stores complete details and impose immutable functionality. In other words, once the data is saved, no one can change/change it.
To create an ICO blockchain smart contract development services you will need:
ICO Contract Subject: The software needed access to goods, services, etc. to lock or unlock automatically.
Digital Signature: All participants of the contract must sign a digital signature with a private key.
Contract Terms: A sequence of actions required to execute a smart contract. In addition, all participants must sign.
Smart Contract Development
Smart Contract Development Company is a virtual contract built using a blockchain platform for stability and privacy purposes. This smart contract can be concluded between two parties without the intervention of a third party, and the terms and conditions are drawn up according to the authority. Once these terms and conditions are met, funds are automatically transferred from one party to another. Smart contract data is stored on the ledger to enhance security. These enticing qualities not only make smart contracts stand out from the box but also garnered attention from various industries.
Nadcab Technology, a leading smart contract, provides a comprehensive range of smart contract development, security audit services, and solutions based on customer requirements. Complete blockchain smart contract development services architecture and code-based evaluation to ensure the security of smart contracts. Our team of experienced developers has the expertise to develop all types of smart contracts across a variety of blockchain platforms including Ethereum, Hyperledger, EOS, and Corda, as well as languages like Solidity, Golang Vyper, Truffle, and more. | https://medium.com/@nadcabofficial/smart-contract-developer-in-gwalior-919870635001-nadcab-technology-f78c031ea7a4 | ['Nadcab Software Development'] | 2020-12-24 12:03:46.223000+00:00 | ['Smart Contract Blockchain', 'Smart Contracts', 'Nadcab Technology', 'Blockchain', 'Tron'] |
Disruption risk in the insurance industry | Co-authored with Joe Agiato, CEO of PIUS Limited, http://piusre.com/the-pius-team/.
The business landscape is littered with formerly invincible companies that have fallen prey to digital disruption. Enterprises such as Sears, Blockbuster, and Kodak that were once the pillars of the global industry are now tombstones in the graveyard of corporate demise, driven to extinction by innovation in technology and business models by VC-funded startups. Entire industries, as diverse as stock brokerage and newspapers, have been driven to the edge of ruin because of their inability to effectively adapt to the new landscape.
Consumer lines of the insurance industry are no exception, with commodity products such as homeowners and auto businesses falling prey to new, internet-driven business models, as demonstrated by the acquisition of Esurance by Allstate. Commercial lines have so far been spared from the carnage, but that is no reason for complacency. If recent history is at all a guide, proactive planning for disruption is the key to survival for incumbents. In this article, we examine the levels of disruptive threat to the major segments of the business and recommend strategies for mitigating innovation-driven risks.
To date, the primary targets for disruptive innovation have been in the areas of distribution, policy creation, underwriting and claims management, but new business models are emerging using automation, advanced analytics, connected devices, and machine learning to build holistic policies for consumers that can be switched on and off on-demand. An emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) business model stands poised to transform the personal and small business lines. AI-driven innovation is already setting its sights on some of the higher margin products. New business models are enabled by reams of high-quality, IoT-collected data. Processed by AI-enabled algorithms, it obviates the need for underwriters’ judgment. Even now, you can get MetroMile and pay your auto insurance premiums as you go.
Property & Casualty
Funding in the billions of dollars has been flowing into startups directly attacking the business models of a number of segments of the P&C space. Companies like Metromile, Root, and Censio, for instance, are changing the way consumer auto policies are underwritten, priced, and sold, while Lemonade and Trov are doing the same for the home and renters segment. There are startup entries into the travel risk, cyber liability, and general commercial lines. An entirely new segment of on-demand insurance has recently emerged, driven by new entrants such as Slice, Risk, and Cuvva.
To date, the market share captured by all new entrants has been relatively minor. The sheer scale of the leading multiline P&C carriers offers them a level of security, inasmuch as they are in the position to acquire the more promising new startups — albeit at a healthy premium. While there have been platform entrants expressly seeking to displace incumbents — startups such as Clover, Ladder, and Oscar — their combined scale and funding are still not large. Having said that, we have seen the scale achievable by a successful digitally driven startup — witness Amazon and Netflix for example — so P&C incumbents would do well to keep a wary eye on developments. Insurers with large personal line operations should probably feel the most threatened at this juncture because digital disruptors have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to capture large market shares in consumer segments.
Specialty P&C and Liability
The relatively small P&C and liability segments such as MedMal have not yet been frontally attacked, possibly because the market sizes have so far failed to generate venture capital excitement. However, as the InsureTech category becomes more crowded, more and more sectors are likely to be targeted by well-capitalized new entrants.
Specialty insurers generally lack the resources of the larger P&C incumbents, which give the latter the ability to strategically acquire disruptive innovators. This makes specialty insurers considerably more vulnerable. In fact, it would not be surprising if startup-led disruption transformed their business landscape into a much less friendly place within the next half-decade.
Life
Life companies face an uncertain outlook with regard to imminent disruption. On one hand, they often command significant resources and a high degree of customer lockup through existing policies, which supports the argument that they have a level of insulation from disruption in the short term. On the other hand, given that their primary business is consumer-oriented, they are directly in the crosshairs of digital disruptors skilled in rapidly making large inroads into consumer segments.
As the Electronic Health Records marketplace becomes more concentrated, it may well become feasible to price policies based on access to aggregated health data. Patient privacy concerns will no doubt remain present, but permission can often be elicited with promises of discounts. Combined with social media data from the likes of Google and Facebook, insurers would then be able to price risk with the inclusion of actual propensities to engage in risky behavior. If the insurance companies start investing in these types of data aggregators, they will have much better data to make decisions.
As it happens, a number of new entrants into the Life space have been attacking the dominant business model, with well-capitalized startups such as Ladder, Halo, and Ethos beginning to take some market share. On balance, it would appear that Life insurers are on notice for imminent disruption and should be especially proactive in implementing defensive innovation, as well as taking steps to participate in the innovation cycle on the theory that if they cannot beat them they should join them.
Health
Health insurance, integrated as it is, so closely into the entirety of the national healthcare system, is a very capacious topic that is beyond the scope of this article. It should be noted, however, that while funding has been flowing to new entrants such as Oscar and Devoted who are seeking explicitly to disrupt the space, the sheer ponderousness of this segment militates against disruption. As of today, the largest threat to the Health business appears to be large employers’ desire to form self-insurance consortia. If this trend accelerates, the industry stands to lose many of its most profitable customers. How long before an app is developed that will, with permission, access your electronic health record and quote a premium?
Reinsurance
Small and midsized reinsurers have been under pressure for some time, with consolidation and market exists being driven by falling margins and a string of losses, exacerbated by the entry of a number of new startups, such as Aeolus, CATCo, Fermat, Nephila, Securis, and Stone Ridge, offering less versatile product but with better pricing supported by leaner cost structures.
The Big 5 Re companies have not only survived the shakeout but have been pioneers in InsureTech venture investment, seeking to forestall disruption by being at the table when it threatens. Their example illustrates the best practice approach to disruptive innovation: anticipate, allocate investment, and actively adopt emerging innovation. In effect, the most innovative reinsurers have become disruptors in their own right, leaving them in the best competitive position of the industry today.
Brokerage and Distribution
The brokerage business is probably most immediately and existentially threatened by digital disruption. Disintermediation has been gathering momentum across industries touched by startup innovators. Stockbrokers are almost non-existent now, and investment advisors are highly threatened. Retail real estate agents’ fees are rapidly approaching zero, and appraisers are preparing to join buggy whip makers in the halls of obsolescence. Car dealers are also going by the wayside because startups like Carvana will let you buy your car online and deliver it to your house, while the Teslas of the world are migrating to direct sales. Malls are also disappearing because Amazon and online stores are putting them on their heels and slashing brick and mortar profitability. In banking, Capital One, Ally, and Grasshopper operate with virtually no branches.
Startups like Hippo, Lemonade, Next, Goji, and Wrisk are not the sole threat to the brokerage business. Thanks to new digital technologies, carriers are finding it ever easier to reach their customers directly. Personal line brokers are probably the first in line for obsolescence, but commercial line agents are also in danger? At risk? (You just used “threat” a couple of sentences ago) threatened. In fact, those brokers who think that it will never happen in the commercial lines space are in for a rude awakening. The personal attention of the broker will be more than offset by the big data — and better data — of the data aggregators and AI learning algorithms.
Technologies enabling instant underwriting and custom policy pricing are already taking much of the value-add of brokers to the end consumer. While for some time now brokers have been casting themselves as risk management consultants, this by itself will not save them from the ever-falling pricing that may well put an end to commissions as a form of distribution compensation.
Survival Strategies
While disruption looms, incumbents have a few arrows in their quiver to help them remain relevant and thrive in today’s changing landscape. Broadly, the most promising strategies based on the experience in other industries can be outlined as Embracing Innovation, Seat at the Table, and Business Reinvention.
Embracing Innovation is a strategy to actively seek out innovations that streamline operations and grow revenues and profitability and aggressively drive internal adoption. Most companies have established innovation executive roles and/or innovation committees. Results vary, but well-implemented innovation programs do pay dividends such as survival and lasting competitive advantage. The key to the success of such programs is a well-managed combination of top-down mandates and bottom-up initiatives that ensure both buy-in and resources necessary to drive adoption. A key part of this approach is a strategic M&A program to acquire startups pursuing promising disruptive business models, as a way of future-proofing the core business. It appears that some brokers feel that if they can control their client relationships, they can own the distribution chain. We do not believe that will continue: personal relationships will give way to more efficient pricing with better data.
The Seat at the Table strategy is fundamentally a set of programs to engage with and invest in tomorrow’s disrupters. Becoming early alliance partners and investors for startups gives insurers a unique early view of the emerging changes to the industry. Many companies have already created corporate venture capital initiatives, with various levels of effectiveness. Their task is to adopt best practices of CVC formation and management in order to maximize both strategic and financial returns. Companies that are too small to create private CVC initiatives at meaningful scales should consider forming investment consortia with their channel and alliance partners, and even with competitors, because a shared early view is better than none at all. A word of caution: investing in third-party funds as limited partners may provide financial returns, but not a meaningful seat at the table because of the insulation created by the presence of fund managers.
While carriers can compete by anticipating and adopting innovation, brokers have no such luxury. Their very business model is under existential threat. To survive as enterprises, they need to Reinvent their Businesses entirely. Their competitive advantage lies in their relationships with and knowledge of the customer. To capitalize on this strategic asset, they must aggressively seek out new business lines that serve these customers, by partnering with and investing in innovative startups on one hand and launching risk carry businesses on the other.
In Conclusion
The insurance industry is increasingly a target for digital disruption, but incumbents still have an opportunity to retain relevance and thrive in the rapidly changing business environment. | https://medium.com/@dgimpelevich/disruption-risk-in-the-insurance-industry-4709c98d6664 | ['David J. Gimpelevich'] | 2019-06-17 18:31:34.971000+00:00 | ['Insuretech', 'Disruption', 'Corporate Innovation', 'Insurance', 'Venture Capital'] |
The One Skill That Will Transform You Into a People Person | The One Skill That Will Transform You Into a People Person
Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash
Being able to create relationships and connect with people is arguably one of the most useful skills you can have in life.
It can help you in your professional life, for example, communicating with clients, and it can help you create amazing friendships in your personal life.
Life just seems to run smoother when you know how to deal with people.
Now, I could give a lecture on all the little things that you could do to improve your ability to get along with people, but I’m sure you have much better things to do with your time.
So I’ll cut to the chase.
Mastery of this one skill you will allow you to make deeper connections with friends and acquaintances with ease, and completely change the way you interact with others.
What is this valuable interpersonal skill?
The Skill
The one skill that you need to master is active listening.
Active listening is your ability to focus on a speaker and completely understand what the have to say.
Why Active Listening Is Great for Building Relationships
Active listening shows to speakers that you are fully engaged in the conversation, hanging off of every word, and people genuinely appreciate this kind of attention.
By listening to them so intently, you make them feel important.
Everyone wants to feel important.
People will love having you around because you make them feel like a superstar.
How to Become an Active Listener
The first step to becoming an active listener is to get out of your head.
In most conversations, while the other person is talking, we are thinking of a response, shifting our attention away from what the other person has to say.
You need to make sure that you are fully engaged with the person you are talking to. Don’t think of a response until after they are done talking. You will have more than enough time to come up with one then.
Another big key is you need to make sure you fully comprehend what the other person is saying. Ask clarifying questions such as “what did you mean by that?” or “can you tell me more about that?”. Also, once in a while, summarize what the speaker has said to make sure that both of you are on the same page.
While you are listening, hold back your judgments. People hate to be judged, and it causes them to become defensive and share less. While you are listening to them, they should feel safe to share, the same way you would want to feel.
Also, maintain strong eye contact. Strong eye contact shows your listener that you are paying attention to what they have to say.
Finally, don’t interrupt the other person in the conversation. People hate to be interrupted. It’s disrespectful, annoying, and alienates the other person from the conversation. Make sure they’re done before you give a response.
R ecap
Now, let’s go over the key components of active listening.
Be fully engaged in the conversation Maintain strong eye contact (6-second increments should be fine) Don’t judge the speaker Don’t interrupt Ask Clarifying Questions Summarize what was said
There you go! If you implement these tips into your daily interactions, you will soon become a master at active listening! | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/the-one-skill-that-will-transform-you-into-a-people-person-87ff1fb54e61 | ['Todi Afo'] | 2020-12-10 03:33:40.244000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Relationships', 'Skills', 'Self'] |
Tolerance Is Needed More Often Than Not | Reaching out to others that we do not identify with, either because of religion, sex, color, or any other dissimilarites, has nothing to do with tolerance.
Accepting that all other humans are just as human as we are is an incredible feeling, inside.
We are different yet not, we share feelings, maybe not the same way. We were all born equal, why are we not? | https://medium.com/american-haiku/tolerance-is-needed-more-often-than-not-1d23683a6969 | ['Pierre Trudel'] | 2020-12-15 15:48:06.666000+00:00 | ['LGBTQ', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Americanhaiku', 'Womens Rights', 'Love'] |
The Best Roast Turkey, Ever. | The Best Roast Turkey, Ever.
No matter how much effort I put into making the Thanksgiving turkey, I was never happy with it. Until this year. So here’s a recipe ready for Christmas. Ellen M. Shapiro Follow Dec 4, 2020 · 5 min read
This Thanksgiving could possibly have been my 20th time making the roast turkey. And it’s the only time I’ve been truly happy with the results.
Oh, I’ve tried brining, shoving butter under the skin, turning the bird three or four times, using butter-soaked cheesecloth (that, from Julia Child), constant basting, etc., etc. No matter the methodology utilized, when the dark meat was done, the white meat was dry; the whole production might have looked pretty on its decorated platter but was not worth the [considerable] effort. After all, all roast turkeys are welcome when covered with gravy and accompanied by tasty stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, and seasonal vegetable dishes. This year—once I knew that our relatives who’d were out of the country since April had tested negative and could come—I vowed to do something different.
But what? I happened to have caught ‘Pati’s Mexican Table’ on PBS last week, during which Pati Jinich made a Yucatan-style turkey marinated in citrus juices and spices, wrapped in huge, supple banana leaves, and oven-roasted ‘pibil’-style, that is, as if baked in an outdoor firepit. Hmm, it gave me an idea. People love my spice-rubbed brisket, which I wrap in foil and barbecue low and slow. Why not do a turkey the same way? And why not roast it breast-side-down, which I’d read about but had never tried. The upside-down method has been touted as the surefire way to keep the white meat—the whole bird—juicy. Rather than trying to get moisture (usually in the form of butter) to permeate the meat by basting from the outside, if you roast it breast-side-down, the natural juices run down and baste it from the inside. Aha!
What I did was truly experimental. But it worked. And it was so much easier! You might ask, though, Why am I posting this now? Isn’t it several days too late? Not if you live in England, Mexico, or one of the other countries where roast turkey is the centerpiece of traditional Christmas dinner. If so, you might be interested in a new way to do it. Like this:
1. Make the Spice Rub
• Mix together in a small bowl:
¼ cup each ancho chili powder, kosher salt, brown sugar
1 Tb each onion powder, paprika
1 tsp each black pepper and dried thyme, sage, and rosemary.
2. Prep Turkey
• Get together:
1 fresh turkey, 12–14 lbs. (mine was 13).
2 - 3 Tb softened butter
a few cloves peeled garlic, 1 cut-up lemon, sprigs of rosemary
1 qt container chicken stock or broth
• Preheat the oven to 325 F/265 C. (I used the“convection roast” setting).
• Wash the turkey inside and out and cut off the wingtips and ‘parson’s nose’ (fleshy protuberance at the posterior end) with kitchen shears.
• Pat the turkey dry and rub it with enough softened butter to lightly coat the skin. Pat the spice rub as evenly as possible into the buttered skin.
• Place the turkey breast-side-down on a rack in a roasting pan.
• Rub the inside of the turkey cavity with the last of the spice rub and put the garlic cloves, lemon wedges, and rosemary inside.
• Tie the legs together with kitchen twine.
• Pour two cups of the chicken stock (or one cup stock, one cup white wine) into the roasting pan.
• Cover the whole thing as tightly as possible with heavy-duty foil, crimping it around the edges of the pan.
• Place it in the oven and leave it there for 3 to 3.5 hours, depending on the size of the turkey, doing nothing (except, perhaps, preparing your side dishes).
3. Make Turkey Stock Base for Your Gravy
• Put the turkey neck, gizzards, parson’s nose, and wingtips into a medium saucepan. Add two cups chicken broth, 1 cup water, a few sprigs of parsley, and 1 each carrot, celery stalk, and onion, and a piece of fresh ginger, all roughly cut up.
• Bring to a simmer and simmer on low, covered, for 30 minutes or so. Set aside.
4. Back to Turkey
• After 3 hours (for 10 lb. turkey to 3.5 hours for 14 lb.), remove it from the oven and discard the foil. Scoop or pour most of the pan juices into the saucepan with the turkey stock base. The juices should be abundant and very flavorful.
• Raise the oven temp to 375 F / 190 C.
• Turn the turkey breast-side-up. Brush it with maple syrup.
• Return it to the oven and roast, uncovered, for 40 minutes or so until the skin is richly browned.
• Place the turkey on a carving board and loosely tent it with foil while it rests. You’ve got 20 minutes to finish the gravy and heat up your side dishes in the oven.
5. Finish the Gravy
• Scrape everything in the roasting pan into your saucepan and bring it to a simmer again. Place the roasting pan on the stove over low heat.
• Melt 3 Tb butter in the roasting pan. Add 3 Tb flour (I like ‘Wondra’ instant flour for this). Whisk the flour and butter together, eliminating any lumps (and making sure it doesn’t burn). Let this roux cook slowly for 2–3 minutes.
• Slowly strain the contents of the saucepan into the roasting pan, discarding the chunks of vegetables. Keep whisking until gravy reaches the desired creamy consistency. At this point, you can return it to your saucepan until it’s time to put it in a gravy boat or bowl for serving at the table.
6. Carve Turkey!
After bringing in the whole bird to be admired and carving it (directions abound in websites and books), arrange the legs, thighs, wings, and slices of breast meat on a platter. I like to decorate the platter with rosemary sprigs and dribble gravy over everything before bringing the platter to the table.
And Eat!
Herewith our exceptionally succulent, deliciously spice-rubbed turkey—are our side dishes: an oval dish with roasted brussels sprouts, golden beets, and green beans; a casserole of mashed sweet potatoes topped with pepitas (pumpkin seeds); cranberry-orange sauce; and (not shown) everybody’s favorite cornbread stuffing with portobello mushrooms and candied pecans.
Our relatives took lots of leftovers at home. And there was plenty left here for the two of us. The next day: turkey tostadas! The absolute best way of enjoying the leftovers. I’ll write about that… soon. | https://medium.com/the-cookbook-for-all/the-best-roast-turkey-ever-2978bb05e462 | ['Ellen M. Shapiro'] | 2020-12-04 00:27:02.755000+00:00 | ['Thanksgiving', 'Cooking', 'Christmas', 'Turkey', 'Food'] |
I’m On Your Side: Sleep Deprivation, Unconditional Love, & Other Things That Just Might Kill You | This is part three of a series about my new album, Two-Headed Hearts, with my band Paul Jacobsen & The Madison Arm. I’ll be talking about the songs, the recording process, and other stuff. This one’s for the parents quarantined with kids they love to the ends of the earth and might sometimes need a reminder of that tenderness.
Babies sleep. Until they don’t. And then you don’t. And when you don’t, it can get a little touch & go. Or a lot.
If you spend any time at all in the Parenting section of a bookstore (remember those?), you’ll find a robust literary arm constructed around the sleeping of babies. Each author drops knowledge like a mountaintop guru who has selflessly walked the arduous path to enlightenment and is now ready to dispense this hard-won wisdom, different from the other gurus’ adorably outdated ideas, just kindly pay the nominal book fee and all your sleep troubles will be a thing of that past. GUARANTEED.
Whatever you do, though, don’t read TWO of the books. Stick with the one. Hold its principles dear. Obey it religiously. THERE’S A SYSTEM. It will work. Just give it the requisite 57 weeks to really become, y’know, habit. These things take time.
Because if you read a second book, you might find that the authors actually directly contradict each other.
“Never put your baby to sleep with food.”
“Always feed your child before bedtime.”
“Never wake a sleeping baby.”
“Wake your baby at regular intervals for feedings.”
“Let the baby cry. It’s fiiiine.”
“You are a monster. Never let that precious soul feel abandoned.”
And on and on. The conflicting advice will drive you mad, pinging between philosophies like a tennis ball at Wimbledon. Another thing that will (privately) drive you mad? The success stories of your friends whose baby “just, like, sleeps all the time” or “we just swaddle her and put her down and 19 hours later, she wakes up SO HAPPY” or whatever. You will be forgiven for praying that your friends’ child goes through a protracted juggalo phase or something. You’re only human.
To get your baby to sleep, you will do anything, though. Anything. Believe anything. Try anything. The baby will fall asleep faster if I sacrifice 3 fingers to the Infant God of Sleepytime? Perfect. I already know which fingers! Such is the desperation of sleep deprivation. It’s no joke. In the words of Lana Del Rey, “it’s enough just to make you go crazy, crazy, crazy…”
When our first child was born, my wife & I read all the books. (OK. She read them and then transmitted knowledge as it became applicable.) We were fine at first because a lot of babies sleep early on. Then, it happened. “It” being sleep trouble. And we were a mess, changing sleep strategies on the sleep-starved fly at 3am, arguing over who got up last in the wee hours, bickering over which book we were currently adhering to, deciding to swap Nights Of Sleep where one of us would be on baby duty the entire night, only to swap again at 4am when the Knight of Sleep was about to go all Jack Nicholson in the Shining. Again, cue the Lana Del Rey.
Don’t get me wrong: there were magic times with our babies. Rare were the ones, though, that occurred between the hours of 11pm and 6am. Surely that’s no surprise to anyone.
So when we would stumble upon something that was calming to our little son during those stressful hours, it felt like a miracle. One of those things I turned to when my wits’ end was farther in the rearview than I’d like: the piano.
I sat on the piano bench, held my son in the cradle of my left arm, and with my right hand began to slowly pulse a quiet triad made up of the notes A, D, and F-sharp. I’d swap out the F-sharp for a G now and then. And, light cascading from the heavens and angels whisper-singing (because no one needs a choir of angels startling the baby with their hallelujahs, much less a Drummer Boy), the baby would stop crying. And the dad might too. We could all breathe again. This was heavenly peace.
It was just a D chord occasionally flirting with a G chord on an old piano. I hadn’t invented some Brian Wilson- or Bach-level chord progression. It’s as primal and basic as you can get. And, in a very tiny way, it was a lifesaver.
That’s the beginning of “I’m On Your Side,” a song I wrote as a brand new, freaked out, overwhelmed-but-happy-as-all-get-out new parent, desperate for even a couple hours’ of sleep but even more desperate to convey to this little human just how loved he truly was and is and always will be, no matter what. No matter when. No. Matter. What.
“ In the hurricane eye, let the waves rise, I’m on your side.”
(Hear the song here, if you’d like: https://pauljacobsen.bandcamp.com/track/im-on-your-side) | https://medium.com/@pauljacobsen/im-on-your-side-sleep-deprivation-unconditional-love-other-things-that-just-might-kill-you-24dcf5860c3 | ['Paul Jacobsen'] | 2020-04-23 23:58:33.831000+00:00 | ['Songwriting', 'Music', 'Babies', 'Parenting', 'Paul Jacobsen'] |
Build Your Own Fake News Classifier | DATASET
The dataset I used for this python project is news.csv. This dataset contains News, Title, Text, and Label as the attributes. You can download it from here.
READING THE DATASET
#Reading the data
df=pd.read_csv('/home/femme_js/Hoaxify/news.csv') df.head(10)
This is how dataset looks like.
Before proceeding, check whether your dataset does have any null value or not.
# checking if column have NaN values check_nan_in_df = df.isnull()
print (check_nan_in_df)
This data frame does not consist of null values. But if your data frame consists of null values fill them up with spaces before combining them into a feature. Here’s how you can:
df = df.fillna(' ')
As we see both ‘Title’ and ‘Text’ features are important so we can combine them into a single feature named ‘Total’.
df['total'] = df['title'] + ' ' + df['text']
df.head()
The dataset looks like this.
PRE-PROCESSING OF THE DATA
To preprocess your text simply means to bring your text into a form that is predictable and analyzable for your task. We used nltk library for this.
import nltk
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer from nltk import sent_tokenize, word_tokenize
Removing Stopwords: Stopwords are the words in any language which does not add much meaning to a sentence. They can safely be ignored without sacrificing the meaning of the sentence. You can read more about it here. Tokenization: Tokenization is the process of tokenizing or splitting a string, text into a list of tokens. One can think of token as parts like a word is a token in a sentence, and a sentence is a token in a paragraph. For Example:
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize text = "Hello everyone. You are reading NLP article." word_tokenize(text)
The output looked like this:
['Hello', 'everyone', '.', 'You', 'are', 'reading', 'NLP', 'article', '.']
3. Lemmatization: Lemmatization is the process of grouping together the different inflected forms of a word so they can be analyzed as a single item.
Text preprocessing includes both Stemming as well as Lemmatization. Many times people find these two terms confusing. Some treat these two as same. Lemmatization is preferred over Stemming because lemmatization does the morphological analysis of the words.
Examples of lemmatization:
swimming → swim
rocks → rock
better → good
For taking a high-level dive into Stemming Vs. Lemmatization, check here.
The following code does all the pre-processing.
stop_words = stopwords.words('english') lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer() for index, row in df.iterrows():
filter_sentence = ''
sentence = row['total']
# Cleaning the sentence with regex
sentence = re.sub(r'[^\w\s]', '', sentence)
# Tokenization
words = nltk.word_tokenize(sentence)
# Stopwords removal
words = [w for w in words if not w in stop_words]
# Lemmatization
for words in words:
filter_sentence = filter_sentence + ' ' + str(lemmatizer.lemmatize(words)).lower()
df.loc[index, 'total'] = filter_sentence df.head()
CONVERTING LABELS
The labels here as classified as Fake and Real. For training our model, we have to convert them in numerical form.
df.label = df.label.astype(str)
df.label = df.label.str.strip()
dict = { 'REAL' : '1' , 'FAKE' : '0'} df['label'] = df['label'].map(dict) df.head()
The label feature looks like this.
For further proceeding, we are separating our dataset into input and output features as ‘x_df’ and ‘y_df’.
x_df = df['total']
y_df = df['label']
VECTORIZATION
Vectorization is a methodology in NLP to map words or phrases from vocabulary to a corresponding vector of real numbers which is used to find word predictions, word similarities/semantics.
For curiosity, you surely want to check out this article on ‘ Why data are represented as vectors in Data Science Problems’.
To make documents’ corpora more palatable for computers, they must first be converted into some numerical structure. There were few techniques used to achieve this such as Bag of Words.
Here, we are using vectorizer objects provided by Scikit-Learn which are quite reliable right out of the box.
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfTransformer
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer
count_vectorizer = CountVectorizer()
count_vectorizer.fit_transform(x_df)
freq_term_matrix = count_vectorizer.transform(x_df)
tfidf = TfidfTransformer(norm = "l2")
tfidf.fit(freq_term_matrix)
tf_idf_matrix = tfidf.fit_transform(freq_term_matrix)
print(tf_idf_matrix)
Here, with ‘Tfidftransformer’ we are computing word counts using ‘CountVectorizer’ and then computing the IDF values and after that the Tf-IDF scores. With ‘Tfidfvectorizer’ we can do all the three steps at once.
The code written above will provide with you a matrix representing your text. It will be a sparse matrix with a large number of elements in a Compressed Sparse Row format.
The mostly used vectorizers are:
Count Vectorizer : The most straightforward one, it counts the number of times a token shows up in the document and uses this value as its weight.
: The most straightforward one, it counts the number of times a token shows up in the document and uses this value as its weight. Hash Vectorizer : This one is designed to be as memory efficient as possible. Instead of storing the tokens as strings, the vectorizer applies the hashing trick to encode them as numerical indexes. The downside of this method is that once vectorized, the features’ names can no longer be retrieved.
: This one is designed to be as memory efficient as possible. Instead of storing the tokens as strings, the vectorizer applies the hashing trick to encode them as numerical indexes. The downside of this method is that once vectorized, the features’ names can no longer be retrieved. TF-IDF Vectorizer: TF-IDF stands for “term frequency-inverse document frequency”, meaning the weight assigned to each token not only depends on its frequency in a document but also how recurrent that term is in the entire corpora. More on that here.
