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The future of Overwatch and what it means for collegiate eSports | It’s been over two weeks since Overwatch League was announced. Much of the player hype and debacle has faded, however the industry leaders and decision-makers are still pondering over the ramifications this has for our industry and the culture of eSports or “Esports”. We a-dults now b o y z. This has lead to a chain reaction with publishers and leagues rethinking their 5 year plans.
Overwatch moving forward
With Overwatch’s immense growth this was an inevitable. The debatable eSports failure that was Heroes of the Storm left Blizzard Activision with an uneasy feeling of defeat. In addition to HoTS losing its unique fandom Starcraft has lost its prominent Korean league. Their much needed traction as a relevant eSports publisher/organizer truly was and is hinged on the success of Overwatch as not only a casual game but a competitive global league.
For players it facilitates a truly global competition with players across the world uniting under one banner to play for fame glory cash and prizes. For businesses and brands it facilitates the ability to get into eSports while it’s hot. Purchasing coveted chartered memberships. There is a lot of anticipation and truthfully everyone’s watching including Riot Games. Just recently, a source close to the situation noted an estimated 90 million dollar (USD) partnership between Riot Games and MLBAM to stream LoL eSports.
A deal which certainly has been in the works for months if not years now, but this couldn’t have come at a greater time.
Riot Games and the boy who cried wolf
Riot Games have been under immense pressure from Lol sports team owners, in a leaked document team owners came together to demand more transparency, stipends, prize pool and opportunities of earning money including enfranchisement, broadcast and itemization revenue sharing as-soon-as-possible. It’s very clear that they are looking for more ways of making money to keep them afloat as most, if not all are running in the red this fiscal year.
If the market continues to over-saturate player earnings they will continue to rise while the organizations who aren’t-ventured-back will continue to lose an incredible amount of money. They’ll have to cut back staff members, cut whole teams or even forfeit spots if they can’t pay for them.
Debate aside whether you believe Riot should franchise now, tomorrow, or never, the 90 million annually will certainly help keep LoL eSports’ team owners happy if that comes their way. In no shape or form is Riot hurting for them to keep that 90 million, with their valuations and profits estimating to remain within the high 6 figures, this deal will certainly indulge the luxury of their LoL eSport’s ecosystem. Reaping the rewards and solidifying deals with decision-makers across the traditional media pond, keeping LoL eSports alive and well for years to come.
Overwatch can be the next best thing
But let’s jump back to Overwatch League. They plan on franchising, revenue sharing, globalizing teams, all altruistic in nature. With their tenured experience as a game publisher and the critical success that was Overwatch World Cup, it was the sign they needed to green-light this new ambitious venture. What we know now is simple — eSports just took 10 steps forward in the right direction.
The industry is self-reliant on sponsorships from endemic companies. Without them, they can’t afford to keep the lights on at the end of the month. With new venture capitalists and angels entering the scene there have been a fortunate handful of who forego the tradition of relying on sponsorships.
By introducing chartered spots you allow new players to enter the fold, who are ready to invest into the industry, or allow the veteran players to imprint their brands for years to come. Advertisers and sponsors in and out of eSports won’t be afraid that an LCS team will be relegated to the Challenger Series to lose the brand exposure or sales they needed. Their worst nightmare now finally in the process of disappearing into the past.
I’ve written about the future of eSports at least a dozen or so times now. The narratives are the same, but depending on the game I associate the write-up with, minuet changes are made however the foundation always remains the same.
You get the best of both worlds. Everyone makes money. Players are secured and protected. Organizations, publishers, and partners share a piece of that oh so good pumpkin pie. What about collegiate eSports, how will that be affected?
Collegiate eSports will expand or integrate into the league circuits
Photo credit: Riot Games
As chartered memberships (enfranchisement) and other outside supportive partnerships form you’ll see a large debate about balancing and filtering old from new. Worthy from unworthy. Money talks and for that reason many have raised their pitch-forks contesting enfranchisement in eSports. To keep the competitive integrity alive by rewarding those who come here to be the best, not those with deepest pockets.
We in eSports are akin to nothing and we are constantly going through the process of trials and tribulations figuring out how to implement a strategy correctly that works for everyone.
With relegation and promotion looking to be fazed out we’ll be hit with a dilemma that could jeopardize the competitive integrity of the LoL & Overwatch League. One way I see this being tackled; turning collegiate eSports into combines (scouting grounds) or competing in smaller circuit leagues for scholarships and prize pools leading up to collegiate event equivalent of ‘Worlds’.
As I said earlier only time will tell, but we’re heading in a good direction. Rocky but every rocky road leads to safe ground.. we hope.
—
Managing Director @eSportsRDANet. I like food and good screenplays. I don’t hold my tongue, sorry mom. Inquiries [email protected] or Tweet me @MellowWalt for updates. | https://blog.starters.co/the-future-of-overwatch-and-what-it-means-for-collegiate-esports-78108b5c4cc2 | ['Walter Sosa'] | 2016-11-18 03:14:53.256000+00:00 | ['Esports', 'Gaming'] |
Deep Cuts | I hope
I will find love
again
I hope
I can get
over you
someday
for I still
love you
but the wounds
you cut
are still too deep
to heal. | https://medium.com/self-ish/deep-cuts-d6aae389c347 | ['Fọlábòmí Àmọ Ó'] | 2020-12-27 07:02:35.079000+00:00 | ['Heartbreak', '2020', 'Love', 'Poetry', 'Africa'] |
These are the places where Pride parades were banned | Pride really is a protest in these countries
Last year, LGBTI activists were detained by police in St. Petersburg during a Pride march | Photo: Facebook/Russian LGBT Network
A few weeks into Pride month 2019, it is worth remembering not every country has the freedom to organize a parade.
In certain nations where being LGBTI is illegal — or the so-called ‘LGBTI propaganda’ is — governments and local authorities have banned Pride parades on multiple occasions.
Pride really is a protest
Taking to the streets to march in fabulous outfits and unapologetically affirm your identity is one of the crucial elements of most parades in Western, liberal countries. But a smooth march isn’t always the case.
Many LGBTI communities put their effort, time and money in parades that don’t always take place.
Whether authorities claim security concerns or blame Pride to promote ‘dangerous’ values, LGBTI events often don’t get the green light. And they might face violence by extremists groups if they do go ahead.
Pride in Cuba
In May 2019, communist authorities in Cuba unexpectedly cancelled the annual conga against homophobia. Activists then organized an alternative march on the same day, Saturday 11 May.
More than 100 demonstrators took to the streets of the capital, Havana.
Some said plainclothes security officers stopped them and used violence on them. Moreover, police arrested at least three people.
Tbilisi Pride in Georgia
Georgian LGBTI activists are battling with the police in order to celebrate Pride.
As the powerful Orthodox Church and extremist groups actively protest against the LGBTI community, police claim it won’t be able to protect Pridegoers during a public event.
Protests turned violent at an IDAHOBIT (International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia) event on 17 May this year.
Following that, police told the Tbilisi Pride team that going ahead with their planned five-day festival would be ‘impossible’ and that they could not ensure safety for all.
Jerusalem Pride in Israel
While Tel Aviv Pride has been taking place relatively peacefully since 1993, Jerusalem’s fourth LGBTI event couldn’t initially take place.
2005 saw a rare instance of religious leaders of Jerusalem’s Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities unanimously asking the municipal government to revoke permits. The court later canceled the ban, allowing the event to go ahead.
Kenya hosted the very first refugee LGBTI event
As homosexuality is a crime punishable up to 14 years imprisonment in Kenya, public LGBTI parades aren’t an option for local lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people.
However, in 2012 the American embassy in Nairobi held the first ever Pride event in Kenya.
Furthermore, the Kenyan refugee camp of Kakuma, a town in northwestern Turkana County, hosted the very first refugee Pride in 2018. Many of the LGBTI refugees at the camp come from Uganda, where gay sex is illegal.
Despite organizers received death threats after the event, they said they plan to host another event this year.
Latvia hosted EuroPride in 2015
Latvia held their first Pride in 2005. The event had been previously banned by the council and the Prime Minister, but a court’s decision allowed the march to go ahead.
Prides in Latvia faced significant violence since that first parade and up until 2009 when Riga hosted Baltic Pride. The capital also hosted EuroPride in 2015, attracting 5,000 participants.
Lebanon never hosted a Pride march
Lebanon has never had an LGBTI parade. Over the past two years, police have banned the event for fear of offending ‘public morality’.
In October 2018, threats of violence also shut down a queer Halloween mixer at the American University of Beirut (AUB).
Despite opposition, embassies, activists and locals shops flew the rainbow and the trans flags on 17 May to mark IDAHOBIT. It was a historic day in a country where being gay is illegal.
Authorities have banned several Prides in Poland
In 2005, local authorities forbid Warsaw Pride. Then-Mayor Lech Kaczyński was among those opposing the event, which occurred nevertheless. The ban, in fact, was later declared a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Authorities have been trying to ban other Prides ever since, including Lublin and Rzeszow in 2018 and Gniezno in 2019. They went all ahead among the protest of nationalist, anti-LGBTI groups.
Russia has always banned Pride
Russian authorities have been banning Pride events for years in order not to promote LGBTI lifestyle to children. Former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov also labelled Pride ‘satanic’.
Federal laws passed on 29 June 2013 ban the distribution of ‘propaganda’ to minors encouraging ‘non-traditional sexual relationships’.
Despite being fined by the European Court of Human Rights in 2010 for interpreting it as discrimination, the city of Moscow denied 100 individual requests to hold Moscow Pride through 2012. They cited a risk of violence against participants as the main reason for the parade not to go ahead.
Moreover, the first government-approved Pride march in Russia got banned in August 2018 within 24 hours of approval.
Following the initial announcement by prominent local LGBTI activist Nikolai Alekseev, officials said they would not let the event go ahead. The parade was due to take place in the village of Yabloneviy, outside Novoulyanovsk, 500 miles east of Moscow.
What’s more, 30 participants were detained for trying to set an LGBTI march in St. Petersburg on 4 August 2018.
Pride in Serbia
Before becoming one of the biggest LGBTI events in the Balkans, Belgrade Pride was banned several times due to safety concerns.
The capital’s first attempt to hold a Pride event saw extremists injuring several people and clashing with the police.
In 2009, authorities moved the location of the march from the city centre to a space near the Palace of Serbia, therefore effectively banning the original Pride.
Authorities also banned every attempt of organizing the parade between 2010 and 2014.
In 2013, local authorities canceled Pride just one day before it was supposed to take place. Activists organized a protest, marching to the Parliament building.
Pride events in Turkey
Turkey has recently lifted its ban on LGBTI events.
Kaos GL, a Turkish LGBTI rights group, successfully appealed the ban at the 12th administrative court in April 2019. The ban had been in place since November 2017.
In the past, far-right groups have attacked Prides. LGBTI rights activists in Turkey have also experienced widespread discrimination and abuse from the authorities.
In July 2018, Istanbul police stormed an LGBTI event and fired rubber bullets and teargas into the crowd. The police raid happened after Pride organizers had reached a last-minute agreement with the authorities to allow the march.
Despite the ban lift, police in Ankara also violently ended a student-led march at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in May 2019.
Uganda had a secret LGBTI event
Ugandan laws prohibit both male and female homosexual activity. ‘Carnal knowledge against the order of nature’ between two males carries a potential penalty of life imprisonment.
Therefore, Ugandan LGBTI people have always struggled to hold marches and demonstrations publicly.
In September 2018, the Minister for Ethics and Integrity in Uganda Simon Lokodo tried to ban arts and music festival Nyege Nyege (which translates to ‘sex sex’). Lokodo claimed the event promoted ‘homosexuality’, ‘LGBTI’, and ‘open sex’.
However, the next day the minister backtracked, allowing the event to run.
In May 2018, Lokodo forbid the country’s IDAHOBIT event minutes before it was about to begin.
After Pride was banned in 2017, Ugandans lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people held a secret Pride in Kampala, the capital. | https://medium.com/@stephsarrubba/these-are-the-places-where-pride-parades-were-banned-ef56cbeecfea | ['Stefania Sarrubba'] | 2019-08-07 18:15:25.264000+00:00 | ['Russia', 'Pride', 'Poland', 'Homophobia', 'LGBTQ'] |
Lunch That Your Mouth + Stomach Will Love | My husband is a chef and he loves to make lavish dishes. Me, I do the best I can, but plating and decor are my thing. Pregnancy has surely brought in some random cravings, but one craving I’m thankful for is healthy vibes. Now there requires some frying aspect so I know all the health nuts are backing up, but the rest is a so yummy and filling at the same time. Other perk you ask… you can work with a protein, vegetable, or fish! So what is it that I’m so excited about to share that turns any lunch into a glorious one, Milanese with eggplant, chicken, or cod.
My husband will prep the chicken, eggplant, or cod for me so that when I get home I plate and eat. We use panko in this house because well crunch factor is a must and for me when I eat I love textured mixtures within my food. After the prep and frying, add arugula, cubed fresh mozz, and plum tomatoes with onion that were soaked in balsamic vinegar. If you prefer the glaze, have at it! Easy, light, filling, and I’m always sad when it is over.
Well, time to finish some lunch prep and dinner for the holidays! Enjoy these next few days with those you can and don’t forget you can always tune into my podcast every Sunday 12 noon. Look up on Apple podcast, Google podcast or Spotify (plus 5 more platforms) 4.0-ing Life.
Xx
Deana | https://thequeenbuzz.com/lunch-that-your-mouth-stomach-will-love-a923150c9b3d | ['Deana Elwood', 'Head Bee'] | 2020-12-24 17:21:17.826000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Chefs', 'Health', 'Cooking', 'Future Of Food'] |
To My 23 Years Old Expatriate Self, You Are Special. | To My 23 Years Old Expatriate Self, You Are Special.
Mindful tips that any young adult can use to live life to the fullest.
@henrypaulphotography unsplash.com
When I was 23 years old, I was living in Tokyo, Japan. I just started to work in a large investment bank as a technologist. Life couldn’t be any more exciting. Living it up as an expatriate in Asia is amazing. The sheer amount of drinking involved is mind-boggling. Adding on the proper amount of karaoke, onsen or Japanese hot spring, and temple surfing, I felt cultured, entertained, and successful all the time. The Japanese people didn’t help. They love to treat foreigners well on the outside. If it wasn’t for my lack of confidence at that time, I could’ve been that American overseas with a large bloated ego the size of the Atlantic. But, thankfully, I was still finding myself. The “nice” words, even if fake, helped to boost my self-confidence.
Looking back, living the expatriate life in my 20s taught me so much about life. Away from my home in America, I was free to make mistakes and learn from them. I was also free to pursue any passions in my spare time outside of my job. For once, I felt like I was discovering parts of myself that I never knew existed.
Delving into a new culture helped me find my own identity.
It also inspired a new kind of spirituality in me. Dealing with life issues such as gender disparity, politics in life, and life in a foreign country is a lot for a young 23 years old. But, if you throw rocks at a young 23 years old for an hour, chances are that 23 years old will have the energy to bounce those rocks right back at you.
It’s the prime time to take on A LOT in life and see what you can make of it.