MODELING
After Vectorization, we split the data into test and train data.
# Splitting the data into test data and train data x_train, x_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(tf_idf_matrix,
y_df, random_state=0)
I fit four ML models to the data,
Logistic Regression, Naive-Bayes, Decision Tree, and Passive-Aggressive Classifier.
After that, predicted on the test set from the TfidfVectorizer and calculated the accuracy with accuracy_score() from sklearn.metrics.
Logistic Regression
#LOGISTIC REGRESSION
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
logreg = LogisticRegression()
logreg.fit(x_train, y_train)
Accuracy = logreg.score(x_test, y_test)
print(Accuracy*100)
Accuracy: 91.73%
2. Naive-Bayes
#NAIVE BAYES
from sklearn.naive_bayes import MultinomialNB
NB = MultinomialNB()
NB.fit(x_train, y_train)
Accuracy = NB.score(x_test, y_test)
print(Accuracy*100)
Accuracy: 82.32 %
3. Decision Tree
# DECISION TREE
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier
clf = DecisionTreeClassifier()
clf.fit(x_train, y_train)
Accuracy = clf.score(x_test, y_test)
print(Accuracy*100)
Accuracy: 80.49%
4. Passive-Aggressive Classifier
# PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE CLASSIFIER
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score
from sklearn.linear_model import PassiveAggressiveClassifier pac=PassiveAggressiveClassifier(max_iter=50) pac.fit(x_train,y_train) #Predict on the test set and calculate accuracy y_pred=pac.predict(x_test) score=accuracy_score(y_test,y_pred) print(f'Accuracy: {round(score*100,2)}%')
Output:
Accuracy: 93.12%
CONCLUSIONS
The passive-aggressive classifier performed the best here and gave an accuracy of 93.12%.
We can print a confusion matrix to gain insight into the number of false and true negatives and positives.
Check out the code here. | https://medium.com/swlh/build-your-own-fake-news-classifier-7918f05c2ec7 | ['Jeevanshi Sharma'] | 2020-06-27 08:14:20.568000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'NLP', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Fake News'] |
3 Reasons Why You Click on Listicles | Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
If you don’t know what a Listicle is, then let me put you to ease as I can guarantee that you’ve seen ’em before.
A listicle is a list of things regarding any topic that can either inform or misinform you. I’m here to tell you why you are prone to click on listicles.
1. They are fast.
For the first time in human civilization, we are living in a world where people don’t like to read. People want information quickly that can save their time. A listicle serves exactly that purpose and so you feel drawn to click on them to get easy and quick information.
2. They discuss intriguing topics.
What makes you want to click on a listicle is something with a really catchy headline. Something that really fascinates you to the core and makes you ponder will automatically have your finger clicking on the screen before you realize it.
3. They use odd numbers.
There is research showing that people feel comfortable when looking at odd numbers. They appear to be more reliable and factual. So in the future, if you see a listicle you’ll notice how an odd number is always at play. | https://medium.com/@commonysense/3-reasons-why-you-click-on-listicles-4e204ce46af3 | ['Common Sense'] | 2019-01-10 03:28:26.488000+00:00 | ['Facts', 'Reason', 'Listicles', 'Common Sense'] |
Take Breaks If You Want To Win | A mini-guide for avoiding burnout while increasing your output
In a world where “faster” is considered “better” and your productivity is the pin number to your wealth and success. People are praised for their accolades and medals and their trophies adorn their walls. Working yourself to the bone is normalized and we often hear the phrase “Keep going, if you stop now, you’ll never finish the race.” If we were actually running a race, maybe it is not exactly recommended to stop where we are-but within the context of our lives, we must ask ourselves why are we in such a hurry? Why are we even running? Sure, getting things done quickly proves that we are elite strategists on the exterior. When things that we touch are accomplished in record-breaking time this may be overtly efficient, but at what price?
The key question: At what point do we establish the hedges between zeal and overwork?
It’s the corporate indoctrination that envelops our sole purpose. Our self-worth begins to entwine with our essential daily outputs and this often results in mentally beating ourselves up when we don’t attempt to achieve our lengthy to-do-lists. While it’s not an excuse to keep letting yourself slide every day, finding your own metronomic pace in life and learning to balance this with the instinct of when to take a pause is vital.
The first step is learning to listen to your body. If you are feeling aching shoulders and your eyes are wanting to close with each email that you send, this is your body signaling you to take a pause.
For example, The Draugiem Group in Latvia, tracked employee times clocking in-and-out and their collective productivities via software. With data analysis, the top ten percent most productive employees took more breaks in comparison with their coworkers who completed less work. Roughly estimated the high producers worked for 52 minutes and took 17-minute breaks. While this is an example of how breaks can increase productivity, the right system in place based on your needs, energy levels, and workspace can make all the difference in achieving higher productivity at your job or after work, when you’re working on your heart-fulfilling passion projects.
Depending on where you are, take some time for yourself to either take a nap, read, listen to a new podcast, learn how to cook a new meal etc. whatever it is that you remotely find interesting.
If you are already applying these principles, maybe the burnout or lack of interest is not because you aren’t taking enough pauses. The daily grind that you’re experiencing is grinding on your goals and your hope for a life that involves using your full-scale talents and abilities.
The only person or circumstance that is stopping you is you. If your current routine is leaving you feeling drained and unmotivated, it’s time to develop new strategies and habits to keep you moving.
Everyone is deserving of life worth living. | https://medium.com/@cewriter/take-breaks-if-you-want-to-win-66e25772022f | [] | 2020-12-16 13:54:20.495000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life Hacking', 'Productivity', 'Mindset', 'Motivation'] |
My (huge) Tesla Model Y Review | And that’s really the best way I can describe the Y: it’s the 3 done right. It’s almost as though the sedan form factor of the 3 shouldn’t even exist; or the Model S, either, for that matter. And obviously, that’s sort of my point. Not only does a sedan in America in 2020 make about as much sense as a sugar cube on cauliflower, nevermind, say, in Europe where sedans are about as common as truthful tweets from a certain orange-faced president, but the Y’s dimensions just work better. And if you disagree with me, you’re wrong.
Where the 3 looks a bit odd from certain angles — to be polite — the Y has a sort of techno chic stance, its rounder, more bulbous shape giving it a counterintuitively more planted look despite riding 2.8 cm (1.1 in) taller than, and towering a not inconsiderable 18.3 cm (7.2 in) above, its smaller sibling. But it’s not just the Z-axis that’s increased; it’s a surprising 5.6 cm (2.2 in) longer and 7.1 cm (2.8 in) wider, too. So a merely lifted Model 3 this is not; it’s a lifted, stretched, slightly widened, hatchbacked, and yes, decidedly enfattened Model 3.
If this all sounds a bit like a beginner learning the non-uniform scaling tools of 3D modeling software like Maya or Blender, well, you’d be right: while many expected the Y to certainly ride taller than the 3, I’m not aware of anybody who expected it to grow in all three dimensions.
And as for being hatchbacked — that hatchback is glorious! It is absolutely cavernous, to say nothing about the so-called “sub-trunk” that holds maybe four full bags of groceries under the trunk floor. Without getting overly metric-y about all this, suffice to say that our Model Y can swallow substantially more stuff than our previous car, 2017 Mercedes-Benz GLC 300.
If ever there was an example of minimizing external dimensions while maximizing internal volume — a hallmark trick of engineering for which Teslas are famous thanks to their EV chassis design that eliminates wasted space — the Model Y is surely it. Need more space? Get a Model X. Get rid of a few kids. Or just stop hording so much stuff, I don’t know.
The end result is basically a real life version of the exaggerated car props you might see in a sci-fi movie set some 10 or 20 years hence, except that this thing just looks better, even if it is, admittedly, tricky to photograph well (for me, anyway).
Focusing only on car measurements, though, doesn’t actually reveal the full picture; measurements are a funny thing. Sort of like airplane seats — if you remember those days long ago when we still used to fly pre-COVID — where an extra two inches of seat pitch is the difference between agonizing and bearable, you can be sure the Y’s increased size over the 3 pays off massively, to a degree that simply cannot be appreciated on paper.
So allow me to use myself as an illustration. Standing about 6-foot-4-inches tall with a fairly slender frame of about 200 pounds, I find the Model 3 tolerable at best, and almost painfully uncomfortable for anything more than a one-hour drive at worst. And I basically can’t fit in the back seat at all for anything other than demonstrating the fact that I, uh, can’t fit in the back seat.
Granted my experience with the Model 3 is based on the standard black seats rather than our Model Y’s premium white seats which are at least anecdotally said to be vastly more comfortable, but the volume delta between the two vehicles simply cannot be ignored. While on paper the Y appears just marginally more spacious than the 3, in practice, it goes from feeling like a cozy, compact sports sedan (which to the 3’s credit, is precisely what it is), to a properly spacious people-and-stuff hauler. It feels dramatically roomier inside.
Photo by Marc Hoag. Copyright © 2020 All Rights Reserved.
And those seats! I’ve been spoiled/fortunate/blessed to experience some extraordinarily comfortable car seats in my life, both in cars that I’ve owned, but also cars I’ve sat in. The thing about car seats is, the comfortable ones really stand out; you simply can’t forget them. In no particular order, then, cars like our aforementioned 2015 Volvo XC90; my wife’s 2015 New Beetle (seriously); our previous 2017 Mercedes-Benz GLC 300; even my old 2005 BMW 645 had extraordinarily comfortable, supportive seats.
But these so-called premium white faux leather seats of the Y take seat construction suppleness and extended drive ride comfort to an altogether new level. If you’re hesitating whether to check the upgrade box to grab them for an additional $1000 (as of this writing, anyway), don’t worry about whether they’re difficult to clean — they aren’t; they’re no different than the black seats in this regard, nor do they stain any easier — so just get them. They’re absolutely gorgeous and make the car look like a Star Trek shuttle pod.
I won’t go into detail about the infotainment design, about which tomes of reviews have been written, and eons of YouTube minutes produced, but to describe the Y’s interior— or any Tesla’s interior for that matter — as barren, or sparse or perhaps even Teutonic, would miss the point entirely: it is indeed decidedly minimalist to an extreme which, let’s face it, as with minimalism in art, it’s a potentially polarizing affair. But given Tesla’s hockey stick sales growth curve, the majority of which is thanks to Model Y sales, it appears most people love it, as do I.
At this point I’m sure many of you not yet convinced will be shaking your fists, white knuckles and all, faulting Teslas for not being luxurious enough, or for their (occasional) subpar build quality (more on this later). But here’s the thing though: while other cars surely do provide more opulent, tangible luxury — don’t think for a moment that I haven’t been lusting after the latest 2021 Mercedes-Benz S-Klasse from Sindelfingen; or, for something less dissimilar to our Y’s price point of just over $60,000, an E-Klasse wagon, arguably the greatest vehicle in the world, full stop — that’s like complaining that Times New Roman has more elegance than Helvetica; it’s an argument that misses the point entirely. The real point is that luxury has a finite life span; classic is by definition eternal.
If ever there were a sans-serif automobile, this is surely it. Want proof? Just consider that the Model S is essentially unchanged from its introduction eight years ago; in car years, that’s an eternity to go without a major design upgrade. The only cars I can think of to go so long between model years might be the Mercedes-Benz SL; the Corvette; and … that’s about it, honestly.
Forget the iPhone analogies, Tesla’s vehicles are basically the Helvetica font of the automotive world: clean, simple, functional, and utterly timeless.
FUTURE IMPERFECT
Right, so the Y is a prettier, roomier, hatchbackier, and comfier Model 3; what’s not to love? (And before some of you comment that I’m not well acquainted with the 3, just check out this video I made nearly two years ago.)
Well, nothing, really, though there are a few curious issues, if I’m honest. And when I say “curious” issues, I mean precisely that: while they impart some nontrivial faults to Model Y, they would be pretty trivial to resolve.
Suspension
First, there’s the suspension. It’s really good: firm without being jarring, comfortable without being floaty. If this sounds somewhat Bavarian, then you know your cars: it does remind very much of Germany’s finest marques, perhaps rather more BMW than Mercedes, and even then, think the harder BMWs of the 90s and early 2000s; so more E36 or even E46 than F32.
Except that this impressive fourth opus by Team Elon suffers a bit from cut corners, something you’re likely to experience while literally carving up your favorite mountain roads. On straight roads —whether Autobahn-smooth or San Francisco moon craters — the car does a fine job soaking up both long wavelength undulations and higher frequency vibrations alike. And yes, our Model Y, anyway, is utterly devoid of shakes, rattles, or vibrations; the build quality is astounding, full stop.
But two peculiar bits of spring dynamics come into play when hitting a bump mid-corner or when executing sudden directional changes. Simply put, the car’s otherwise fantastic, seemingly unflappable composure misses a beat; or rather, it beats one too many times, with a sort of echoing rebound that makes the car sort of flop about.
It’s not quite unsettling, but it is a bit jarring for such an otherwise planted ride; and I know it’s not just me; my wife, too, has complained, even when sat in the passenger seat. Even entering the admittedly too-large driveway ramp to our garage at anything other than perfectly perpendicular to the ramp induces a severely unpleasant wobble, the likes of which I haven’t felt since my painfully sprung 2001 BMW X5 4.4i. I suppose it feels like an incredibly stiff, unadjustable rear sway bar tying both sides of the rear together, and then attaching them to not-quite-right springs.
And that’s the thing: it took me nearly the entire 16,000 km (10,000 mi) of ownership thus far to even convince myself I wasn’t imagining things. But for my wife’s comments on the same, which never quite rise to the level of outright complaint, I was starting to wonder whether it was all in my head. And then I read somewhere — and frustratingly can’t find it now — that the Model Y and the Model 3 inexplicably share the same, totally unaltered springs, and that’s when it hit me: besides the Y’s dimensional surplus over the 3, most crucially raising its center of mass, it also carries a further 156 kg (344 lbs) of heft. I suspect it is this suboptimal pairing of the 3’s springs to the Y’s heavier and larger frame, and taller ride height, that is responsible for the Y’s marginally sub-par suspension dynamics. But if this is the only consequence of any necessary cost-cutting on Tesla’s part, I’ll take it.
Turning radius
Second — and there really isn’t much to say about this — there’s the turning radius. How shall I put this simply… it is woefully, abysmally poor, turning what should be simple U-turns into 17-point contortions. I’ve seen full-length coach buses with rear-steering turn tighter circles than the Y. What should be trivial becomes a desperate act of planning in all but the largest parking lots. There’s a drive-up ATM near our home which requires a U-turn to access, and it is simply impossible to do so. I now find myself driving all the way around rather than embarrass myself and risk holding up traffic.
I know that all-wheel drive systems by their mechanical nature, all things being equal, will impart a penalty on turning radii; I get this. I’ve also owned other all-wheel drive vehicles like the aforementioned 2001 E53 BMW X5 4.4 and, more recently, our 2017 Mercedes-Benz GLC 300 4Matic (which was replaced by our Model Y, actually, when its three-year lease expired on Valentine’s Day). I don’t remember thinking the X5 had a poor turning radius; and the GLC could practically turn inside its own length.
But let’s dispense with hyperbole for a moment. I googled the actual turning radius numbers, and here they are: GLC: 11.8 m (38.7 ft); X5: 11.6 m (38.1 ft); Tesla Model Y, a whopping 12.1 m (39.8 ft), despite being just 10.2 cm (4 in) longer! Ok so if I’m honest, I expected a significantly larger delta between the Y and the two Germans, but the truth is, the 33 cm and 52 cm (1.1 ft and 1.7 ft) delta between the Y and Munich’s finest makes all the difference between pulling off that U-turn or not, and it’s something quickly learn to plan around.
Tires
Third — and this is indeed truly trivial but worth mentioning if you’re planning on taking your new Model Y to play in the snow — while the stock Continental ProContact RX 255/45R19 rubber is good enough in the dry, the same cannot be said for the snow (though weirdly enough I haven’t yet had the chance to test them in plain old rain, because California).
We just had our first experience in the fluffy white stuff a few weeks ago when the first snow of the season hit the Lake Tahoe area and — there’s no way to mince words here — the tires were bad to the point of being scary; and I’m a fairly competent, if not particularly experienced, driver in the snow.
While the traction- and stability-control systems proved telepathically instantaneous at regulating torque to each of the four wheels via the dual electric motors, the tires’ apathetic cold weather performance proved no match for physics, and I soon found myself threshold braking instead of relying on ABS, and slowing excessively in advance of anything that showed even a modicum of accumulated snow and ice.
Regenerative breaking proved particularly tricky. I had forgotten to reduce the regen seetting from “Standard” to “Low.” Big mistake. Having lifted in anticipation of a particularly menacing patch of icy snow, the resultant rapid deceleration caused the wheels to slip as though I’d foolishly hit the brakes. The stability computer went wild, and I somehow remembered to compensate by counterintuitively applying some power, the Tesla equivalent to reducing braking force. Admittedly, once I changed the regen to “Low” this was less of an issue, but I have never driven a vehicle less confidence-inspiring in the snow and ice than our Model Y with these particular tires.
Again questioning my own sanity though — but my wife too said she could feel the slipping traction to an almost nauseating degree at times — I thought to pull up the reviews for these tires on Tire Rack, and, well, see for yourself: “winter/snow performance” scored an overall rating of “4.8 — Fair,” broken down to 5.4 for “light snow traction,” 4.5 for “deep snow traction,” and 4.3 for “ice traction.” For comparison, the tires I intend to replace these with — Bridgestone Turanza QuietTrack — scored 9.3, 8.4, and 7.9 respectively, for a combined “winter/snow performance” rating of 8.5. That’s a huge difference no matter how you look at it; so it wasn’t just our imagination.
I get that this was likely just another way to cut costs and, crucially, to keep the price of entry into a Model Y as low as possible — the OEM tires are indeed about $34 less per tire for a combined savings of $136 — but when you’re talking about a car that starts at $48,490 (as of this writing; the prices are always fluctuating, because Elon) and can balloon up to $71,490 (and even $74,490 once the 3-row/7-seat option becomes available), unless I’m missing something, it seems foolish not to have kitted out the car with the better shoes.
AUTOPILOT
If you were expecting this review to have been a deep dive on all things Autopilot, well, you’re not alone: so was I. But since my aforementioned Model 3 video already covered Autopilot which, apart from markedly increased competence since then is essentially unchanged, I decided to wait until I receive the so-called Full Self Driving beta, or FSD beta as it’s affectionately (and infamously) called and I’ll do a full review then.
That said, yes, Autopilot hasn’t just improved since my Model 3 review nearly two years ago, it’s also better than when we first took delivery in June of this year. It’s subtle, but it makes all the difference between trusting it (however misplaced that trust may be; more on this in a moment) and not using it at all.
There are, however, four really pesky scenarios where Autopilot still essentially fails: merge lanes; new lanes; left turn lanes; and phantom braking.
Merge lanes — especially with traffic in both lanes — seem to present the greatest challenge to Autopilot, at least of the current version (2020.44.25). And when I say “greatest challenge,” I mean Autopilot just doesn’t work, reducing first to a twitchy bout of uncertainty, and eventually a convulsing, drunken mess of haphazard steering flicks, brake jabs, and acceleration spikes. Suffice to say, I disengage Autopilot at every upcoming merge.
Similarly, the formation of new lanes seems to turn Autopilot into a deeply disturbing, indecisive jumble of aggressive corrections, its AI- and ML-powered neural net completely unsure how to behave as the present lane suddenly splits into two. Again, in these situations, I almost always preemptively disengage Autopilot.
Left turn lanes are another, less common, but no less unsettling use case where Autopilot just seems to make something more complex than it should be. Imagine you’re driving along a one-lane road which has a dedicated, protected left-turn lane at the intersection above. You’d assume — especially since the car can see the left turn arrow as indicated by the on-screen visualization— that the car would stay in the default lane, but no: inexplicably, it almost always tries to dart left into the turn lane, in some vain attempt at escaping your control.
Which leads to a related point: Autopilot’s peculiar refusal to hug — or at least prefer — the inside of corners. I’m pretty sure I mentioned long ago (perhaps in my Model 3 video, too) that carving the “optimal racing line,” the geometrically straightest path through a series of bends, starting wide, clipping the apex, and then exiting wide, wouldn’t just be more efficient, it would be vastly more comfortable for passengers. While the latest software update does indeed seem to somewhat improve on this, I find the car still tends to float in the dead-center of the lane instead of choosing a more optimal inside path.
Then, there’s the dreaded “phantom braking,” where Autopilot will mistakenly fear an imminent collision and slam on its brakes in a desperate attempt to save your life — or perhaps its life? — due to a false positive. This is annoying at best and extremely dangerous at worst since it could cause a driver to rear-end you; and because they’d reasonably assume you were brake checking them, you’d likely soon be staring down the business end of a gun (a US-only feature).
Finally, I’d be remiss not to discuss the rather less tangible, less obvious risks associated with Autopilot. Here’s the problem: notwithstanding the several gripes above, some of which are decidedly dangerous issues, for the vast majority of the time, Autopilot actually works spectacularly, magically well. It works so well, in fact, that my wife and I find ourselves driving far more often; much further; and in worse traffic than we would ever have driven otherwise. (This personal anecdote corroborates other evidence that Tesla owners in the UK also drive further and more often than drivers of any other car.)
If I were to venture a guess, I’d say that I’ve relied on Autopilot for probably 90–95% of the 16,000 km (10,000 mi) we’ve driven so far. (It would be great if a future software update showed the actual percentage of Autopilot engagement; I just tweeted this suggestion to Elon.)
Please, Elon?
Granted, the vast majority of our driving is freeway based which obviously skews this data, but so be it: freeway driving is where you want Autopilot the most, and where Autopilot truly shines (though preliminary tests of the aforementioned FSD beta show astonishing promise at Autopilot’s city driving capabilities).
As I’ve mentioned previously on my podcast, there is also is the very real increased risk of falling asleep at the wheel because Autopilot is just convincing enough that you do eventually tend to let your guard down, at least when you’re tired. Train your brain to continually mange the machine like an Airbus A350 pilot, and the continuous mental checks should keep you conscious; but allow your concentration to falter late at night on a dreary, straight stretch of road, and you could very quickly run into trouble.
And that’s the double paradox, really, of this interim state of autonomy. First, the additional safety can cause people to be less careful, therefore netting greater risk. Second, although you’re more like to fall asleep at the wheel, you’re probably less likely to die or to kill others because the Tesla will presumably come to a stop if it senses you’re no longer attentive.
Before continuing deeper into a quick discussion on Tesla’s endeavor to full autonomy, it’s worth providing a quick crash course (pun not intended) on the five so-called levels of autonomy. I had planned to share a popular graphic I often share when giving talks on this stuff, but I think I’ve finally come up with a simple way to explain it:
Level 0: no electronic driver assistance at all
Level 1: cruise control or steering assist
Level 2: cruise control and steering assist
Level 3: in limited scenarios like traffic jams, the car can drive it self fully autonomously, and while the driver can tune out in these limited scenarios, they need to be on alert and ready to take over at a moment’s notice
Level 4: the car can drive itself fully autonomously everywhere except when and where it can’t (think geofenced areas or adverse weather conditions), but it will give the human a long heads-up before that occurs, hence, the human can tune fully tune out
Level 5: no steering wheel, full autonomy; the holy grail of self-driving vehicles
SOURCE: IEEE Spectrum
Bearing all that in mind, I’ve argued several times that the gap between Level 2 autonomy and Level 4 autonomy — the dreaded Level 3 Gap, or L3G as I call it— is the autonomous vehicle equivalent to the Gartner Hype Cycle’s so-called trough of disillusionment; or the uncanny valley in computer graphics and movie special effects, where a cartoon that starts to appear too human, without being quite right, shatters the suspension of disbelief. We can either accept something obviously inhuman like a robot, a machine, or a cartoon; or something definitively human. Something between the two doesn’t work.
In the case of movie special effects, the greatest risk is being subjected to the horrors of Tom Hanks’ animated train conductor in Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express.
In a not-quite autonomous vehicle, the greatest risk is death.
The point is, Tesla is getting precariously close to Tom Hanks’ soulless, digital marionette from the beloved children’s story-turned-creepy CGI disaster, and unless it can safely jump that chasm and reach something more Commander Data and less Frankenstein’s monster, say, things could start to get very messy indeed.
CHARGING
You’ll notice I haven’t discussed anything about the charging experience, whether using our home charger or the now impressively (mostly) ubiquitous Supercharger stations that Tesla has installed across large swaths of the world. That’s because it works so well, it’s so effortless, so normal, so totally inconsequential — and, frankly, just so cool it becomes fun to charge up — that it doesn’t merit any discussion.
Yes it’s true that, at typical California freeway speeds — to say nothing about the Autobahn — you do need to budget in additional charging time every 320 km (200 mi) or so. Granted our Long Range AWD is rated at 508 km (316 mi) — thought it annoyingly shows just 495 km (308 mi) when fully charged — but at freeway speeds, you should realistically expect between 320 km to 402 km (200 to 250 mi) of driving before you’ll want to pull in for a charge up, with 10% remaining.
If this sounds a bit disappointing, a few things to consider. First, I can tell you that my 2005 BMW 645Ci managed just 402 km (250 mi) or so around town; and perhaps 560 km (350 mi) on the freeway; my wife’s Beetle eeks out just 482 km (300 mi) on the freeway. So really the Model Y isn’t far behind. And considering that 320 km (200 mi) of driving is nearly three hours without a bathroom break, it’s a pretty prefect driving range when you think about it like that.
Second, most people rarely need to travel the maximum range of their car, Tesla or otherwise. And the few times that you do, well, as my wife and I say, “if this is the worst part about owning a Tesla, we’ll take it.” The truth is, if you can find a 250kW charger, you’ll likely rarely need more than 20 to 30 minutes of charging time; and from the time it takes to walk to the store, grab some water, use the bathroom, and walk back to the car — in my experience, most Superchargers tend to be placed about a five minute walk to the nearest conveniences — you’ve probably already recharged more than enough. The point is, range anxiety simply isn’t a thing anymore. It just isn’t. If you’re still stressing out over it, probably figure out how to handle your anxiety issues and practice better daily time management. Seriously. A charging pit stop shouldn’t derail your entire day.
FINAL THOUGHTS
So, the Model Y looks good; it’s Tesla-fast; it’s practical; it’s comfortable; preliminary reports suggest it costs less to own over five years than a Toyota Camry; Autopilot continues to improve; and its range is more than adequate. Sure, nothing will ever beat an S-Klasse for luxury; the suspension is marginally mismatched; the OEM tires are awful in the white stuff; the turning radius is laughably bad; and Autopilot still has a long way to go before achieving even proper Level 3 capabilities, let alone Level 5. But as a whole package the thing is otherwise just so damned perfect it just doesn’t matter, and it makes any other car seem utterly pointless as a daily driver.
And that’s my point. This is actually the biggest problem with the Model Y, at least for a car guy like me: it’s such a basically perfect daily driver inasmuch as an iPhone is basically the perfect mobile device, that it’s totally ruined other cars for me. Cars that I would have otherwise bought as a substitute in a heartbeat — like the sublime Volvo XC90 (which we actually did own, briefly in 2015, for about two weeks, until a software glitch thoroughly bricked it and it was repatriated back to Sweden), or the impossibly relaxing if decidedly unexciting Audi A4 wagon that we recently drove on our last trip to France — these are cars that I will never get to enjoy on a daily basis now that we have a Tesla in our garage.
And that’s a shame. Because while Tesla has indisputably produced the perfect Goldilocks car for most people with the Model Y, there are plenty of other wonderful cars out there.
Unfortunately, they’re just not wonderful enough anymore, even if, subjectively at least, I still lust after them. | https://medium.com/@marchoag/my-huge-tesla-model-y-review-the-perfectly-flawed-goldilocks-car-37c23dffb26 | ['Marc Hoag'] | 2020-12-24 18:00:57.286000+00:00 | ['Self Driving Cars', 'Autopilot', 'Autonomous Cars', 'Tesla', 'Cars'] |
Karl Jobst speedrunning channel is offering a NordVPN discount | Video games are tons of fun, and more and more people tune in to play them, especially when the quarantine has everybody locked in their homes. There are many ways to play a video game, maybe you just want to complete the main scenario, or you want to uncover every secret hidden somewhere, or just relax doing random side quests and traversing beautiful landscapes. One of the ways to challenge a game is a speed run, that’s where you try to complete the game or a level as fast as possible. There are lots of speedrunners that produce entertaining videos, and Karl Jobst YouTube channel is dedicated to them. Knowing a lot about speed, Karl also recommends one of the fastest VPNs out there, and even provides a discount!
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Haven’t heard of Karl Jobst speedrunning channel?
Karl joined the YouTube community in 2010 and over the years gathered almost 200k that generated nearly 30 million views. These are high numbers, and it shows that the video content is of the highest quality. However, video games might not be for everybody, or not everyone is a fan of speedrunning art.
Luckily, there are way more YouTube channels to choose from, and lots of them are just as fun. For example, you can double-check Amazonian YT channel for the popular Magic the Gathering collectable card game footage. Or if comics is more of your thing, there’s Variant Comics channel dedicated just for that. You’ll find something to watch 100%, and both of these great channels are also recommending NordVPN! | https://medium.com/@specterryan6/karl-jobst-is-offering-a-nordvpn-discount-92259f05f6e1 | ['Ryan Specter'] | 2020-05-08 08:43:59.804000+00:00 | ['Discount', 'Cybersecurity', 'Privacy', 'VPN', 'Deal'] |
For J., On Falling Again | You put your heart to sleep, buried the spark
that flashed like flame before the Reaper dropped;
accustoms to the pulse-less heavy start
that filled your heart when all the planet stopped.