To my 23 years old self, I want you know I’m proud of you for all that you’ve accomplished during that time. This is why I wrote this to give you the motivation to do even more.
Get over yourself
So, you got your first job. You got your first apartment. You actually have money in your bank account. Good for you. But you know what? Getting the first job is easy if you’ve got connections through your school. If you are lucky to get into a program where Companies will mentor you, you’ve lucked out in a huge way. Yes, you’ve worked hard up to this point to gain these opportunities. But, everyone works hard. Not everyone will see the fruits of their labor. As you progress in your life and career, things will get much harder still. You will meet many challenges. Sometimes, you will fall and fail miserably. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you won’t see your efforts pay off. Celebrate the fact that you are doing well now. Put all of that into perspective.
Learn to be grateful for each day. It’s the only way you’ll be able to weather changes later on in life.
Cook for yourself
Yes, you are a busy professional. You eat takeout all the time. But, even in Japan, the gourmet capital of the world, you will get sick of all the endless varieties. Okay, maybe not. But, making your own food is about appreciating simple well-made dishes that inspire you. It will make you feel like an adult. The simple act of preparing a meal from the ground up will fill you with simple joys. If you cook with a friend, well, then that just adds spices into any relationship.
Discover new experiences
Even as an expatriate living in a different country, life can become a routine boring mess if you allow it to be. There are plenty of expatriates who work long hours, only socialize in the expatriate community, and drink at the same bar every day to pass the time. Life as an expatriate can be filled with new experiences if you routinely reach out from your inner circle. Socialize with the locals. Talk to people at food stalls you buy food from. Visit the homes of locals and reach out to understand their way of life. Travel to remote locations that you never thought you’d be.
Watch how life experiences change the way you think, the way that you relate to others, and the way that you love.
You can be lonely in a crowd. You can deal with that.
There’s such a thing as being too busy to deal with your problems. Having a new life at a young age can become a kind of escape. In that escape, you will feel lonely from time to time on. Not dealing with your inner self or your spiritual self will mean that you won’t be able to relate to others on a spiritual level. That will translate to ample amounts of time spent at being lonely in a crowd. Well, how do you deal with that? You don’t. You let loneliness lead you to spirituality. You lean into your loneliness by doing activities by yourself.
The more you practice being alone, the more you will be able to find your own spirit. Once you found your own spirit, you will learn to find other people’s spirits. Spirituality is the really about discovering the spirits in all things.
Love wholeheartedly, even if it’s not right.
Loving someone is a privilege. We take this for granted so much when we find someone. But, really, you are not guaranteed to receive love even if you are in a relationship. The point here is to practice loving people wholeheartedly, in the right ways. Once you’ve learned to love, then there’s a chance that you might find someone who will reciprocate the same kind of love.
Love is also an activity and a practice. You need plenty of practice to get good at it.
What is the right way to love someone? Well, it’s to give them maximum freedom to be themselves. It’s to appreciate them in their “bare” selves. It’s to take them with “worts” and all. It’s acceptance.
Be real, be yourself, and quit following the herd.
Everyone’s got quirks. Some people have more than others. The corporate environment makes you conform to their standards all the time. So, you’ve got to be yourself outside of that structure. You’ve got to learn about yourself. Once you’ve discovered yourself, then take actions that are only true to you. Don’t let others pressure you into conforming. You only get so many hours of spare time. You deserve to be yourself during those hours.
Don’t let your friends lead the way of your life. Lead your life and your friends will follow. If they don’t, then get new friends.
Take control of your life through the mundane.
At 23 years old, you think you are an adult. But, really, you are just interning to be an adult. At any internship, you have to learn the mundane tasks that will enable you to take control of your life. How to file taxes properly? How to cook a simple meal? How to do your own laundry? What to do when you are stuck in an airport? How to fake your way out of a conversation in a foreign language? How to lose weight when you are working 12 hour days? How to find friends when you don’t speak the native language?
Whatever your circumstances, you need to take actions to get a grip. Controlling what you can control is the key. Take care of yourself by taking care of your business.
Finish things.
By far, my biggest success when I was 23 years old is learning to focus my attention and to finish things. It doesn’t matter if it’s a project that I finished at work. It doesn’t matter if it’s a meal I finished cooking. It doesn’t matter if it’s a relationship that just ended. The ability to see things to completion is such a huge skill.
You don’t know yet. But, in many circumstances in life, success requires you to simply finish. If you “finish” every day, all those successes will add up.
Follow your passions and think big.
Are you a woman? Are you a minority? Do you feel disadvantaged in some way? Do you have a disability? Do you have health issues? Well, none of that prevents you from pursuing your passions. Life is too precious to waste to not step outside your comfort zone. What’s the biggest dream that you have? Make it come true. You heard me. By achieving success on an immediate goal, you will gain exponential motivation to pursue your life in a huge way.
This kind of “living your life to the fullest” will allow you to appreciate all that life has to offer later on.
Learn how to care for yourself and how to set boundaries.
Noise is all around. When you are young, it’s easy to get distracted by all the hustle and bustle. You have many friends who want to pull you in all directions at once. At your work, you don’t have authority. You work to help others at work. Even if you have own passion projects, you have many constraints that will throw curveballs at you. All of that quickly pile up to take away your time and energy. What do you do? You draw the line.
You tell people you are busy. You take actions in situations that literally spell out “No, thank you.” You let go.
You choose what you want to do at any given moment in time. Use that choice to take actions that will reflect your authentic intentions. Through that, recognize that “you” come first. Caring for yourself is paramount to caring for others. You do you! | https://medium.com/swlh/to-my-23-years-old-expatriate-self-you-are-special-cdfe11e53a76 | ['Jun Wu'] | 2019-09-15 18:36:23.429000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Travel', 'Culture', 'Leadership', 'Self'] |
2021 is going to be a bad year for world hunger | 2021 is going to be a bad year for world hunger
How climate action can make a difference
On 9 October 2020, as it was announced that the Nobel Peace Prize 2020 would be awarded to the UN World Food Programme, many WFP teams across the world were concerned about the latest data from the field. Assessments showed upticks in hunger in communities that had been doing well only a year ago, and meetings with governments were being scheduled to discuss preparedness plans for a difficult year ahead.
Photo: ©Mehedi_Rahman/WFP
While the award came as a strong acknowledgement of the work WFP is doing to combat hunger and prevent it from being used as a weapon of conflict, the distinction was tempered by the knowledge that humanitarian needs are rising faster now than at any other time in the 21st Century. In 2019, 688 million people had been chronically undernourished, and 135 million people had been driven into life-threatening situations as a result of conflicts, climate or economic shocks. Today, WFP’s live Hunger Map aggregates 957 million people across 93 countries who do not have enough to eat. The Global Humanitarian Outlook projects 239 million people in need of life-saving humanitarian action and protection this year.
Numbers are driven by a toxic intersection of several crises. Where the COVID-19 pandemic meets rising urbanization, globalization and environmental degradation, economic recessions and poverty ensue. These new vulnerabilities clash with a global climate emergency that adds increasingly severe weather shocks and stresses to the equation. Climate extremes do not only undermine the pandemic response and economic recovery — they also aggravate resource scarcity and displacement which, in turn, fuel social and political tensions that can discharge as violence and conflict.
While the emergence of the coronavirus in 2020 has reshaped our lives, the world has also grappled with one of the hottest years on record. Along with devastating heatwaves and wildfires, there have been floods, storms and city-sized locust outbreaks. Despite great operational capacities to save lives after such emergencies, agencies such as WFP are under no illusions that emergency aid can ever be enough to manage the escalating humanitarian needs of the 21st Century.
In January, WFP was among signatories to an open letter to G7 Leaders, which said: “Every day we each take precautions in our own lives. We wash our hands or wear a mask. We try to save for an uncertain future, or we buy insurance. We must now apply this common sense at a global level.”
Photo: Bangladesh 2020 floods ©Mehedi_Rahman/WFP
Of the factors driving global hunger, climate is the one that can best be predicted using science. Our technical abilities to monitor and forecast weather-related hazards have never been as good as today. There is no ethically justified reason to keep treating climate disasters as inevitable and ‘natural’ surprises. As countries are re-grouping to think about ways in which the COVID-19 crisis can be used as a springboard to build more resilient societies, climate foresight and preventive planning need to be part of the equation.
In the past year, 40 WFP country offices have engaged in a strategic dialogue with their host governments about climate risk management in food systems. In tandem with their ever-present readiness to deliver humanitarian response, these country offices have doubled down to help strengthen social safety nets with climate risk insurance solutions. They have also arranged preventive cash transfers based on weather forecasts, and helped governments to mobilize climate funding to increase the climate resilience of food systems in the most vulnerable contexts.
Today, many countries have started to recognize the global climate emergency as a humanitarian issue. Climate change fuels conflict and economic risks, while compounding the effects of disease outbreaks. Like COVID-19, it is highly globalized and dynamic, and cannot be contained by one country, one institution or one academic discipline. It requires countries and organizations to work together to identify and implement solutions.
Some of these solutions are emerging from new angles and directions, for example as part of a new global dialogue about food systems. WFP’s involvement includes anchoring the Resilience Action Track of the 2021 Food Systems Summit to discuss game-changing approaches for the transformation of imperiled and unsustainable food systems. This is an opportunity to address the interconnected problems of climate disruption, environmental degradation, food waste and unhealthy diets, which affect countries all over the world, including Spain and G7 countries. These might have stronger economies to cope with the impacts of some of those problems, but they also feel the burden of how the climate crisis is impacting the rest of the world — such as through the growing flow of climate refugees and the rising prices for certain agricultural imports.
In November, the experiences from WFP’s climate action programmes will be shared with delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference (CoP26) in Edinburgh. By that point, thousands more lives will have been threatened by climate extremes, and it will again be apparent that climate change has become an urgent humanitarian issue. Organizations such as WFP will have kept working to save lives — looking for ways to reduce the need for humanitarian aid over the long term. Whether this will be possible will depend on many factors — but it certainly includes a stronger focus on foresight and anticipation so that predictable climate emergencies can be prevented.
About the Author: This article has been sent in by Gernot Laganda, PROC, Chief of Climate and Disaster Risk Reduction Programmes, United Nations World Food Programme. | https://medium.com/@un-food-systems/2021-is-going-to-be-a-bad-year-for-world-hunger-6a7c43a294cf | ['Un Food Systems Summit'] | 2021-05-12 14:24:37.033000+00:00 | ['United Nations', 'Sdgs', 'Climate Change', 'Food Systems', 'Build Back Better'] |
XinFin and Black Tier Solutions Partners With Blockchain at Michigan. | XinFin and Black Tier Solutions Partners With Blockchain at Michigan.
Black Tier Solutions will be responsible for assisting the University of Michigan Blockchain group to develop a tokenized student rewards program and a tokenized gaming platform using XinFin Hybrid technology.
Black Tier Solutions announced the partnership with Blockchain at Michigan.
Black Tier Solutions will be responsible for assisting the University of Michigan Blockchain group to develop a tokenized student rewards program and a tokenized gaming platform using XinFin Hybrid technology.
“The University of Michigan produces some of the most talented developers in the country and they have an unparalleled interest in blockchain. This initiative is a first of its kind here in the United States and we are thrilled to be a part of it” said Chris Neill, founder of Black Tier Solutions located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
“We are more than excited to partner with Black Tier Solutions and the XinFin protocol,” said Jonathan Calso, VP of Consulting at Blockchain at Michigan. “Students get a chance to work on real applications and gain valuable experience in an emerging and fast-paced industry. We hope to expand the blockchain ecosystem on campus, and the developer ecosystem on XinFin as well”
The University of Michigan plans to undergo a soft launch in Q4 of this year.
About Blockchain at Michigan
Blockchain at Michigan prepares students to excel in the Blockchain space by providing professional development opportunities alongside industry partners, building educational resources with multidisciplinary facets, and aiding students in meaningful research and project development.
About XinFin
XinFin is an open-source enterprise-ready Hybrid Blockchain for Global Trade and Finance.
XinFin network capabilities allow all types of enterprises to connect their legacy systems with a Blockchain Network via XDC Protocol and messaging compatible with ISO20022 standard. It combines the power of Public and Private Blockchains with interoperable smart contracts. XinFin is fully EVM compatible. For more information on XinFin, please visit www.xinfin.org or learn more about XinFin in this video.
Useful link for XinFin Masternode:
Steps to Setup Masternode on XinFin MainNet
XinFin Mobile Wallet
XinFin Web Wallet
Steps to resign master node
Step by step guide to issue your own token on XinFin network
Step by step guide to swap token on XinFin network
Guide to setup node with one click installer
Watch the video to Setup XinFin Masternode with One-Click installer
Follow XinFin on:
Twitter: ( @ ) XinFin_Official
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xinfin/
Telegram: https://t.me/xinfintalk | https://medium.com/xinfin/xinfin-and-black-tier-solutions-partners-with-blockchain-at-michigan-52cdce274b49 | ['Xinfin Xdc Hybrid Blockchain Network'] | 2019-11-15 12:09:50.903000+00:00 | ['Michigan', 'Blacktiersolutions', 'Xinfin', 'Blockchain', 'Partnerships'] |
Roborock’s S7 robot vacuum aims to be the only cleaning robot you’ll need | Roborock’s S7 robot vacuum aims to be the only cleaning robot you’ll need Mark Jan 20·2 min read
Roborock was one of the first manufacturers to build a robot vacuum that can also mop hard-surface floors. The company’s all-new Roborock S7, announced during CES, will be its most advanced cleaner yet when the appliance ships in March for $649.
The Roborock S7 features a sonic mopping system that can vary from 1,650 times per minute up to 3,000 times per minute to disintegrate surface dirt andd dried-on spills. An intelligent lifting system detects when the vacuum transitions from a hard-surface floor to an area rug or carpet and automatically lifts its mopping unit.
[ Further reading: The best robot vacuum cleaners ]With Roborock’s previous vac/mop hybrids, you needed to deploy no-go strips to prevent it from moving onto carpet while it mopped. This new model will also lift its mop unit when it docks for a battery charge or after it has finished its work, to avoid leaving a wet pad resting on your floor.
This new model will offer the same suction power as the Roborock S6 MaxV that preceded it—2500pA—but the manufacturer says its redesigned brush hugs the floor better and should do an even better job of pulling dirt out of your carpet.
As with previous models, the Roborock S7 will support Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Siri and it can also be controlled with Roborock’s companion app for Android and iOS.
We’ve had favorable opinions of each generation of Roborock’s bots—including the Roborox S4, S5 Max, S6, and the S6 MaxV—so we’re looking forward tchecking out this new model.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@mark55129190/roborocks-s7-robot-vacuum-aims-to-be-the-only-cleaning-robot-you-ll-need-d8d68dbfcafa | [] | 2021-01-20 13:04:39.164000+00:00 | ['Headphones', 'Home Tech', 'Entertainment'] |
Is Bitcoin for Criminals? | Is Bitcoin for Criminals?
It’s no secret that some of Bitcoin’s earliest users used it for criminal actions. Ransomware: viruses that encrypt a hard drive and leave a message and a Bitcoin address with a 72 hour countdown have likely made millionaires out of some criminal hackers.
Interestingly, nobody blames the internet for enabling this. The headlines at the time tended to focus more on Bitcoin’s role, as Bitcoin is still a novelty for the majority of the population.
But is Bitcoin really to blame for criminal use? Furthermore, are criminals still using Bitcoin as it grows in popularity and use? These are important questions potential investors in a technology need to ask.
Thankfully, the answer to both questions is “no”. Let’s take a look at each one individually.
Abusus Non Tollit Usum
This phrase, “the abuse does not invalidate the use”, has a long history in our legal system. The idea that objects can be misused or abused-as an alcoholic does with alcohol-does not mean that there is no valid use. In fact, it is difficult to find any single item that one cannot misuse or abuse.
One direct corollary here is cash. Cash has been used in illegal operations for generations. The same advantage that cash has to Bitcoin-its fungibility-allows it to be used easily by criminals worldwide.
While some companies such as Visa and Mastercard might like to see us move to a cashless society, the result would be an incredible loss of freedom and a huge growth in the power of credit companies to determine where an individual can-and cannot-spend her money.
We tolerate the criminal use of cash because we value its use more than we fear its abuse.
Is Bitcoin Still a Criminal Favorite?
In short, no. While careful key management can generally obfuscate the user from his Bitcoin hoard, the public nature of the blockchain makes privacy a challenge. Recall, the blockchain is a public ledger that anyone can read. Beyond that, miners could decide to decline transactions from certain public addresses that are known criminals (for instance, a ransomware address with BTC in it), essentially burning those coins and making them unspendable.
Regardless of what you heard on the evening news, Bitcoin was never anonymous.
Criminals have been moving to privacy coins that are built from the start to be anonymous, such as Monero. Another project, ZCash, features both anonymous and pseudonymous transfers, depending on the users’ needs.
Are Privacy Coins Awful?
This question goes beyond Bitcoin and cryptocurrency into the nature of privacy in general, which is beyond the scope of this blog. However, many law abiding citizens use encryption for email and texts that protect them from criminals as well as governments. One such use case was this girls’ school in Afghanistan, which was made possible by Bitcoin.
There are many reasons for law abiding citizens to keep their wealth private, which are obvious. Privacy coins will certainly see their share of abuses, but their use, like Bitcoin, does not invalidate the use.
Let Hedge help you discover your uses for cryptocurrency.
What Hedge Offers
Security:
Hedge leads the industry in providing secure wallets with proprietary best in class distributed cold storage practices. The keys to your funds never touch the internet and cannot be stolen by hackers. There is no single point of failure that can jeopardize your fiduciary.
Applications:
Hedge offers application interface solutions to make your apps work with our apps. Small regional bank looking to compete? Incorporate Hedge’s APIs into your app and give your customers the ability to buy and sell bitcoin through your institution.
Access:
Hedge is the only firm in the industry that gives you 24/7 access to your funds. We net settle transactions in a proprietary process that maintains the safety of keys in cold storage, but with near real time trading.
Let Hedge manage blockchains; you manage your clients. | https://medium.com/usehedge/is-bitcoin-for-criminals-64f5d5205a11 | ['Chris Metcalfe'] | 2018-08-29 17:25:33.633000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
Rise Of The Nodes - part one | At the time of writing, I envision Rise Of The Nodes as most probably turning into a series of short (hopefully) writeups about what nodes are or should be as I believe that we might be reaching a point in time where they become a real area of focus and attention for a much larger audience than in the past.
Look Around
We don’t need to imagine a dystopian future.
All we have to do is look around and notice that most of the groundwork for that has already been laid out:
global infrastructures monitored 24/7 by nation states so that they can watch you, your behavior, your opinions, your accounts;
governments passing laws granting them powers which are now enforced outside of a normal and democratic judicial oversight framework;
attacks on constitutional or basic rights such as freedom of speech or the right to assemble;
private companies, some larger than most countries in the world, often monopolistic in nature, capable of filtering access to everyday services based on moral opinions that they try to promote globally.
In a lot of ways, the only thing this comes down to is an overwhelmingly complex legal burden for simple citizens as their rights are gradually but steadily eaten away by larger interests’ groups looking to accumulate power and often artificially protect their dominant positions for their own financial benefit.
The very uneven balance of power is often tilted towards the larger, more powerful organizations, whatever their nature and motives might be, as they have a different perception or use of two key tools: time & money. The more complex and expensive a situation is, the more you should expect large organizations to hold a massive advantage over individuals.
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America
There Is Still Hope
Looking at the world today, one would probably be very tempted to say that it is increasingly complex, global, fast-paced, digital, and that this trend is showing no slowing down — quite the contrary.
However, I do believe there is reason for optimism and hope.
Over the past couple of decades, we have witnessed social or political events which while very diverse in nature, have all taken center stage for a brief amount of time in their respective countries while simultaneously making major headlines around the globe.
Usually the explanations end up being very local. Most of them have to do with politics, economics or the very specific events that have triggered some sort of popular unrest. However, you rarely find — if ever — a much broader analysis placing that specific event within a much larger timeframe, culture or geographic zone.
Not seeing the big picture might be a significant oversight. Sometimes, general trends are far more important and powerful than events. Watch the tide, not the waves.
What I think those very macro trends tell us is that overall, a significant number of people are tired with how the world is being run and that they feel like they ended up with the short end of the straw. The feeling of resignation is palpable, as individuals increasingly feel a complete lack of power to do anything to change their conditions
But what I believe is even more telling is how many of these people add that while they are dissatisfied with the state of things or point out to how poorly they are represented they do not want to run for office themselves.
This is never discussed or debated. Voting seems to appeal to less and less people but the only elements that are mentioned are high turnout = good and low turnout = bad. But what about alternatives to voting, or other ways of voting? Maybe those aren’t discussed because they would not benefit so much the people who try to get voted in than the people who are supposed to vote.
Most people seem to aspire to lead their lives freely. Simply put, they expect their privacy to be respected and to enjoy the best quality of life possible for themselves and their family.
So far, they have tried to do that, and earlier generations even succeeded. Many of us grew up with the expectation that our quality of life would exceed that of our parents, but more and more that is no longer the case — and for some incomprehensible reason, you keep being told that there is no inflation…
People are frustrated, but without an alternative to what they were raised to believe they are resigned to the status quo — even if it’s getting increasingly harder. And although technology, the most obvious example being the internet, has greatly facilitated innumerable aspects of daily life, it has also made you more vulnerable.
Large companies and government institutions now have even more monitoring capabilities, tracking our every move. In other words, complete strangers — and a lot of them — know everything about us — and use it to our disadvantage.
But up till now, it wasn’t really clear how you could, concretely and effortlessly, lead your life as you wished and protect you best interests.
Rise of the nodes
Now I might be over-reaching quite a bit when I say effortlessly as this still requires a lot of work on a protocol level and on a user interface level. But that, I hope, is just a work in progress.
What It also requires is some form of resistance on an individual basis. It requires the courage to embrace an alternative. It’s time to make a stand.
“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.” Etienne de la Boétie — The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
And that is where my hope lies. There are things that people can do, individually, to protect both their privacy and assets.
For decades now, people far brighter than me, have spent their time trying to create an electronic version of money. Thanks to years of effort, we now have bitcoin: sound electronic money.
But Bitcoin, through its characteristics offers more possibilities than what we were used to with our old fiat digital currencies.
It gives you the opportunity to opt-into an owner-less system with written rules that you can enforce, and it allows you to conduct un-censorable, private, financial transactions with other individuals around the world freely.
With such a solid foundation, and a proven track record of running resiliently and uninterrupted for 10 years, at some point it’s our turn, you, me, everybody — to catch the ball and run with it. And that’s where Lightning Solutions comes in.
Convinced that greater financial freedom is possible, we decided to build nodl, a plug and play Bitcoin node with Lightning. We recognized the incremental benefits for individuals running nodes, and we also felt that there weren’t any viable, off-the-shelf, open nodes that were commercially available. Either you knew enough about hardware, software, Bitcoin and Lightning Network to put it all together by yourself or you followed a detailed setup guide like the great one Stadicus maintains for Raspibolt. In the meantime, another interesting option has surfaced with Pierre Rochard’s node launcher that you can run from your Mac or PC.
But when we set out to build nodl originally, we were trying to look a little further down the road in order to design what we firmly believe should become a staple in regular households, the Bitcoin personal assistant, or for businesses, the Bitcoin business assistant.
I’ll spend some time in the next articles detailing what lies beneath those products, and how they can be practically applied in everyday life. | https://medium.com/coinmonks/rise-of-the-nodes-part-one-7f9d9130c800 | [] | 2019-02-19 13:59:34.048000+00:00 | ['Full Node', 'Lightning Network', 'Sovereignty', 'Bitcoin', 'Freedom'] |
8 productivity tips to set yourself up for success | If you’re reading this, it means you’re getting serious about your time. Time is our most valuable resource and you’ve taken a step towards taking control and putting your time towards what really matters to you.
P roductivity is defined as the ability to produce a certain amount of results or outputs given your amount of resources or inputs.
Productivity is all about trial and error. No two people are exactly the same — we think differently, we work differently. Productivity comes down to figuring out what works for you.
For some inspiration, here’s 8 tips we’ve gathered from our community on to set yourself up for maximum productivity.
1. Create a peaceful environment
Like the saying says, a happy body is a happy mind.
Create the environment that is most suitable to you. This could mean lowering the temperature, opening up windows, or getting into your favorite sweats.
Additionally, over time, we’ve been primed to react to auditory cues — construction noise, office conversations, phone notifications, etc.
To maximize your chance of having an uninterrupted work session, try finding a quiet place to sit, put your phone on ‘do not disturb’, and close out all messaging applications.
Many have also found it helpful to play background music or white noise. Check out our favorites!
These actions will not only make you comfortable, but keep your mind focused on your task versus your environment.
2. Make a checklist of the things you need
Before you sit down for good, gather all the necessary equipment you might need. This will reduce any moving around time and keep everything you need conveniently close to you. Some things I find I always need are:
Computer charger
Headphones
A pen and my notebook
Blue light glasses
3. Fill up a glass of water
Similar to the first saying, a healthy body is a healthy mind.
Water is very important to your body. It brings hydration and nutrients to every one of your cells. So do your body a favor, and before you sit down, fill yourself a glass of water and drink it throughout your work session.
4. Emphasize your bigger picture
Many times, we get stuck on the day to day happenings and we forget about the bigger picture. This includes your vision board, if you have one, and your yearly goals. Ask yourself:
What are you working so hard for?
What gets you up every day?
Spending a few minutes before starting your session helps you emphasize your bigger picture and gives you a stronger and purer drive.
Start your day at Sidekick’s HQ — review your yearly goals and reinforce your vision.
Adding on, spend some time envisioning your goals coming true. The more you believe in something, the more motivated you are to work for them, the higher the chance of the goal being accomplished.
5. Set daily goals
Before starting your work day, set yourself a few daily goals. A good number to commit to is 3. Commit to accomplishing the 3 most important goals or tasks of your day.
6. Plan your day
Most importantly, plan or schedule your day.
“Plan your day before it gets planned for you.”
Be intentional about how you spend your time and what tasks you will accomplish today. Without doing this, your time might go to meetings, social distractions, or internet distractions. And before you know it, it’ll be the end of the day and you’ll ask yourself, “What did I even do today?”
Have your calendar and goals side by side so you can make sure you’re doing what you need to do.
7. Turn off your distractions
Just before you’re about to start work, turn off all your distractions. This includes putting away our precious phones, closing distracting tabs, and blocking the strongest of digital temptations.
Block your biggest digital distractions on Sidekick’s blocklist. Ensure you’ll complete your session without any unnecessary rabbit holes or newsfeed scrolls.
8. Start!
And finally, start! The hardest thing, but the most necessary thing about working is starting. Don’t worry, I’ve been there. Procrastination gets the best of us.
But, when you start and you eventually accomplish your tasks, you’ll finish your day feeling much happier, lighter, and more complete. | https://medium.com/the-sidekick-app/8-productivity-tips-to-set-yourself-up-for-success-cdee86769fb6 | [] | 2021-07-06 13:01:29.195000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Daily Life', 'Study', 'Success', 'Tips'] |
The Exercise Benefits Of Replacing Music With Mindfulness | Music adds to the enjoyment of exercise. I get it. Why would you want to listen to the clunks and oofs and background chitchat that make up the cacophony of sounds in a gym? Why would you want to listen to the repetitive thump of sole on concrete, of inhalation and exhalation, of passing traffic?
To drown out distractions, the allure is to tune into your favorite playlist, plug in the earphones, and get super-focused. Indeed, music is a great tonic for motivation, and there is a time and a place for the welcome boost music provides.
However, I’ve noticed that some of my best training sessions are when I train without music. There are subtle ways I use music not to enhance focus, but to distract myself from my routine.
With mindful training, I ditch the playlist and listen exclusively to my body. The difference in quality between these sessions can be profound. So if you’re used to music fueling your sessions, here’s why it’s worth ditching the earphones. | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/the-exercise-benefits-of-replacing-music-with-mindfulness-ff70ad46db59 | ['Ricky Derisz'] | 2020-11-15 15:28:36.590000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Fitness', 'Lifestyle', 'Mindfulness', 'Exercise'] |
Her memory of the midnight attack was muddled, but her battered body bore the story. | Purple bruises peppered her arms, legs and chest. Blood dried on her busted lip. Dark, swollen skin circled her bloodshot right eye. Hospital scans confirmed her ex-boyfriend’s attack had inflicted internal trauma too.
Now, hours later, he was in jail and Leah Gunion was home again. Concussion-weary and tender, she tucked her toddler back into bed and sat down to nurse her infant son. An 8 a.m. knock at the door disrupted her first moment of peace.
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A woman waited at the threshold. Her polo shirt bore the insignia of the Florida Department of Children and Families. Thinking she was there to help, Leah let her in.
For the next six weeks, Leah would battle the state for custody of her children, though DCF investigators never suggested that she injured her kids. They didn’t accuse her of using drugs or failing to provide for her boys’ basic needs. | https://medium.com/@papivo6646/her-memory-of-the-midnight-attack-was-muddled-but-her-battered-body-bore-the-story-a25e366c11e4 | [] | 2020-12-17 15:27:33.785000+00:00 | ['Memory Leak', 'Heroku', 'Verzuz', 'E 40'] |
Reverse relationship in Django | This blog post teaches you about the relationship between the child and parent models and vice versa. Let us consider the following School and Student models for example.
Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash
The student model will have the student name and the school model will have the school name alone for simplicity.
This is how our models look like.
from django.db import models
class School(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
def __str__(self):
return self.name
class Student(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
school = models.ForeignKey(School, on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name='student')
def __str__(self):
return self.name
Direct relationship
In the above Student model, the school field has a foreign key relationship with the school model.
This is an example of a direct relationship. If we wish to get the school name from a student object we can simply do the following.
>>> from student.models import Student
>>> student = Student.objects.all().first()
>>> student
<Student: John>
>>> student.school.name
'Stanford'
Or if you want to query all the students whose school name is ‘Stanford’ we can simply do the following.