Bedecked in widows’ webs, bent low in grief,
time comes to fill your chest like Novocaine,
so petrified with the holy belief
that searching out new love brings certain pain.
But pain is everywhere: memory, joy,
two lovers touching, chaste as winter snow.
Behold the echo of the breathing boy
transformed by love, lit with a lively glow.
And then from black, a spark! You dream a song
but singing hurts too much. Your lover’s gone. | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/for-j-on-falling-again-4d60348199eb | ['Zach J. Payne'] | 2019-05-24 20:39:25.106000+00:00 | ['Grief', 'Poetry', 'Healing', 'Love', 'Poem'] |
Exploring Monotone Subsequences With Dynamic Programming in Python | Exploring Monotone Subsequences With Dynamic Programming in Python
When computer science and dynamic programming meets mathematics
Introduction
This is the code heavy addendum to the more mathsy article I wrote on the Erdos-Szekeres Theorem. However, this is also self-contained, and is focused on finding monotone sequences rather than proving things about their size.
Our task is to write a program to find the longest increasing subsequence in a sequence of numbers. And then to visualise the results!
For instance, the longest increasing subsequence in [1,2,3,0,4] is [1,2,3,4].
The mathsy result is quite astonishing. It says that for any sequence of n² different numbers, we can always find an increasing sequence of length n, or a decreasing sequence of length n.
Dynamic Programming Solution
In dynamic programming, we aim to memorise solutions to a smaller part of the problem to solve the larger problem. If the solution to the larger problem can be built from the smaller problems, then dynamic programming may be useful. The key insight here is that sometimes by removing the first element of a sequence, the longest increasing subsequence remains the same. A simple example of this is [100, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, -1], where the longest increasing subsequence is [0,1,2,3,4,5]. and when we remove the first element, the longest increasing subsequence of [0,1,2,3,4,5,-1] is still [0,1,2,3,4,5].
In this case, the longest increasing subsequence has to start somewhere. If it starts at the first element, then all we need to consider is the remaining elements which are larger. If it doesn’t then we just consider the smaller problem of all elements after the first.
Dynamic programming builds the larger solutions from the smaller solutions in this way, by working upwards.
What we will do is create a python dictionary. In the dictionary* we will map a number to the longest increasing subsequence starting at that points. (There are probably more memory efficient ways to encode the information). Then, we will use the information we have worked out for points later in the sequence to quickly solve for the longest.
*As each number will only appear once, this works fine. If the same number appeared multiple times we could use a tuple of number and position.
A Worked Example
Code will abstract this logic, and abstract logic is confusing, so let’s see it in action first.
Our sequence is [100,0,1,2,3,4,5,-1].
We first look at the last element of the sequence. The longest increasing subsequence starting at -1 is, unsurprisingly, of length 1, because this is the end element.
So, our dictionary currently has {“-1”: [-1]}.
Next, we look at an increasing subsequence beginning at 5. [5,-1] isn’t increasing, so once again the maximum length of increasing subsequence is 1.
Our dictionary now reads {“-1”: [-1]. “5”:[5]}
Next we get to 4. We want to solve this using our previous knowledge. So, we scan for elements which are larger than 4. 5>4. So the longest increasing subsequence beginning at 4 is [4] + [whatever the longest increasing subsequence starting at 5 is].
The use of the previous knowledge allows us to solve each step very simply. To work out the longest increasing subsequence starting at 0, we just find the numbers larger than 0 to the right hand side, and find the longest one, add 0 to the beginning, and add the new sequence to our dictionary.
Eventually, our dictionary will read:
{“-1”: [-1]. “5”:[5], “4”:[4,5], “3”:[3,4,5], “2”: [2,3,4,5], “1”:[1,2,3,4,5], “0”:[0,1,2,3,4,5], “100”:[100]}.
To find the longest subsequence, we just find the longest entry in our dictionary, or we update the largest element we have found as we create the dictionary. As both are O(n) time, it doesn’t make much difference which one we do.
Implementation
I would encourage you to try implementing this yourself! My code is nothing special — I’m not a coder by training (nor by experience), so what I present is fairly rough and ready.
First, we set up our function. It takes in an array (the sequence) as an input. Then we create a dictionary called scores_dict, and memorize the length of the sequence seq.
def longest_increasing_subsequence(seq):
scores_dict = dict()
length = len(seq)
Next, we loop over the sequence. Yes, I indexed from 1 to length+1, because I prefer it, even if it marks me out as a real amateur! If i==1, we are adding the last element of the sequence to our dictionary, which is just that element anyway.
Otherwise, we set up ‘current_best’ to keep track of our best option so far. Then, we loop over all elements later in the sequence. If they are larger than our current element, and they give a better score than our current longest increasing subsequence, then we update our longest subsequence accordingly. If an element is smaller than our current element, we ignore it.
This loop then completes the dictionary, working from the last element in the sequence backwards, until we have found out the longest increasing subsequence starting at every element. Then we return the dictionary, for the user to use as they wish! (they can extract the longest increasing subsequence in O(n) time, as previously discussed)
for i in range(1,length+1):
if i == 1:
scores_dict[seq[-i]] = [1, [seq[-i]]]
else:
current_best = [0, None]
for j in range(1,i):
if seq[-j] > seq[-i]:
if scores_dict[seq[-j]][0]+1>current_best[0]:
current_best[0] = scores_dict[seq[-j]][0] + 1
current_best[1] = [seq[-i]] + copy.deepcopy(scores_dict[seq[-j]][1])
else:
pass
else:
pass
if current_best[0] == 0:
current_best = [0, [seq[-i]]]
scores_dict[seq[-i]] = current_best
return scores_dict
Some elementary running time analysis
The overall solution has some easy upper bounds. The outer loop is length n, the inner loop performs less than O(n) operations, which gives a maximum running time of O(n²).
In contrast, the ‘naiive’ approach of searching through all the subsequences and identifying whether they are increasing and their lengths is exponential time. I first implemented this solution, which got slow at around n=7, and didn’t work on my computer (intel i5, two cores, 8gb ram) for n=10. In contrast, I could fairly comfortably run the dynamic programming solution when I tested it for n=100.
Some Visualisations
Graphs are pretty. So let’s see some ways to visualise this. First, let’s understand what the graphs below are representing.
Here we look at both longest increasing subsequence, and longest decreasing subsequence. I use Inc[x] to represent the length of the longest increasing subsequence starting at the number x in the sequence, and Dec[x] to represent the length of the longest decreasing subsequence in the sequence.
E.g., in our sequence [100,0,1,2,3,4,5,-1], Inc[0] = 5, as the longest increasing subsequence starting at 0 is [0,1,2,3,4,5], and Dec[0] = 2, as the longest decreasing subsequence starting at 0 is [0,-1].
Each ‘dot’ (technically: node) of the graph represents one of the numbers in our sequence. I set n=49=7²
A connection is drawn between a node x and a node y if (Dec[x]==Dec[y] or Inc[x]==Inc[y]). E.g. in (4,5,6,1,2,3) we would connect node (6) with node (3), as the length of the longest increasing subsequence ending with (6) is length 3, and the length of the longest increasing subsequence ending with (3) is also length 3, so Inc(3)==Inc(6).
We colour a node red if the longest increasing subsequence, or the longest decreasing subsequence, ending at that point, is greater than root N. These red points therefore show us how often the condition of the theorem is met. I.e. a red point signifies the existence of an increasing or decreasing subsequence of length at least root N. Every diagram contains red points!
Next, we thicken some of the edges (‘connections’). We thicken the connections if they are a connection between red dots. This is to give some feel for the density of red dots.
The code I used for this is below. It just adapts some of the documentation code I found on the networkx website. See here. It creates 10 graphs, by generating 10 random 49 digit sequences, finds the longest increasing and decreasing sequences for each digit, and adds the nodes as described using the dictionaries.
for i in range(10):
my_seq = [i for i in range(n)]
random.shuffle(my_seq)
G = nx.Graph()
for j in range(n):
G.add_node("a" + str(j)) #aj is the longest increasing subsequence starting at j
G.add_node("b" + str(j)) #bj is the longest decreasing subsequence starting at j
dict_a = longest_increasing_subsequence(seq=my_seq)
dict_b = longest_decreasing_subsequence(seq=my_seq)
for a_obj in dict_a.keys():
for b_obj in dict_b.keys():
if dict_a[a_obj][0] == dict_b[b_obj][0]:
G.add_edge("a"+str(a_obj), "b"+str(b_obj), weight=dict_a[a_obj][0])
else:
pass
pos = nx.spring_layout(G)
elarge = [(u, v) for (u, v, d) in G.edges(data=True) if d['weight'] > n/2]
esmall = [(u, v) for (u, v, d) in G.edges(data=True) if d['weight'] <= n/2] # nodes
nx.draw_networkx_nodes(G,pos,
nodelist=["a"+ str(i) for i in range(n)],
node_color='r',
node_size=20,
alpha=0.8)
nx.draw_networkx_nodes(G,pos,
nodelist=["b"+ str(i) for i in range(n)],
node_color='b',
node_size=20,
alpha=0.8) # edges
nx.draw_networkx_edges(G, pos, edgelist=elarge,
width=1)
nx.draw_networkx_edges(G, pos, edgelist=esmall,
width=1, alpha=0.5, edge_color='b', style='dashed') G.clear()
plt.show()
plt.clf()
Now, let’s visualise in another way. Now, we only draw edges between two nodes if Dec[x] == Dec[y]. This visualises, for each point in the sequence, how many other points’ longest decreasing subsequence is the same length.
We can do the same for increasing subsequences. We now draw an edge between two nodes x and y if Inc[x]==Inc[y]. This visualises, for each point in the sequence, how many other points’ longest increasing subsequence is the same length.
This visualisation is a neat way of illustrating the logic used in the Erdos-Szekeres Theorem I wrote about previously. You can check out what I wrote about that here! | https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/exploring-monotone-subsequences-with-dynamic-programming-in-python-b8b0a55e9411 | ['Maths'] | 2020-07-25 16:37:29.694000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Programming', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Math', 'Mathematics'] |
Thought Plagiarism and How It Threatens Creative Platforms | Thought Plagiarism and How It Threatens Creative Platforms
When does copying end and the destruction of ideas begin?
Photo by Vinicius Amano on Unsplash
Every platform has its self-seekers — that is, those who try to game the system by milking the creativity of others and doing as little as possible on their end. Money and fame are usually the motivating factors for this.
They are the mimickers, the copiers, the type that ‘steal’ an idea and rework it in a way that rides on the coattails of the originator. They don’t care about attribution. They don’t wait and give the content distance in time. They’ll cash in as quickly and as frequently as possible. This is because to them, the internet is all about free speech.
Sometimes, they’ll go as far as calling it working smarter and not harder — except, the reality is that it’s leaning toward a black hat attempt to get as much money and attention as possible without adding value to the platform that’s paying them.
We’re not talking about those moments of mind-melding experiences where two creators happen to have the exact same idea or thought wave around the same time. It happens. Those moments are often done in isolation and innocence, making the similarities forgivable.
The difference between innocent creators and self-seekers is that the latter will exhibit an identifiable trend. They don’t just have one-offs — they have a history of content that seems too alike to be coincidental.
When enough people do this with money and fame as the main motivator, they drown out the original voices and contribute to the image of sameness on a platform. | https://medium.com/prototyping-a-year/when-people-chasing-after-money-and-fame-turn-platforms-into-trainwrecks-84018439878a | ['Aphinya Dechalert'] | 2019-10-06 14:13:41.508000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Business', 'Creativity', 'Startup', 'Writing'] |
Screen Time Deadly Weapon for Kids: | In this article I am going to talk about the various struggle we as parents face with respect to restricting our children screen time, its harmful effect on brain and physical well being, the negative impact on children, It becomes the compulsory action to be taken by the parents to restrict the screen time and for it the parents have to take out time to read books to their kids ,play at least one sport or role play ,play indoor games and make them learn swimming, tennis, gymnastics, dance or judo. We should condition the child brain with new language, new sport, new stories, visiting museum, zoo, botanical garden.
With current scenario and technological advancement and our dependency on Smartphone, we have become a slave to technology rather we should take charge of technology and use it for our requirements to facilitate our living and not become part of our living. There is no such need for children of for age group 1 to 9 years old to use smartphones. New Rules should be made to restrict the use of Smartphones, tablets, TV.
#schoolMykids #easyParentingadvice
Screen Time Limits should be set. Experimenting 30 Day screen detox. Teaching Emotional Intelligence Parents should start watching TV shows and movies with children to keep a track and monitor their media usage. Limit cell phones for all meals on the dining table Indulge your child to play more outdoors the way we use to in our childhood. Play Dates should be encouraged more. To develop Reading habit amongst kids.
The importance and criticality for keeping the kids away from smartphones and restrict their screen time it’s because early experience matters the most, the first two years of life the brain develops the most. It is necessary to stimulate the brain appropriately by its usage but Overstimulation or Inappropriately stimulation of brain is not good and results in various problems amongst kids they suffer from a short attention span, short memory. The reason for short attention span is because what they see on screen in video is fifty scenes changing in one cartoon which is not true and very different from the real world, hence the expectation from the real world is too much and when they don’t see as per their expectations they find it boring and return to virtual world again.
As per my experience keeping the kids engaged in extracurricular activities is the best way to keep them away from the screen. They develop one sport, art, language and condition their brain and this good stimulation.
“Change the beginning of the story and you change the whole story”. | https://medium.com/@somyakapoor.advisor/screen-time-deadly-weapon-for-kids-c4bc867d88be | [] | 2020-05-16 04:55:24.056000+00:00 | ['Parenting Advice'] |
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM JEFF BEZOS’ AFFAIR AND BLACKMAILING SCANDAL? | If you think bullying happen only in kids think again, it happens in adults too, but then it is called extortion, blackmailing, etc. This is exactly what Mr. Pecker, owner of the National Enquirer, is doing to Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the wealthiest man in the U.S.
Unfortunately for Mr. Pecker, his intention backfire and after Bezos exposed him, he became the villain and Bezos the hero, gaining the respect and admiration from both men and women. I applaud Bezos because I would do exactly the same, it is about principles. Mr. Pecker was empowered by his inmunity deal with the Justice Department and friendship with Donaild Trump, and that makes him act stupidly. Seriously, messing with the richest man in the world? His abusive behavior enfuriate Bezos and he hired the best, Gavin de Becker and the best lawyers, to find those responsible for trying to harm him and make justice for him and other victims, who hadn’t had the resources, financial or otherwise, to stop Mr. Pecker.
For those still stuck in the mentality that Bezos is a home wreaker or unfaithful husband, they have to realize that whatever issues happen in his family are their own business and no one else’s. Remember what the bible says when condemning adultery “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at him.”
I write books on relationships and after researching and interviewing men and women on infidelity, I came to the conclusion that in 90 percent of the affairs, both, the husband and wife, are part of the problem. Is it right or fair to cheat? No, but it happens. It is ok to desire to be together “Until Death Do Us Part” like the scripture said, but it is wise to be prepared in case it doesn’t happen that way. Remember this saying “everything bad always brings something good”. As long as you don’t resist the change, you will see a brighter future, it may not be imediatly but it will happen. If you partner is having an affair, remember that God, the universe, or whatever you call the supreme power have something better planed for you.
As for the cheaters they are building their own karma. Leave them alone because karma is a bitch and don’t forgive anyone, no matter if you are the hottest pop start, the sexiest actress alive or the richest man in the world. Be the best person that you can be because what goes around ALWAYS comes around. | https://medium.com/@AlfioriLinda/if-you-think-bullying-happen-only-in-kids-think-again-it-happens-in-adults-too-but-then-it-is-29071b763552 | ['Linda Alfiori'] | 2019-02-17 16:13:04.545000+00:00 | ['Jeff Bezos', 'Healing', 'Affairs', 'Bullying', 'Relationships'] |
The 4 Best Healthy, High-Protein Christmas Recipes (From My Granny) | Today I have for you the best healthy high protein Christmas recipes you can conjure up when you want to leave your friends and family drooling, while still getting all that good protein in there, and keeping it healthy overall, I will also include a Vegan\Vegetarian recipe that’s sure to bring you the good mood and the gains, so keep reading!
1) High Protein Christmas Turkey Roll
Let us start with this protein-packed treat, which is a classic, but today we’ll bump it up in terms of health, goodness and amount of protein…yeah, because the turkey itself isn’t enough for us gains connoisseurs.
The ingredients are:
INSTRUCTIONS:
Flatten the turkey breast with a meat tenderizer or something akin, season both sides with black pepper and salt and put it to rest in the fridge. In the meantime, clean and peel the potatoes and the carrots with the onion and the celery, then prepare a pot and bring to a boil and let them cook for twelve minutes. Drain the vegetables and start mashing them clumsily with a fork, then add half a teaspoon of salt, 3 tablespoons of grated parmesan, break the baked ham in it along with the cheese of your choice, the boiled egg (be generous with the ham!) mince and add the parsley, set aside the mixture. Take out the turkey from the fridge and place it on a baking sheet, with some baking paper and cover the meat with bread crumbs until well coated. Spread the turkey and then start scooping the veggies\ham mixture on it, spreading it evenly then make a roll out of it. Add more bread crumbs to the outside of the roll and drizzle well with 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Wrap the roll inside the baking paper like it’s a big candy and bake in a pre-heated oven at 200C° for 30 minutes, once it’s done turn off the oven and let it rest inside for a bit, then cut into slice and serve.
Enjoy.
2) Oven-baked “Mezze Maniche”
As an Italian, I couldn’t let you go away without giving you my personal pasta recipe which is super healthy and full of proteins, so you can enjoy a carb treat without worrying too much about it while knowing that all your protein needs are satisfied.
The ingredients for this amazing and comfy pasta recipe are:
INSTRUCTIONS:
Put some butter into a bigger saucepan and brown the ground beef with it for about 15 minutes, then mix the Bechamel and some black pepper to taste, set aside. Finely chop the carrot and mix the frozen peas in another pan and let them cook for 15 minutes as well, then add the chopped parsley and the Passata, cook for another 2 minutes. Start preparing a pot with some water, bring to a boil and add the pasta, cook it until al dente. Take a bowl and put the Mezze Maniche in, add the peas mixture in and mix, then add half of the meat mixture and mix again. Take a baking tray and grease it with butter and some bread crumbs while starting to add a pasta layer and crumble some of the boiled eggs on them followed by black pepper, parmesan and the sliced cheese, repeat the process with each layer and until the tray’s full and you finish the mixture. Onto the final layer add the 2 tablespoons of oil and top it with grated parmesan and bread crumbs for that nice crispy crust. Put in a preheated oven at 170C°(325F°) for 10/13 minutes.
3) High-Protein Xmas Minestrone
How about a veggie delight packed with minerals, vitamins and awesome proteins for our friends veggie lovers out there? this wintery Minestrone has everything you need to make you feel amazing. The vegetarian option here only comes into place when we’re talking about the parmesan that’s in the recipe, otherwise this is vegan, and an EXPLOSION of flavors and goodness for your body.
INGREDIENTS:
INSTRUCTIONS:
Peel and wash all the vegetables, from the pumpkin take out the seeds, then dry the vegetables and start cutting them into chunks\little cubes, set them aside for now. Start to gently cook the carrot, the onion and the celery with 2 tbsp of olive oil for about 10 minutes, when softened, add all the beans and the Rosemary in it. Cover with water and then add the pumpkin, the cabbage, the potatoes & the lentils. After 20 minutes or so add the zucchini, the tomatoes and the peas, and let them cook for about 3 minutes, add the parsley and salt and pepper to your taste. Take out the rosemary, the Minestrone is ready, finish it with some olive oil and a sprinkle of parmesan if you like.
4) Italian Protein Packed Meatballs “Polpette”
What did you expect?
Since I’m Italian I can’t restrain myself from providing you a meatball recipe. This comes straight from my grandma, but with some healthier tweaks that don’t make compromises with the flavour! and after all, I’ve already included a few italian recipes in here already, so why not.
Now, you need to know that I don’t give THE EXACT quantities of the ingredients in my recipes as you’ve probably seen. In our family we do things “by eye” as that’s how most Italian families operate. So DON’T WORRY ABOUT QUANTITIES AND WEIGHING EVERYTHING! FOOL!
INGREDIENTS:
Meatballs
1KG [2 pounds?] of Ground Turkey (If you can, ask your butcher to make it for you)
2 Large Eggs
Bread crumbs — (You can either use whole wheat for a heartier flavor\ white for something lighter)
Fresh Parsley (dried works too… 😦 )
Fresh Basil (dried works too… 😦 )
Parmesan Cheese (Be generous with it) \ You can use Pecorino for an Intense Flavour, TRY IT!
Garlic Cloves (dried if you can’t 😦 )
1 Big Onion. (Red kind) ½ for Meatballs ½ For Sauce
For The Salsa (Sauce):
DIRECTIONS:
Let’s start with the sauce.
1. Dice up your onion (*pepper) Sautee it with oil for a few minutes, then add garlic and stir. Cook for a few minutes while stirring.
2. Add your tomato and all the seasonings (See ingredients) bring up to a bubbly boil, then turn the heat down and let them gently simmer while you make the meatballs.
Meatballs.
3. In a large bowl put your ground meat of choice, eggs, chopped basil, bread crumbs, minced garlic, parsley, pecorino\parmigiano and onion together. (use parmigiano for more proteins) and mix until everything is well combined.
4. Once everything is well-mixed, you can start shaping the meatballs. They should be around the size of a golf ball.
5. Now while everything’s still hot and bubbly, you can start placing each meatball in the boiling sauce, make sure the sauce’s enough to keep the meatballs completely covered.
6. Then be sure to turn the heat on LOW & let them cook for about 2\3 Hours for a more enhanced flavor. (They don’t usually need THIS long, but they’ll taste better if you do cook them longer)
Enjoy the GAINZ AND THE ASTONISHING FLAVOR! YUM!
And have a mighty Christmas.
I’m all about creating stuff and more importantly helping people — Courses, Softwares, and eventually Original Brands. | https://medium.com/@stormynook/the-4-best-healthy-high-protein-christmas-recipes-from-my-granny-ecaffd4c6677 | [] | 2021-01-14 12:42:18.705000+00:00 | ['Recipe', 'Protein', 'Fitness', 'Health Foods'] |
Amazing NFTs from outer space waiting for you: MGH announcing a partnership with NFT artist Ashilraj | Amazing NFTs from outer space waiting for you: MGH announcing a partnership with NFT artist Ashilraj The DAC Aug 10·5 min read
Written by Robin Prock
Picture it:
You are an astronaut… slowly drifting through space while a rope chains you to your spaceship. Before you shimmers the colorful infinity — plasma clouds bathed in lava red, moons peering out at you like the antennae of a snail, and cold asteroids gathering dust like gems in a showcase. What do you feel as you stare through the glass of your helmet into the immensity?
Fear, horror, dismay… or awe, beauty and humility?
I feel the immeasurable beauty as I gaze upon Ashilraj’s NFT:
Floating to the moon
Is there a better way to describe the incomprehensible space than the tiny astronaut lying like a child in the cold hands of the universe?
Beautiful and humbling…
This image is one of the NFTs Ashilraj created for Metaverse Game Hub (MGH) — and we are incredibly proud to announce this partnership now.
Read on to learn who Ashilraj is, how the NFTs benefit you as a member of the community — yes, with a little luck you’ll have one in your hands… or in your wallet — and of course I’ll show you more pictures of Ashil… I can’t keep them from you.
The artist of the NFTs: Ashilraj
Why NFTs?
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a thousand answers — be it from investors, artists, traders, collectors….
But the Indian artist Ashilraj had a particular answer that I didn’t expect:
NFTs have brought digital art to the masses.
Before, people (especially the art community) looked at digital art like a 5-star chef looks at his kitchen when a mouse crawls between his feet… now they say: “Wow, this is awesome!”
This excites Ashil; NFTs have made people appreciate digital art — thus, Ashil’s incredible art. He started painting as a school kid, first sketches in black and white, no colors; then came college, coding, and his education as a developer…
…but art didn’t let him go; he learned to work with colors from scratch (color theory is hard as hell!) and has been a digital artist for a year now.
Only one year, that’s incredible.
Because his images are colorful, startling, awe-inspiring, mystical, magical, enigmatic, inspiring, dazzling, rapturous, imaginative, mind-bending, in short:
Incomprehensible!
Like everything that ventures into the unknown.
And that is also Ashil’s goal:
We don’t know what lies dormant beyond the stars — a space rover can’t show us, no observatory can, and neither can Christopher Nolan with Interstellar. We know almost nothing… that’s why we dream and fill the vastness with our dream figures as if the universe were a dream catcher.
What buzzes, slumbers, breathes, and lives in space now? This is the question, Ashil asks himself — and his pictures give you his answer.
Below, I’ll show you three more of his pictures; if you want to admire more of his incredible work (and not only pictures from outer space), follow him here on Instagram.
But what will MGH do with the NFTs, and how will you benefit?
How MGH will use the NFTs for its community
We have big things in store for you… Ashilraj is the first outstanding artist to put his ideas on pixels for us. Over the weeks and months, we plan to form partnerships with many artists to be a gallery for exceptional NFTs….
…NFTs to entertain you, to inspire you and of course to give you gifts.
Because with them, we will reward you if you actively participate in our community, fulfill tasks, take part in raffles… show your personality in MGH. How about having such an astronaut from above floating in your Wallet too? — Isn’t that amazing?
For example, we have distributed some NFTs to three lucky winners who bought MGH tokens in the Early Membership Pools.
That we will do with some of the NFTs…
…the others we will auction on OpenSea, so that many people will discover them, and they will get the attention they deserve.
Learn more about MGH here and visit us on our website: https://www.metagamehub.io/
But now, you’ve probably been waiting for this, I’m going to show you three more artworks by Ashil:
(He created ten in total for us).
3 impressive artworks from Ashilraj… do you feel the breath of the universe?
Swimming in Space
Black, blue and an ominous poisonous green in the background, peeking around the corner like a masked face. The background is mystical…
…but in the foreground floats a jellyfish — the calm and bright point that dampens the menace and touches the eye. Its light illuminates the darkness…but as it floats on, its light too will go out like smoke rising from a cigarette and blurring in the summer breeze.
This NFT shows the shy beauty of light and darkness in space — the beauty that attracts us and makes us shiver at the same time.
The Immersion of Light
This image reminds me of a stanza in the poem “The drunken boat” from Arthur Rimbaud:
Now I, a little lost boat, in swirling debris, Tossed by the storm into the birdless upper air All the Hansa Merchants and Monitors Could not fish up my body drunk with the sea;
Source: Poemhunter
It is the opposite of the astronaut from above — no rope protects him, he floats freely, nothing reaches out to pull him back. He is lost like the drunken boat in the poem.
Perhaps he feels fear… or wonder at the purple clouds that surround him?Who knows?
And then in the center, that white rectangular light. Perhaps a portal from whence he came? Can he reach it again?
The image is a beautiful mystery.
The Planet with a Spear thorugh its Heart
The last image shows the eerily beautiful destructiveness of the universe: A dying star is a feast for the eye, a colorful funeral — yet it dies.
Here an arrow of light pierces a planet and in the background shooting stars or meteors fall like bombs into the distance…
…at least I see it in such a way.
You can see something different, find a different meaning, feel different feelings; and that’s how good (NFT) art is supposed to be.
To say it with Oscar Wilde:
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
What does the mirror show YOU? | https://medium.com/@thedac/amazing-nfts-from-outer-space-waiting-for-you-mgh-announcing-a-partnership-with-nft-artist-3ee75bce5a47 | ['The Dac'] | 2021-08-10 17:10:30.433000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Metaverse', 'Nfts', 'Art', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Machine Learning with PHP: using Support Vector Machine (SVM) via ext-svm | Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
PHP is a very popular language, and when something gets very popular it usually happens that someone come out and just says “that’s not cool”, and it’s ok, it happens. I read lots of articles saying “PHP is not cool for machine learning” or saying “just move to language X to perform this, there will work better” (I’m not gonna flame another language, just talking about random stuff on the internet).
I’m a PHP lover, I won’t negate that, I tried different languages, frameworks, developed native applications, I love to try new things but I also love PHP. But sometimes I’m held back by the fact that the PHP ecosystem is missing some extremely interesting features like powerful Machine Learning libraries.
Last time this happened was during my PhD thesis writing. My thesis was about “Indoor Localization”: I had to study the various techniques, delineate a possible approach to perform the localization, and finally, I had to build an experimental system composed of a web interface to handle the localization and a client to use it.
To study Indoor Localization, I got many papers from IEEE Explore thanks to my university access, studied different approaches, and I finally picked a combination of techniques to approach my localization, but that’s not the purpose of this article.
And what does this have to do with PHP and Machine Learning? Well, it’s kinda curious, all tests I performed to learn how SVM works were in python because the engineer helping me with my development was skilled with Python, but I had to write a web application and that engineer wasn’t practical writing backends, so I got an idea, I google for “PHP svm” and the first result was “SVM — Manual — PHP” from PHP.net documentation.
Ext-svm: what and why
And here will come the critics, PHP just approached Machine Learning, other languages has it from years and, why should I pick it? It’s easy because ext-svm is just a wrapper for the libSVM library (check libsvm on Github) that’s written in C++, this means that every time you want to perform an SVM operation using PHP, this will be executed at a lower level and the results will be propagated to PHP thanks to the ext-svm interface.
LibSVM is an efficient solver for SVM classification and regression problems. The svm extension wraps this in a PHP interface for easy use in PHP scripts. As of version 0.2.0 the extension requires PHP 7.0 or above.
For me, that was awesome! That was everything I needed to move from Python (python devs please don’t hate me) that I didn’t know so much, to PHP on which I‘m more skilled.
Installing ext-svm
First of all, the extension is available on Pecl, this means that if you have access to a command-line with administrator permissions you can just
pecl install svm
Please note that ext-svm is currently in Beta, so if you got problems with pecl, to install it any way you can just:
pecl install svm-beta
The output will be something like:
downloading svm-0.2.3.tgz ...
Starting to download svm-0.2.3.tgz (130,776 bytes)
.............................done: 130,776 bytes
7 source files, building [... skipping the whole output ...] Build process completed successfully
Installing '/usr/lib/php/20190902/svm.so'
install ok: channel://pecl.php.net/svm-0.2.3
Extension svm enabled in php.ini
If you want to check if the extension has correctly been installed just launch:
$ php -m | grep svm svm
The extension is now installed and you’re ready to go!
Build your first classifier
To build our first classifier we’ll just stick to the documentation example and check if it works. Our classifier will be trained from an array, and we’ll check if it can predict a value from the training dataset.
<?php
$data = array(
array(-1, 1 => 0.43, 3 => 0.12, 9284 => 0.2),
array(1, 1 => 0.22, 5 => 0.01, 94 => 0.11),
);
$svm = new SVM();
$model = $svm->train($data);
$data = array(1 => 0.43, 3 => 0.12, 9284 => 0.2);
$result = $model->predict($data);
echo $result;
If you save this file and then run it via console, or put it in a web server and access to it, the result should be -1 . Why?
Let’s decompose our code to understand how it works. On the first two lines, we found our array of array representing the data
$data = array(
array(-1, 1 => 0.43, 3 => 0.12, 9284 => 0.2),
array(1, 1 => 0.22, 5 => 0.01, 94 => 0.11),
);
If you focus on the inner array, every row can be split into two parts: the result and the features for training. The first value of the array (at index 0) is the classification result, followed by features, so for array(-1, 1 => 0.43, 3 => 0.12, 9284 => 0.2) the classification result will be -1 and the following values grouped as key/value couples are features.
Later we instance the SVM:
$svm = new SVM();
The SVM instance can be tweaked by calling setOptions , for example, you can change your kernel before training:
$svm->setOptions([ SVM::OPT_KERNEL_TYPE => SVM::KERNEL_SIGMOID ]);
Constant values to tweak options can be found in the SVM Class Documentation on php.net.
Now that we have our SVM ready, we can train a model:
$model = $svm->train($data);
This line outputs an SVMModel which we can use for predictions. If you have a very big model, you can just save it to a file with save(string $filename) and reload from the filesystem with load(string $filename) this way:
$model->save('model.svm');
// later... somewhere in the code
$model->load('model.svm');
Please note: save and load will return a boolean value, you can check it or drop it, it’s up to you!
Latest three lines are the testing code:
$data = array(1 => 0.43, 3 => 0.12, 9284 => 0.2);
$result = $model->predict($data);
echo $result;
You take the features you measured and wanna check against the model and put them into an array, in this code the array is called $data . That features will be processed from SVM by using the training set.
Once our data are ready, we can call predict to classify the data passed as input and get a float output corresponding to the prediction. Finally, we can echo it, or use it somewhere else.
Built, trained, predicted
Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash
Now your system has the PHP SVM extension installed, you can train a model, save it, reload it and make predictions, everything from now, it’s up to you!
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/machine-learning-with-php-using-support-vector-machine-svm-via-ext-svm-37ef9c3027cd | [] | 2020-12-27 16:48:09.574000+00:00 | ['Support Vector Machine', 'Machine Learning', 'Web Development', 'Svm', 'PHP'] |
A Noob’s Guide to K-Means | Today we will be learning together a very interesting algorithm that uses similarity among items to group them. The idea seems pretty similar to that of KNN algorithm but the algorithm is not. Let’s get started with the k-means algorithm
What is clustering and what are its types?
Clustering is a process of grouping up data points or items based on their similar features. It does not involve labelled data and it is left on the machine to find a pattern according to which we cluster. There are 3 types of clustering:
Exclusive Clustering: The clusters are non-overlapping ( example: K-means)
Source: analyticsprofile.com
Overlapping Clustering: some data points may belong to one or more clusters(example: Fuzzy or C-means clustering)
Source: analyticsprofile.com
Hierarchical Clustering: creates an hierarchy of clusters. Creation of such hierarchy could be either in a bottom-up approach(agglomerative) or top-down approach(divisive).
Introduction
K-means clustering is an unsupervised learning algorithm. Unlike in KNN algorithm, we do not group them by choosing the group that majority of the K neighbours belong to. Instead, we choose random k centroids, find the data points near those centroid and group them accordingly. We will get more into this as we will move to its implementation.
Let’s take an example to understand the idea of clusters:
Source:lbb.in
Imagine you are at a restaurant. You will see that a bunch of people are sharing a table. This suggests that these “clusters” of people, are familiar with each other more than the people sharing another table.
Another example could be that if you are in an “all-you-could-eat-buffet”, you would always see the dessert, main course and the appetizers separated.
Source:theatlantic.com
From both of these examples, we can see some properties of the clusters formed via any clustering algorithm:
Within a cluster, the data points are as similar to each other as possible.
If we compare each point within one cluster to each point within any other cluster, then, the data points should be as dissimilar as possible.
Working and Implementation:
Steps to perform K-means:
Assuming we have selected the number of clusters, k, we choose any k random positions as our centroids. For each of our centroids, we find their distance from each of our data points. If a centroid has least distance from a point, that point is grouped with that centroid. After grouping each point of our dataset, we find the mean of points in each of the clusters. This mean becomes our new centroid. If our new centroid values and old centroid values are equal then, this means we have reached “convergence” or the process of clustering is over. Else we would repeat steps 2 to 4 until we reach convergence.
Given below is the implementation on crime.csv dataset:
You can find the dataset here.
You might find this code implementation a bit intimidating but don’t worry I will explain each and every function in this code as best as I can. That being said, given below is the description of this code:
We will be importing all the important libraries to process and visualize our data like as given in the first cell in our embed.
For clustering data, I found it easier to remove the columns “Date” and “Magnitude” as they didn’t seem to have any significance to our data. I just dropped the “Date” column here. Feel free to do so for both.
For clustering algorithms, you might find scatterplot from seaborn or scatter() from matplotlib.pyplot a very convenient tool for visualizing data points and seeing how similar they are to each other.
After removing all the unnecessary columns, I converted our dataframe into a numpy array which I find easier to work with.
Some common arguments and their meanings:
df = dataset
k = number of clusters
centroid = center (or centroid) for each and every group. The number of centers is equal to k.
randomCentroid(df , k):
The above function is used for finding the random centroids required for our first step. It uses uniform() function from the random library to generate a random float value in the range of the minimum and maximum elements of a particular column.
I used df.shape[1]-1 here because I am only concerned with the first and second column and not the “Magnitude” column. If you are removing that column all together, just remove the -1 here.
FindDistance( ):
Generates the square of Euclidean distance. It takes 2 rows as the argument. In our case each row would only contain the elements of “Latitude” and “Longitude” columns.
group_data(df , k , centroid) :
It groups the data points based on their closest centroid values.
For example, if a particular point is closest to the centroid associated with group 1 then, this data point would be added to the said group.
It creates a dictionary named “groups” which has the group number/label as the key and for each group it stores the row of all those data points which are closest to the associated centroids.
KMeans(df , k):
cen: it is a list storing the initial set of randomized centroids for each group.
it is a list storing the initial set of randomized centroids for each group. ncen: stores the list of new centroids that we calculate by finding the mean of each point in each cluster.
stores the list of new centroids that we calculate by finding the mean of each point in each cluster. If the values of ncen and cen are equal then, we have reached a point of convergence and we return the group details and the final centroid values.
For k=5 we get the following result,
Applications:
used in recommendation systems in online shopping and our “beloved” Netflix.
You can find dominant colours in an image
Is used in feature-learning step in either semi-supervised learning or unsupervised learning.
Advantages:
It works for dataset where the data points cannot be separated by a straight line.
It works for unlabelled data which is pretty common in the real-world.
It is pretty easy to implement.
It is pretty efficient on large datasets.
Disadvantages:
Finding the appropriate k value is difficult.
The clustering is dependent on the initial set of centroids especially for high values of k.
Outliers might affect the centroid positions which inadvertently affects the clustering.
If the shape of the clusters are complex, then k-means might not be able to give satisfactory results.
That wraps our blog. Hope it helps you to understand k-means algorithm a little bit better. Thank you very much for reading!!! | https://medium.com/swlh/a-noobs-guide-to-k-means-215a600bd1eb | ['Tanya Gupta'] | 2021-01-19 08:18:02.467000+00:00 | ['K Means Clustering', 'Machine Learning', 'Beginner', 'Unsupervised Learning'] |
The Problem of BitClout Creator Coins | Creator Coins Do Not Benefit Creators.
When you buy a creator coin on BitClout, the only real benefit the creator derives is in the form of the Founder’s Reward. Buying a coin and increasing their coin price has no actual bearing on a creator or a project aside from giving them a false sense of worth. We cannot conflate owning someone’s coin with a show of support, except in instances were the FR is high since many people buy coins purely for investment purposes because they see an opportunity to make money and not necessarily because a creator is awesome.
Many creators talk about creating value for their investors and suggest that’s why coin price is important. That’s a noble sentiment but when you dig deeper, it’s not how many people actually feel. If you say you are trying to create value for your investors, what you should mean is that you want your investors to profit from buying your coin, either in the short or long term. The problem is that they can’t really do that if they are vilified and labeled a rug puller or scammer for selling.
If you care about your investors, you should want them to make a profit and sell when the time is right for them. End of story.
I’m also extremely disheartened in general by the negative sentiment around an investor selling a creator coin and this culture that’s been created wherein people are publicly called out for it. When you really think about it, it’s ridiculous. Nobody’s brand or project is harmed when the price of their coin goes down. If you feel yours is, you need to rethink your business model.
If people bought your coin to “show support” for you or your project, they shouldn’t care about your coin price and thus someone else selling has no bearing on them and it likely not a reflection of you (unless you posted something highly offensive). If someone bought your coin as an investment, they did so at their own risk and they should understand all the reasons creator coin prices are highly volatile (this is a topic for another day).
Reasons Investors May Sell Creator Coins
There are many reasons why someone may sell a creator coin they purchased. It’s important to understand these so below are some examples:
They made money off the investment and feel it’s the right time to sell (yay!)
They need the liquidity to participate in other projects or fund other creators (yay, they are spreading the love around)
They need the money. Let’s all remember that behind most accounts, is a real person with real world problems and we never really know what someone is going through in their life so we need to be less judgmental and more compassionate.
They no longer believe in the creator/project they originally bought into or their values no longer align because a creator changed how they were using their account or did/said things the investor doesn’t agree with. It’s their prerogative to change their mind, especially when circumstances change and they really shouldn’t have to justify their decisions.
They became disillusioned with BitClout and decided to exit. This is one we should be concerned about as it’s a barrier to the growth of the platform.
While this is not a new idea, it’s worth providing a reminder that creators can benefit when someone sells their coin because it will likely lead to other’s buying the dip which results in the creator receiving more $clout in the form of founder’s rewards. An actively traded coin is a positive, not a negative. | https://stetzine.com/the-problem-with-bitclout-creator-coins-b8800a60c684 | [] | 2021-08-12 03:55:14.976000+00:00 | ['Bitclout', 'Stet', 'Nft', 'Creator Economy', 'Blockchain Social Network'] |
how to share linkedin post on whatsapp | Sharing Public Posts On and Off LinkedIn
When sharing a post, you can control who sees it from the share box. Public posts can be shared on other sites as long as your public profile is also showing. If your profile isn’t public, your post will only be visible to members who are signed in to LinkedIn.
Important: Posts created on other LinkedIn sharing platforms that use the Public setting, such as InShare and Elevate, will continue to be visible only to those signed in to LinkedIn.
Updating your settings to allow sharing of your posts
Within your privacy settings and under Blocking and Hiding the followers setting should be set to Everyone .
the followers setting should be set to . Note: If you’ve blocked a member on LinkedIn, they may still be able to see a Public post that appear outside of the LinkedIn network.
If you’ve blocked a member on LinkedIn, they may still be able to see a Public post that appear outside of the LinkedIn network. Public profile visibility — Set to Make my public profile visible to everyone and select Posts & Activities.
Sharing a public post outside of LinkedIn
To share a public post off LinkedIn:
Click the Click Copy link to post. Paste the URL to another site such as Facebook or Twitter.
iOS
To share a public post off LinkedIn:
Tap the Tap Share via. Tap Copy from the option menu that slides up. Paste the URL to another site such as Facebook or Twitter.
Android
To share a public post off LinkedIn:
Tap the Tap Share via. Tap Copy to clipboard from the option menu that slides up. Paste the URL to another site such as Facebook or Twitter.
Note:
It isn’t possible to change the visibility of posts shared before July 2017.
Storyline and multi-photo posts aren’t currently available to users who aren’t signed in to LinkedIn.
…ReadMore | https://medium.com/@gunjannayak2k20/how-to-share-linkedin-post-on-whatsapp-d2d25c86c1c7 | ['Technical Nayak'] | 2021-03-16 13:59:01.913000+00:00 | ['LinkedIn', 'WhatsApp', 'Social Medi', 'Share', 'Facebook'] |
Chinese Tech Giant Huawei Sues Verizon Alleging Patent Infringement | The Chinese technology company Huawei has quite recently filed two lawsuits against Verizon (an American telecommunications company offering wireless products and services) alleging Patent Infringement.
Although Huawei has a very tiny presence in the United States, many American companies, including Verizon, shall still use its patented technologies and innovations as the company holds even more than 87,000 patents worldwide, out of which 11,000 are in the US. Moreover, thousands of elements of Huawei’s Intellectual Property (IP) will be “standard-essential patents,” which include technologies crucial for mobile networks such as 3G, 4G, and now even 5G. Various other technology firms, including Huawei’s rivals, shall require using the patented technology corresponding to their telecommunications networks.
Huawei has claimed that it tried negotiating royalty payments with Verizon, that too, for a significant period but couldn’t end up reaching an agreement on license terms. Song Liuping, the chief legal officer at Huawei, has stated that for many years now, Huawei has successfully negotiated patent license agreements with a lot of companies out there; however, in case no agreement can be reached, then Huawei has no choice other than seeking a legal remedy. He further stated that it is indeed a common practice in the industry today, but all Huawei wants is Verizon to respect Huawei’s investment in the fields of research and development either by paying adequately for the use of the patented technology or refraining themselves from using the same in their products and services.
In its lawsuit filed, Huawei has said that the alleged infringements relate to 12 patents in different areas ranging from networking to video communications, with titles like Sending Method and Receiving and Processing Method. It further stated that Verizon has greatly profited from the use of these patented technologies as it generated $29.8 billion in revenue in 2018 for its wireline division, which includes Huawei’s fiber-optic communications network.
The US has put a lot of pressure on Huawei for quite some time now by accusing it of being a national threat and claiming that Beijing could use Huawei’s networking gear to spy on the Americans; Huawei has always denied such allegations. Moreover, the US has even put Huawei on its blacklist, which restricts the tech giant’s access to US technology. On the other hand, Huawei has been trying to fight back against this US pressure by going ahead with legal means. In 2019, Huawei sued the US corresponding to a law, which bans government agencies from buying the tech giant’s equipment, by claiming that the legislation is unconstitutional.
Without any doubt, patents could prove to be exceedingly beneficial for Huawei to go after the US business firms. Also, Huawei’s founder and CEO, Ren Zhengfei, signaled last year that Huawei might look forward to extracting royalties from other companies. Ren said that over the past few years, Huawei had not been aggressive in seeking IPR royalties from technology or business companies that use its IP since it was way too busy in pursuing its business growth. He also stated that once Huawei gets some time, it shall undoubtedly try to extract money from the companies that use its IP. | https://medium.com/@kashishworld/chinese-tech-giant-huawei-sues-verizon-alleging-patent-infringement-ac98de35794b | ['Kashish Intellectual Property'] | 2020-02-12 07:42:18.388000+00:00 | ['Huawei', 'Trademark', 'Patents', 'Lawyers', 'China'] |
The Power of Acceptance | Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash
The most difficult, yet most satisfying thing in our life is Acceptance. The sooner the better. We live with limitless expectations which are attached more with our loved ones than from ourselves. We expect a lot of love, attention, time, things and what not.
But, when it comes to self, we tend to kill those expectations. How? Let’s say you want yourself to attain a beautiful figure or athletic body. But, you keep postponing your exercise plans to every next day. That’s because we are so easy with ourselves that we let it go when we don’t complete it.
When it comes to our near and dear ones, we often get angry when they are not able to cope with our demands. We expect them to be so perfect and we don’t want them to create any mistakes as well. But, why do we forgive ourselves when we don’t fulfil the wishes which we wanted to?
At times, when our loved ones are not able to give that time and attention to us, we start complaining and ruin our mood. Ever realised, if we don’t waste time complaining and spend that time on improving ourselves instead, how different things would become then?
This might sound a good thought to you but in actual it is very difficult to apply to. Why? Because we have this very difficult habit of not accepting things. We find it easy to waste time on negative thoughts, complaining things as if why the other person is not doing the things as we want.
Once, you start accepting things, life would become much more easier. Try accepting the fact that the other person has his/her own life, requires his/her own space to live. Stop running after anyone to let them stay in your life. Get over your insecurities. If someone has to stay in your life, they will stay. If they don’t, they were never meant to stay. It is better you let them go. Unleash all those bonds which are creating disturbance in your life. If you can’t create space for yourself, don’t let them cause storms in your mind.
Give yourself that breathing space. It is high time that you start to live your life, concentrate on improving yourself, give attention to your physical and mental health, prioritise yourself. Accept the fact that life would be more enjoyable if you keep the focus of your life on yourself.
Start implementing the power of acceptance today and see the results for yourselves. You will find a considerable difference. Start creating that difference today ! | https://medium.com/@drbetina24/the-power-of-acceptance-4a5d8c366ce2 | ['Dr. Betina Chandolia'] | 2019-02-18 11:33:37.579000+00:00 | ['Love Yourself', 'Life Lessons', 'Power', 'You', 'Acceptance'] |
Deconstructing the American voter | Let’s not underestimate the enduring power of propaganda
Monday, November 16, 2020. By B. Kumaravadivelu
Writing in 1922, Walter Lippmann, one of the most influential journalists of the 20th century, cautioned us against two kinds of “uninstructed” voters.
“There is the man,” he observed (let’s overlook the dated gendered usage) “who does not know and knows that he does not know. He is generally an enlightened person. … But there is also the man who is uninstructed and does not know that he is, or care. He can always be gotten to the polls, if the party machinery is working. His vote is the basis of the machine.”
What Lippmann wrote nearly a century ago is true even today. The party machine is still alive and sick.
As results of the 2020 Presidential election started pouring in, a recurring comment we heard was how Trump managed to get 72 plus million votes, more than any candidate in American history, except Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020. The comments were made sometimes in bewilderment and sometimes in resentment. Examples:
A Pulitzer-winning historian informed us that Trump is “the first full-scale demagogue” and that the Founders knew that “republics were uniquely vulnerable to demagogues, because they were dependent on popular opinion, which was easily manipulated by fear-mongers brandishing conspiracy theories with potent appeal to the uneducated.”
A political scientist was amazed that Trump got so many votes in spite of his “constant effusion of lies and disinformation; his relentless assaults on the media, the courts, the career civil service, and the political opposition; his efforts to politicize and demand personal loyalty from the military, the intelligence apparatus, and federal law enforcement; his misuse of presidential power and discretion for political and financial advantage; and his gestures of sympathy and support for racist right-wing extremist groups have no parallel in the annals of the American presidency.”
A New York Times columnist wondered why there was no “moral wave” after the nation “experienced four years of the most divisive and dishonest presidency in American history.” He felt that the country was the loser because there should have been a widespread rejection of that kind of leadership.
From London, a journalist from the Guardian summarized the general reaction in some countries outside the USA. He said, “if voting for Trump was truly a test of America’s moral standards, the country has failed.”
Whether we agree with these sentiments or not, what’s not disputable is that it’s easy for a demagogue to sway public opinion and make “the uninstructed” dance to his tune. Even more depressingly, once people are swayed one way or another, the disinformation they are exposed to remains etched in their minds. Very few of them change their opinion even if they are presented with irrefutable facts.
History is full of such instances. Just a couple from recent memory:
Not long ago, a birther movement became a cottage industry spreading disinformation among a large segment of the American population: that President Barack Obama was a Muslim and was born in Kenya. As we all know a billionaire real-estate businessman with political ambitions was one of the prime movers.
Even after Obama was elected and re-elected as President, a Gallup poll conducted in 2015 found that 43 percent of the Republicans, 29 percent of independents and 15 percent of the Democrats thought he is a Muslim.
The sad part is, even after Obama’s birth certificate from Hawaii was produced, there remained a significant percentage of the American public who persisted with the falsehood.
Yet another example relates to the fabricated report about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction which led to a devastating war in the Middle East. In what has become an infamous presentation to the United Nations Security Council, the then Secretary of State Colin Powell made a case for war based on false evidence. Later, when the truth became public, he called his presentation “painful,” something that will “always be a part of my record.” A year after the war, President George W. Bush admitted: “We all thought there was weapons there.”
In spite of the retractions from the President, the Secretary of State and other officials, according to a poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2015, more than 51 percent of Republicans and 32 percent of Democrats continued to believe that Iraq had WMD.
What we see here is the long-lasting power of propaganda. The unmistakable lesson we need to draw from it is clear. We need to cultivate an enlightened citizenry. An “instructed” citizenry, as Lippmann would say.
There certainly are several voter education websites with useful outreach programs. However, they seem to be mostly limited to election-eve information, informing the public about candidates and their views, explaining ballot measures, etc.
There are also University-based public opinion centers. They are mostly focusing on academic goals such as researching political and public opinion trends. No doubt, they maximize our knowledge-base.
These steps are necessary but not sufficient.
What we need are consistent and coordinated efforts to foster in our citizens a critically reflective mind that can tell the difference between fact and fiction, between ideas and ideologies, between information and disinformation, between a demagogue and a statesman.
In the prevailing sociopolitical environment, such a task seems to be easier said than done. We are faced with a deadly combination of fact, fiction and faith that seems to be bringing out the worst in some of us.
Participatory democracy is not designed to handle an unending barrage of fake news and evidence-free claims especially from people in high places. Nor can it handle special interests and lobbyists, patronage and pork, spin doctors and sound bites, tweets and trolls.
We have no choice but to come up with strategies and tactics that can help us all overcome the prevailing deficiencies in our electoral policies and practices.
To paraphrase an old tenet: a nation gets the leaders it deserves.
********** | https://medium.com/@b.kumar/deconstructing-the-american-voter-428a26064c1d | ['B Kumaravadivelu'] | 2020-11-16 14:02:22.366000+00:00 | ['Democratic Party', 'Propaganda', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Outreach', 'Republican Party'] |
The SPAC Slowdown: What You Need to Know | Photo by All Bong on Unsplash
By Louis Lehot, a business lawyer at Foley & Lardner LLP in San Francisco and Silicon Valley
Special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), organizations that raise funds in the public markets for the purpose of acquiring a private company and taking it public, had their heyday during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, 248 companies went public through mergers with SPACs, exceeding the number of such deals in the past ten years combined, according to SPAC Data.
While the craze continued through the first quarter of 2021, issuance ground to a stunning halt in April. SPAC Research reports a nearly 90 percent drop in SPAC merger filings from March 2021 to April 2021. The overall market value of SPAC mergers has fallen as well; CNBC’s SPAC Post Deal Index, which is comprised of the largest SPACs within the last two years, has fallen more than 20 percent year-to-date. The plaintiffs’ bar has found SPACs, and have announced a plethora of stock-drop investigations and class-action lawsuits.
Now that it seems the SPAC bubble has burst, what’s next?
These are five things to keep in mind as we watch the market for what’s to come.
Market response is crucial
The SPAC slowdown is part of a market response to over issuance, soaring prices and a pending regulatory crackdown ahead of the bubble bursting.
In April 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued accounting guidance changing longstanding interpretation that SPAC warrants should no longer be classified as equity, and henceforth as liabilities. Warrants give investors a right to purchase a company’s shares in the future at a specified price; when these prices rise, investors can profit quickly by exercising these warrants.
To clear a pending transaction with the SEC, SPACs have had to go back and restate their financial results to properly account for warrants, slowing down the de-SPAC process.
Concurrently, the SEC announced that warrant redemptions negotiated as part of the de-SPAC process needed to comply with the tender offer rules, further slowing down the process.
Looking to the future, however, the SEC has prepared the market for what will be the most fundamental change that de-SPAC transactions get marketed to investors. Reuters reported that the SEC is preparing interpretive guidance to close the safe harbor for forward-looking projections in de-SPAC transactions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. It is this safe harbor that made a de-SPAC transaction a much more attractive path to fundraising and public listing than a traditional initial public offerings for pre-revenue and early stage technology companies. Whereas PSLRA’s safe harbor is not available for initial public offerings, the SEC has allowed, and even required, that SPACs disclose forward-looking projections in marketing documents to stockholders considering de-SPAC transactions. Going forward, according to Reuters, the SEC will interpret de-SPAC transactions like IPOs and close off reliance on the safe harbor, effectively limiting the marketing of these transactions.
Don’t panic
To the naked eye, this stark shift in trends, numbers and regulations could easily seem like cause for alarm. However, not only is this to be expected, it is actually indicative of healthy market growth. While it’s important to keep an eye on the market, it’s too soon to tell if this drop portends a long-term pullback, though there are several factors at play that could do so in the coming months.
Additionally, remember that there are other contributing factors that can impact the market above and beyond the SEC’s guidance. For example, the flurry of activity in Q1 may have been the last remnants of pent-up demand from 2020.
The announcement of proposals to significantly increase capital-gains and other taxes could also be encouraging the sudden pullback. As Congress marches down the road to compromise, the increases will not likely be as large as those initially proposed, the markets will price them in, and countervailing and mitigating measures will be introduced and implemented.
Prepare for a change of pace
The complexity associated with the new SEC accounting guidelines means that SPACs will need to be more meticulous with their accounting and sharing of forward-looking information. Since mindful disclosure takes time, expect that high-quality SPACs will find ways to minimize warrant issuance, restrict redemption terms and avoid detailed projections. Additionally, it is highly likely that the market will find some sustainable level of SPAC IPO activity, since the numbers suggest the market was not just oversaturated, but that companies are still figuring out how best to use this new investment vehicle.
Bear opportunity costs in mind
A recent report by PitchBook on the SPAC market notes that they have benefited from interest rates approaching historic lows. These record-breaking lows have created an environment where the opportunity cost of locking money in SPACs is also low. This means investors are much more likely to risk their money in SPACs due to the possibility of better returns.
Don’t worry about obsolescence
SPACs are still useful. A merger with a public SPAC will remain a reasonable alternative for a late stage private company ready to go public that wants to quickly capitalize on a market window. It is also a great option for a heavily capital intensive business going after a big disruptive opportunity that will require more than what venture capital or private equity can fund alone. Think rocket ships to outer space, air taxis, or green hydrogen pipelines criss-crossing the planet. As we look forward to find ways to finance the rollout of 5G wireless spectrum for consumers, or refinance highways, railways, airports and shipyards, SPACs may yet have a big roll to play.
SPACs offer flexibility in an industry that depends on it. In a market that has seen such explosive and impressive growth, investors may temporarily choose to turn away from SPACs for a time and focus on their existing investments. However, as long as SPACs can provide a viable path for companies to raise capital and go public, they have a seat at the table.
Financiers seem to agree that SPAC deals will continue to move forward, and that investors should be prepared to adjust in accordance with regulations and market pace. While it’s impossible to predict the future of SPACs off of a single data point, it’s important that investors and companies keep an eye on long-term trends. While this correction is a healthy move for the market, it’s too soon to tell if this signals a long-term shift.
While legal constraints, regulatory restrictions and investor protections should tighten up as we approach the summer of 2021, do not expect the SEC to permanently shut down a viable path for the capital markets to fuel global growth.
* * *
Louis Lehot is an emerging growth company, venture capital, and M&A lawyer at Foley & Lardner in Silicon Valley. Louis spends his time providing entrepreneurs, innovative companies, and investors with practical and commercial legal strategies and solutions at all stages of growth, from the garage to global. | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/the-spac-slowdown-what-you-need-to-know-5e5de49ba66c | ['Louis Lehot'] | 2021-07-03 08:13:11.268000+00:00 | ['Louis Lehot Attorney', 'Louis Lehot', 'Lawblog', 'Attorney', 'Lawyers'] |
AYS Daily Digest 08/09/2021: Amid the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, Europe makes sure “2015 won’t happen again” | AYS Daily Digest 08/09/2021: Amid the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, Europe makes sure “2015 won’t happen again”
Protest against new plans for EURODAC // Report on political economy of the border industrial complex published // Greece one year after the fire in Moria // Complaint filed against Samos authorities for pushback // New deportation and return bill implemented in Greece, despite criticism // Updates from the Sea // New outrageous anti-migrant law in Denmark Are You Syrious? Follow Sep 9 · 10 min read
One year ago today, Moria camp burned down. See below. Copyright: Sea Watch
FEATURE: Border enforcement amid humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan
Just one day after Kabul fell to the Taliban, German chancellor hopeful Laschet claimed “2015 cannot be repeated”. What happened in 2015 has been interpreted in various ways. However, what happened afterwards is more important. While, in the late summer of 2015, we witnessed a brief moment of actually existing legal entrance routes for people trying to apply for asylum in Europe, the access to these routes from autumn on became more restricted every day. First only specific nationalities where allowed to pass, then the number of individuals who could pass was reduced each day — until finally around 13,000 people were stranded in Idomeni in Northern Greece in a massive, chaotic camp in March 2016. The borders were sealed, Fortress Europe re-erected, all legal routes denied. Since then, the EU has not only not provided any legal entrance routes, but has enforced borders and surveillance and criminalized irregular migration in order to make it impossible for people to succeed in overcoming the system.