>>> students = Student.objects.filter(school__name='Stanford')
>>> students
<QuerySet [<Student: John>]>
This is straightforward and simple, right? We are accessing the parent object from the child object. What if we want to do the opposite of this? Let us say we would like to query the parent objects based on applying some conditions to the child object.
Reverse relationship
If we look at the models, it gives us a feeling that only child objects are mapped to the parent objects and not the other way round right?
This is where the “related_name” argument comes for the rescue. This will act as a field in the model while querying parent objects based on the child models.
Let us say I need to query all the schools where a student named ‘John’ is present. Then I can do the following.
>>> from student.models import Student, School
>>> School.objects.filter(student__name='John')
<QuerySet [<School: Stanford>]>
I have a student named ‘John’ in ‘Standford’ school record. Let me add one more ‘John’ to some other school and query again. Now two schools will be returned.
>>> from student.models import School
>>> School.objects.filter(student__name='John')
<QuerySet [<School: Stanford>, <School: Harvard>]>
This is my student table records.
student table record
We have successfully filtered parent values from the child values using reverse relationship with “related_name” attribute.
Conclusion
Hope this article is helpful. Follow me for more articles on Django and Python. Happy coding! | https://medium.com/@allwin-raju-12/reverse-relationship-in-django-f016d34e2c68 | ['Allwin Raju'] | 2020-12-25 14:52:49.098000+00:00 | ['Django Child Relationship', 'Django', 'Django Parent Child', 'Django Parent From Child'] |
Why Love has Become My Religion | The exception to the rule in a traditionally religious family.
By Tyler Nix on Unsplash
I grew up in a family of devout Christians. Literally, about 80 percent of my adult relatives are pastors, ministers, ushers, choir members, praise dancers, officers in the church or otherwise heavily involved. I was set on this same path from the youngest age that I can remember.
We would wake up bright and early Sunday morning to get ready for the day’s services. My mother would curl my hair and I’d slip into one of my fancy ruffled dresses, a pair of white lace ankle socks and slightly-heeled shoes. My brother would put on his best suit accompanied by a fresh haircut and we’d join my mom and grandmother, who were always dressed to the nines and usually in big swanky hats, as we headed to Sunday school.
After Sunday school we’d hang around until the morning service started about 30 minutes later. Then, we’d go home and eat the huge dinner my grandmother prepared the night prior, before heading back to church for the evening service. Later in the week, there was choir rehearsal on Tuesday or Thursday, sometimes both, and Wednesday night bible study. This would be in addition to any special programs or events that may have been taking place. It felt like we were always at church. I didn’t mind it much though. It was all I knew.
Outside of church I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house and she was very strict. She wasn’t the type to leave her religion between the four walls of the sanctuary. We couldn’t listen to secular music or watch non-godly television shows. In school I could never participate in discussions with the cool kids about the latest Nightmare on Elm Street Movie or Bobby Brown song. That is until I got a Sony Walkman one Christmas and discovered the local radio stations. It opened up a whole new world for me!
When home with my mother, she would get up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and catch me still awake, reading by my nightlight. I had a purple King James Version Bible with my name engraved into it that would often serve as my reading material of choice, if I wasn’t caught up in an edition of The Baby Sitters Club. I was the model church-going little girl.
Then, as I got old enough to notice certain things, I did. As I got old enough to think for myself instead of regurgitate what I had been taught, I thought. A pastor at one of our churches fostered a 15-year-old girl who was beautiful, but troubled and alone. He got her pregnant. Later, my aunt wanted to seek more holistic cancer treatments for her son as she was leery about the effects of chemotherapy and the manner in which it ravages a human body. Though the church was filled with financially prosperous members, no one was swayed enough by her tears to help with payments. My cousin died in his early 20s. Many assisted with covering the cost of his funeral.
I saw religion and individuals claiming to be religious hurt more people than were helped, and started to explore the point of it all. I know you can’t judge a thing or a group of people based on a few anomalies. There are plenty of Christians who live by the principles, who are “good” people that aim to be of service and help those in need. I know some personally. Bad experiences didn’t drive me away. I mostly just stopped identifying with not just Christianity but religion as a whole.
I’m pro-do whatever makes you happy as long as you’re not harming anyone. I want people to love who they love and live their lives in truth. Not my truth, not your truth, not the truth in a book, THEIR truth. Religion just started to feel too constricting for me. So, I started to focus more on morality. What matters most to me is the way that we treat other people.
I started to focus on love. Not in the emotional sense, but as a perspective. Love embodies kindness, support, tolerance and empathy. It has no rules and no boundaries as to whom it can be bestowed upon. Love is freeing.
Practicing love allows me to also maintain respect and appreciation for those who do choose to follow a religious doctrine. Sometimes, we need something to hold on to that feels bigger than ourselves. Religion is that something for a number of people. It’s helped carry my mom through to being the best version of herself that she can be. So, I don’t knock it at all or undervalue the importance of its presence in the lives of some.
That’s the beauty of operating in love; with a sense of integrity there are no hard rights and wrongs as far as what people should believe or how they should live their lives. Do what works for you. Do what makes you happy. Do what makes you a better human being. And allow others to do the same.
For me, love is enough. | https://acamea.medium.com/why-love-has-become-my-religion-1f25d7b3bdf9 | ['Acamea Deadwiler'] | 2019-06-10 06:24:44.365000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Spirituality', 'Christianity', 'Religion', 'Unpopular Opinion'] |
W10 NFL Monte Carlo Projections | How to interpret the ISW’s New Look Tables
p (w) % = Implied win probability per team based on the results stemming from 10,000 monte carlo simulated games (e.g. NYJ won 5,156 / 10,000 simulated games → NYJ’s p(W) % = 51.6%).
Avg. Score = The average (projected) score per team derived from 10,000 simulated games.
Spread = The average point differential between the two average scores.
Avg. Total vs. Market = The average total is equal to the the sum of each team’s average projected scores. The market is what ESPN’s quoted total (‘over /under’) is.
Market Spread = The current line or spread per ESPN’s NFL Daily Lines.
p (cover) % = Estimated likelihood that each team covers the spread given the market spread based on our 10k monte carlo simulations.
p (cover total) % = The likelihood that the total (i.e. the sum of each team’s final scores) goes over ‘O:’ or under ‘U:’ the market total based on 10k monte carlo simulations.
The ISW’s Power Ratings
The ISW employs its proprietary power rating system each NFL season beginning with preseason power ratings that are adjusted weekly according to team performance against the spread (ATS) as well as margin of victory throughout the season.
The ISW’s NFL W10 Power Ratings | https://medium.com/the-intelligent-sports-wagerer/w10-nfl-monte-carlo-projections-81edac90aa2a | ['John Culver'] | 2020-11-15 17:09:06.747000+00:00 | ['Sports Betting', 'NFL', 'Predictive Modeling', 'Handicapping', 'Sports Data'] |
How to create hot animations for any interface | The same principle works for app animations. They have to be small and looped to look good and work well.
Eye-tracking login and icons
Icons — 3–4 seconds of the animation will be more than enough. For most of the tones, you will need to reveal some animation for icons, but sometimes you will want more complex and looped animation.
Technical specifics
Frame rate
We recommend using 30 fps for your animation. Even though the standard frame rate for the web is 60 fps, 30 fps works better — animation looks more smooth and weighs less.
File format
You can use 3 types of files for your websites and apps: gif, mp4, and Lottie JSON.
If you try to compare these formats by their file sizes and quality, it will look something like this. Lottie is the smallest and has the best quality. Mp4 weighs a little bit more and has worse quality. Gif — big file size and bad quality.
Gif
A non-static image format that can be easily used everywhere: on a website, in a mobile app, social media materials, or even sent to your friend as a sticker.
In this format, you will have a transparent background which isn’t possible in mp4 format.
format. This format will be suitable for you with small-sized compositions or single elements.
Better not to use it for big ones because the file size might be too big and its quality not so good comparing to mp4 and Lottie formats.
MP4
It’s the most common video format.
Comparing to gif mp4 has a good quality and a smaller file size. It’s easy to use on your websites and apps.
You can’t have a transparent background in this format so keep that in mind if you want an animation for a website banner or something else with a color background.
Lottie JSON
A Lottie is a JSON-based animation file format that you can use on any platform as easily as static assets. They are small files that work on any device and can scale up or down without pixelation.
Jason is the most flexible format. If you choose Lottie Json, you get the opportunity to change some settings like animation speed, background color, animation on hover, loop animation, etc. via Lottie web player.
To implement a Lottie file on your resource just give it to your developer or use the Lottie file player to generate the code.
Lottie format is suitable for such platforms as Windows, iOS, Android, native script, xamarin, react native, angular, flutter, qt, skia, and vue.js
We recommend using a Lottie format. This way your animation 100% will be of decent quality, you will have a transparent background and implement animations easily on lots of platforms.
If you don’t want to spend a lot of time on the animation, but you want to test Lottie animations — we prepared a lot of FREE animations for you.
4 categories in 2 different styles. You can download full compositions or only elements from them.
Check our website and grab your Lottie right now!
Ideas and design part
When you are thinking about animation ideas keep in mind everything listed above about the duration, loops, and file size.
Here we share our ideas dealing with the creation process and we do hope it will help you.
Think about the main goal of the animation. What story do you need to tell with it? What should the user feel and think while watching? Imagine how the main elements of the illustrations will look. What will represent your story — characters or abstract elements? Brainstorm ideas. Never begin to design or animate if you have only one idea for it. Write down a couple of options, list their pros and cons. Only after that choose the one you will work on. Write down a detailed plan if you have a big story to animate. That will help you plan your work better, so you don’t end up with a long and confusing animation. Work on the style. Collaborate with an illustrator or do it yourself. It’s important to consider the final output format at this stage because if you use some heavy textures or even embedded AE effects, they might not work in Lottie. Do your homework. Name all the layers properly, split all the elements that will be animated to the different layers.
Animation process recommendations
Before you start preparing your illustrations for the animation. You can do this in graph editors where illustrations were created on preparing them in After Effects.
For example, we take this smart guy from our free Lottie animations.
Split body parts into different layers and give them proper names
2. Align anchor points
3. Parent layers
Lottie hacks
We use Lottie in our work all the time so we prepared some hacks for you. | https://medium.muz.li/how-to-create-hot-animations-for-any-interface-213a44ddab7e | [] | 2021-02-02 11:19:26.359000+00:00 | ['Motion', 'Lottie', 'Animation', 'Design', 'Interaction Design'] |
Getting the most out of Jupyter Lab | Getting the most out of Jupyter Lab
Image by author
Love them or hate them, notebooks are part of being a data scientist. Historically the only way to work with notebooks was using Jupyter Notebook — in 2017 we were given Jupyter Lab.
Jupyter Lab offers a superior development experience to Jupyter Notebook, with improvements such as:
a file browser
a text editor
terminal access
split views
This post is aimed at showing off what Jupyter Lab can do. If you are already a Jupyter user, skip straight to the tips & tricks section.
Installation & Use
Install without a space:
$ pip install jupyterlab
Start a server with a space:
$ jupyter lab
You can then point your browser to http://localhost:8888/lab , and you'll see the Launcher screen, shown below with the File Browser open in the sidebar:
Unlike Jupyter Notebook, you can have multiple tabs open side by side — you can also keep track of your kernels by selecting Running Terminals & Kernels in the sidebar:
Notebooks vs. Jupyter Notebook vs. Jupyter Lab
Something that can be confusing is the difference between the .ipynb notebook file, Jupyter Notebook & Jupyter Lab:
a notebook file ( .ipynb ) is a JSON text file that defines the structure & code of a notebook
) is a that defines the structure & code of a notebook Jupyter Notebook & Jupyter Lab are programs that allow you to run & edit notebook files
Both Jupyter Notebook & Jupyter Lab can be used to run any .ipynb notebook file.
Kernels & virtual environments
Another area for confusion is what exactly a kernel is. A kernel is just a running Python interpreter, usually connected to a notebook. It is possible swap kernels after they are running, but it’s not something we do a lot.
Kernels can be managed from the menu bar — restarting kernels is something that is done a lot. Unfortunately there are no default shortcuts setup for kernel management — see our post on Customizing Jupyter Lab Shortcuts to see how to set these up.
In order to control which virtual environment you are using in the notebook, it’s best to activate the environment before you install Jupyter Lab or start the server. For example, if you are using conda to manage virtual environments:
You’ll also want to make sure you activated this environment before installing Jupyter Lab.
When editing notebooks, Jupyter Lab becomes a modal editor with two modes — Command and Edit:
Command Mode for operating on cells
Edit Mode for operating on text
A modal editor will operate differently depending on the mode — the same key will do different things based on what mode you are in. You can see what mode you are in on the status bar.
You can move between modes using:
Enter to move from Command to Edit
to move from Command to Edit Escape to move from Edit to Command
Cells can be run using Shift Enter in either mode, ending up in Command mode.
Cells
A notebook is composed of cells — blocks that contain text. The text inside a cell can either be code, Markdown or raw text. The ability to have mix executable code and Markdown documentation is a key feature of notebooks.
You can change the cell type using a dropdown:
You can change cell types using the following shortcuts in Command mode:
- m = change cell to Markdown
- y = change cell to code
Three other useful Command Mode shortcuts for operating on cells are:
- a = insert cell above
- b = insert cell below
- dd = delete cell
Mastering these five shortcuts will allow you to work with cells as efficiently as you work with text.
Jupyter Lab Tips and tricks
This section is a rapid fire look at the features Jupyter Lab offers.
Tooltip
Pressing Shift-Tab will show a tooltip for the function or class your cursor is on:
Contextual help
Similar to the tooltip, except it’s always there. You can have this help always shown in a separate pane by opening a Show Contextual Help window from the Launcher:
Consoles
Consoles are another way to interact with a running kernel — a cool trick is to connect a console to a Python script ( .py ):
Markdown preview
No more committing README.md changes just to see the updates:
These are actually iPython features, and will also work in an iPython kernel:
a single ? to see the docstring
to see the docstring a double ?? to see the source code
Running shell commands
Another iPython feature - running shell commands inside a notebook:
You can use this to automatically install packages in the first cell of a notebook — make sure to use the -q flag to hide the output:
%%autoreload
Autoreload helps deal with the problem of source code outside the notebook not being reimported when it’s changed. This is only a problem when the source code changes after you start the kernel — essentially only when you are writing code yourself, external to the notebook.
%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2
Putting these two commands at the top of your notebook will mean that if you make changes to source code outside of the notebook, you can get these changes without having to restart the kernel.
Dark theme
The most important tip of all — a dark theme:
Jupyter Lab Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet
Below is a list of the most useful keyboard shortcuts in Jupyter Lab:
Cmd B = toggle sidebar
= toggle sidebar Alt W = close tab
= close tab Enter = to move from Command to Edit
= to move from Command to Edit Escape = to move from Edit to Command
= to move from Edit to Command Shift Enter = run cell
Command Mode
- a = insert cell above
- b = insert cell below
- dd = delete cell
- z = undo cell
- shift z = redo cell
- m = change cell to Markdown
- y = change cell to code
Text mode | https://towardsdatascience.com/getting-the-most-out-of-jupyter-lab-9b3198f88f2d | ['Adam Green'] | 2021-03-01 14:57:19.084000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Jupyterlab'] |
Multiple Income Review 2021 | Hey there! Welcome to my review post for Multiple Income Funnel.