Now, with a new humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, there won’t be another 2015, because the EU and Frontex are far better prepared than they were in 2015. In an interview given to Reuters, Frontex CEO Leggeri said that the agency is closely surveilling what is going on not only in Afghanistan but also in neighbouring countries. He said the EU is much better now at returning people as well as assessing the nationality of people who might claim to be Afghans.
Meanwhile, human rights activists are following the rhetoric of the EU towards the Taliban regime with great concern. Instead of the EU providing safe and legal entrance routes, many fear that it is only a question of time before the issue of deportations to Afghanistan will be on the table again. In the last decade, 70,000 people were deported from the EU to Afghanistan.
Nick Buxton, a researcher at the Transnational Institute has said:
“Whether it is member states pushing to continue deporting Afghans or EU statements about working with the Taliban to prevent migration flows, the EU perpetuates its policies of denying safe legal routes to desperate people, knowing that this will lead to many lost lives.”
Border fences are a normality again in Europe — although invisible for people with European passports. According to this article, 13 EU member states have erected fences along their borders, also between neighbouring member states.
However, it is not only the borders of EU country through which the EU tries to deny people access to the asylum system. A huge part of the border work is done by other countries, financed by EU money and framed as state-building, development, or humanitarian action. This article speaks about border externalisation to West Africa.
EURODAC to be turned into a tool of mass surveillance, NGOs fear
Meanwhile, 31 NGOs send an open letter to members of the European Parliament working on new rules for the Eurodac database. The database was established in 2000 and collects the finger prints of people who are apprehended in the context of irregular border crossings. The database forms the backbone of the Dublin system, as matches in Eurodac are used as evidence for determining which country is responsible to lodge the asylum process under the ‘first entry rule’ of the Dublin regulation.
According to the plans, new types of data will be collected in Eurodac, including facial images and biometric data, as well as data about children who are six year’s of age and older. Also the group of people from which data will be collected is to be expanded and should now include irregular migrants, people disembarked following search and rescue operations and people eligible for resettlement within the EU. The letter send to the MEPs calls upon them to implement a delay in the legislative process in order to give time for the consideration of the implications for fundamental rights .
For more info, see:
and here:
Who is profiting from Fortress Europe?
The ‘Advancing Alternative Migration Governance’ project published a report that looks into which private and commercial actors are involved in the implementation of current border control systems and how, through their assumed expertise, they shape and influence policies on what border control systems looks like. | https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-daily-digest-08-09-2021-amid-the-humanitarian-crisis-in-afghanistan-europe-makes-sure-2015-a149c7b077d6 | ['Are You Syrious'] | 2021-09-09 14:36:35.424000+00:00 | ['Digest', 'Afghanistan', 'Europe', 'Moria', 'Refugees'] |
Ditching fossil fuels can tackle affordable housing and climate change | A version of this article appeared earlier in The Hill
BY CARL POPE AND BRUCE NILLES
With the passage of one of the nation’s most ambitious climate policies earlier this year, D.C. has sparked an important conversation — how can all this new clean power be used to lower housing costs and reduce air pollution? The answer is clear: by replacing gas as the primary means of heating and cooling our buildings, and cooking our food, we can slash carbon pollution and lower the cost of new housing.
At a time when the fossil fuel industry is doubling down on gas, Berkeley, California last week became the first city in the U.S. to ban the fuel source in new homes. This is yet another example of how, even while the federal government continues to prop up the pollution economy, local governments are pioneering necessary climate solutions. With its new clean energy policies, now is the perfect time for the local Washington, D.C. government to further its transition beyond gas — and outline a path for cities across the nation to do the same.
Using gas to power our buildings may have made sense when coal was our primary energy source and we ignored gas’s serious health and safety issues. But today it only remains the default thanks to the myopic business tactics of fossil fuel companies. They have misled the public on the impacts of gas, calling it “natural” and “clean” — even though it is neither. This disinformation is furthered by studies like a recent one that argued that an all-electric home in Maryland would emit more pollution than one powered with gas. However, that study — and others like it — used a decade-old data set from when coal provided the majority of Maryland’s electricity.
Burning gas also poses significant health threats — threats that are well studied, but rarely reported. In the kitchen, cooking indoors with gas releases levels of nitrogen dioxide that the EPA says are dangerous and illegal outdoors. John Hopkins scientists have linked gas stoves to asthma attacks.
Despite these urgent reasons to ditch gas in our buildings, fossil fuel advocates are using decade-old data to argue for wasting money — and risking our health — by continuing to use gas in our homes.
Current data presents a starkly different picture. Over the last 10 years, the U.S. retired over 50 percent of its coal fleet, and while cheap, clean energy was not yet as widely available, the use of gas boomed. Today, burning gas emits more carbon than coal. In the District, burning gas in buildings contributes more than half of the carbon pollution emitted within the city, larger than that produced by cars, trucks and buses combined.
With recent advancements in clean energy, however, we have an opportunity to move beyond gas and not only tackle rising levels of carbon pollution, but address another one of the city’s growing crises: affordable housing.
It’s no secret that the D.C. metro area is grappling with a shortage of affordable housing. Many of the District’s lowest-income residents now spend as much as 80 percent of their income just to put a roof over their heads.
In the context of this crisis, new research from Rocky Mountain Institute has found that constructing all-electric homes without any gas service is cheaper than building homes with both gas and electric. This is because cheap prices for wind and solar mean utilities can lock in long-term, low rates and avoid the price shocks to gas customers seen in Chicago and Los Angeles.
This new paradigm of affordable and pollution-free housing wasn’t possible even 10 years ago, but abundant and cheap clean energy and the widespread availability of super-efficient, electric appliances have changed that. With heat pump technology, we can replace gas appliances with new electric appliances that are more than four times as efficient — and don’t emit any air pollution in the home.
Why now? Under the leadership of Mayor Muriel Bowser, D.C. has already taken great strides to reduce pollution from the buildings sector and lower housing costs — and is poised to rapidly pave the way on electrification in coming years. In the past year alone, D.C.’s solar capacity has grown by over 20 percent, and its historic clean energy act means the city will be 100 percent renewable within the next 15 years.
While the fossil fuel industry continues to obfuscate, the transition to a 100 percent clean electricity grid is undeniable — and unstoppable. Initiatives to halt fracking and shutter coal plants mean renewable energy will continue to grow, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and open a new frontier in lower-cost and safer housing for all residents. | https://carlpope.medium.com/ditching-fossil-fuels-can-tackle-affordable-housing-and-climate-change-df0faf6c8a39 | ['Carl Pope'] | 2019-07-23 23:36:03.409000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Fossil Fuels'] |
5 Reasons Why I Opened an Etsy Store | At the beginning of 2019, I was lost. Trying not to drown in a heap of debt. You see, for most of my adult life, I did not receive financial education. At age 16 when I got my first credit card, I didn’t really think about paying off what I put on it.
I know it sounds crazy but sometimes you have a very naive and ignorant view of money when you don’t know how it works.
Years later, when I already realized I’m in trouble, I told myself that everything would be alright when I finished my Computer Science degree and started working for hi-tech salaries. Boy was I wrong. I tried writing in Medium’s Partner Program for a while to make some side-hustle money until I realized I’m sacrificing my creativity for the sake of survival.
It didn’t work. I wasn’t fast enough and writing there only covered my monthly coffee.
Now, after three years in the hi-tech industry, more than 18 months on Medium, and a smaller but still kicking debt, I decided I need a different path. I need more than one income stream to make my dreams come true.
But, in today’s world, any income stream I would pick should have people in mind. I don’t get money in a void — there is a person behind the payment who seeks value for their money.
I tried many paths. And then I found Etsy.
Etsy always seemed vintage and a lot of work. I never knew I could open a shop here with minimal effort. If I knew I would have done that years ago.
So, without further ado, here are five reasons why I decided to open a shop on Etsy.
1. Express My Ideas
A shop like this makes my ideas a reality. As I’m writing stories and creating fantasy worlds, some of those creations will deserve merch.
This shop becomes the perfect place to share those creations and in every sense of the word make my dreams a reality. I have already bought a notebook that I designed straight from my provider.
Next will be some mugs and even face masks.
2. Serve My Audience
My blog has attracted a few hundred people that now receive emails from me. These people also have desires and needs and in fact, some of the products that you will see in this shop would be designed specifically for them.
They have been with me from the beginning and it is for them and the people who will join them that I’m making my creations. They decided to be the audience of those ideas.
3. Learn About Making Money
In the age of the Pandemic, people are looking for salvation. They lost their job, they fear for their future. They seek help.
I want to be that help. Through this journey, I hope to learn enough to be able to explain these lessons to other people.
But, aside from that, I also want to learn for myself how life can look like when money works for you and not against you.
4. Teach Others to Walk The Same Path
For me, learning how to pay off my debt by building a business from scratch, would only be a victory if I can teach that to other people.
So that’s one of the goals of this journey. I not only want to learn how business works and perhaps how to serve people better, but I also want to know enough to explain to people how to start this journey on their own.
I’ve always had educational tendencies. I’m an instructor for a course I opened on Udemy a while ago, I wrote a short course about how to write fantasy from what I learned so far among other educational products.
I always teach because if you don’t then what good is your success? I’m a firm believer in the sentence — success is only good if you can share it.
Perhaps before long, I will be able to share mine.
5. Pay Off My Debt
The holy grail. I used to owe $70k. My debt has taught me many things in life, but it had also made it a lot more difficult. I had countless sleepless nights where I would worry about how to finish the month. I had to lie to friends to avoid telling them about it. For a long time, I also kept it hidden from my parents.
Now things are different. But my burning desire to pay my debt remains.
Conclusion
So, in this store, I intend to express my ideas and serve my audience with those ideas, and also with theirs. It will allow me to learn how money works until I can explain it to other people. And lastly, it will allow me to tackle and hopefully overcome my debt.
Thank you for reading this story! Please feel free to always reach out with new design ideas and I’ll do my best to make them a reality for you.
Enjoy! | https://theorencohen.medium.com/5-reasons-why-i-opened-an-etsy-store-749dab929e90 | ['Oren Cohen'] | 2020-09-25 08:05:01.726000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Geek', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Ecommerce', 'Business'] |
Stakes Are ‘Enormous’ for CBD Regulations as FDA Hearing Draws Nearer | The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will hold its first ever hearing on cannabis compound CBD on Friday, amid immense pressure from the food and beverage industry and dietary supplements makers move quickly on CBD regulations.
Friday’s long-awaited hearing, announced prior to the departure of former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, will serve only as a listening session for the agency. Policy won’t be determined right away ー it could take months or even years to establish official regulations ー and yet the stakes are still high.
“The FDA is on an information gathering mission,” said Rod Kight, cannabis legal expert and attorney at Kight Law. “There’s not any immediate stakes involved, but in the big picture the stakes are enormous.”
CBD, or cannabidiol, is a compound derived from hemp or marijuana that has been praised for various health and wellness benefits, as well as for not getting its consumers high. It has existed in something of a legal gray area for years, meaning very little research has actually been done on it. And because there is virtually no regulation in the industry, it is difficult if not impossible for consumers to know exactly what the CBD products they purchase actually contain and what effects they can expect.
When Congress passed the 2018 Farm Bill in December, it removed industrial hemp and its compounds, like CBD, from the purview of the Controlled Substances Act. The FDA immediately stepped up to say that in spite of the shift, adding CBD to food and beverages or making health claims about it are strictly prohibited, in part because the compound has already been regulated by the FDA through prescription seizure reduction medication Epidiolex from GW Pharmaceuticals ($GWPH).
A decision to permit the use of a prescription compound in over-the-counter supplements would greatly undermine the FDA’s own established clinical trial process, Kight said.
“If companies are going to be willing to spend millions of dollars and years and years on research and development to push these products through, the FDA wants to encourage that,” Kight said, adding that “CBD itself and cannabis compounds have been in the food supply … for hundreds and maybe thousands of years.”
“On the one hand the FDA has to preserve the integrity of the its process and by the law, on the other hand there is such an enormous push to have it available and to regulate it properly that it’s at a crossroads,” he said.
Much of that push is coming from a rash of businesses that popped up hawking everything from burgers with CBD-infused sauce to cosmetics in an effort to take advantage of a market that is projected to hit $22 billion by 2022. Any decisions the agency makes concerning banning or limiting the use of hemp-derived CBD in food, beverages, and supplements could hurt those businesses. But experts like Kight and Eric Berlin, partner at Dentons and a leading cannabis legal authority, speculate that the FDA will ultimately end up with a bifurcated system in which lower potency cannabinoids like CBD can be included in food and supplements, while higher potency forms will be reserved for prescription drugs.
“I believe the FDA’s concern is with very high doses of CBD, and of course adulterated product, and of course [health] claims. I believe that their efforts in this area will be geared mostly to those three and that they will be trying to find a way to not have a whole industry-wide crackdown,” Berlin said.
Long term, regulations for CBD could form the basis for the entire industry should marijuana be legalized on the federal level.
As the FDA inches closer to regulating hemp and CBD, other government agencies are clarifying their own stance on the issue.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday released guidance on hemp as it relates to interstate commerce. According to a legal opinion from Stephen Vaden, general counsel to the Department of Agriculture, states and Native American tribes have the authority to prohibit or more stringently regulate hemp, but they cannot interfere with hemp shipments across state lines. The opinion referenced a case earlier this year in which Idaho police confiscated a shipment of hemp from Oregon to Colorado ー and a local judge ruled they did have to return it.
The Transportation Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, also updated its official policy over the Memorial Day weekend to allow travelers to pack hemp and CBD in their checked and carry on luggage. The TSA still forbids traveling with any federally illegal substances, including medical and recreational marijuana. How exactly agents are expected to gauge THC content ー the only differentiator between marijuana and hemp ー of various, unregulated products found in luggage is still an open question.
“The final decision rests with the TSA officer on whether an item is allowed through the checkpoint,” the TSA clarified on its site. | https://medium.com/cheddar/stakes-are-enormous-for-cbd-regulations-as-fda-hearing-draws-nearer-860f5ec31a63 | ['Chloe Aiello'] | 2019-05-29 19:29:07.783000+00:00 | ['Marijuana', 'FDA', 'Cannabis', 'Farm Bill', 'Cbd'] |
A Basic Guide To Mobile Wallets | In today’s world, where our smartphones are turning out to be our ever faithful shadow, fusing together everything from news, work, entertainment, communication, and more into our palm, it’s no surprise that mobile wallets are emerging as a comfortable solution for payments.
There is a whole lot of options out there, leaving many confused about the best method to adopt. Should I go for net banking, credit/debit cards, the various mobile wallets offering different discounts on different sites or more likely, a combination of them? So far, people have grabbed whatever is readily available to pay for their daily bills, movie tickets, cab rides and just about everything, and here, mobile wallets seem to have scored over others. The checkbook or more correctly, the checking account used to be the springboard for banks to continue, well, banking on their relationship with users by upselling other services. But today, the fundamental platform is rapidly shifting to the mobile, from the checkbook. Meaning, tech companies can now turn into the entry point to banking in ways which were just not possible before, especially, though not only, through payments. Yet, mobile payment adoption hasn’t caught on as fast as expected.
Mobile payment technology has grown in fits and spurts.
Over the past few years, Android Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Square, PayPal and more, have all introduced ways to finish a purchase or exchange money using a mobile phone. Also, some vendors, have created their own mobile payment systems and integrating even order fulfillment. It’s driving an evolution in payments. Mobile wallets are still a relatively new but rapidly growing concept, aiming towards a cashless society. However, it will take a lot longer before traditional wallets are entirely replaced. But the adoption of this technology has seen a considerable growth in the past few years. The reason is quite apparent. Mobile wallets have made the payment process an entirely seamless one for us. If you are still new to the concept, here’s what you need to know:
What is a mobile wallet?
Simply put, a digital wallet is to a traditional wallet what an email is to postcards. Most of these wallets work through apps you can download on your smartphones, hence the term mobile wallet. Like Uber made hailing a taxi just a few taps away, a mobile wallet makes payments a few taps away, through the user’s smartphone. Interestingly enough, Uber has the option of using mobile wallets to pay for the trip rather than hard cash. So even if you don’t have cash and you’re too lazy to walk to an ATM, a mobile wallet will allow you to make transactions. Just ensure you have money in your mobile wallet, which you can add through net banking or credit/debit card. In fact, often mobile wallets, categorized for an NFC integration on mobile, allows a secure credit card payment via mobile.
So is the smartphone mightier than the wallet? | https://medium.com/swlh/a-basic-guide-to-mobile-wallets-230e95907ee4 | ['Amit Ashwini'] | 2019-07-18 08:28:31.071000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'Fintech', 'Mobile Payments', 'Software Development', 'Mobile Wallets'] |
“Show Me Your Friends and I Will Tell You What You Are” | Spanish Proverb
People have a huge impact on your life. “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” says American entrepreneur and motivational speaker Jim Rohn.
You should think about the people you are associating with the same way you think about what you eat and how you’re exercising. Here are a few examples on just how poignant this one reality can be.
The “PayPal Mafia” is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional successful technology companies such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of these so-called members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at some point in their studies.
Why do we denigrate a smoothly run southern Mediterranean conglomerate with tight hierarchical structures by associating it with some slick tech startups? The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bust of 2001. The PayPal Mafia phenomenon has been compared to the founding of Intel in the late 1960s by engineers who had earlier founded Fairchild Semiconductor after leaving Shockley Semiconductor. The selection process and technical learning at PayPal played a role, but the main factor behind their future success was the confidence they gained there. Their success has been attributed to their youth; the physical, cultural, and economic infrastructure of Silicon Valley; and the diversity of their skill-sets. PayPal’s founders encouraged tight social bonds among its employees, and many of them continued to trust and support one another after leaving PayPal. An intensely competitive environment and a shared struggle to keep the company solvent despite many setbacks also contributed to a strong and lasting camaraderie amongst former employees.
Members of the PayPal Mafia in Their Sunday Finest
The tale of Standard Oil’s proclivity to gobble up competitors in the process of gaining control of the stream of commerce within its industry is well known. Less known is John D’s benevolence towards the owner/founders of these absorbed entities. The talented ones were kept on and given raises with profit sharing. The truly gifted ones were brought into corporate headquarters at 26 Broadway to help the manage the firm. The company grew rapidly as the oil business became socially ensconced with American society. While John D. Rockefeller was the unassailable head of the organization, the limelight was left to his active partners: Henry H. Flagler, Samuel Andrews, Stephen V. Harkness, Charles Pratt, Henry H. Rogers, his brother William Rockefeller and numerous others. After the breakup of Standard Oil for alleged monopolistic control of an industry in 1911 all these gentlemen went onto successful careers in business as well as philanthropic endeavors which largely define our cultural landscape today.
Strong associations are not limited to the world of business. The world of sports is replete with fruit-of-the-tree analogies. Let us take as an example a rather well-known Football Coach and the legacy he left behind:
Parcells’ Big Blue Wrecking Crew
Published by Luigi Rosabianca of Shield Advisory Group | https://medium.com/@lou-18943/show-me-your-friends-and-i-will-tell-you-what-you-are-bf43cff713bf | ['Luigi Rosabianca'] | 2020-12-03 18:06:08.744000+00:00 | ['Shieldadvisorygroup', 'Consulting', 'Case Study', 'Business Strategy', 'Luigirosabianca'] |
A Psychological Masterwork That Will Leave You Begging for the Single Sound of Music | A Psychological Masterwork That Will Leave You Begging for the Single Sound of Music
This review originally appeared on Operawire.com on December 17, 2020.
This review contains spoilers. The author strongly recommends that you first get acquainted with the work on Spotify, and later come back to the article.
I wish I could start my acquaintance with works of the composer Katarzyna Głowicka with something more tangible — lighter or heavier, whiter or blacker, louder or quieter. With anything else at all.
Kasia’s past commissions include Warsaw National Opera House, La Monnaie, Holland Symfonia, BBC Scottish Ensemble, Ensemble Recherche, Holland Symfonia, and European Contemporary Orchestra. And there is (and hopefully will be) much to say about her works with The Airport Society in Brussels.
“Lilian” review is a cover story on Operawire.com on December 17 and 18.
But when I start my work with the Polish composer’s piece, I have only read an interview speaking about “Lilian” and then I listened to it immediately.
“The refugee crisis has mostly disappeared from the front pages in Europe but remains a daily struggle for thousands of people.”
The refugee crisis is a difficult topic, and so I presumed that pure emotions would become a sure guide in writing this review. But in fact, it took me two weeks to simply explain — first, to myself — how am I going to convince you to listen to this undoubtedly important yet unbearably difficult piece.
The radio play “Lilian,” which I’m not calling an opera, will show you more horrors of reality than you are used to seeing. This piece makes you discover the weakest and the most frightening parts inside of your self even though it says nothing directly about you.
The music is over.
The plot is based on the WhatsApp messages exchanged between a professor in Europe and a young Eritrean man trapped in a Libyan refugee camp. There is no promise of a happy ending, but you cannot possibly imagine what the biggest challenge in this play will be.
Having been promised to hear an opera, I am painfully waiting for the sounds of music. The narrative unfolds stubbornly and each new message gives no relief. Feeling under pressure, I’m still expecting the music to come and to save us. But the piece is passing fast, and eventually, I’m losing hope.
There’s a lot of weakness and inability in these 25 minutes. Loads of fear and violence, to which we are already accustomed in the modern world. And from which we so easily can escape on daily basis. “You cannot change it, don’t worry,” modern therapists teach us. But here, in “Lilian,” audially present on two continents, we seem to be locked in a room of weakness and despair. We cannot change it, but are also unable to escape.
Why don’t we hear what we expected?
Desperation takes out all the energy and there’s nothing to feed the orchestra on. The only mechanical noise in the background keeps us from falling into silent oblivion. And the weakness of the moment is going through the whole body, so where could the power for singing come from?
This noise, lack of sound, this cry might not be something a composer is supposed to produce. What if it was the only real sound she, Lilian, was able to produce living through this lack of will, of power, of simply breathing in this story.
But then, I see this piece as something almost musical and surely created by a composer. Perhaps, these are the only sounds suitable to expose such conditions.
Hope(less)
Although Katarzyna Głowicka noted that the story illustrates the power of hope and that the two main characters are united by their shared sense of humanity, I could only see this piece revealing that none of our kindest motives can go over the borders and that only the powerlessness unites people in the modern world. We can only sit, and type messages, and wait. And, yes, through this we can find hope and trust.
“Lilian” is a story that might have to be told as a story of hope because nobody wants to hear it simply as it is. And it is one of the first attempts to bring such a difficult and bleak topic into the opera world — the world that seemed to have the right sound for everything before — love, war, betrayal. But this? Nothing sounds right for it.
By the end of my discourse, a bright cross-discipline example comes to my mind. As an experienced graphic designer, I work with empty spaces more often than with objects. White space — black letters, short sentences — it’s all clear. Negative space helps me to focus attention on the words and meanings; it screams “Look, only this matters!” And no decorations are needed.
Kasia Głowicka didn’t want to make it easier, brighter, or more beautiful for us. And therefore, she hasn’t decorated her work. Her awareness is enough — it’s already overwhelming. I believe she craved to bring us a both-sides perspective on the war conflict, in which we all are involved — in our warm beds, or cells — in our common impotence. Only music can awaken and empower us. Music can heal.
Silence is violent. It’s heavy, dark, and merciless. And while humankind is waiting to be saved by a single sound, the silence doesn’t need any reinforcement at all.
Are we ready to hear it? | https://medium.com/opera-in-review/a-psychological-masterwork-that-will-leave-you-begging-for-the-single-sound-of-music-6b9a1653b084 | ['Polina Lyapustina'] | 2021-01-18 19:29:10.064000+00:00 | ['Radio', 'Performance', 'Refugees', 'Review', 'Culture'] |
Watch out Congress, Nina Turner is coming | While there will be detractors in both parties, one thing we know for sure is that Turner is for us, not the one-percent. Many opponents of policies like Medicare for All or a $15 minimum wage will say it is too soon or we’re moving too fast to implement these things, but this pandemic proves that we’re right on time. We may have lost the electoral battle of 2020, but the war for the soul of the Democratic party is ours for the taking because we won the argument.
The time is always ripe to do right. – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., 1968
This is primarily why I love that Turner is running for Congress. She is not going to wait or be told when the right time will be to address the issues that make people uncomfortable, especially those who have been more than well off through the pandemic and one of the greatest wealth transfers in history. A shift in America’s priorities with steadfast focused leadership will need to take shape and Turner can do much more than just rise up to the challenge, she can shine and lead us through the inevitable justice required for us to move forward as a nation.
Four days before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, he gave his last Sunday sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. where he stated with great urgency about the need for those who present themselves as good people to not let time become a force of social stagnation. Because what is inevitable can only wait on so much time, and “the time is always ripe to do right.” An outright rejection of the bloodshed, violence, and brutality must be met by the people who are put in power––remember, we vote for these folks and need to hold them accountable every November, not just presidential elections.
In this spirit, Turner not only recognizes the urgency of the people, but is ready and willing to take action on it. Her campaign announcement, ‘No Honeymoon’, holds nothing back and captures the need to hold the Biden administration accountable. More importantly, Democrats will hold the smallest majority in House seats in more than a century, which is going to put an increasing amount of pressure on Blue Dog Democrats. And with the potential addition of Turner, my bet is Nancy Pelosi is shaking in her boots and the Democratic Party will pull out all of the tricks to block her from being elected.
Let’s be clear, this is nothing new as many left-wing congressional candidates before Turner like AOC, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman faced the same obstacles. However, they had a much tougher road as they were fresh faces that had to take on Democratic incumbents with decades of experience in their primaries. On the contrary in Turner’s case, she is running for a wide open congressional seat with potentially four to six other candidates giving her a better shot than her peers. The reason being is that Turner already has a great amount of name recognition from her time representing portions of the district as a Cleveland City Councilwoman, Ohio State Senator, and on the trail with the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns in both 2016 and 2020.
Additionally, this district is a Democratic stronghold including most of the majority-black precincts between Cleveland and Akron. Thus, it would be safe to assume that the winner of the Democratic primary would go on to win the seat. In these types of congressional seats, the question is usually what kind of Democrat will be elected—a progressive or the typical neo-liberal corporatist bought out by special interests that follows whatever leadership tells them. Turner will certainly not be the latter and the prospect of her being sent to Congress will not only increase the leverage of progressives within the House, but also provide the leadership that the progressive movement desperately needs as Bernie will seek to pass the torch pretty soon.
I along with many others will have my fingers crossed in hopes of Turner turning this out because there is nothing I would love more than a cutthroat Turner speech from the House floor calling out Pelosi and the rest of her minions. I’m counting on it!
– Peace be unto you. | https://medium.com/@odali/watch-out-congress-nina-turner-is-coming-ed47f93ad79b | ['Steven Odali Rodriguez'] | 2020-12-24 14:01:30.348000+00:00 | ['Congress', 'Democrats', 'Progressive', 'Nina Turner', 'Republicans'] |
Dadrock — Best Albums of 2020. What a fucking year. Here are the… | What a fucking year. Here are the albums that stood out for me in 2020.
Fiona Apple, Fetch The Bolt Cutters
When Wilco released their masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2001, it was the perfect soundtrack for the post-9/11 era. “Tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad sad songs” (“Jesus, etc.”); “I would like to salute, the ashes of American flags” (“Ashes of American Flags”) — Jeff Tweedy’s plaintive lyrics resonated with an audience grappling with a new world order. But remarkably, he wrote those songs before the planes crashed into the WTC. Wilco finished production in early 2001, months before 9/11. The album’s prescience is haunting. Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters doesn’t directly foretell a global pandemic, or suggest that we would all be on lockdown for most of the year, but there is a homespun quality to the music, created pre-pandemic, that made it the perfect soundtrack as time lost meaning, high fidelity was replaced with ambient echos of living room concerts on Zoom, and we found unique ways to entertain ourselves. Pots and pans are used as percussion. Dogs bark in the background. Fetch The Bolt Cutters was like a visit from an old friend who shows up unexpectedly, but you’re damn glad to see them.
2. Haim, Women In Music Volume III
A creative leap for a trio of Jewish girls from the Valley. There’s certain consistency to the tracks as the album unfolds; you keep waiting for the dud but the dud never seems to come. Not sure what they mean by “bonus tracks” but the trio of songs that close the album (“Now I’m In It”, “Hallelujah” and “Summer Girl” are among the strongest of the album. All killer, no filler.
3. Run The Jewels, RTJ 4
On May 29th, for an excruciating 8 minutes and 46 seconds, George Floyd’s life was extinguished. At a time when we were already stuck at home looking in the literal and proverbial mirror, an American reckoning was explored anew. Five days later, RTJ dropped their fourth album. On tracks like “yankee and the brave (ep. 4)” and “holy calamafuck” you can practically hear the concrete underneath a million boots hitting the streets in anguish and indignation.
4. Waxahatchee, St Cloud
Katie Crutchfield AKA Waxahatchee knows a thing or two, because she’s seen a thing or two. Exhibit A:
Tomorrow could feel like a hundred years later
I’m wiser and slow and attuned
And I am down on my knees
I’m a bird in the trees
I can learn to see with a partial view
I can learn to be easy as I move in close to you
5. Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
“I Know The End” as the credits roll on this emotional, deep dark turgid year. The Spotify Canvas for that song is Phoebe making out with an older woman on a loop which is distracting.
6. Bruce Springsteen, Letter To You
2020 was poised to be a big year for Bruce, with a new album and world tour with the E Street Band put on hold due to the pandemic. Letter To You is his twentieth studio album; in a modern spin, it was released as a documentary on Apple TV+ which is a good way for us “visual learners” aka aging dadrockers to take it in. A trio of tracks (“If I Was the Priest,” “Janey Needs a Shooter” and “Song for Orphans”) feature lyrics from deep in the archives of Bruce’s diaries, reworked for now, and give a clever nod to the early days of his “next Dylan” hype almost a half century ago. Letter To You is also an album of reflection and loss from a man who presumably can’t go on doing this forever, but damn if he’s not going to try.
7. Nathaniel Rateliff, And It’s Still Alright
An elegy for his lost friend and producer Richard Swift, who took his own life in 2018. They were scheduled to record this album together. A new depth to Rateliff’s canon as he steps away from the Night Sweats and delivers a powerful acoustic leaning collection of thoughtful songs.
8. Bob Dylan, Rough & Rowdy Ways
Is the lyric “I’m just like Anne Frank — like Indiana Jones. And them British bad boys the Rolling Stones” Dylan’s stab at a hip hop boast? Rough & Rowdy Ways is an appropriate description for Dylan 39th (!) studio album. Closing it with a 16 minute tribute to the JFK assassination is such a Kanye move. Get ready for Ye’s 16 minute elegy of Biggie and Tupac.
9. Jason Isbell, Reunions
Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places, but Isbell’s latest has received faint attention in year end best of lists, which is a head scratcher. Hall of Fame Twitter troubadour Isbell delivers another stellar collection of meditations on love, loss and broken souls.
10. Jay Electronica, A Written Testimony
Jay Electronica has been around since myspace was our primary promotional music driver, yet A Written Testimony is somehow his debut album. Both contemporary and a throwback to a more compelling era of hip hop, when Jay Z and Kanye were at the top of their games.
11. Avett Bros, The Third Gleam
If I could quarantine pod with one artist, it’d be the Avett Brothers, hands down. You’re sitting down to a nice brew of coffee and hot oatmeal, look over, and Scott pulls out a banjo and harmonica, Seth with a simple acoustic. The best…part…of waking up, is Avetts in your cup!
12. Andy Shauf, The Neon Skyline
There’s something about the Springsteen of Saskatchewan*’s music that makes you stop what you’re doing whenever you hear it and figure out who it is, where is it coming from, where is it going.
[*”Springsteen of Saskatchewan” is a preposterous and inaccurate way to describe Shauf; I just liked the way it rolled off the tongue.]
13. Drive By Truckers, The Unraveling
“Thoughts And Prayers” is a devastating gun control missive that makes you look back wistfully at the halcyon days when the only floating virus we were concerned with was the bullet.
14. Clem Snide, Forever Just Beyond
“Roger Ebert” and “Don’t Bring No Ladder” is a devastating 1–2 punch to kick off an album.
15. Everything Is Recorded, Friday Forever
Not much of a track record of successful side projects created by record label execs, yet here we are. XL Recordings founder Richard Russell delivers the goods, a completely contemporary experience, out Gorillaz-ing the Gorillaz, though to be fair their album was very good as well.
16. Car Seat Headrest, Making A Door Less Open
Do yourself a favor if you haven’t already — pause the podcast and spend 5 minutes with “Can’t Cool Me Down”. Or if you prefer, check out a 2020 band practice during quarantine in their performance of it on Fallon.
17. Jeff Tweedy, Love Is The King
With its No Depression alt country flourishes, Love Is The King plays like a great lost Uncle Tupelo album, albeit one where Tweedy took the mic for all of the songs. Obama dug it.
18. Sufjan Stevens, The Ascension
The anti-lockdown album — where releases by the likes of Fiona Apple, Taylor Swift, the Avett Bros etc sound like they were made within the confines of quarantine, The Ascension is big, majestic and expansive.
19. Sylvan Esso, Free Love
Makes me miss the days of cocktails in a hotel lobby, and mall dressing rooms.
20. Taylor Swift, folklore
What are you doing to me, Taylor? I’m a grown man, heading towards a half century of living, listening to your output this year like it’s your personal Nebraska. When my kids come in the room I self consciously turn it off. I need help Taylor.
The full list: | https://medium.com/@dadrock/dadrock-best-albums-of-2020-1e5e37e0d017 | ['Steve Seidel'] | 2020-12-25 18:15:24.480000+00:00 | ['Album Review', '2020', 'Music', 'Best Of', 'Indie'] |
How to Get a New Habit To Stick | Identify the new habit. What is the new habit that you would like to incorporate? Is it meditating? Gratitude? or is it a little bigger like a full-blown morning routine? The key is to start small and add to it gradually. For example, let’s say you want to have an evening routine. Start by implementing one or two tasks. I wanted to practice gratitude and read daily. Starting small would be committing to reading one page every day or simply adding have some fruit and a glass of water to your morning routine and gradually add to it. Why? Why do you want to start this new habit? Our minds are very powerful which is why having a strong why will help you to actually get the task done. Is this habit something you want to do or you feel like you should do? See the difference, you are less likely to complete a task you should do as opposed to one you want to do. If your why is because you should be doing it you need to really think about it and rephrase your why. Be purposeful and intentional. A lot of this is mind over matter. For example, my why for the daily gratitude practice was because at the time I was feeling very gloomy and I knew that a little gratitude practice can bring in great benefits including bringing in more positivity into my life, and at that time that’s what I needed. Some questions that might help you strengthen your why would be: Will this new habit make you more confident? Will it make you healthier? Do you want to be healthier? Will it make you happy? Do you value yourself to implement this new habit? What will this new habit do for you? How does it benefit you and do you want that benefit? Now that you have the new habit broken down into small easy to accomplish tasks, and you have a strong purpose let’s figure out when you will execute. It is important to have a trigger to remind you and mentally prepare yourself to do the task. The trigger should be something you already do. For example, my trigger is taking a shower. Every evening I would take a shower before bed. This is a strong trigger because I was already doing it daily. Don’t pick a trigger that you rarely do, that will be setting yourself up for failure. It is best to focus on completing your new habit after the trigger because it will help you to remember your new habit. Plan. Life gets busy sometimes we get tired. Preparation is the key to success. Come up with a game plan that will allow you to overcome the obstacles. an if/then plan. Here are some examples: — If I miss a day of reading I will read 2 pages the following day. If I go to a restaurant I will order an Arnold Palmer instead of soda. Do not skip your new habit 2 days in a row, “if you don’t use it you’ll lose it”. How will you hold yourself accountable? Do you need an accountability partner, maybe a friend to help you stay on track? What will be the consequences? Maybe a friendly bet? Invest in yourself. Do not be afraid to invest in yourself it will help motivate you to accomplish the task. Again you need to set yourself up for success by having the right tools. For example, if you want to start yoga, it will be beneficial to invest in a yoga mat that is comfortable for you. Execute. You are now mentally prepared and ready to execute. You have the tools for success. Please keep in mind that consistency brings results. You are shooting for action. Even if you are tired start by asking your self can I just… start small? Can I just wipe down the counters before starting the game? It a little task that won’t take more than a few minutes and you can decide to keep tidying up or go play your game because you accomplished the task you set out to do. Give yourself permission to suck. Can I just write down my ideas and come back and edit them into an article? Can I just do 10 squats today? (Can I just is a great way to start adding to habits also, “can I just meditate for 30 more seconds?”) Reward yourself for just doing the action, results will come once you’re consistent.
I hope this is helpful. These are some tips that have helped me in cultivating new habits. If you need an accountability partner or help to strengthen your why please do reach out! Have fun cultivating new habits and becoming the best version of yourself!! | https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-get-a-new-habit-to-stick-8def2bfa44ff | ['Bonita Lisa'] | 2020-12-24 17:54:23.189000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Habits', 'Life', 'Self-awareness', 'Productivity'] |
ICEIL Conference 2020 Amity University, New Deli, India | ICEIL Conference 2020 - Amity University, New Delhi, India
Remarks by Bernie Rhinerson, Board Trustee, San Diego Community College District
December 19, 2020
https://www.amity.edu/iceil/default.asp
Good afternoon and thank you for this invitation to participate in this remarkable conference on Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Education. Being the only panelist from the United States on this panel and possibly for this Conference, I am indeed honored to be with you.
I am here representing the San Diego Community College District in San Diego California. It is the middle of the night for me, 1:30 AM Pacific Standard Time, but I wanted to be here to share with you some insights about entrepreneurial education offered by community colleges in the United States and of course to learn from my esteemed colleagues on this panel a little about your work in India, a place I hope to visit after this crazy global pandemic we are all suffering though.
Let me begin by telling you about my role at the San Diego Community College District and my work on the national level with other community college trustees around our country through the Association of Community College Trustees, ACCT.
After a long career in the field of public relations and communications, I was elected to the Board of Trustees of the San Diego Community College District in 2012. In November, I was just reelected to my third 4 year term on the Board. I am one of five Trustees who govern on of the largest community college systems in the United States, with four colleges serving more than 100,000 students in the San Diego region. Our Colleges, Mesa College, Miramar College and City College all offer 2 year Associate Degrees and numerous career focused certificate programs. Through Mesa College we now offer a Baccalaureate Degree in Health Information Management. Our College of Continuing Education serves 40,000 students offering short term career certificate programs.
Our Board oversees the general policy direction of the district, a budget of more than $300 million and a staff of more than 5,000 faculty and support professionals. Since joining the Board in 2012, we have strongly supported the addition of more entrepreneurial education programs and education in communication skills so essential for successful entrepreneurial careers.
San Diego’s Entrepreneurial Environment
In this brief time I have with you, let me share an overview of the entrepreneurial education opportunities at our colleges and how those programs are preparing students to start their own business and to survive in the “Gig” economy.
Let me begin with an overview of the entrepreneurial environment in our region. According to a 2017 survey by the San Diego-Imperial Center of Excellence for Labor Market Research:
• San Diego/Imperial County is home to more than 26,000 startups and small businesses.
• In San Diego County, 95% of business establishments employ fewer than 50 employees. Small businesses are a primary driving economic force.
So clearly in our region, Entrepreneurship is a Viable Field for Students!
That same survey from San Diego-Imperial Center of Excellence for Labor Market Research found that more than 1,800 San Diego/Imperial County community college students who exited a Business and Entrepreneurship program experienced a 37% increase in earnings.
And in a 2019 survey of independent “Gig” economy workers in our region found that more than 30% of Gig workers surveyed wanted to receive more training on how they can market themselves, increase sales and manage finances.
Entrepreneurial Education Opportunities at SDCCD
To respond to this demand for entrepreneurial education, the San Diego Community College District offers a full range of degrees and certificates in Entrepreneurship and Small Business. Degrees range from a focused Associate Degree in Entrepreneurship at Miramar College, an Associate Degree In Entrepreneurial Small Business Management at City College, and a very unique Certificate in Cannabis Dispensary Operations from City College to serve that new and growing industry in California.
Most importantly, all of our degrees include courses in soft skills or communication skills that are so important for students to be successful in the workforce and the entrepreneurial environment.
A recent study by Burning Glass Technologies found that, on average, one in three skills requested in 25 million U.S. job postings is a baseline skill. According to studies from Harvard and Stanford, occupations with the greatest increase in employment and wage over time have been those that require both “soft” and “technical” skills.
And a April 2020 study of job postings in the San Diego region by Center for Excellence for Labor Market Research found that 21st century employability skills in online job postings could be grouped into six categories:
1. Effective Oral and Written Communication. LinkedIn Learning (2020) identified “communication” as one of the top three skills in the workplace.
2. Collaboration Across Networks. As virtual and global collaboration increases, employees must be able to work with people of different generations and backgrounds.
3. Agility and Adaptability. Employers need workers who are resilient, adaptable, and flexible to change.
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism. “Leadership and management” is also one of the top three skills in the workplace.
5. Accessing and Analyzing Information.
6. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving.
To prepare our students with these needed communication skills, our colleges offer these additional courses that prepare our students in these areas:
• Communication
• Problem Solving
• Literacy (Quantitative and Informational)
• Ethical Reasoning
• Knowledge of and Interaction with Cultures and the Physical World
• And more…
Our goal is to not only teach specific career job skills but also help students gain understanding and practice with essential skills such as teamwork, communication, adaptability, creativity, problem solving, conflict resolution, and more.
Examples of courses for an Entrepreneurship program student that give Communication and Listening Skill Development include:
• English 101 Reading and Composition
• Communication Studies 103 Oral Communication
• Entrepreneurship Program Courses for Additional Skill Development
• Business 119 Business Communication (topics include interpersonal communication and international/cross-cultural communication
• Business 150 Human Relations in Business (introduces students to human behavior in business settings)
Each of our four colleges has programs specifically designed to support students who want to pursue an entrepreneurial career.
At Miramar College, in addition to the program course work, students are offered
· Entrepreneurship Workshops
· Start Up Support Services
· Intensive Mentorship
· Coding Application & Web Design support
· Legal Advice & Law Workshops
· Branding & Design Clinics
See this video: https://youtu.be/__LaN2pw4_A
At City College our students have On-Campus Opportunities to lead businesses:
· Student-run food pantry
· Student-run Fantastique
· Student-run Business Resources Center
Our College of Continuing Education was the 2019 Entrepreneurial College of the Year awarded by The National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE). NACCE is the nation’s leading organization focused on promoting entrepreneurship through community colleges and represents 340+ community and technical colleges who serve more than three million students.
The College of Continuing Education has 7 learning centers across the City of San Diego offering career education. I encourage you to view an inspiring YouTube video of one of our students who recently moved to San Diego from India who took courses in Fashion Design to start her own clothing business. See: https://youtu.be/slvTAZc80Ng.
The College of Continuing Education is also fast becoming a leader in online career education. And I am very excited to announce that Our College of Continuing Education has recently entered into a partnership with Unmudl to offer a large group of career skill courses online to students globally. Now, students in India are able to take an entrepreneurial education course from our college in San Diego California or from several other community colleges within the Unmudl college network.
See: https://unmudl.com/colleges/san-diego-continuing-education-79
In particular I would call your attention to the Small Business Planning Certificate which is a two-course Certificate Program that provides students with the principles, practices, strategies, and requirements needed to form and manage a small business. See: https://unmudl.com/colleges/san-diego-continuing-education-79/courses/small-business-planning-certificate-268
Unmudl is developing a national network of community colleges to deliver job skill courses online to a global student audience. Currently the Unmudl network has 7 colleges offering a total of 233 online courses.
See: https://unmudl.com/colleges
Working to Support Entrepreneurial Education
In addition to being a Board Trustee at the San Diego Community College District, I am also a member of the Board of Directors for the National Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT). In these roles, I am working to be a strong advocate for the expansion of entrepreneurial education in our community college system and to ensure that our entrepreneurial programs include vital courses in communications to help students be successful in entrepreneurial careers.
At the national level, ACCT is working with community college boards across the U.S. to educate trustees about the importance of including entrepreneurial education as a key element our workforce training programs. We are also advocating for more Federal funding to support entrepreneurial programs and apprenticeships.
We are at a critical time in our history and in our global history when colleges must provide critical education and re-skilling to prepare students for the post pandemic economy. A recent ACCT report “Reskilling for the Pandemic Recession and Recovery” highlighted the importance of community colleges in workforce development and concluded that Colleges can improve reskilling programs by increasing financial aid, focusing on the unique needs of adult and out-of-work learners, and offering hybrid educational options.
So in conclusion, I look forward to continuing to be a passionate advocate for entrepreneurial education not only at our colleges but nationally and globally.
I believe that in the post pandemic world, the workplace will be dramatically changed and that as educational leaders we have a responsibility to help our educational programs evolve to prepare students for that future. Independent “Gig” work, small businesses, virtual online businesses will continue to grow even more after the pandemic and this will offer huge entrepreneurial opportunities for the students who are educated and prepared.
Thank you again for inviting me and best wishes to all of you for success in 2021. | https://medium.com/@bernierhinerson/iceil-conference-2020-amity-university-new-deli-india-23eac81d5032 | ['Bernie Rhinerson'] | 2020-12-18 22:41:35.614000+00:00 | ['Community College', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Higher Education', 'Workforce Development'] |
Reflections | I’m doing my weekly roundup again! All my posts for the previous week together for anyone who’s interested.
Here’s last week’s featuring poetry, and a short story.
I appreciate all the kind feedback on these posts and I hope that if it’s your first time reading them that you’ll enjoy them too. | https://medium.com/echoes-of-the-soul/reflections-3cf746743e47 | ['Heather Ann'] | 2019-06-16 15:31:02.746000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Writing', 'Poetry'] |
The Ultimate Keto Meal Plan: The Tastiest, Healthiest, and Easiest Recipes You Can Make. | This blog post contains affiliate links for Amazon products. For more information please read our disclaimer page.
What is a keto diet?
The keto diet is a high-fat, low-carb diet. It’s also high in protein. And it turns your body into a fat-burning machine.
There are three phases to the keto diet:
• Ketosis phase — in this phase, you eat very few carbs and sugar, gradually working up to 20 grams per day or less. Your body will turn to fat for fuel.
• Ketogenic Maintenance — once you reach your goal weight, you can continue the ketogenic maintenance phase indefinitely. You’ll want to eat healthy fats and limit your carb intake to about 50 grams per day.
• Pre-keto Transition — before starting the keto diet, you’ll need to give yourself two weeks of pre-keto time where you gradually reduce your carb intake.
Benefits of a keto diet
Eating a keto diet can help you lose weight, get healthier, and even improve your mood.
If you’re looking for a way to get started eating less carbs, ketogenic diets could be the answer for you.
Ketogenic diets are high in fat and low in carbs. They’ve been proven to help with weight loss and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Eating this way can also lower cholesterol levels and blood pressure.
There are many other benefits that come from following a keto diet. For example, it can help with mental clarity and lower feelings of depression or anxiety. And because the diet is high in fat, there’s a possibility that it could even make you live longer!
My Best Kito Diets Recipes And plan
The pitfalls of a keto diet
One of the biggest challenges with keto is just getting started. It can be difficult to even know where to start or what you should be doing.
First, you have to remove all sugars from your diet. This includes natural sugars, like fruit, as well as artificial sugars, like those found in candy and other treats.
You also have to restrict carbohydrates. One of the major tenets of a keto diet is that you’ll need less than 50 grams of carbs per day. That’s about one apple!
Next, you must take it easy on the fat. A ketogenic diet typically contains no more than 20–30 percent fat calories per day — about two tablespoons worth. And this is coming from healthy sources, like nuts and seeds, avocados, fatty fish like salmon, eggs, and oils.
Lastly, you should make sure you are getting enough protein for your body to function well without carbs or sugar.
How to get started on a keto diet
Ketogenic diets are becoming more popular. If you’re considering adopting this way of eating, it can be difficult to get started. There are many benefits to keto diets, but what about the pitfalls?
There are many keto cookbooks available on Amazon that can help you get started on your new way of eating. One popular one is The Keto Diet by Leanne Vogel. This book contains over 125 recipes with ingredients that are easy to find at your local grocer or supermarket.
This keto cookbook offers many helpful tips for those interested in adopting the diet lifestyle. It also has an entire section devoted to cooking for beginners, which includes lots of pictures and clear instructions for making all sorts of basics like eggs, cheese, sauces, and more.
If you’re considering getting into the keto way of living, this is a great place to start!
New way of eating with the help of Leanne Vogel’s cookbook, “The Keto Diet”.
A keto diet is a low-carb, high-fat diet that helps your body produce ketones. When your body burns fat for fuel, it produces ketones. This is called being in ketosis, and it’s the goal of a ketogenic diet.
The Keto Diet by Leanne Vogel is this new way of eating that health experts are touting as a viable alternative to your standard high carb diet. Made with ingredients that can be found at a grocery store or supermarket, these recipes will make adopting this new way of eating easy and tasty!
Overview and synopsis
If you’re interested in starting a keto diet, this post has everything you need to get started. It contains 6 benefits of ketogenic diets, 6 pitfalls of ketogenic diets, and 10 keto cookbooks you should know about. One popular cookbook is the Keto Diet by Leanne Vogel. You can learn more about her book below!
My Best Kito Diets Recipes And plan
Recipes that we’ll see in the book.
The Keto Diet doesn’t contain any recipes. All the recipes are found on Leanne Vogel’s blog, Healthful Pursuit.
So you want to start a blog? Great! But before you do, make sure you know how it works and what you need to do to run a successful blog. | https://medium.com/@tecnicalrambogame11/the-ultimate-keto-meal-plan-the-tastiest-healthiest-and-easiest-recipes-you-can-make-4890da92bd9c | [] | 2021-12-25 11:44:22.403000+00:00 | ['Ketogenic Diet', 'Keto', 'Ketosis', 'Keto Meal Plan', 'Keto Diet'] |
How to solve Two-Sum Algorithm in JavaScript | I think we all can agree on this: Two-Sum Algorithm is sort of a classic data structure challenge. In my blog, I’d like to share two approaches to solving it. The first one is a so-called “brute force” method, and the second one represents a more elegant solution
So, our problem is: Given an array of numbers and a target number, find the sum of two numbers from the array that is equal to the target number. May not sum the same index twice. Return these numbers.
Create a working solution with nested loops (Time complexity: O(n²))
Here, I’m using nested for-loops to check all possible sums in the array. Once I get the right pair, I return them. If nothing matches, an empty array is returned.
function twoSum(nums, target) {
let result = [];
for(let i = 0; i < nums.length; i++) {
for(let j = i + 1; j < nums.length; j++) {
if(nums[i] + nums[j] === target) {
result.push(nums[i], nums[j])
}
}
}
return result;
};
2. Use an Object-based solution (Time coxplexity: O(n))
A more sophisticated and time complexity friendly approach is solving this problem by using an empty object. That will give us O(n) in time complexity.
function twoSum(nums, target){
//FIRST STEP: create an empty Object
let numObject = {}
//SECOND STEP: use a for-loop to iterate through the array
for(let eachNum in nums){
let otherNum = target - nums[eachNum] //we'll check for otherNum in the object and if it's there, we got it and can push in our result array. if(otherNum in numObject){
let resultArr = [];
resultArr.push(otherNum, nums[eachNum])
return resultArr;
} numObject[nums[eachNum]] = eachNum //NB! adding key/value has to go after the if-statement to avoid adding the same index twice. We add the value or a new pair on each iteration.
}
return "not found";
}
Hope it was helpful!
Source: | https://javascript.plainenglish.io/how-to-solve-two-sum-algorithm-in-javascript-90c998dd8aad | ['Anastasia Orlova'] | 2020-12-21 08:06:20.700000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Data Structures', 'Problem Solving', 'Two Sum', 'Algorithms'] |
How to establish work between designers and developers? | Have you ever struggled with a misunderstanding between designers and developers?
Let’s be honest, almost everyone has.
“Why are these developers asking so many questions? Can they just build the website as I have designed? Why are the fonts not the size I wanted?” “Does anyone really care about the font size? It’s impossible to implement your design. Is there any difference between those 2 colors?”
It appears that developers and designers often see the world from nonidentical perspectives and speak different languages.
Have you ever realized that you have no idea, what developers are talking about? Do you still feel scared of words like API, polymorphism, pull requests, etc?
As for the developers, listening to designers’ discussion of empathy maps, wireframes and perfect shade of blue is definitely driving them crazy.
Let’s just accept that, okay?
However, we’re still playing on the same team, aren’t we?
Both designers and developers have the same important goal in mind: “Deliver a great result to the end client”. So, how to achieve this goal most effectively together and avoid getting stressed?
Here are 6 crucial tips for designers that will help to optimize and accelerate designer-developer collaboration:
Communication
This point is the most important one. Talk, discuss, ask and answer questions during the whole design process! Be patient and offer as much help as it is possible. Don’t forget, that both designers and developers are on the same team. Communication is a key factor when it comes to collaboration with other team members. Before starting designing any product or software, make sure you’re on the same page with developers and understand all technical restrictions. Make regular check-ins with the dev team to be sure that everything is moving smoothly according to the plan.
Check out more useful tips on how to arrange designer-developer communication productively here:
“Working Together: How Designers And Developers Can Communicate To Create Better Projects” | https://medium.com/weavik/how-to-establish-work-between-designers-and-developers-53988191eef3 | ['Bohdana Tyshchenko'] | 2020-06-11 20:42:27.586000+00:00 | ['Figma', 'Sketch', 'UX Design', 'UI Design', 'Ux Ui Product Designer'] |
Surviving the mask. | Surviving the mask.
I nearly broke my entire being trying to understand my ex, who was diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.
I never really knew what hit me. In the beginning there were flags, not just red ones. All different coloured flags. I never quite knew where I stood. I never knew why I couldn’t just walk away. Something inside of me felt sorry for this man, and I had this insatiable desire to save him. Save him from being someone I thought was merely a product of his childhood. Boy, was I so very very wrong. This guy didn’t have a bad childhood. In fact, it was probably better than mine. It took time for me to realise that he would literally bad-mouth ANYONE in his life, as long as it gave him attention and the supply he feeds off the most, sympathy.
I became his supply. In the sense that he started manipulating how everyone perceived me. Every single thing he did or said in front of my friends, family, even strangers, was calculated, deliberate and with one intention: to make sure I came across as a monster that poor him was “saddled" with.
This guy moved in with me. He didn’t pay rent. He didn’t buy groceries. I bought all his clothes. I didn’t gain a partner. I unknowingly adopted a child. A child that had such a deep resentment towards every fibre in my being that I started believing that the problem must lie with me. I mean, it had to be me right? No normal human being would stay with someone they treated so terribly unless that person deserved it, right? WRONG!
I’m not even sure where/how/when the constant gaslighting began. But I do remember having to go to hordes of psychiatrists to find out “what was wrong with me". Even when a psychiatrist told me straight to my face that this man is a Narcissist and will destroy my life, my friendships, my support system, I just couldn’t comprehend it. Surely there must be something that I could say or do or if I just showed him endless love, supported his every whim, surely then he would see that life is a good place, people are good and then he would strive to be better. Oh, he did some striving alright, but not in the direction I thought.
People laugh when I tell them what it was like living with this person, the person who put me in hospital several times, the person who I had a child with, the person who ultimately discarded us completely for a new life. Was that enough? No. This same person re-entered our lives, not in the form of a relationship, this person, who had absolute freedom to be with someone else, move on, start fresh, this person who had no logical motive to think that I would be a threat to his new, fabricated life, this person tried to kill me. In front of our child.
This is honestly the shortest possible version I could ever tell. The full story would take me months to write. I would need to go back to therapy to go through everything because I battle to seperate emotion from the memory. But I was silent for long, too long, and it nearly cost me my life, and if this could serve as a warning to anyone else who is in a situation that sounds like this and possibly save them from the destruction it will ultimately crush their life with, then I will be happy. Nobody should ever have to experience this.
He didn’t just target me, he tried to wipe out my daughter from a previous relationship and his own child too. He shoved pills in their birthday cakes, he would leave our toddler in his unlocked car in dangerous areas. He drugged my eldest so that she couldn’t intervene when he attacked me.
The day I nearly lost my life, this person was under the impression that I was unconscious. I was not.
I will never forget the moment the mask fell. The ultimate mask. He had several backup masks through the years. But when that final mask slipped off, I will never forget the way his eyes turned black, his entire face seemed to just…distort. I knew, in that moment I knew, I needed to get as far away from this person as possible, more importantly, I needed to get my children as far away from this person as possible. He was going to kill us.
So we ran. We ran far. But not before he made the ultimate scene at the place I was staying. Not before the police came (for the 8th time I might add) and threatened to arrest ME. He had accused me of stealing his belongings. This final power move ended up being to his own detriment. By this time I had suffered years of abuse. I was ill. I had had a heart attack. I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and Mallory Weiss Syndrome. I was living with PTSD and Panic Disorder. I was being tested for everything under the sun. I was vomiting blood. I was inflamed. My joints were swollen. I believed I was dying. Neighbours started coming out of the woodwork to tell the police about how he would take our daughter for a walk, and pop in, to tell them all about what a horrible person I was, how abusive I was, how my children were terrified of me. The neighbours saw the truth. At last. Each of them had been told a different story. Nothing added up. I was contacted by a social worker who assessed him, I was told to get as far away from him as possible, that he was incapable of feeling emotion. The police advised the same thing, even though I had an ongoing court case against him for domestic violence, which had been postponed several times while he walked around free to do as he pleased. They told me that I would be stuck there for up to five years, fighting him in court. I did not have any energy left. Our small daughter randomly piped up “why does daddy put poison in mommy’s food?”. This guy, this stranger that I had allowed to come into my home, had TOTALLY overlooked the fact that our child could speak and relay things. He viewed her as an object, nothing more. And he actually told her what he was putting in my food whenever he did dinner, because he literally did not think she would say anything. In his mind she was still the baby that couldn’t communicate. Everything made so much more sense. The decline in my health finally made sense.
A friend of mine helped me escape with the few belongings I had left. She was our angel, our beacon of light. I can honestly say that without this incredible woman, I would not be here today. And worse, my children might not be here either. She has taken care of us. She has listened. She has been our rock. I owe her my life.