You’ve probably landed on this post because you are looking for more information about Multiple Income Funnel. I’m sure you are curious about all the hype surrounding the Multiple Income Funnel system and the income claims seen online and on Youtube. Well, you’ve come to the right blog post.
In this Multiple Income Funnel review post, I am going to go over the platform, how it works, what you get when you join, the cost, compensation plan, a demo of the platform, and my experience with the system thus far since I joined. I’ll also share my thoughts on who this system is perfect for.
So continue reading to learn more about Multiple Income Funnel. 🙂 Don’t feel like reading this full review and want to go straight to the sales page?
==> Click Right Here For Access
Watch my video below for a high level overview and demo of the Multiple Income Funnel system.
What is “Multiple Income Funnel”?
Multiple Income Funnel is a marketing system/tool to help you promote your business. They also provide you landing pages, professionally copy written auto-responders, and marketing training, as well as the opportunity to earn commissions referring other people to the system.
So How Does The “Multiple Income Funnel System” Work?
The main feature of Multiple Income Funnel is the ability to have a done for you solution to generate consistent affiliate commissions online.
The system comes with high converting capture pages, built in follow up emails that follow up with your leads for you, as well as tons of resources to make easy sales.
The really great thing about this system is that the 4 income streams inside are handpicked to not only be very valuable for a person wanting to make money online, but also they are high converting and have great compensation plans.
Some of the income streams pay you 100%, instant commissions up to $2,000! This is a true gamechanger if you’ve had to wait to access your earnings in the past, or had to give a chunk away to product owners.
What Are The Income Streams Inside The Multiple Income Funnel?
1. Multiple Income Funnel itself — You will earn when people signup for a monthly or annual plan under you.
2. Easy 1 Up — This is an online marketing education platform with many levels of training.
3. Textbot.ai — This is a text messaging software that you can use to drive traffic to whatever offer online you want.
4. Traffic Authority — This is a platform to purchase traffic and access training on traffic from top earners online.
What’s Included With “Multiple Income Funnel” When You Join?
The Multiple Income Funnel contains the following:
Done for you affiliate system
Ability to profit from 4 different, high converting income streams
Tons of resources to promote such as copy paste Social Media posts, emails to send, banner ads, and more
Access to private Facebook group for 24/7 support
And much, much more!
What Is The Cost of “Multiple Income Funnel”?
The cost to join Multiple Income Funnel is extremely affordable. It is either a monthly fee of $49 or an annual fee of around $350.
Some of the other income streams are ‘pay to play’ meaning you have to be at a certain level inside to earn commissions and this would be an additional cost. Most affiliate programs are pay to play so it’s normal.
How Does The Multiple Income Funnel Compensation Plan Work?
I actually recorded a very indepth video breaking down all the different income streams, the costs, and the compensation plan when you refer someone to join under you.
Just click play below and follow along!
Is “Multiple Income Funnel” Right For You?
If you are someone who is either brand new online, has struggled in the past, or a seasoned marketer who just wants to add an additional income stream, this system is for you. This is the easiest and most unique marketing system and income program to join to make the income you desire. What I love most about this program is that the ONLY thing you have to focus on is sending traffic to your link (which is taken care of with income stream #4).
In my first day of joining Multiple Income Funnel I made over $300 totally on autopilot! All I did was make a few posts online. Again, if you’re not very technical or skilled in sales, this is perfect. You just send someone to your link and everything else is taken care of for you.
With that being said, if you are looking for new way to make money that doesn’t involve messing around with sales funnels and building an email list, then this is the program for you. It’s an affordable and easy software platform and business opportunity with simple training.
If you are excited about Multiple Income Funnel, then by all means click the link below and let’s get you started. See you in the inside! 🙂
CLICK HERE TO SET UP YOUR ACCOUNT NOW
Looking forward to seeing you on the inside! | https://medium.com/@garrettbarry29/multiple-income-review-2021-c38bfe352fe0 | ['Garrett Barry'] | 2020-12-25 13:58:18.842000+00:00 | ['Work From Home', 'Multiple Income Funnel', 'Reviews', 'Make Money Online', '2021'] |
Zero Iteration MagicScript | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/japanese-magic-leap-fans/zero-iteration-magicscript-638aee7ffda8 | ['Sadao Tokuyama'] | 2020-12-22 13:24:34.238000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'AR', 'Magic Leap One', 'Magic Leap', 'マジックリープ'] |
My Health-Tech Startup Journey | I am not Don Quixote.
I see more than a windmill.
I had a career. In the late 1980’s I was an M&A tax lawyer working on corporate acquisitions and dispositions. I was just a grunt, but I got to work on several of the most exciting transactions of the decade. Then, in 1991, I became an investment banker. By the time I left, I was the global co-head of the top-ranked project finance advisory team in the world, assisting equity consortia on billion-dollar projects ranging from toll roads to airports to power projects. I even advised on the first all-electronic toll road in North America, but this road did not indicate where my life would lead.
I still think of this as “my” toll road.
In the world in which I lived, I had the “typical” job. I loved the intellectual challenge of what I did, but I always knew that it was a place for me to build skills and learn — not the place from which I wanted to retire. After 15 years in the “professions,” I realized that what I did on a daily basis was no longer fulfilling. And then, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and it reinforced my feeling that there had to be a more meaningful way to invest my time.
The Initial Journey
And so, in 2004, I started to explore opportunities in the world of health-tech. A great thing about health-tech is that almost everyone is there because of a personal story. Another positive is that very few of us “newbies” understand the market, allowing us to naively set lofty goals. In general, it’s not that “insiders” don’t want change, but the existing incentives, structures, and technologies make that problematic. Those embedded in the system often look to make incremental adjustments, as they realize that real change is a Herculean task and probably won’t work. Gradual improvement is better than fighting a windmill.
To learn about the market, along with two NYC cardiologists, I started a cardiovascular imaging business. The point of this endeavor was to give me an insider’s view of how a segment of healthcare works and then figure out the problem(s) I wanted to solve.
The idyllic visit to a doctor’s office
I learned:
how physicians perceived their practices versus the reality of how others viewed them. As remains true today, although physicians provided the ultimate clinical value to patients, the team around them was perhaps even more critical in building the patient relationship and meeting the patient’s needs:
that empathy and smiles mattered, even if the conversations were mundane and “just” around scheduling or billing. I found that the vast majority of offices undervalued their staff, but those who did not were frequently the most loved by their patients; and
the tech products designed for healthcare typically did not consider any user's needs except the billing office, and on occasion, the physician.
My First Aha Moment
I love to initially solve mundane workflow problems, and grow from there. I see them as the best way to begin a relationship. In our new cardiology business, I saw a significant problem in cardiac imaging workflow. Why were we making physicians stay in the office for hours to read and report on imaging exams? Why did patients need to take a trip to an office to pick up their images, bring them to another office, and then have the practitioner unable to read those images due to technical incompatibility issues?
In 2007, along with a team of devoted colleagues, we began to build a substantial “niche” solution for medical image management. For the first seven years, few people understood what we did. And potential clients asked confusing questions. While it seems strange to think of now, this was 2008, which meant that the tech solutions most healthcare groups used were designed pre-Y2K. Some sales prospects credited us with inventing the internet instead of understanding that we were simply a SaaS solution utilizing the internet. Others questioned why they would ever want to do anything other than keep their medical images on a hard drive. (Or at least they thought they were still on a hard drive.) Eventually, people began to understand “the cloud” and how Software as a Service could benefit healthcare.
Building our company was a long and slow path. Have you ever awoken with night terrors wondering what would happen if your product failed and you lost all of the patient data? Our system design addressed this risk, but…what if? Why did I give up my prior security and achievement to worry about everything that would or could go wrong tomorrow? My only answer as to why was because, on most days, I loved it.
Few things exceeded the excitement of the first time I saw a cardiologist using our product during a medical conference. Instead of listening to the lecture, he was doing his work from his seat. And then, a few years later, I saw a cardiologist using our product on an airplane with United Wi-Fi. What a thrill. That’s why I chose the path I did. We were making a difference (and making money).
Although this isn’t actually my family, you get the idea
In 2016, we sold our company. By most “real world” standards, the sale would be considered a success, but compared to the world of “overnight” unicorns, we had just managed our way through the process. It was a slog with a nice financial outcome. But building in health-tech is really slow…
Didn’t We Just Have an Exit?
As my family rejoiced that the albatross was gone, I broke the news to them. I wanted to do it again. They thought I was crazy. But, yes — I wanted to build another health-tech company, and I “invited” them to take this journey with me. This time would be different. My last company was all about workflow; this one would be about genuinely helping people and solving “our” problems.
The Why
Having witnessed three close family members’ care management as they deteriorated from good health through illness over more than a decade, I was astounded by what I saw. Pancreatic cancer, congestive heart failure, and dementia. Three very different paths but unfortunately with many similar challenges. Bouncing between medical offices, hospitals, SNFs, home aides, and so many other market participants — the health system was not designed to allow efficient and effective care delivery that met its users’ needs. Attacking this problem called to me.
Plus, I would be starting this company with the person who joined me as an intern at my last company and had earned the role of COO by the time we sold. She would be with me to manage the day-to-day while I had the freedom to dream about our audacious future.
We had all learned so much, and it would have been a waste to stop. We were no longer health-tech outsiders. We developed knowledge and built a valuable network. We were smart enough to know that we could avoid making the same mistakes again. But we were also smart enough to know that new mistakes would occur.
The What
Personally, in our quest to manage care, I had the benefit of 5 physicians in my family, a strong healthcare network, a legal and finance background, the vast resources available in NYC, and most importantly — an interested and engaged family. But the process was still excruciating.
And it wasn’t just hard for the individual. It was difficult for everyone around them.
Managing care is bewildering. Particularly for the older adult, who is often treated with disregard.
The “patient” (rightfully) did not want to give up control and independence, often until far beyond when they should have ceded some of their decision-making. Family members had no idea what was going on, with disjointed messaging amongst the care team. Our (superb and caring) private home aides had transitional issues as they changed shifts. And providers of all sorts only had part of the story.
We were lucky. In each case, we had the luxury of discussing and planning for these issues. If it was so difficult for us, how arduous must navigating this path be for those who don’t know or understand “the system” or have the time, knowledge, network, and financial security to learn?
You Can’t Do This, Can You?
So our goal was clear. Let’s build something that makes healthcare better for all participants — but starting with the patient and their family. Let’s be certain to respect existing systems and workflows. And let’s not just think about the clinical. Let’s consider social, communication, education, resources, etc. Let’s make it usable and approachable for all — almost irrespective of education level or knowledge. Let’s also invite other health-tech solutions to join us. And let’s create a B2B and B2B2C model that generates an ROI to the healthcare system, which subsidizes our desire to help the underserved consumer market that is already drowning from the cost of care.
We may not have battled the windmill, but we’re not alone.
Okay. We know what we want to do. This should be easy — says absolutely no one who understands healthcare, human behavior, relationships, finance, or how hard it is to build a company.
And by the way, building our vision isn’t cheap. So one of our goals would be to invest both our time and money to learn enough to ultimately attract the “right” investors. For those who haven’t been through this, the thought is that any capital is good. For the experienced, they know that the right partners, whether for product or capital, are critical. What we are doing is hard. If you don’t understand the market, you believe that we are either (i) geniuses solving the world’s problems or (ii) ignorant, with no understanding of the complexities of what this takes. We are neither.
As we have just gone commercial, our Users will begin to tell us what we did right and what we missed. We’re pretty confident that we’ve done a good job thus far, but we’ve only just begun, and we don’t know what challenges are ahead. We only know that they are there. And along the way, we will be looking for partners of all sorts.
HealthHive, PBC has come to life.
How Do I Distinguish Myself From Quixote?
Picture this. I’m at a cocktail party (yes, someday we will be able to socialize again), and someone asks, “what do you do for a living”? Do I tell them that I spend lots of time (and lots of my money) trying to build a solution that the world thinks is almost impossible to create? Or do I presumptuously say I’m the CEO of a health-tech company and make it sound glamorous? Or do I tell them the truth — we have our North Star, and each day we try to figure out how to get closer?
Well, at least we’re trying to do something that will matter.
Are you interested in helping us in any way? We are always looking to connect with smart people who share a common passion. I love what I do, and I am excited to speak with people who share that passion. | https://medium.com/@sfarber-healthhive/my-health-tech-startup-journey-f966790fbdbf | ['Stephen Farber'] | 2021-04-03 21:25:22.268000+00:00 | ['Coordinated Care', 'Startup', 'SaaS', 'Health Tech', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Chubi Farmers Empowerment Project (CIFEP) | Chubi Agro is a Nigerian based company registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) with registration number RC 1543606 to venture into the business of Agro-Allied Training of small holder farmers across the production value chain.Chubi Agro have positioned herself based on her indebt knowledge to provide adequate fertilizers, improved seed, chemicals, mechanized services and extension. We will adopt a value chain distribution network to get to the framers within our chosen population.
Chubi Farmers Empowerment Project (CIFEP) is a smallholder farmer-focused intervention initiative of Chubi Agro at supporting 500 small holders farm households comprising of 300 women and 200 youth owning 1ha with an average of 7dependents, translating to 3,500 persons in soba Local Government Area ofKaduna State. Each household will be supported with kits of rice seeds (Seeds, Fertilizer, Chemicals and basic health insurance) worth about 110,000 USD.
Visit our website to know more and donate for us | https://medium.com/@hadegold001/chubi-farmers-empowerment-project-cifep-fe1086af9487 | [] | 2020-12-26 01:09:45.235000+00:00 | ['Farmers', 'Indiegogo', 'USA', 'Empowerment'] |
How Failed Housing Policy Reshaped Brooklyn’s Communities | As the city government’s approach to affordable housing has changed in recent decades, Housing New York serves as a prime example of the limitations of the modern system. New affordable housing units are integrated into market-rate construction, with different set-aside requirements based on income distribution. Thus, affordable housing mechanisms are tied solely to new development, often built in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods where it is cheap enough to finance the affordable housing set-aside and where a high enough demand exists for new units. The recently announced housing plan does little to address the core issues of the city’s housing crisis, but rather enables ongoing real estate trends that have been detrimental to Black and Latinx communities. What results from this phenomenon is the hyper-concentration of new housing in select parts of the city, failing to be spatially equitable as other parts of the city see little to no construction.
Of the five boroughs, more projects related to Housing New York have been built in The Bronx and Brooklyn than the rest of the city combined. Upon further analysis, the funneling of new construction into specific districts within the respective boroughs is even more severe. Expanding this analysis past spatiality, specifically to race and demographics, is an essential addition. It can already be concluded that any geographical concentration of new affordable housing is unhealthy — both for the location of affordable housing, and the developmental pressures that comes with it. With the exception of Brooklyn Community Districts 1 and 2 (Williamsburg/Greenpoint and Downtown Brooklyn), which include a significant portion of Housing New York’s supply of new construction from new luxury high-rise development, predominantly Black and Latinx areas are disproportionately targeted as areas for new development. The racial and spatial disparities analyzed in the above graphs can be attributed to relatively cheap land costs, low rates of homeownership, and less organized community opposition. Predominantly white districts of the city, such as Community District 6 (Park Slope/Carroll Gardens), have advantages including higher-than-average homeownership rates and protectionist zoning, making it financially undesirable for developers. With the city locked into a public-private partnership, real estate markets thus dictate the spatial outcomes of our present and future housing opportunities.