I am now on quite the cocktail of medication for my heart, blood pressure, hernia, to name a few. My health is nowhere near what it used to be. But I am here. I am alive. My beautiful children are alive. And we will be okay. As a matter of fact, I refuse to believe that we will be anything less than great. | https://medium.com/@aileenhut/i-nearly-broke-my-entire-being-trying-to-understand-my-ex-who-was-diagnosed-with-narcissistic-5e27eddedff7 | ['Aileen Margot'] | 2020-12-13 18:55:12.641000+00:00 | ['Narcissism', 'Happy Endings', 'Abuse Survivors', 'Abuse', 'Life Stories'] |
What is Debugging! How to do it ? | If you are a programmer, coder or a computer science enthusiast then, this is something which you have probably heard from your friend, colleague or in you coding community!
Debugging is such an important part of programming, not just programming but learning too. Because if you know how to debug your code, you are actually going to understand how your code works & how the computer actually run your code!
So, what’s the point of debugging, what do you mean when someone says lets debug our code!
The word DEBUG means to DE-BUG i.e., to remove bugs from code
In order to remove bugs from our code we have to diagnose what is wrong with our program. Debugging concepts are apply to any of the IDEs out there.
So, Here we are using GDB Tool to debug our programs!
Now, What is this GDB Tool?
GDB — The GNU Project Debugger, is a powerful debugging tool for c,c++ and many other programming languages. It allows you to poke around inside your programs while they’re executing.
It actually gives you the opportunity to see exactly what happens when your program crashes. GDB is a command line tool that means you interact with it in a terminal using commands.
It’s a free( libre ) software. The latest version of GDB, version 9.1, is available online. Here are two ways to download GDB Tool :
You can download it for any IDEs which suits you best. It supports mostly all the possible languages. GDB itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows Variants.
You can check that you’ve downloaded the GDB tool with the latest version or not? , by writing a single command in your command prompt!
“ gdb -v ”
From Command Prompt
End of /Part 1
In the /Part 2, you will get to know how it works & what are the commands which helps to debug! You’ll gonna like this tool as it helps you most of the time during debugging! (Here is the part 2) | https://medium.com/@er.sushant.2/what-is-debugging-how-to-do-it-162f5e31ecc1 | ['Sushant Gupta'] | 2020-06-09 15:15:09.112000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Computer Science', 'Tools', 'Debugging', 'Programming'] |
Mobility and COVID Infection Rates | Mobility and COVID Infection Rates
Mobility data is a powerful tool for understanding and anticipating COVID infection rates. Mobility data from cell phone has been used to track the initial spread of the disease, to inform social distancing rules, and to evaluate the impact of recent protests for racial justice on disease spread. But not all movement is the same. As we work with governments and decision-makers to use mobility data for COVID planning, we have noticed a surprising trend. The relationship between movement and COVID infection rates is evolving along different paths in different locations.
Using movement data from our good friends at Mapbox, we analyzed movement patterns across 1129 cities and counties from pre-COVID through the current spike of cases. From this data, we created a unique “Movement-COVID Fingerprint” for these areas. These fingerprints show the very different paths that communities have taken through COVID response and recovery.
Our preliminary conclusions from our work with mobility data are:
At the beginning of the crisis, there was a strong correlation between decreased movement and a subsequent reduction of infection rates a few weeks later.
Over the past few months, some cities have been able to increase movement and maintain decreasing infection rates, while others have not.
Of a range of social and demographic indicators, lower social vulnerability and percentage of African American residents are most correlate with locations that maintain decreasing R(t) (transmission rate) while increasing movement.
Voting patterns are also correlated, but less so. Areas that vote primarily democratic are slightly more likely to have a favorable Movement-R(t) Fingerprint. This is consistent with other research that suggests that people who identify as Democrats are also more likely to wear a mask and maintain safe distances while moving.
Mobility data for COVID response
Movement restrictions are a critical tool for governments to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these restrictions are extremely painful. Understandably, governments want to relax restrictions to the minimum level necessary to keep the virus under control. We’ve seen the best results from governments that have taken a highly data-driven approach to determining when and how to relax restrictions. Mobility data is extremely valuable for evaluating actual social distancing practice and fine-tuning policies to reopen the economy.
We use Mapbox Mobility Data with our partners. We like the Mapbox data because it is:
very high spatial resolution (to the city block)
frequent and fast (daily data delivered by next day)
privacy protecting (no personal data collected from the phone)
To support data-driven COVID response, Mapbox has created a new mobility dataset to measure social distancing practices under COVID. Mapbox Movement Index (MMI) is a mobility dataset to monitor population movement relative to pre-COVID movement rates, down to the city block. This data is incredibly useful when combined with data on infection rates, hospitalization rates and data on social vulnerability.
In the very beginning of the crisis, through the initial lockdown we saw a significant correlation between movement [MMI] at one point of time and infection rates [R(t)] roughly two weeks later.
COVID-19 transmission rate (Rt) shows a strong relationship with movement patterns 14–21 days prior.
However over the course of reopening, we’ve seen this relationship diverge. Some locations have been able to increasing movement without a corresponding increase in R(t).
Movement-R(t) Fingerprints
An analysis tool that our partners have found particularly valuable, is a simple plot of the evolving relationship between movement and R(t) at the city level.
Epidemiologists and policymakers track the average ratio of new infections spread per person in a region, or R(t), to understand how the virus spread. Government and public health officials have all honed in on a goal of an R(t) of less than 1. An R(t) of 1 means that you’ve flattened the curve. Sustained rates above 1 mean that you are on a path to overwhelming your hospital system. The higher the number, the more quickly you will overwhelm the hospital system and the disease will be even more lethal. You can read more detailed explanations here.
A standard time-series line chart can show both MMI and R(t) on the same chart.
But this view of the data can slightly obscures the relationship between the two variables, and how they move with a time delay. We created an alternative “four quad” view. This chart plots the same MMI and R(t) values for each date as a scatter plot, connected by a line to show progress through time. We then annotate these scatter plots with policy decisions and thresholds to indicate broader patterns.
Each point represents the MMI and R(t) values for one date. This chart is technically called a connected scatterplot, perhaps most famously illustrated by Hannah Fairfield in the New York Times.
Looking at the relationship between movement data and R(t) in this fashion provides a fine gauge on how movement and social distancing policies impact actual behavior and movement levels, and in turn how these translate into slowing COVID infection rates.
With this visualization, you hope for a C-shaped graph. At the start of the crisis, people are moving normally and the virus is spreading at its natural rate (R(t) of around 2). Cities and states then enact restrictions on gathering and movement. First, movement levels fall dramatically and within a few weeks these restrictions result in lower infection rates (movement from quadrants A→B→C). A well managed county can then gradually and carefully reopen. In these cases, movement increases without a subsequent increase in R(t) (A→B→C→D). If a county opens too early or too aggressively, infection rates could go back up (A→B→[C→D]→A). These patterns, especially when overlaid with policy decisions, can show us how effectively individual counties have responded to the pandemic.
New York, NY
New York City starts with high-movement and high-R(t). As social distancing policies are enacted, movement decreases, but it takes a few weeks for R(t) to catch up. Eventually once R(t) is below 1.0, movement restrictions can be eased while the resulting impact on R(t) is carefully tracked.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C. moves in a similar pattern. More restrictions imposed seemed to have slowed down movement, though not to the extent of NYC. Interestingly, the Stay At Home order seems to have been instituted after movement had already significantly decreased.
Harris County, TX
Harris County in Texas (home to Houston), represents a county where the curve hasn’t followed the same path. Movement only dropped to about half of the baseline, as opposed to 20–35% in DC in New York. The infection rate in Harris County continues to rise. A mask mandate was ordered on July 2nd.
Miami-Dade County, FL
Miami-Dade County’s curve looks similar to Washington, DC for the first month. As movement starts increasing, there is a sharp rise in R(t). It subsequently falls for a two week period before rising again.
Divergent Reopening experiences
In April and May, fingerprints followed predictable patterns. A significant decrease in mobility would eventually be followed by a steady decline in R(t). Cities that did not reduce movement would churn in a high R(t) cycle.
In June and July we’ve seen a greater divergence in experience. Overall movement has increased in most cities and counties. However some counties were able to increase movement while keeping R(t) low. Others were not.
This suggests that not all “re-opening” is the same. How people move about and interact matters. In addition to where they are going, what activities they engage in, and critically what precautions they take to safely go back into public can have significant effects on resulting transmission rates. Do people wear masks in public? Do they keep a safe distance? Do they avoid crowded indoor spaces?
What factors lead to “good reopening”
This divergence presents a critically important research question for safely reopening an economy. What practices allow a community to maintain low infection rates even as you increase the movement and economic activity? It isn’t enough to study locations that have low infection rates vs. high infection rates. It is more interesting to study communities that have been able to increase movement while maintaining low R(t), to understand what allows them to achieve this. Essentially, what are the characteristics that allow an area to break the relationship between movement and disease rates. This provides hope for developing safer ways to reopen the economy.
We looked at a range of demographic, economic, and social indicators to determine which best correlate with places that have managed to break this relationship across 1129 cities and counties in the US.
Our preliminary findings suggest that:
Areas with vulnerable populations are harder to reopen safely. A county’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) score was the most predictive factor on whether increased movement would lead to increased transmission rates.
Numerous studies suggest that Black and Brown people are disproportionately paying the cost of COVID. Our analysis is consistent with that finding, in that areas with a higher percentage of African Americans were less likely to escape the movement/COVID relationship.
Areas that tend to vote for Democrats were slightly more likely to be areas that fared better as movement increased. This is consistent with other research that finds that people who identify as Democrats are more likely to trust public health officials and are more likely to engage in practices like wearing masks.
Restaurants probably deserve scrutiny. For the small subset of cities where restaurants reservation data is available, restaurant reservation trends were highly correlated with disease trends. That doesn’t necessarily mean that restaurants are worse than other locations. We didn’t have any data that would allow us to look at attendance at gyms, bars, tattoo parlors, libraries, or grocery stores.
There is more research to do. We will continue to investigate how communities reopen safely and would love to team up with other researcher and policymakers. Please contact us if you’d like to collaborate.
R(t) data from the CovidActNow API | https://medium.com/devseed/mobility-and-covid-infection-rates-6e2185207cbb | ['Drew Bollinger'] | 2020-07-08 00:48:31.348000+00:00 | ['Movement', 'Mobility', 'Covid 19', 'Mapping', 'Health'] |
Not My Yellow Panties, Part 3 | Not My Yellow Panties, Part 3
After fucking the stranger in his hotel room, tasting his cum, swallowing it, letting him use and violate me in ways I’ve yearned for, while my husband was at home doing who knows what to his fat little side chick with her fucking ugly yellow panties, I went home. Of course, as a flight attendant, it took longer than just a jaunt across town. I found this stranger in another city, an airport hotel, far from home. Being in my profession, I could cheat on my husband whenever I wanted, but I never had. Not until a few days ago. And that was after finding his mistress’s panties in my fucking laundry room. I am angry, can you tell?
My revenge sex was hot. At least there was that. My husband hadn’t fucked me like that in months. Maybe that’s how long he’s been hammering his new girl, who knows. I want to catch them. I want to walk in on them and see what she does to him, what he does to her. It wouldn’t be a shock now. The shock was finding her undies. Again, in my fucking laundry room! So what did I do when I got home? I fucked his brains out.
Remember, we were supposed to have date night. I bought a copy of those terrible yellow cheekinis (in my smaller size of course) that I found, her yellow cheekinis. I’ll tell you, if it weren’t for the color, they would be hot. But yellow underwear. It’s the color of something I’m not ever trying to think of during sex. Whatever. Date night is later. And I am going to wear them. To see if he notices. I wonder if he looks for them. I wonder if he even knows they are missing, or were ever there to begin with. Maybe they got scooped up after their clothes came off when they jumped into the shower together. We have an overly big shower, plenty of room for sex. Hot, soapy sex. I wonder if she lathered him up, scrubbed every inch, rinsed him off, and then got her knees and presented her face for fucking. Or did he fuck her from behind, her hands on the glass, moaning, screaming as his cock went farther and deeper inside her. Maybe he got her worked enough and stretched her other entry with a soapy finger, before fucking her in her slutty little ass. The shower, after all, is the best place for that, at least to start. It’s nice and clean!
That’s what I think about now. What he did to her, and what she did to him. And then I think about my stranger. In a way I’m glad I found her fucking underwear. It led to the best sex I’ve had in quite a while. Well, until I got home that is.
My husband was home when I returned. I put on my happy face, I can do that. Most girls can’t. I can. Oh they say they can, but why then do their husbands always say, “what’s wrong? I know something is wrong.” Of course they do, they can sense it. They aren’t as dumb as we would like them to be. Actually, this was easy. I was happy. I had just gotten laid the night before, I came more than once, and felt valuable again. So, yeah, I was happy! We exchanged pleasantries and a quick kiss. I told him I need a shower after the flight, a long hot, soapy shower, and left him in the living room to enjoy whatever he was doing before I returned.
I made my way through the bedroom, I unzipped my skirt, and unbuttoned my blouse, tossing both of them onto the bed as I walked into the bathroom. I started the shower, letting the water heat up before I stepped in. Meanwhile, I wiggled out of my black silk panties and let my VS bra fall to the tile floor. I left them there. I stole a glance at myself in the mirror, grabbed my razor, and stepped into the shower. The same shower that he probably fucked Ms. Yellow Panties in. I bet her tits were all soaped up and on this glass. Whatever. I enjoyed my shower. I made myself smooth in all the right places, and had a little shower fun with the wand. Enough to turn me on.
After my shower, I dried my hair with the hair dryer. Why? You’ll see. I re-applied a little makeup, using the pink lipstick that my husband likes, and just the right amount of blush to bring a dab of color. I didn’t want the evening fuck me look, I wanted cute but sexy. I got it. That would be the only color for the rest of the evening. I made sure my skin was completely dry, and dressed myself up. Black fishnet stockings, black gloves, and a black corset. Oh, and a black thong that I am quite sure when I bent over showed my tiny little pussy; all smooth of course. I completed the look with a sexy pair of black heels that matched it all. I went deep into the closet to find my black sex whip. I was angry. I was horny. And I was going to do whatever the fuck I wanted.
I walked out the bathroom, making sure the sound of my heels was heard on our faux-wood floor. Click, click, click. Out of the bedroom, I reached the living room. He was on the couch, watching some dumbass sports show, he couldn’t see me from where I was. “Get the fuck up, ” I said, and tapped my heel on the floor, loudly. It startled him. He turned around and saw me. “Get in the fucking bedroom, now!” He did as he was told. Wouldn’t you?
Click here to see what I did to this poor soul when he went to the bedroom.
Please follow me if you want to hear the rest of the story! It’s free to follow and helps me keep writing! Also, message me on reddit or Twitter, I love to chat! | https://medium.com/sexual-compass/not-my-yellow-panties-part-3-7e2639f8b5ad | ['Avery Montgomery'] | 2021-09-16 15:52:05.455000+00:00 | ['Revenge', 'Erotica', 'Cheating', 'Erotica Series', 'Sex'] |
Your Body is a Temple. | I was inspired to take my first yoga class because of my eating disorder.
Yoga was a practice for me to continue 𝙥𝙪𝙣𝙞𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 my body + myself for 𝙚𝙭𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜.
Learning to respect my body,
Learning to honor my body,
Learning to cherish my body,
Learning to celebrate my body,
Took me yeaaaaaarrrrrrrssssss. Literally.
Age 5: earliest memories of shame/hatred towards myself
Age 10: eating disorder began
Age 18: first yoga class
Age 23: began honoring my body as a temple
I remember having a conversation with my grandma who is 83. She was talking about how she didn’t want to eat a piece of cake because she might gain weight. That’s when it really struck me. I didn’t want to be 83 and worrying about my body. I didn’t want to spend my entire lifetime loathing myself.
That moment, in combination with a few key others, really struck me. I decided that wasn’t going to be my life or my future. I was going to heal the pattern now. In a world that thrives off of self-hatred I was going to be radical. I was going to not only accept my body, I was going to love my body.
Learning to love your body is one of the most important things you will 𝙀𝙑𝙀𝙍 do.
Your body is the home of your Soul.
Your body is a temple.
Your body is sacred.
Your body is an 𝙚𝙭𝙥𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙤𝙣 of Source.
Your body IS the journey.
Our consciousness is 𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭.
Your body is only for 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 lifetime.
The journey of life is the journey of your body.
𝙎𝙏𝙊𝙋 𝙁𝙄𝙂𝙃𝙏𝙄𝙉𝙂 𝙔𝙊𝙐.
Stop using your precious energy on self-destruction.
𝘾𝙃𝙊𝙊𝙎𝙀 𝙏𝙊 𝙇𝙊𝙑𝙀 𝙔𝙊𝙐.
Embrace your body as a portal of Divinity.
Embrace your body as a conduit of pleasure.
Embrace your body as a tool of purpose.
Experiencing your body as a sacred temple is devotion to Divinity.
What are you devoted to?
x Serena
@serenavamoroso
PS — learn to LOVEEEEE your body, all of her, in Feminine Magnetism. DM for info. | https://medium.com/@serenavamoroso/your-body-is-a-temple-b10fc0487ea6 | ['Serena V Amoroso'] | 2020-12-18 17:42:31.468000+00:00 | ['Body Positive', 'Embodiment', 'Mental Health Awareness', 'Eating Disorders', 'Body Image'] |
Is Bond Cleaning An Easy Task? | Is Bond Cleaning An Easy Task?
It is of great debate whether Bond cleaning is easy or not. But, in general, it is difficult to satisfy the inspectors in bond cleaning. Cleaning each and every corner of your house with absolute perfection seems to be a near to impossible task and needs a great deal of time to do so.
Some people use their time judiciously and give a call to Bond cleaning Gold Coast to make the work easier and faster. Bond cleaning is quite easy if you follow these steps accordingly.
THE TOP-BOTTOM METHOD
If you opt for the method of top-to-bottom cleaning, then it will be much easier to clean the room. But, if you follow the method of bottom-to-top cleaning that is from floor and carpets then walls and windows and finally, the ceiling then, it will be more difficult.
This is because dirt will fall from the ceiling on the fan clean on the floor or carpet. Then, you need to go through double cleaning of the floor of the carpet. Whether Bond cleaning Brisbane is easy or difficult depends on the method you choose to do it.
BOND CLEANING IS EASY, WITH TRICKS
· You may consider your carpet stains quite stubborn. But, it is not difficult to remove stains from the carpet. The method you use, i.e. scrubbing is wrong, try blotting to remove stains. Furthermore, blotting stains will not spread. Hence it is to clean carpets in bond cleaning.
· Magic eraser makes bond cleaning easy to remove any stains of hard surface.
· People are really worried about toilet stains and even after cleaning remaining yellow stamp. It is really difficult to scrub that stains away. But use a pumice stone and easily remove all stains along with a yellow stamp.
MONEY DIFFICULTY IN BOND CLEANING
You may think bond cleaning requires a huge amount of money for purchasing cleaning liquids.
· Use your daily use of corn starch and shine all glass surfaces with minimum cost.
· Take vinegar from your kitchen counter to clean the pipes of the sink.
· Mix baking soda in regular water to clean the oven and sinks.
· Sometimes it is really difficult to get the bond money back in fancy homes. But with the solution of vinegar and baking soda clean shower walls. This will help to efficiently save your money but with satisfactory cleaning.
· Furthermore, often you need to apply a double coating of cleanser. But if you choose the correct weather for bond cleaning this will not happen. Choose the perfect weather when your cleanser does not dry quickly.
DIFFICULTY WITH TIME IN BOND CLEANING
Even with a vacuum cleaner, it is really difficult to clean the rooms. This is because you have to hold the vacuum cleaner and move it continuously. It makes your hand ache and in addition, takes a lot of time.
But with the right technique of pulling the vacuum cleaner back instead of pushing it is easy. Hence with this technique bond cleaning Brisbane is easy and will acquire less time.
Conclusion
Hence from the above examples, you can easily conclude, whether it is easy or difficult depending on its method.
Therefore, it is very important to choose the right method to make your bond cleaning Gold Coast easy. Hence, you can easily get your money bond money back. | https://medium.com/@princegohil/is-bond-cleaning-an-easy-task-73e0cea61c70 | ['Prince Shrawan'] | 2021-11-26 08:20:16.532000+00:00 | ['Cleaning', 'Cleaning Services', 'Bond Cleaning', 'End Of Lease Cleaning'] |
Swaddling — Is It Good or Bad For YourBaby? | Image: Pexels
Modern swaddling is increasingly popular as a means of settling and soothing infants and helping babies sleep longer with fewer awakenings. Yet there are controversy concerning the healthy short and long term outcome of swaddling.
All different techniques of swaddling have in common that they restrict the movement of the body and limbs. Swaddling keeps your baby’s arms and legs from flailing and prevents startling and self-waking. It is not hard to do, but you do need to learn the proper technique to make sure swaddling will be safe effective for the baby. The idea is to wrap babies snugly so they won’t try to wiggle out of the swaddle, but leave enough room at the top to breathe and at the bottom for bending the legs up and out from their body. Experts say that swaddling soothes babies by providing the secure feeling they enjoyed before birth.
Since the early 1990’s the medical community has recommended placing babies on their back to sleep to reduce the risk of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Studies showed swaddled babies sleep better in the back sleeping position, as they prevent newborns waking themselves from Ballistic Movements (throwing of the hands and feet without control, due to central nervous system development).
Yet the medical and psychological effects of swaddling are still in dispute. One recent study indicated that swaddling increased the risk of SIDS because baby’s sleep is deeper which makes baby less alert.
Babies shouldn’t be swaddled long-term. Experts vary in their opinions about how long a baby should be swaddled. Some say one month of age while others say until three months. Long-term routine swaddling might impair a baby’s gross motor development, so it’s important to end the practice after a few months.
In the past, some studies have shown a higher risk of slow gross motor skills in babies who are swaddled most of the day and night and hip dysplasia with tight swaddling. However, some say that when swaddling is for sleep only, and not for times when babies are really practicing motor skills, no harm will be done.
According to studies hip dysplasia is associated with a tribal, antiquated way of swaddling where the legs are bound together and hips are often rigidly straightened. This way the hips cannot flex or open up a little. Also, several studies have shown that even young babies (like in Mongolia) with mild motor delay from snug wrapping almost 24 hours a day quickly develop normal development once the swaddling is stopped.
The important question is then how even a mild motor developmental delay in western babies, where competition and comparison are part of our everyday lives, will affect how parents deal with such a delay, making baby sit or walk before their body is ready for it, for example. But this is a topic for a whole new post.
Wishing you enjoyable and motoric days,
Maya | https://medium.com/@contact_80960/swaddling-is-it-good-or-bad-for-yourbaby-f221b575e1d4 | ['Koala Moms'] | 2020-09-23 04:20:39.827000+00:00 | ['Attachment', 'Swaddles', 'Health', 'Parenting', 'Baby Products'] |
Understand JavaScript Execution Context. | Understanding how JavaScript runs your code is the key to becoming a seasoned developer. Execution context is one of the key concepts one has to understand if you are to know how your code runs.
Knowing this will help you to fully understand scope, hoisting, closure, improve your debugging skills and improve your ability to read large code base.
We would approach this concept using lay man words to lessen the complexity surrounding this concept. So, lets have an understanding of lexical environment which will help us to understand execution context. Lexical environment of a code is the physical location of a code in a program.
let me = 'i am inside an environment called me' function whereIsMe() {
let me = 'i am inside an environment called me';
console.log(me);
} console.log(me);
whereIsMe()
In the above code, we have two variables called me; both me is living in two different environments. Looking physically at the code, the first me is living in a global environment and the other me in a function. This represents their lexical environment.
Having known that the environment of a code is important to JavaScript, what the heck is execution context?. In programming, execution means to run your code and context means where or place.
Hence, execution context is a wrapper or an environment that manages your code that is running. So, at a point in time in the life cycle of your program, there is at most one execution context running, that is known as the running execution context.
A new execution context is created whenever control is transferred from the executable code associated with the currently running execution context to executable code that is not associated with that execution context. The newly created execution context is pushed onto the stack and becomes the running execution context.
A bucket or a data structure called call stack is created to keep track of the current execution context and all the execution contexts. The stack puts the current one that is running at the top which is the last to enter the stack. This design pattern is referred to as LIFO meaning last-in first-out.
call stack
We have three execution context in JavaScript viz: Global execution context, function execution context and exec execution context.
Global Execution Context (GEC).
Global execution context is an object wrapper or an environment JS Engine creates immediately a js file is loaded to the browser even when you have not written single line of code.
When a script executes for the first time, the JavaScript engine creates a Global Execution Context. During this creation phase, it performs the following tasks:
Create a global object i.e., window in the web browser or global in Node.js. Create a this object binding which points to the global object above. Setup a memory heap for storing variables and function references. Store the function declarations in the memory heap and variables within the global execution context with the initial values set as undefined.
GlobalExecutionContext : {
GlobalObject: {}
variableEnvironment: {
EnvironmentalRecord: {
//keeps tracks of the environmental variables
a: 'undefined'
b: 'undefinde'
c: <Pointer to Fec for c>
} thisBinding: window || global
outerRef:
}
}
Note: this = GlobalObject only in Global execution context.
JavaScript engine creates the execution context in the following two stages: Creation phase, Execution phase.
In the creation phase JavaScript engine doesn’t execute any code. Rather, it compiles the code by scanning over your program. In the creation phase, JS engine performs the following task:
Creates VariableEnvironment Object: This contain all the variables, function arguments and inner functions declaration information.
2. Creates the LexicalEnvironment: The JS engine initializes the scope chain which is a list of all the variables objects inside which the current function exists. This also includes the variable object of the global execution context. Scope chain also contains the current function variable object.
3. Determine the value of this: the JavaScript engine initializes the value of this. The value of this can either be the global object or an object containing the function in terms of function execution context.
In the execution phase, JS engines will again scan through your code to update the variableEnvironment variables which was initially set to undefined with the values of the variables and execute the code.
After the execution stage, the variable object will look like this:
GlobalExecutionContext : {
GlobalObject: {}
variableEnvironment: {
EnvironmentalRecord: {
//keeps tracks of the environmental variables
a: 'i have been updated'
b: 3
c: <Pointer to Fec for c>
} thisBinding: window || global
outerRef:
}
}
Function Execution Context (FEC).
This is an environment that is created by JavaScript engine every time we call a function. The Function Execution Context is similar to the Global Execution Context but instead of creating the global object, it creates the arguments object that contains a reference to all the parameters passed into the function.
This keeps track of the number of arguments passed to the function using the length property in the argumentObject. It also follows the same pattern for execution and creation phase we discussed above with global execution context.
variableEnvironment = {
argumentObject : {
0: a,
1: b,
length: 2
}, a: 3,
b: 2,
} FunctionExectionContext = {
VariableEnvironment: {
ArgumentObject: {
0: a,
1: b,
length: 2
}, a: 3, b: 2, outer: <GlobalLexicalEnvironment>,
ThisBinding: <Global Object or undefined>
} }
About The Author
Jude Nwafor is a software engineer @sterling_bank Plc. You can follow me on twitter @thaddydore | https://medium.com/@thaddydore/understand-javascript-execution-context-b7314606f54a | ['Nwafor Jude'] | 2020-11-17 10:34:46.944000+00:00 | ['Execution Stack', 'Call Stack', 'Javascript Development', 'Execution Context', 'JavaScript'] |
How to Make Real Money on Red Bubble | How to Make Real Money on Red Bubble
Quarantined Income Workshop #4
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash
Hello, and welcome to the fourth workshop in the Quarantined Income series!
I’ve been receiving a lot of positive feedback for the first three workshops, and I’m very grateful to everyone who’s been so encouraging of the series so far.
I hope that some of you made use of your weekend to get started in a new hustle that will one day yield a new source of income and hope for the future.
I’m personally in a very good mood because I was one of the very lucky people admitted into the very first Disneyland grand re-opening anywhere in the world.
It was so nice to be out in the sunshine, while also dodging the other guests and praying that after months of isolation, I don’t catch the virus during my very first day outside.
The focus for today’s workshop is Red Bubble, which is a platform that isn’t discussed very often because it’s very challenging to make money from.
Today my guest and I are going to explain how you can find your success with Red Bubble. We will also lay out a strategy that will help you differentiate yourself from the competition.
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
So What’s Red Bubble?
Red Bubble is a platform that will sell your unique designs by printing them onto clothes, mugs, bags, hats, and all manner of other wearables and collectables.
Just from that description, you would think that Red Bubble must only be for the artistic among us, but I haven’t found that to be the case.
Years ago, I discovered that Red Bubble could be just as lucrative for those of us with no artistic ability, but rather an ability to see what’s popular at the time.
People love quotes, and people really love to wear what they love to say. During my Red Bubble phase, my favourite thing was searching the internet for whatever was being quoted in the moment.
I’d then write out the quote with a cool font, arrange it nicely on a t-shirt template, then upload it to Red Bubble’s platform.
For me, the most evergreen content has come from quotes that were pulled from TV shows that age really well.
When I think of TV shows that have aged well, nothing comes to mind more prominently than the US version of The Office.
That show has only grown in popularity since leaving the air all those years ago.
The show is so evergreen that some of its actors (I’m looking at you Jenna Fischer) make their entire living talking, writing, and podcasting about the show.
So when it came to quoting reference material, The Office became an early focus for me. I’d find popular quotes that I like, write it in a cool font, then add some copyright-free images for good measure.
This resulted in designs that were original, yet referenced material that people already know.