Financing and Zoning
Similar trends of development are mimicked when mapping the number of residential units financed through the usage of the 421a Tax Abatement, which provides tax breaks for developers if they build a required amount of affordable housing. As mentioned in the previous section, driving developers to build only where it is profitable has led to substantial disparities in where new housing is being built. Populous neighborhoods such as Borough Park, Kensington, and Canarsie have experienced relatively insignificant levels of multifamily financing, while Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Bushwick have seen explosions of new development. In combination with easy access to Manhattan, relatively cheaper rents, and cultural demand, the desire to live in these select neighborhoods is reflected in drastic increases in construction and financing for multifamily buildings.
Source: 2019 Census Data, Department of City Planning — Zoning Districts
Furthering this analysis, it is important to pose the question as to why these distinct communities in Brooklyn are seeing unprecedented levels of real estate development. Leaving market forces aside, underlying zoning laws can better explain the resultant racial disparities that arise from market-reliant housing policy. In contextually zoned areas, often correlated with high rates of white households, low-rise aesthetics and lower levels of density are protected. Reducing the capacity for development in white enclaves of the city yields higher property values due to rarer, older, and more desirable housing. In turn, communities lacking protectionist zoning policies see much greater communal changes than those that do. Unfortunately, city government and planning-related agencies are complicit in the discriminatory outcomes that originate from its reliance on the private market and appeasement to white homeowners. In Williamsburg/Greenpoint, ample protectionist zoning and a relatively high rate of Housing New York Development are able to co-exist. Major transit thoroughfares and waterfront corridors have been upzoned to properly incorporate new affordable housing options and density; all the while homeowners and renters in contextually zoned segments of the neighborhood can reap financial benefits that are tangential to new development. In Bushwick, where contextual zoning is almost non-existent and new housing construction is rampant, the detrimental effects of disproportionate protectionist/pro-development policy are visually stark and will be further discussed below.
Neighborhood Effects
While this report utilizes Mayor De Blasio’s Housing New York as an example of misguided housing policy, it is by no means the sole contributor to the following trends. Instead, it is representative of flawed market-reliant policy that has unfairly created developmental pressures in working-class neighborhoods of the city while simultaneously supporting protectionist zoning and homeownership opportunities in white, high-income neighborhoods. Incentivizing the new development of housing without equalized protectionist zoning or renter protections in at-risk neighborhoods has only exacerbated a chronic issue the city has faced for decades. In the case where protectionist zoning ceases to exist in all enclaves of the city, communities of color will still bear the majority of development pressure, but much less so than today. Insurmountable community opposition and high land costs have expelled development in predominantly white neighborhoods with strong homeownership, encouraging developers to build where it is cheaper. That being said, differences in rent stabilized units over time proves to be an important indicator for neighborhood changes and can reflect how real estate pressure may impact a given area.
In terms of borough-wide trends, two thirds of Brooklyn’s communities lost a marginal or significant amount of rent stabilized units, and a third gained in rent stabilized units or stayed the same. The two districts that made the most use out of 421a financing, districts 1 and 2, saw noteworthy increases of 26% and 65% of rent stabilized units, respectively. In comparison, Community District 4 (Bushwick), lost 14% of its rent stabilized stock across the neighborhood, and only saw gains in a handful of new buildings that are centered around luxury development hotspots. Without supply-side financial incentives to rehabilitate, develop, and construct new affordable housing in less-desirable portions of a given neighborhood, new development will fail to reach much needed areas.
Source: Pratt Center Neighborhood Data Portal
The spatial unevenness that arises from said phenomenon has detrimental effects on the community as a whole — market pressures will continue to raise the area’s cost of living without providing new employment opportunities and accessible amenities. Speculatory practices have favored prospects of more profitable developments or market-rate rents, upending the livelihood of long-time tenants. With such an intense decrease in the rent stabilized housing stock and lack of strong contextual zoning laws, many minority communities are facing or will inevitably face the same fate as Bushwick. The outcome of exploitative policies is saddening — upzonings, promising to create new affordable housing, can often lead to an insurmountable loss of rent stabilized apartments, which is undoubtedly New York’s most affordable housing. As a lifeline for those that could not otherwise afford to live in modern-day New York, losing rent stabilized apartments only further damages a community that lacks protectionist zoning or robust renter protections.
Black and Latinx individuals, the demographic groups most at-risk of displacement, experienced alarming changes in three key neighborhoods: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Bushwick. In Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 2018, the quantity of Black residents decreased by 15% and 18%, respectively, since 2009. In Bushwick, Latinx residents decreased by approximately 19%. In comparison, white households in these three neighborhoods have increased by an average of 126% within the same time span. This is not to say that young, white renters should not live in these respective neighborhoods — upzoning around transit corridors and building in abandoned lots alongside renter protections should encourage a denser, more diverse community without causing ruptures in the pre-existing fabric. Black households saw strong increases in neighborhoods further south and east, indicating a potential relocation in light of rising rents and costs of living in neighborhoods closer to Manhattan and other major job centers. The displacement and replacement of Black and Latinx households is nothing short of modern-day segregation, giving those with higher racial and wealth statuses priority in the housing market.
Conclusion
As the city rounds the corner of Housing New York’s construction and preservation goals, it is essential to reflect on its effects through its association with the real estate market. Through the hyper-concentration of affordable housing in select segments of the city, the implications of public-private development of affordable housing has gone unnoticed. With less diversity in the city’s overall spatial allocation of housing, certain neighborhoods that may require additional real estate investment will continue to go underfunded while only a select few have been radically changed to incorporate the city’s growing need for new housing. Statistically, the communities in Brooklyn that have borne the weight are traditionally Black and Latinx, which are, on average, the most affected by evictions and rent burdens. The real estate market is not the only figure to hold accountable for this resultant outcome. As a consequence of the city government’s complicit actions in nurturing this public-private partnership without taking essential precautions, we are left with a city that is more spatially unequal and segregated. | https://medium.com/@ags537/how-failed-housing-policy-has-reshaped-brooklyns-communities-7507867ebda | ['Arvind Sindhwani'] | 2021-03-03 18:09:46.432000+00:00 | ['Housing', 'New York City Real Estate', 'Affordable Housing', 'City Planning'] |
Secure payment methods in Cosmo Casino | When looking for the ideal casino to play at, one of the most important factors players seek out is available payment options. Technology has made it possible to deposit money to a casino account through means other than traditional banking, effectively saving time and cost. These online methods that casinos, including Cosmo Casino, have adopted make it possible for players all over the world to participate seamlessly.
How do you know the options a casino has in place? Well, most of them have elaborate T&Cs with a breakdown of payment options, but not everyone reads those. In that case, reviews such as the one done on Cosmo Casino NZ breaking down every small detail you may want to know of the site means you don’t really have to read the entire Cosmo site. The review addresses security concerns, games, and payment options.
Here is an in-depth look at deposit and withdrawal methods at Cosmo Casino. Also, the minimum first deposit, regardless of method used, is €10, and the process is instant. Players can get right into gaming as soon as they load up their accounts. Operational currencies on the site are USD, CAD, EUR, and GBP.
Deposits
These are deposit methods accepted at the casino:
✔ Visa
✔ Mastercard
✔ Neteller
✔ Skrill
✔ PaysafeCard
✔ ECOPayz
✔ AstroPay Card
Visa
As a widely accepted payment method, Visa allows players to credit their accounts instantly. The casino imposes no rules at all for this payment method other than the expected card information. You can always change your deposit method even when you use Visa for the first time.
Mastercard
There are minimal to no charges when depositing money into your gambling account using MasterCard. If any, it is based on the service provider’s terms and not Cosmo. It may take a few hours for the balance to reflect on your account, so you may want to keep checking it regularly.
Neteller
This e-money transfer service that is available in various parts of the world is instant and the charges are way lower than they would at traditional banks. Thanks to its safety and user-friendliness, Neteller is the most popular payment method for gamblers world over. Minimal information is required for opening an account.
Skrill
This digital multi-currency wallet allows people over 18 years old to register an account with only their email and little other information. Since it allows over 40 currencies, players from various parts of the world can use it. Just like other digital wallets, this deposit method is discreet.
PaysafeCard
This Austrian-based prepaid payment card helps gamblers limit their expenditure. You load it with the money you want to spend and have to reload it once this is exhausted. Just like others in its category, PaysafeCard is easy to operate, quite cheap, and fast.
ECOPayz and AstroPay Card
These two methods of deposit allow you to make online payments to and from anywhere in the world in minutes. They are discreet and fast, and you don’t have to divulge lots of information to open an account. They are secure so that you don’t have to worry about any data or information leaks.
Withdrawals
The minimum withdrawal at Cosmo is €50, and it can take between 1 and 10 days, depending on the method you choose. The maximum withdrawal weekly limit set by this casino is €4,000.00.
Visa and MasterCard take 1- 3 business days after you have made your withdrawal request for the money to hit your account. This time allows the casino to check for any errors and anticipate any changes you may make to your withdrawal request.
Neteller, Skrill, EcoPayz, and Jeton take 1 business day each to effect withdrawals since most of the verification required can be done within this time. This reason alone makes these some of the most popular withdrawal methods at most casinos, coupled with their low charges.
A direct bank transfer (DBT) has a long wait since it could take between 6 and 10 business days to effect. It makes sense that time is spent on this since it involves communication between two plus banks with different money transfer policies. The minimum withdrawal amount using this method is €300, and there are costs associated with it since there are several third parties involved.
Cosmo Has Enough Options
This Cosmo Casino review shows all the options that players have when they have at this casino. You are advised to select one for each — deposit and withdrawal — that you can stick with for the time you partner with Cosmo. | https://medium.com/@paulalzaaaa/secure-payment-methods-in-cosmo-casino-7878a0858e1b | [] | 2020-12-24 20:56:17.660000+00:00 | ['Gambling', 'Payment Methods', 'Payment', 'Casino'] |
A Guide to the Museums Open During COVID and How to Visit Them | Photo from Google.
Known for its vast array of art and sculpture derived from antiquity to the late-renaissance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now open with new COVID safety-measures put in place. NYU students can attend the Met at a discounted price but must reserve a time slot online then purchase a ticket in-person at the admission desk. The admission fee for students is $12 and includes access to exhibitions and same-day entry to both Met locations.
The Museum of Modern Art
Photo from Google.
The Museum of Modern Art features world-famous works from artists of the modern era including Vincent Van Gough, Alfred H. Barr, and a personal favorite of mine, René Margritte. NYU students can receive free admission to the MoMA with a valid student-ID. Tickets cannot be bought in advance and must be picked up at the ticketing desk in the museum’s main lobby. Time slots only last an hour, so make sure to research which exhibits you want to see in advance!
The Guggenheim
Photo from Google
Coined as the museum where “radical art and architecture meet,” this New York gem is back in business! The Guggenheim asks all visitors to visit their “Before Your Visit” page and review the new modified hours and safety precautions for the exhibit. With a reduced capacity of 25%, timed-tickets are required for entry but discounted for students with a valid student-ID.
The American Museum of Natural History
Photo from Google.
Looking for something different from your typical art museum? Go check out the American Museum of Natural History, full of out-of-this-world exhibits about space, 21st-century science, and dinosaurs! Tickets must be purchased online and include access to permanent museum halls and at least one special exhibition (dependent on the tier of ticket you purchase). For general admission, students receive a discounted ticket at $18 with a valid student-ID and New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut residents receive free admission with valid ID.
Museum of the City of New York
Photo from Google.
For a mix of both art and history, go check out the Museum of the City of New York. Exhibits highlight important cultural-events like the Black Lives Matter Movement and the life of Former-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, all tied together with fantastic artwork and commentary relevant to the events. Students receive a discounted ticket at $14 which can be purchased online or in-person, including an hour and a half time slot and access to all exhibits. | https://nyulocal.com/a-guide-to-the-museums-open-during-covid-and-how-to-visit-them-e4ab7af3628e | ['Jaden Tactaquin'] | 2020-11-19 20:26:10.593000+00:00 | ['Student Discounts', 'Covid 19', 'History', 'Museums', 'Art'] |
Autonomous Cars: A Smart Cities Answer to COVID-Proof Transit? | Image credit: Cruise
Of all the circumstances that we might have imagined kickstarting America’s smart city aspirations, a pandemic surely wasn’t on our list. And yet, our anxieties over disease transmission might just be the fuel that propels us towards a future in which autonomous cars become the urban norm.
A huge setback for public transit
For the last several months, the COVID-19 pandemic has compelled us to change our perspectives to suit a newly disease-aware world. We’ve adapted our day-to-day routine to suit social distancing recommendations and become leery of crowded, high-traffic areas. Our faith in public transit, in particular, has been shaken so profoundly that it very nearly demands an innovative fix. Time magazine recently described COVID-19’s impact on public transit as “apocalyptic.”
“[Buses] that once carried anywhere from about 50 to 100 passengers have been limited to between 12 and 18 to prevent overcrowding in response to coronavirus […] Seattle transit riders have described budgeting as much as an extra hour per trip to account for the reduced capacity, eating into their time at work, school or with family,” Time’s Alejandro de la Garza wrote in July.
Sometimes, riders’ anxieties compel them to leave the bus before their stop; one woman who de la Garza interviewed described exiting several stops early with her seven-year-old son after the driver allowed a crowd of people to board at once.
“It’s very trying,” the source, Brittany Williams, shared. “I’ll put it in those terms.”
How can we keep public transit viable?
The obvious answer to the overcrowding and slow-transit problems would be to add more buses — but such a move doesn’t seem economically feasible with the current decline in public transit use. In July, the Transit App reported a 58 percent year-over-year reduction in travelers within Williams’ home city of Seattle.
Numbers are a little worse in Washington D.C., with a 66 percent decline in Metrobus use and a 90 percent drop in Metrorail traffic. The losses experienced in New York City are among the worst, with the Transit App noting a 95 percent loss in the spring and a still-alarming reduction rate of 84 percent in late summer.
Pandemic fears have limited traveling, which in turn has limited fares to a trickle and all but eliminated cities’ abilities to add to their public transit fleets. According to a recent McKinsey report, 52 percent of American respondents travel less than they did before COVID-19. Many who do travel opt for a private vehicle over bus or train trips. A full third of surveyed consumers say that they “value constant access to a private vehicle more than before COVID-19.”
To risk stating the obvious: not everyone can buy or store a public car, nor should they even if they could. The environmental impact of replacing public transit with individual vehicles would be environmentally disastrous and dramatically exacerbate existing traffic and parking problems. Moreover, reports indicate that purchasing intent has dropped with the economic downturn; people don’t want to buy new cars when their incomes are uncertain.
An opening for autonomous cars
But I would argue that city-dwellers don’t necessarily need private cars — they just need a mode of transport that offers the isolated, sterilized feel of personal vehicles with the cost-efficiency and dependability that characterizes good public transit. Ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft have set the groundwork for this, but aren’t a perfect fit. They’re expensive, focused on one person at a time, and naturally pose a virus-spread risk to passengers and drivers alike. But what if there were no drivers, only a limited number of masked and isolated passengers traveling pre-defined, regular routes?
Years ago, architect Peter Calthorpe painted a vision of California cities with autonomous cars that was very nearly this, writing: “Down the center of El Camino, on dedicated, tree-lined lanes, [would be] autonomous shuttle vans. They’d arrive every few minutes, pass each other at will, and rarely stop, because an app would group passengers by destination.”
There’s a window of opportunity to reshape consumer perception of autonomous cars within a public-transit perception. Instead of anxiously fleeing buses inundated with close-seated crowds, mothers like Brittany Williams could order an autonomous ride and sit, as per a COVID-optimized version of Calthorpe’s vision, either alone or with one or two distanced others. Between routes, these cars could be sanitized and sent off to support new passengers. Such an approach would establish self-driving vehicles not as a one-person luxury, but a new and COVID-thoughtful form of public transportation.
The sustainability and convenience benefits of adding a self-driving shuttle service to public transit are countless. These include lessening the need for private cars, mitigating traffic deadlock, and improving passenger convenience. Autonomous shuttles could shoulder at least some of the burden carried by other public transit services and lessen the need for additional (if half-filled) buses and trains.
While it is true that Uber and Lyft have been talking about developing autonomous cars and next-gen taxi services for years to no avail, we are now closer than ever before to achieving viable autonomous driving technology. Earlier this year, the GM-backed driverless car startup Cruise received a permit from the California DMV that would allow the company to test driverless cars without safety drivers, albeit only on specific roads.
This represents a significant step forward in the deployment of autonomous cars and, if successful, could lead to the first fully-autonomous vehicles. It is worth noting that despite delays, Cruise hopes to launch a self-driving taxi service soon; its fourth-generation autonomous cars features automatic doors, rear-seat airbags, and, notably, no steering wheel.
If Cruise can manage to accomplish this, it stands to reason that autonomous shuttles are not all that far away. If anything, cities might have more opportunities to partner with self-driving startups and incorporate autonomous shuttles into municipal transit. Given that pandemic-prompted anxieties will likely persist until (if not well beyond) the emergence of a mass-produced vaccine, it seems likely that the window of opportunity for piquing consumer interest in socially-distanced autonomous transit could extend out over years.
Of course, there are few clear speed bumps in the way.
For one, there is still a pervasive stigma around the perceived safety of autonomous cars. Uber memorably halted its experiments in 2018, when one of its experimental vehicles struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona.
At the time, there were rumors that the company planned to divest itself of its self-driving interests entirely; however, the company has begun to restart its efforts on a significantly smaller scale in recent months. Cruise — and any other autonomous car startup that takes on the challenge — will need to assure the public of its products’ safety before it can achieve widespread acceptance.
Another major issue will be cost.
With public transit in such dire straits, obtaining the funds for a partnership between self-driving car startups and municipal transit may prove difficult in the short term unless the local government is convinced of the public’s need for autonomous shuttles and the revenue that such an approach could attract as a result of said need. Proponents will need to launch a media campaign to raise public awareness and bolster backing for adding autonomous shuttles to municipal transit.
If we can get beyond some of these initial hurdles, we can kickstart a smart, sustainable and COVID-aware urban transit system. As with the early days of online shopping, consumer perceptions of autonomous driving will quickly shift from it being a laughable luxury to a must-have public service, especially under pandemic conditions.
Originally published on TriplePundit.com | https://medium.com/@bennatberger/autonomous-cars-a-smart-cities-answer-to-covid-proof-transit-58bfbee89aa0 | ['Bennat Berger'] | 2020-11-13 21:25:23.212000+00:00 | ['Autonomous Cars', 'Autonomous Vehicles', 'Smart Cities', 'Urban Planning', 'Pandemic'] |
Despite rhetoric, the conversion to renewable energy is moving along | By Kent R. Kroeger (May 29, 2019)
Courtesy of Getty Images
Recently, three major renewable energy milestones passed virtually unnoticed as the mainstream media continues to obsess about the 2020 presidential race, the aftermath of the Mueller Report, and the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump.
The first milestone was announced by the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis (IEEFA), when it reported that, in April and May, renewable energy sources, including hydroelectricity, will for the first time generate more U.S. electricity than coal-fired plants, signaling a “tipping point” in the advance of renewable energy as this nation’s primary source of electricity generation.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), all renewables will produce 18 percent of U.S. electricity in 2019, and almost 20 percent in 2020. “Renewable generation is catching up to coal, and faster than forecast,” says Utility Dive editor Robert Walton.
The second milestone was announced by India’s Central Electricity Authority, when it reported India’s solar power industry generated 11.3 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar power during the 1st quarter of 2019. This is a 16.5 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 57 percent increase from the same quarter in 2018. More significantly, it is the first time solar power in India has surpassed 10 TWh in a quarter, representing about 3 percent of all electricity generation. In total, renewable energy sources account for around 9 percent of all electricity generation in India.
Nine percent may seem small, but the long-term trajectory for renewables in India is on the rapid upswing. Without such progress by India (and China), any hope of achieving zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on a global scale is lost.
The third milestone is less obvious but perhaps the most important. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently announced that, despite fast Asian economic growth making coal more popular than ever as an electricity generation source, final investment decisions (FIDs) for coal plants have declined annually from 88 Gigawatts (GW) in 2015 to just 22 GW in 2018, the IEA announced in early May. Given that 30 GW of coal plants were retired last year and this retirement rate will continue into the foreseeable future, more coal capacity will be retired than approved each year going forward.
“This is a sneak preview of where we’ll be in three to four years time,” says Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a renewable energy advocacy group. “If closures stay where they are, we’re at peak (coal) by 2021.”
The future is bleak for fossil fuels (especially coal)
Peak coal is finally visible on the horizon and the world is inexorably marching towards net zero GHG emissions with certainty in the latter half of this century . While still facing many technological challenges —advances in battery storage being among the biggest— the world’s path to zero-emissions electricity generation by 2050 is not wishful thinking (see Figure 1). And the green transformation of other major GHG sources — transportation and industry— won’t be far behind. Electric vehicles, in fact, may be cheaper than internal combustion engine vehicles by 2022, significantly accelerating the transition.
Figure 1: International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) Forecasts for Renewable Energy through 2050
Of course, forecasts can be wrong as they are dependent on a myriad of factors, not all under our control. And the potential for policy changes and economic shocks to stunt our progress can never be ruled out.
Still, even with the Trump administration’s open hostility to climate change science, the U.S. continues its conversion to renewable energy which accelerated during the Obama administration and, according to recent figures from the EIA, has continued in the Trump administration’s first two years (see Figure 2). Indeed, as a source for electricity generation, renewable energy has grown faster annually in Trump’s first two years than during Obama’s eight years (8.2% avg. annual growth vs. 6.3% avg. annual growth, respectively). In comparison, renewable energy’s annual growth during George W. Bush’s tenure was only 1.4 percent.
Figure 2: U.S. Renewable Electricity Generation (Actual and Forecast)
Why the gloom and doom among climate change activists?
If these recent headlines are any indication, the dominate political-media narrative is oblivious to the real progress being made on renewable energy:
Climate change WARNING: Oceans could rise 7 FEET putting 200 MILLION at risk (The Daily and Sunday Express, May 24, 2019) It is absolutely time to panic about climate change: Author David Wallace-Wells on the dystopian hellscape that awaits us (Vox.com, February 24, 2019) The grave threat to US civilisation is not China, but climate change (South China Morning Post, May 28, 2019)
“It is, I promise, worse than you think,” environmental author David Wallace-Wells warned in 2017 about climate change’s impact.
How could a dystopian hellscape be anything else but worse than expected?
“Last year in the summer of 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere you had this unprecedented heat wave that killed people all around the world. You had the crazy hurricane season. In California, wildfires burned more than a million acres. And we’re really only just beginning to see these sorts of effects,” Wallace-Wells recently told Vox.com. “If we continue on the track we’re on now, in terms of emissions, and we just take the wildfire example, conventional wisdom says that by the end of the century we could be seeing roughly 64 times as much land burned every year as we saw in 2018, a year that felt completely unprecedented and inflicted unimaginable damage in California.”
Apocalyptic jeremiads like Wallace-Wells’ new book, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” demoralize readers and feed a sense of hopelessness at the precise moment we need to motivate them. Up to now, such climate change alarmism has been an ineffective strategy to build broad public support for policies that will fundamentally reorganize the world economy.
In spite of that, alarmism remains front-and-center in the 2020 U.S. presidential race. In a thinly-veiled response to former Vice President Joe Biden’s recent suggestion of a “middle ground” approach to climate change, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “I will be damned if the same politicians who refused to act (in past decades) are going to try to come back today and say we need a middle of the road approach to save our lives.”
At least on paper, Ocasio-Cortez has backed up her climate change rhetoric with a wide-ranging manifesto, the Green New Deal (GND). On a scale far grander than Obamacare, the last significant government program passed by Congress, the GND envisions the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by 2030 with renewable and zero-emission energy sources, including nuclear power, making up 100 percent of U.S. power demand. Ambitious on paper, the GND is the ultimate stretch-goal. That is what saving the planet and the people on it will require, says Ocasio-Cortez.
Backbreaking to the U.S. economy is how Republicans describe the GND. “It is quite amazing that someone that is in government — actually elected to the government of the United States of America — would propose that we eliminate all fossil fuels in 12 years,” said Greenpeace Co-Founder Patrick Moore in an interview with The New American. “If we did it on a global level, it would result in the decimation of the human population from 7-odd billion down to who knows how few people.”
With the GND, the progressive movement’s over-stimulated ego meets the Republican’s science agnostic id. Its a septic brew not conducive to successful policymaking.
Yet, we make progress anyway.
To ignore the real advances made in expanding renewable energy capacity in the U.S. (and around the world) is to mischaracterize reality. Furthermore, the momentum in the U.S. has occurred against a hyperpartisan political backdrop where very little substantive climate change legislation has been passed in the past two decades. To the contrary, according to the International Monetary Fund, U.S. direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas reached $649 billion in 2015. That is more than we spend on national defense.
In an odd way, that should be reason for optimism moving forward. Imagine what this country could do on renewable energy if it stopped distorting the marketplace in favor of fossil fuels and let the free market decide.
That is a project even Republicans might get behind. | https://kentkroeger.medium.com/despite-rhetoric-the-conversion-to-renewable-energy-is-moving-along-6b2589711dae | ['Kent Kroeger'] | 2019-05-30 01:36:18.697000+00:00 | ['Renewable Energy', 'Climate Change', 'Fossil Fuels', 'Green New Deal', 'Environment'] |
The Software Engineering Application Timeline | October, November
By this point, you should have applied to all the companies you would like to work for. This is when the bulk of your interviews will occur. If you’re applying to internships, most of these will be via phone and rarely will you have an on-site. Some companies that do on-sites for interns are Microsoft, Bloomberg, and Two Sigma. If you’re applying for new-grad roles, you will likely have a few rounds of phone interviews followed by a “super day” on-site. With that said, this will likely all be virtual this October (2020) due to COVID-19.
If you have pending deadlines, make sure your assigned recruiter is aware of that immediately. If it looks like a lot of your interviews won't be for a few weeks, it may be best not to pester your recruiters so much to make sure that your interviews will line up.
Note: This is just a strategy if you really want your offers to line up. In practice, it’s best to continue the interview process as soon as you can.
If you’re getting offers for internships, congratulations! If you find one you like, you can just go ahead and accept it. If there’s still a company you want to work for, but you have expiring offers, try to extend them. Usually, you can get a one- or two-week extension, but don’t expect anything longer than that.
If you’re getting offers for full-time work, you will definitely want to tell the companies about your other offers to try to negotiate how much you’re getting. Most companies will match comparable companies (think Google-Microsoft), but they will usually not compensate for location differences (Seattle-Mountain View). If you feel like it’s a good option for you, you can accept an offer and later renege (telling the company you are no longer coming to work with them after you signed your contract) when something better comes along. However, this is not something I recommend at all. I would never do this, as I feel it's unprofessional and burns the bridge. A lot of college students see this as a popular option, though, so I decided to mention it. | https://medium.com/better-programming/the-software-engineering-application-timeline-f0b064927a1f | ['Brett Fazio'] | 2020-07-14 15:23:12.424000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Internships', 'Programming', 'Startup', 'Software Engineering'] |
What are the Types of Barriers to Effective Communication? | Communication is an impulse that is present in all living things. Communication, to put it simply, is the exchange of information between two entities. Every action we take can be interpreted as a method of communication.
This conversation does not have to be solely verbal. Sharing something with another individual or group of people is what communication entails. We have usually seen what we mean by the communication process. However, even when every other aspect is taken care of, misunderstandings might occur.
Communication is a basic human need, and in its most basic form, it may appear uncomplicated and straightforward. The numerous obstacles that come into play complicate and frustrate the communication process. These communication barriers hamper the free flow of information, resulting in cognitive dissonance.
Types of Barriers to Effective Communication
We endanger ourselves and others when we fail to communicate properly, regardless of the mode of communication: spoken, nonverbal, written, listening, or visual. Aside from physical and technological hurdles, there are various other barriers to successful communication that every individual, employee, or management should work to eliminate.
Communication is hampered by many obstacles. The intended communication is frequently disrupted and twisted, resulting in confusion and communication failure. Barriers to successful communication can take various forms, including language, psychological, emotional, physical, and cultural barriers, among others.
Here are some of the barriers to effective communication that one or the other person faces:
Language or Linguistic Barriers
Language is required for all forms of communication. And communication gets difficult when people do not speak the same language. This is referred to as a communication language barrier. However, linguistic differences are not the only type of communication obstacle. The use of jargon and technical terminology also causes communication obstacles.
You may have overheard attorneys discussing a case or physicians discussing a patient, but you may not have comprehended what they were saying. Legal and medical language are not for everyone. Lawyers and physicians, on the other hand, routinely engage with clients who are not from the same field and can express their ideas to them by describing the issue, whether legal or medical, in simple terms.
Another type of language barrier is the excessive use of jargon, confusing terms, or technical terminology. You may overcome these obstacles by communicating clearly and suitably for the intended audience. You will be able to create an influence at your workplace if you practice this.
Psychological Barriers
When someone disagrees with them, some people have a propensity of beginning an argument. As a consequence, people prefer to avoid them, which has an impact on both their personal and professional connections.
Anger, anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, shyness, and close-mindedness are among psychological obstacles that may stymie communication and, as a result, relationships. You can avoid the difficult circumstances that emerge as a result of these obstacles if you know how to connect with your audience.
Technological and Socio-religious Barriers
Technology is rapidly evolving, making it tough to stay up with the most recent advancements. As a result, technical progress can sometimes become a hindrance. Furthermore, the expense of technology is frequently prohibitively expensive.