People love to wear what they quote, and they love to buy what they already know. So these designs sold quite well.
For further advice, I talked to Sam, a Red Bubble designer who’s been making decent money from the site for the past three years.
Photo by Edward Cisneros on Unsplash
Please welcome to the stage, Sam
Sam first got started on Red Bubble five years ago when she got the idea to alter characters from TV shows and format the designs for T-shirts.
Downton Abbey was enormously popular at the time, so her first collection of designs featured altered and exaggerated designs based on characters from the show.
For one design, she changed out Lady Mary’s hands for tiger paws and wrote “Lady Mary Clawly” onto the shirt.
For another, she drew Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess and gave her enormous googly eyes, which is a reference to Downton Abbey; but also to Family Guy, who had a joke about Maggie Smith’s eyes seemingly moving independently of each other on the show.
Sam is an artist, so she’s able to draw her own designs and feature them on the site if she wants to.
But because she wants to make money, she’s figured out what many other artists on the site seemingly haven’t.
Entirely original art is extremely difficult to sell because it’s very difficult to convince people to pay money for something they don’t know or recognise.
Her original art is even better than her art that references pop culture, but it doesn’t sell.
A t-shirt featuring a glamorous woman of her own design won’t sell nearly as well as a t-shirt featuring Kim Kardashian slapping her sister just like she did in a recent episode of her reality series.
Sam’s strategy for success is referencing copyrighted material, without ever going so far as to infringe on the copyright.
This means never using images that already exist, but rather designing new ones that are merely inspired by the original images.
For me, I’m not an artist and will never be able to draw an original image. So instead, I try to succeed on the back of quotes, jokes, and poetry that make strong references.
Another important tip from Sam is to make sure you’re checking back on Red Bubble often.
Some artists upload a collection and aren’t back on the site for a while.
Artists feel comfortable going long periods without checking the site because sales figures are emailed to them directly, so they feel no need to check back and see how they’re doing.
But this is a bad idea for two reasons.
The first is that new items become available for consumers to order all the time, and you need to manually confirm that you’d like your designs to be featured on these new items.
For example, Red Bubble recently added masks to the site. (The protection kind, not the Halloween kind).
If you’d like the chance to monetise this new product during the short window when people are bulk-ordering masks, now is the time to get onto the site and add masks as a purchase option to your designs.
You could even design something new that would specifically look great on a mask.
The second reason why you should be on the site often is that you should be adding designs as often as you can.
Every website algorithm favours users who are uploading content more often. This includes Red Bubble, who will feature your products more often in search results if there are new options being added and your profile is updated more often.
In addition to the regular work an artist does, they could easily be dedicating some time every week or two for creating new designs for their Red Bubble portfolio.
You never know which design will be the one that takes off and sets that snowball racing downhill.
Photo by Ari He on Unsplash
Building on the Strategy
So if you’re an artist, try finding a way of including pop culture into your style of creation.
To do this, keep your ear to the ground and get in touch with what’s being discussed in the wider world.
This can be achieved by reading Reddit, but can also be achieved with TikTok, an app through which people broadcast their feelings and passions.
If you’re not an artist, try being creative with words.
One strategy I used for a while was making one image work across several different designs.
To utilise this idea, pay an artist for a unique and generic image. (Make sure your purchase includes all copyright including for commercial purposes).
Then, try to think of lots of different ways you can caption the image that will make a funny or interesting series of designs.
For example, let’s say the artist creates a sassy cartoon cat for you. Try and think of any captions that could relate to being a cat, being lazy, not being a morning person, etc.
You could create an entire collection of designs, just by reusing the cat and adding different funny captions.
You could also colour-swap the cat, let’s say by making it red and including a caption that makes a joke about being sunburnt or embarrassed. (While also referencing a recent and popular moment in culture that relates to sunburn or embarrassment).
Try to think to yourself, “what would I wear on a shirt?”
The follow-up thought could be a simple design that features what you love.
So just ponder what you’d like to wear, then find a way to make it a reality.
Sam started with a love of Downton Abbey, and now creates designs based on what she see’s on TV that inspires her.
She also uses TikTok for glimpses into the world consciousness of impressionable young people at this point in time.
Thanks so much for joining me for today’s workshop, I hope it inspired you to create something new and profitable.
Come back again in two days when the next workshop in the series will be published right here on Money Clip. | https://medium.com/money-clip/how-to-make-real-money-on-red-bubble-c93886d67882 | ['Jordan Fraser'] | 2020-05-12 06:48:19.165000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Money', 'Hustle', 'Art'] |
529 College Savings Plan Fully Explained! | Now that you know what a 529 is and what it’s purpose is, let’s talk about some of the unique features of this investment vehicle.
(1) First, there are no yearly contribution limits to a 529, unlike an IRA or HSA — that has specific yearly contribution amounts that you can’t exceed. But 529s usually have a total value cap for the account. So for a 529, you can contribute as much or as little as you want each year — but only up to the total account value limit, which is usually in the area of around $500k.
(2) Next, these plans, generally come in two different flavors — a pre-paid tuition plan, and an education savings plan.
A prepaid tuition plan works exactly like it sounds, it allows the account holder to purchase credits at participating schools, usually public colleges that are in-state, for future tuition and other fees involved with enrollment. The benefit of the pre-paid plan is that it allows you to purchase these credits at current prices — so that if the price of tuition rises later on, you would have paid a much cheaper amount for that same credit.
The only downsides to this approach is that you can’t invest your money because it’s not put into an investment account, rather they are stored as purchased tuition credits, at a particular university and for this method you have to select and be locked into the school you chose from the beginning — as these credits are generally not transferable to any other school.
But if you look back at history, the prices of tuition nationally have gone up over 25% in the last 10 years. So if you’re certain about what school your beneficiary wants to go to in the future, pre-paying for tuition credits can be a pretty smart move.
Credit: CNBC Make It
The 2nd 529 flavor is the Education Savings route and in this method, the account holder opens an investment account and saves for the beneficiary’s qualified education expenses in the future — much like an IRA or HSA.
And from a tax viewpoint, the 529 is a double tax advantaged account — where you contribute after-tax dollars, and it grows within the account tax free and withdrawals from the account are also tax free, as long as it’s for qualified educational expenses.
(3) The third thing to note about this program, is that there is no one national plan because 529s are all state sponsored, meaning each state has and runs their own program.
Now, this is really important to understand — because for a prepaid tuition program, while you can choose ANY state’s plan, this means that you have to pick a specific school to contribute to and when you are ready to reap the benefits of your contributions, I.E. use the tuition credits — you can only use it for that particular school.
And in the pre-paid tuition route, when it comes time for you to use the funds, some programs actually require you to be a resident of that state — which means you would likely have to move there if you opened up a pre-paid 529 plan in any other state besides the one you are currently residing in.
Far more flexible, is the education savings plan.
In this one, you can contribute to any state program and withdrawal to use the funds for any other state educational expense, regardless of where you live. So as an example, you could be a resident of say, Texas, and set up a 529 in California, or be a resident of Michigan and open an account in Alabama and in either of those cases, make a withdrawal and pay for tuition in New York, if that’s where your beneficiary decided to go.
Credit: Daniel’s Brew
So then, an obvious question you’ll want to ask is, “If in the education savings plan, I can use the funds for any state school my beneficiary wants, does it matter at all, which state program I initially sign up for and participate in?”
Well, the answer is Yes — and here’s why.
There are 2 main considerations to make when choosing the right state sponsored education savings plan.
1) The first is — Local Tax Consideration. You see, if you live in a state that has state income tax, most of those states offer some type of local state tax deductions for contributing to a 529 program. In this case, your contributions would be partially tax free because of this deduction benefit. But one thing you have to watch out for, is that certain states may require you to then use the funds within their state, or pay back some of the tax deduction amount later in distribution. So you’ll want to make sure you check with the fine print before going with your state’s 529 plan, if you’re in it for the upfront tax savings.
2) The second consideration is Investment Choice and Account Performance. Each state’s 529 is powered on the backend, by a certain brokerage or financial planning firm that the program has a partnership with. And through that partnership, there are usually a specific set of investment options that are uniquely provided for that program. And these choices are typically objective or risk based portfolios that they create and manage on your behalf. These portfolios usually have a collection of underlying mutual funds or bond funds and their mix is determined by the portfolio strategy.
Here is an example of some investment choices with New York’s 529 program.
Source: NYsaves.org
As you can see, it looks like this program partnered with Vanguard for their investment vehicles and they seem to offer a good mix of growth and balanced investment strategies in their offerings.
One thing to remember, is that because you don’t have much say in what the underlying funds are within your portfolio (since it’s managed by the program itself), it’s important to make sure you look at the performance of these funds over time, before you commit to a particular state’s program. There is usually a historical performance section in most 529 websites where you can compare how each portfolio does against their underlying benchmark. And if you do some research, you’d be surprised at how much of a difference the portfolio’s performance can be across different state programs.
So make sure you invest a little time to do some comparisons between state 529s — before you commit to one. | https://medium.com/money-clip/529-college-savings-plan-fully-explained-ad169a75134e | ["Daniel'S Brew"] | 2020-11-25 14:40:29.647000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Finance', '529 College Savings Plans', 'Investing', 'College'] |
How to Make a Snazzy Personal Website for your Data Science Blog— Quickly | How to Make a Snazzy Personal Website for your Data Science Blog— Quickly
The lowdown on blogdown
Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash
This article is also available on andrewhetherington.com and LinkedIn.
A personal website is a great place to showcase your work and your achievements. We all know that whether you want to impress at work or whether you want your CV to go to the top of the pile on a recruiter’s desk, you have to be different — you have to be willing go further than everyone else. A sleek, professional-looking website can be one of those things that makes you unique and gives you an edge.
But where to start? You’re a busy person. If you’ve ever taken an introductory course in HTML, you’ll know that there’s a lot to learn even to make the most basic of webpages. And thanks to the fact that almost every website we visit nowadays has been crafted and polished by a team of professional web designers, we have high standards. Unless you are literally Warren Buffet you will need something more snazzy-looking.
So here’s the dilemma — how do you create a high-quality website without spending months learning HTML, CSS, and Java? One answer is to use a website builder like Wix, Squarespace or WordPress. And if you want a drag-and-drop solution without that doesn’t require you to worry too much about the details, then that may be enough for you. Another solution, which potentially offers a middle ground between using website builder and the full-blown do-it-yourself coding approach, is building a site in R using blogdown.
blogdown is an R package based on Hugo, which is a popular static site generator (static sites display the same content for each visitor, whereas dynamic sites can do more complicated things. A static site will work perfectly well for our purposes here). blogdown is great because it gives you a level of flexibility and control over your website without being overwhelming. If something does go wrong or if you want to implement something new, then you have the RStudio, GitHub, and Stack Overflow communities at your disposal to help you learn what to do. And critically, there’s a wide range of themes to pick from to use as templates — beyond some initial setup, you will be free to focus on the content of your site.
Shall we get started?
Download R and RStudio, install blogdown
Firstly, you will need to download R (the base language we will be using) and RStudio (which provides a nicer interface and a bunch of additional useful features). Let me stress at this point that the required R knowledge is minimal!
R is available at www.r-project.org. Click the download link and select the URL of the location closest to you. Select your operating system, the base distribution, download and install.
Rstudio can be downloaded from the Rstudio website.
Once R and RStudio are downloaded and installed, boot up RStudio. Hit Install from within the Packages pane (Ctrl + 7 is the shortcut to bring it up if it doesn’t appear automatically) and search for the blogdown package. Keep “install dependencies” ticked and click the install button. RStudio will handle the rest.
Choose a theme
At this point, you can also choose a theme. There are loads to choose from, each suited ato different purposes and tastes. For my personal website I went with the ghostwriter theme by Juraj Bubniak due to its simplicity. If you would prefer to work with a different theme, go ahead! The process is largely independent of the starting template.
I would, however, recommend doing some research to find someone who has published their website (and associated files) under the same theme. That way, if you run into a problem or an error, as well as having the support of the online communities mentioned earlier you have the option of comparing what you’ve done to a working version of your chosen theme. If you opt for the ghostwriter theme like me, then I’ve uploaded the files for my website on Github for reference.
Start a New Project in RStudio
Once you’ve booted up RStudio, hit File and then New Project. Start the project in a new directory and then select “Website using blogdown” as the Project Type. Set a name for your directory (eg “blog”) and select where you want to save the directory on your computer (eg Desktop).
To load your theme, you will now need to enter the location of the theme on GitHub in the “Hugo theme” textbox. Don’t panic — this is actually quite simple. If you click on your chosen theme from the Hugo Themes page and scroll down to the “Usage” section, you’ll find a GitHub link to the directory where the files are saved. You’ll need to take the last part of this link — the part of the form user/theme-name. For example, for the ghostwriter theme this is jbub/ghostwriter.
Once you’ve done that, hit “Create project” and your website template will be created for you.
Build your website
Let’s take a look at your website so far. Run blogdown::serve_site() in the R console and click the pop-out window button at the top-left of the Viewer pane to see the site in your browser.
The initial ghostwriter template
Not bad for our time investment so far, but depending on the template you chose, it may be looking rather empty (or full of filler text). Let’s cover some of the basic things you might want to do to get your site shipshape. When creating the project, blogdown would have created a complicated file structure in your chosen directory, but there are actually only a few files that you need to change to modify the site and add content. The following instructions may vary for different themes, but the principles will be applicable across them all.
I want to change the landing page and add new sections to the site (eg About, Contact, etc)
Where config.toml lives
You’ll be able to do this by modifying the config.toml file in the top layer of your site’s directory. Using RStudio’s Files pane, you can navigate to and edit the contents of this file. Initially, it may be quite empty (this is the case for the ghostwriter theme):
theme = "ghostwriter"
baseURL = "http://example.org/"
languageCode = "en-us"
title = "My New Hugo Site"
When I made my site, I did some research on this file to see what was possible and what others had used. I changed it to something like the following:
baseurl = "/"
title = "Barney McGrew"
theme = "ghostwriter"
languageCode = "en-us"
copyright = ""
disqusShortname = "XXX"
googleAnalytics = "XXX" ignoreFiles = ["\\.Rmd$", "\\.Rmarkdown$", "_files$", "_cache$"] [Privacy] [Privacy.disqus]
disable = true [Privacy.googleAnalytics]
anonymizeIP = true
respectDoNotTrack = true
useSessionStorage = false [Author]
name = "Barney McGrew"
profile = "" [Taxonomies]
tag = "tags" [Params]
intro = true
headline = " Barney McGrew "
description = "I’m a fireman "
github = "https://github.com/barneymcgrew"
gitlab = ""
linkedin = "https://www.linkedin.com/in/barneymcgrew "
gplus = ""
twitter = ""
stackoverflow = ""
email = ""
opengraph = true
shareTwitter = true
shareFacebook = true
shareGooglePlus = true
shareLinkedIn = true
dateFormat = "Monday, January 2, 2006"
highlightJsUrl = ""
highlightJsLocalUrl = "" [Permalinks]
post = "/:year/:month/:day/:filename/" [[menu.main]]
name = "Blog"
url = "/"
weight = 1 [[menu.main]]
name = "Contact"
url = "/page/contact/"
weight = 3 [[menu.main]]
name = "About"
url = "/page/about/"
weight = 4 [[menu.main]]
name = "CV"
url = "/page/cv/"
weight = 5
The most significant parts of the above code are the [Params] and [[menu.main]] sections, although you should customise the rest where possible too. Under Params, you can set a headline and description to show on the site’s main page. You can also add in links to any other online profiles you have. You can add or remove menu.main sections to create new sections of the site which you want to be accessible from the main page. You can also set the url for these subpages.
How do I add a blog post?
To add content to your website, navigate to the “content” subfolder and go into “page”. This is where blogdown will look for pages to put on your website. To create one, go to File -> New File -> R Markdown. Set the title and author for your post (you can leave the output format as HTML). Clicking OK, you will be greeted with a freshly made .Rmd (R Markdown) file with some automatically generated text telling you how to include R code and plots in your post. For a simple text-and-image blog post, you won’t need this — so you can delete and replace it with these parameters:
---
title: "Putting out a fire"
description: "If you accidentally start one"
author: ""
date: 2020-06-21T22:12:42+12:00
draft: false
---
This bit of preamble allows you to enter various publishing information about your post. Below the second set of dashes is where you can start writing your blog post’s text.
When you want to see how your post looks on the site itself, you will need to run the command blogdown::build_site() in the R console. blogdown will then do the necessary legwork to ensure that your R Markdown file is rendered properly for the site. Run blogdown::serve_site() again to pull up your website.
Our site, after customising the homepage and adding a blank page
How do I add a link?
To add a link, surround the text you want to be a hyperlink with square brackets and follow it up with the destination web address in rounded brackets, like so:
Put [water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water) on it
How do I add an image?
Within the .Rmd file for a post, move the cursor to where you want the image to be. Click the “Addins” dropdown and select “Insert Image”. This will take you to an interface where you can browse your computer’s files for an image.
Click on the “Addins” dropdown to reveal Insert Image
After clicking done, the hard work will be done for you — the image file will automatically be put where it needs to be so that it is rendered on the website. A link to where the image file has been saved in the site directory, like that seen below, will also be generated. You can move this link around in relation to the rest of your blog text to make the image appear where you want.
I’m hope your blog will more insightful than Barney’s. Photo by Zlatko Đurić on Unsplash
Where can I go for more?
You will likely need to do some research to learn how to do more complex things. As mentioned earlier, try the GitHub, RStudio and Stack Overflow communities. There’s also the blogdown documentation for a comprehensive overview of what’s possible.
Ok, so I have a site now — how do I put it on the internet?
This is the easy part! One of the simplest ways is to go to Netlify and create an account. Once you’ve verified your email address, the first page you see will invite you to drag and drop your site folder onto it.
The Netlify Sites tab — it really is as easy as dragging and dropping
Here’s the important part — drag and drop your site’s “public” folder onto the Netlify interface, as it suggests. Within seconds your site will be uploaded and within minutes it will be deployed, meaning that it will now be accessible to anyone with the link. Hooray! Congratulations, siteowner!
Now, the default url generated by Netlify for your site will likely be a bit rubbish and will probably consist of random words and a jumble of letters and numbers. You can easily change this by going into the “Domain management” section of the Settings page for your site. For free, you can have any available domain name — although it will end with “.netlify.app”. If you want your very own custom domain, then this is also very simple — click “Add custom domain” from the same domain management settings. Then, simply enter the domain name you want, check its availability, and then pay the registration fee (a modest $11 for a whole year). And voila — the process really is as simple as that.
Conclusion
My goal here was to show you that you really are only a few hours (if that) away from your own personal website. In an increasingly digital age, it really is worth the time investment to create an online space to showcase your work, your skills, and yourself.
One last word of advice for those that are bold enough to give it a go — don’t be discouraged if things don’t work right off the bat! You may feel like you’ve been stuck on the same problem for a long time, but if you persist, you will eventually experience a burst of progress when you finally crack it.
So good luck! Please share with me any success stories or difficulties you have been having — or perhaps you would prefer to send me a link to a post on your fancy new website? 😉
More info and credits
Andrew Hetherington is an actuary-in-training and data enthusiast based in London, UK.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Check out my webiste at AndrewHetherington.com.
See what I’m tinkering with on GitHub.
For reference, I’ve uploaded the files for my own personal website to GitHub — you can find them here.
Images: Laptop image by Ben Kolde. Fire truck image by Zlatko Đurić. Both on Unsplash. | https://andrew-m-hetherington.medium.com/how-to-make-a-snazzy-personal-website-for-your-data-science-blog-quickly-5ed1b54f98fb | ['Andrew Hetherington'] | 2020-06-28 21:53:15.428000+00:00 | ['Data', 'Website', 'Data Science', 'Website Design', 'Towards Data Science'] |
10TH ANNUAL(AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 10 :: KAREEM JAMES ABU-ZEID on NAJWAN DARWISH | It was good fortune and a good friend that first led me to Najwan Darwish’s poetry. The poet Jack Hirschman introduced me to Najwan’s work back in 2009. Jack, ever indefatigable (and still going strong as he approaches 90), had invited Najwan to be part of the second biennial San Francisco International Poetry Festival, which he was organizing at the time. And although Jack reads and translates a ridiculous number of languages, Arabic isn’t one of them, so he called on me to translate Najwan’s poems for the festival.
Of the 15 poets from all across the world who would be there, Najwan, the only invitee from Palestine, was — perhaps not surprisingly — also the only one who had trouble obtaining a US visa. The visa was seemingly approved at first, only for the approval to then be delayed for unknown reasons, and for an undetermined period of time. Jack did everything he could to help. He finally managed to get someone from the San Francisco’s Mayor’s office (a guy named Gavin Newsom, I believe, who’s been in the news for other reasons lately) to make some calls, and the visa was approved — but too late for Najwan to attend the festival. I wound up reading his poetry in both the original Arabic and in my English translations at the festival, and so my immersion in Najwan’s work began.
I really wasn’t sure what to expect when Jack asked me to translate Najwan’s poetry. Anyone who has read even just a few of the thousand-plus pages of Jack Hirschman’s incomparable Arcanes will know how wide-ranging — and sometimes even contradictory — his interests and causes are. Jack brings together Kabbalah and Stalinism (see Matthew Furey’s documentary Red Poet), rageful social activism and gentle, heartfelt compassion, to name just a few. And Najwan Darwish, too, I soon discovered, is a poet of many different and unexpected facets.
Najwan’s earlier poems, such as this one translated by Kamal Boullata, are often direct, unambiguous, and haunting condemnations of the ongoing Israeli Occupation, which is what one generally expects from Palestinian poetry. But the first poems I saw by Najwan were much more complex, and much more ambiguous. “Jerusalem,” for example, one of the first poems by him that I ever translated, is no facile encomium to the poet’s native city. Instead, the poet directly addresses that city:
“When I leave you I turn to stone / and when I come back I turn to stone / I name you Medusa / I name you the older sister of Sodom and Gomorrah / you the baptismal basin that burned Rome.”
In addition to decrying the injustices of the world, including — but not limited to — the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, Najwan’s mature poetry simultaneously resists falling into simplistic or purely oppositional notions of identity. In 1964, a different Darwish — Mahmoud Darwish (no relation to Najwan) — wrote what is probably the most famous Palestinian poem of the 20th century, “Identity Card.” That landmark text dramatically narrates an encounter between a Palestinian and, presumably, an Israeli security officer: “Write it down! / I’m an Arab! / And my ID number is fifty thousand…” Almost a half-century later, Najwan would write his own poem titled “Identity Card,” which presents a very different notion of Arab and Palestinian identity by embracing Kurds, Amazighs, Russians, Greeks, Persians, and also, at one key moment, Jews: “And my scorn for Zionists will not prevent me from saying that I was a Jew expelled from Andalusia, and that I still weave meaning from the light of that setting sun.” Along these lines, in a recent interview Najwan resisted the notion of being considered solely as a Palestinian poet, or of being pigeonholed in any way: “I may be a committed [Palestinian] citizen, but as a poet (I don’t usually dare to call myself a poet) my identity is more complex and much broader, and contains several layers of histories, civilizations, and identities.” | https://medium.com/the-operating-system/10th-annual-and-final-napomo-30-30-30-day-10-kareem-james-abu-zeid-on-najwan-darwish-e4e9a37af74d | ['Ren W.'] | 2021-04-09 16:50:31.478000+00:00 | ['Arabic', 'Inspiration', 'Palestine', 'Poetry', 'Translation'] |
An Introduction to Machine Learning | Photo by h heyerlein on Unsplash
The words, ‘Machine learning’ can sound either very exciting or very complex to a beginner. For me personally, it has changed from something complex on the surface to exciting when explored more over a period of time. It is very important to understand the meaning of machine learning in simple terms when you start learning about machine learning algorithms altogether.
Machine learning has been growing over the last two decades. You have used machine learning and have been living in it without even knowing when it was already there. Simple things like tagging your friends on Facebook photos or maybe searching a simple thing over the web, which would give results based on the ranking of the pages or your email client such as Yahoo, Gmail filtering out your spam mail in the spam folders are some classic examples of machine learning.
The science of getting computers to know what to do without being explicitly programmed is what machine learning is in very simple terms.
Tom M. Mitchell provided a widely quoted, more formal definition of the algorithms studied in the machine learning field: “A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.
Take an example of your email client filtering out the spam mails. So, here when you click the Spam button for an email to report spam, the email client learns better to filter out the ones that you haven’t even reported as spam. This way it learns better how to filter out spam emails. That means the task of filtering out spam is T in this example and watching you label emails as spam or not spam is the experience E and the performance measurement, P would be the fraction of the emails correctly identified. So, the performance P would improve with experience E.
In this blog, I would present you with a basic understanding of various types of machine learning algorithms. In machine learning, the tasks are broadly classified into two types of learning: Supervised learning and Unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, we teach the machines how to learn and in unsupervised learning, the machines learn by themselves. There are other types of machine learning that I will cover in one of my next blogs. But for now, let's just learn about these two.
Supervised Learning
Supervised Learning
In supervised learning, we are given a data set and already know what our correct output should look like, having the idea that there is a relationship between the input and the output. The goal of supervised learning is to analyze the relationship between the input and output values and predict the outcome of the other input values.
Supervised learning problems are categorized into “regression” and “classification” problems. In a regression problem, we are trying to predict results within a continuous output, meaning that we are trying to map input variables to some continuous function. In a classification problem, we are instead trying to predict results in a discrete output. In other words, we are trying to map input variables into discrete categories.
Example 1:
If we are given the data about the size of houses on the real estate market, we can try to predict their price. Its price will be a function of size as a continuous output, so this is a regression problem.
We could turn this example into a classification problem by instead making our output about whether the house “sells for more or less than the asking price.” Here we are classifying the houses based on price into two discrete categories.
Example 2:
(a) Regression — Given a picture of a person, we have to predict their age based on the given picture.
(b) Classification — Given a patient with a tumor, we have to predict whether the tumor is malignant or benign.
For some other examples of regression and classification, you may probably want to visit my blogs on simple regression and decision trees, respectively.
Unsupervised Learning
Unsupervised learning allows us to approach problems without any given output. We are just given unstructured data and we can make structures within the data but we don’t necessarily know the effect of the variables on the results.
That means in Unsupervised Learning, we’re given data that looks different than data that looks like in supervised that doesn’t have any labels or that all has the same label or really no labels. So we’re given the data set and we’re not told what to do with it and we’re not told what each data point is. Instead, we’re just told, here is a data set. Can you find some structure in the data?
Let's take an example of social network analysis. So given knowledge about which friends you email the most or given your Facebook friends, we can automatically identify which are cohesive groups of friends, also which are groups of people that all know each other?
Another example can be Market segmentation. Many companies have huge databases of customer information. So, can you look at this customer data set and automatically discover market segments and automatically group your customers into different market segments so that you can automatically and more efficiently sell or market your different market segments together?
Again, this is Unsupervised Learning because we have all this customer data, but we don’t know in advance what are the market segments and for the customers in our data set, you know, we don’t know in advance who is in the market segment one, who is in market segment two, and so on. But we have to let the algorithm discover all this just from the data.
All of these are examples of clustering, which is just one type of Unsupervised Learning.
In my next blogs, I will try to cover more about the other types of machine learning. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/an-introduction-to-machine-learning-a632cefcf4b6 | ['Mamta Singhal'] | 2020-11-09 05:58:01.095000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Supervised Learning', 'Unsupervised Learning', 'Beginners Guide', 'Data Science'] |
Core Values of an Apex Officer | The core values of an Apex Officer are intended to guide and inspire us in all we say and do. Ensuring that our values become part of our day-to-day work life is our mandate, and they help to ensure that our personal and professional behavior can be a model for all to follow.
Apex Officer Values
Service to our communities
Commitment to leadership
Respect for people
Reverence for the law
Quality through continuous improvement
Personal responsibility
SERVICE TO OUR COMMUNITIES
An Apex Officer is dedicated to enhancing public safety and reducing the fear and the incidence of crime. Our motto “To serve those protecting our communities” is not just a slogan — it is our way of life.
COMMITMENT TO LEADERSHIP
We believe that every Apex Officer should be a leader in law enforcement and public safety. We also believe that each individual needs to be a leader in his or her area of responsibility. We must each work to ensure that our co-workers, our professional colleagues, and our communities have the highest respect for law enforcement and peace officers.
RESPECT FOR PEOPLE
The life of an Apex Officer should be challenging and rewarding. Our people are our most important resource. We can best serve the many and varied needs of our communities by empowering our fellow officers to fulfill their responsibilities with knowledge, authority, and appropriate discretion. We believe in treating all people with respect and dignity. We show concern and empathy for the victims of crime and treat violators of the law with fairness and dignity.
REVERENCE FOR THE LAW
We have been given the honor and privilege of enforcing the law. We must always exercise integrity in the use of the power and authority that have been given to us by the people. Our personal and professional behavior should be a model for all to follow. We will obey and support the letter and spirit of the law.
QUALITY THROUGH CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
We will strive to achieve the highest level of quality in all aspects of our work. We can never be satisfied with the “status quo.” We must aim for continuous improvement in serving the people in our communities. We value innovation and support creativity.
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
Each of us has a personal responsibility for the success of our community. We respect, care about, trust and support each other. We respect and encourage individual responsibility while recognizing we have a right and obligation to participate in leading our community.
Our interpretation of personal responsibility is: | https://medium.com/@chasedittmer/core-values-of-an-apex-officer-2a060ba09c2a | ['Chase Dittmer'] | 2019-10-09 15:33:39.766000+00:00 | ['Law Enforcement', 'Police', 'Govtech', 'Values', 'Government'] |
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