The majority of companies will be unable to afford adequate communication technology. As a result, this becomes a critical obstacle. Other impediments are socio-religious in nature. A woman or a transgender person may encounter various challenges and restrictions while speaking in a patriarchal environment.
Cultural Barriers
The global platform has created various business and career prospects. However, due to cultural differences, people or businesses frequently lose out on these possibilities.
Language differences can lead to misunderstandings, naming individuals can result in prejudices, and behavioral habits can establish mental barriers. Furthermore, various cultures in different regions might create significant communication obstacles.
So, how would you deal with such cultural differences? The solution is to cultivate conscious cross-cultural awareness.
Organizational Barriers
At the organizational level, there are several types of communication. Each of these approaches has its own set of issues and restrictions that might stymie successful communication. Organizational hierarchy can be a communication stumbling block. Even inside a family, there may be a power hierarchy, resulting in a lack of openness or a communication barrier. The solution is to open a direct line of communication with the appropriate individuals.
Physiological Barriers
Certain illnesses, diseases, or other restrictions may also hinder efficient communication between an individual’s numerous channels. The shallowness of voice, dyslexia and other physiological obstacles to successful communication are examples. However, these are unimportant since they are readily compensated for and eliminated.
Attitudinal Barriers
Some people prefer to be alone. They are introverts or persons who are not outgoing. Others prefer to be sociable or, at times, clinging! Both of these scenarios might create a communication barrier. Some people have attitude problems, such as a large ego and disrespectful behavior.
Discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, or religion obstacle communication as well. Communication is frequently hampered by prejudice, mistrust, and emotional aggression. They emerge as a result of an unwillingness to change or a lack of drive. Effective listening, criticism, problem-solving, and being open to change, may all help you break down communication barriers.
Physical Barriers
They are the most visible obstacles to successful communication. In theory, these obstacles are generally easily removed. They include loudness, closed doors, malfunctioning communication devices, closed cabins, and so forth. Physical isolation between personnel in a large workplace, along with malfunctioning technology, can sometimes result in serious obstacles to efficient communication.
As communication is the most important and necessary soft skill that an individual possesses. Removing communication barriers is a slow but necessary task. In today’s highly competitive environment, communication skill is essential. | https://medium.com/@content-paradigm360/what-are-the-types-of-barriers-to-effective-communication-46e5206755b0 | ['Mayuri Content Writer'] | 2021-07-06 04:22:11.459000+00:00 | ['Barriers To Communication', 'Communication Skills', 'Communication', 'Soft Skills', 'Soft Skills Development'] |
Affordable Luxury Hotels in Singapore | Singapore is a sovereign city-state in Southeast Asia. It is a conglomeration of 62 islands along with the main island which is in a shape of a diamond. It is a center of business and transport and has also emerged as a top tourist destination in the world. There some world’s top 5-star hotels in Singapore along with 4-stars, 3-stars and boutique hotels. Here we are mentioning some best luxury hotels available at affordable prices.
Lloyd’s Inn: If you are looking a budget hotel with excellent amenities then you must check out Lloyd’s Inn. It is located in a prime location in River Valley district and just 4 km away from Marina Bay and 7 km from Universal Studios Singapore theme park. Rooms are spacious and equipped with free Wi-Fi, TVs, minifridges and desks.
The Pod — Boutique Capsule Hotel: As the name suggests, it is a hotel featuring capsule bedding, personal lockers, and free Wi-Fi. You are also offered complimentary breakfast. The Pod is just 2 km away from both the iconic Merlion statue and the Singapore Flyer.
AqueenPayaLebar: AqueenPayaLebaris a relaxed, colourful hotel set on a busy road within close proximity to some of the popular city attractions such as Geylang Serai Market and Food Centre, Tanjong Katong Complex, Joo Chiat Complex and City Plaza. There are 162 rooms categorized in several categories like Superior, Deluxe, Premier and Signature rooms. These rooms are equipped with Wi-Fi, smart TVs and safes. The hotel is 5 km away from East Coast Park and 10 km from National Gallery Singapore.
Amoy: It is a boutique hotel named after the Zhengzhou people who came to Singapore from China for the purpose of settlement. That’s why Amoy’s room share the traditional Chinese décor. Visitors are offered with free breakfast and parking, while in the rooms they get flat-screen TVs, free Wi-Fi and minibars.
The Quincy Hotel:The Quincy is an award winning hotel equipped with cutting edge technology. Once you have entered the hotel you are welcomed by friendly hotel staff ready to help you check in the stylish Studio or Deluxe rooms. Parking and breakfast are free and in the rooms are you will get free Wi-Fi, minibars flat-screen TVs, and designer toiletries.
Carlton City Hotel: Located in downtown Singapore, the Carlton City is a 4-star luxury hotel features ultra-sleek modern decor. The hotel is just 3-minute walk from Tanjong Pagar metro station. Rooms are airy with flat-screen TVs, free high speed internet, tea and coffee-making facilities.Chinatown is just 14-minute walk from the hotel.
Time doesn’t permit to mention all the hotels in Singapore, so we have mentioned some affordable luxury hotels. But before planning a trip you must check that you are getting the best price. For this you have to check some good hotel deals providing services such as Expedia.com, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Trivago.in, etc. You can also try Cheap Booking Hotels which is a new player in this industry. They offer up to 50% discount on luxury hotels in Singapore as well as around the globe. | https://medium.com/@paawann.mishra/affordable-luxury-hotels-in-singapore-92038c3d5a8a | ['Pawann Mishra'] | 2016-12-27 07:59:31.786000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Hotel', 'Hotel Booking'] |
Announcing SpaceNet 5: Road Networks and Optimized Routing | Determining optimal routing paths in near real-time is at the heart of many humanitarian, civil, military, and commercial challenges. This statement is as true today as it was two years ago when the SpaceNet partners announced SpaceNet Challenge 3 focused on road network detection. In a disaster response scenario, for example, pre-existing foundational maps are often rendered useless due to debris, flooding, or other obstructions. Satellite or aerial imagery often provides the first large-scale data in such scenarios, rendering such imagery attractive in the quest to aid disaster response.
Consequently, the SpaceNet partners are pleased to announce SpaceNet 5: Road Networks and Optimized Routing. This public competition will challenge competitors to automatically extract road networks from satellite imagery, along with travel time estimates along all roadways, thereby permitting true optimal routing.
Figure 1. Optimal paths in Khartoum. Left: Simple shortest distance path between start (green) and end (red) locations. Line widths are proportional to speed limit. Right: Path optimized by travel time, rather than distance. The very different paths taken in this plot illustrate the need to extract speed limit and route time estimates for all roadways.
Motivation
The automated extraction of roads applies to a multitude of long-term efforts such as: improving access to health services, urban planning, and improving social and economic welfare. This is particularly true in developing countries that have limited resources for manually intensive labeling and are under-represented in current mapping. Updated maps are also crucial for such time sensitive efforts as: determining communities in greatest need of aid, effective positioning of logistics hubs, evacuation planning, and rapid response to acute crises.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically extract road networks from aerial or satellite imagery at regional and city scales remains a surprisingly difficult yet critically important challenge. Entities such as Google Maps and OpenStreetMap (OSM) provide useful maps of the world, yet accurate road labeling on these platforms is manually intensive and often slow to update in dynamic scenarios. For example, following Hurricane Maria, it took the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) over two months to produce a fully validated map of Puerto Rico, even with a team of thousands of volunteer mappers. Furthermore, large regions of the world remain poorly mapped.
Competition Structure
Current approaches to road detection from remote sensing imagery tend to focus on just the road pixels (e.g. 1, 2, 3), or topology (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4). While these approaches are are a very useful first step, they they fall short of addressing automated routing, as they cannot be used directly to assess optimal routing since travel time estimates are lacking.
We will therefore ask competitors to output a detailed graph structure with edges corresponding to roadways and nodes corresponding to intersections and end points, with estimates for route travel times on all detected edges. Including estimates for travel time permits true optimal routing, not just the shortest geographic distance. This challenge will help fill the capability gap between semantic segmentation of roads and optimized routing for disaster response, among other scenarios.
Figure 2. Left: Road network for sample SpaceNet chip. Right: Satellite imagery overlaid with roads colored by speed limit.
The SpaceNet 5 challenge will run for two months, with an anticipated launch date of September 3, 2019. Data labeling for new SpaceNet cities is ongoing now, and will be publicly released as the competition launch nears. Evaluation will occur with a modified version of the APLS metric, tuned to optimize travel times between nodes of interest.
Stay tuned for more updates on SpaceNet 5, and in the meantime read up on those graph theory techniques. | https://medium.com/the-downlinq/announcing-spacenet-5-road-networks-and-optimized-routing-10ca8538cde9 | ['Adam Van Etten'] | 2019-07-23 17:09:30.362000+00:00 | ['Disaster Response', 'Satellite Imagery', 'Computer Vision', 'Maps', 'Machine Learning'] |
You know you’re a Socialist when … | Rest in Appreciation Todd Kimsey/Seinfeld’s “Communist” Ned Isakoff
You know you’re a Socialist when …
Jeffrey Denny
America hates Socialism.
Many say that’s why Worst President Trump inexplicably won 73 million popular votes, Republicans gained U.S. Congress and state house seats, and the “Blue Wave” was more surf park than Katrina.
The GOP message that all Democrats are creeping Socialists obviously was a voter scare tactic. But it worked by spooking blue-collar working class and blue-blood wealthy class alike into fearing that an AOC Socialist lurks under every bed.
Many old white Republican men wish AOC lurked under their beds. But even non-sickos believe moderate Democrat Joe Biden is a Socialist sock puppet and the Socialists are coming with taxes and regulations to take away our freedoms and monies, as history says they are wont to do. Do your research! as Trumpy Facebook posters declare.
If you’re personally worried you might be a Socialist, or have a friend, family member, neighbor or colleague you’re dying to rat out for their own good and American patriot democracy reeducation camp, look for these telltale signs:
1. Socialists love government money.
For instance, you received and cashed a windfall $1,200 Trump stimulus check, like millions of Trump voters did.
Or you have a small or Fortune 500 business and got a Covid stimulus Paycheck Protection Program loan. Or you kept your job because your employer got that money. Since the loan is forgiven if spent properly, that’s scot-free government money.
You’re a Socialist if you benefited whatsoever like the vast majority of Americans from the trillion-dollar government Covid stimulus and debt.
Or maybe you’re a struggling white Trump voter who hates Democrat Socialist government welfare handouts and not realize poor whites get a lot more than even poorer minorities, but resent them anyway.
You’re conflicted because in spite of indisputable factual disproof, you still believe wealthy right-wing media “personalities” who say that handing out taxpayer money to fellow Americans who need help threatens America’s economic freedom. The nonpartisan Townhall.com explains this in “Wealth Redistribution: The Gateway to Socialism.”
2. Socialists love getting more than they give.
Townhall.com broke down the evil of Socialism: “Wealth redistribution involves the government taking money from those who are ‘producing more than they are consuming’ and giving that money to those who are ‘consuming more than they are producing’.”
For instance, if you live in a Trump-voting “taker” Red State, you consume far more government money than you will ever produce. While Biden-voting “giver” Blue States produce far more than they consume, and bail out the Red States.
As New York Governor Andrew Cuomo respectfully informed U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, New York gave America $116 billion more than it took, while Kentucky took $148 billion more than it gave.
Guess who got the most Covid stimulus money? (Hint: Covid denial states.)
“In the initial $150 billion given to states from the stimulus package, which was allocated by population, New York got less than $24,000 per positive case while Alaska received over $3.3 million,” a WalletHub comparison found.
Of the 15 “most federally dependent states,” which sounds Socialist, 13 voted for Trump.
3. Socialists love government-subsidized energy.
It’s cheaper to heat your home and gas your 12 mpg Ram truck thanks to the $15–20 billion in annual taxpayer fossil fuel subsidies for drillers and miners.
4. Socialists love government-subsidized food.
Groceries also are cheaper thanks to federal farm subsidies, which rose to $28 billion in 2019–20.
“Trump money is what we call it,” said a Missouri soybean farmer hit by climate-driven floods and Trump’s trade war on China that stopped its soybean imports. “It helped a lot. And it’s my understanding, they’re going to do it again.”
5. Socialists love government-subsidized healthcare.
Maybe you love Trumpcare because it was imaginary all along and hate Obamacare, Berniecare or Bidencare because you thought you hated Socialized healthcare.
You sure don’t want the government telling you to pay for a stranger’s care, even if they’re paying for yours. E pluribus unum is what Socialists say, but as the lawyers say, you have caveats.
For example, if you or a loved one can’t afford the $1,000 hospitalization per day for Covid intensive care because you’ve expressed your freedom not to wear a mask, then you might love Socialized healthcare.
All healthcare is socialized. That’s why few Americans pay the actual medical costs they incur. The cost is spread out like State Farm makes good drivers cover idiot drivers.
Medicare certainly is Socialized healthcare. Contrary to myth, we take at least twice what we give over our lifetimes. A lot more if we have a major injury or surgery, cancer or a chronic disease like diabetes.
A surprise to some, private health plans are also big-time Socialized healthcare, since they cost taxpayers some $250 billion a year as employers write off the expense of covering their people — current, retired and on permanent disability.
Medicaid, VA, Children’s Health Insurance and other government coverage of course are Socialized.
The uninsured also get Socialized healthcare. Who pays when you’re not covered and have no money but Chicago Med saves your lives anyway? We all do.
Obviously, there is good Socialism and bad Socialism.
Good Socialism is when government helps you because you believe you deserve it.
Bad Socialism is when government helps someone else that you don’t believe deserves it.
As Americans, we have the God-given Constitutional freedom to decide what Socialism we love or hate, even if we look like foolish selfish hypocrites.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer. | https://medium.com/political-sense/you-know-youre-a-socialist-when-7801ebc890c | ['Jeffrey Denny'] | 2020-12-06 19:16:00.043000+00:00 | ['Commentary', 'Socialism', 'Politics', 'Political Satire', 'Humor'] |
AWS EMR, Data Aggregation and its best practices | What is Big Data ?
Big data is a field about collecting, storing, processing, extracting, and visualizing massive amounts of knowledge in order that companies can distill knowledge from it, derive valuable business insights from that knowledge.While managing such data analysis platforms different kinds of challenges such as installation and operational management, whereas dynamically allocating processing capacity to accommodate for variable load, and aggregating data from multiple sources for holistic analysis needs to be faced. The Open Source Apache Hadoop and its ecosystem of tools help solve these problems because Hadoop can expand horizontally to accommodate growing data volume and may process unstructured and structured data within the same environment.
What is AWS EMR ?
Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) simplifies running Hadoop. It helps in running big data applications on AWS efficiently. It replaces the need of managing the Hadoop installation which is very daunting task. This suggests any developer or business has the facility to try to to analytics without large capital expenditures. Users can easily start a performance-optimized Hadoop cluster within the AWS cloud within minutes. The service allows users to effortlessly expand and shrink a running cluster on demand. They can analyze and process vast amounts of knowledge by using Hadoop’s MapReduce architecture to distribute the computational work across a cluster of virtual servers running within the AWS cloud so that it can be processed, analyzed to gain additional knowledge which involves data collection, migration and optimization.
Figure 1 : Data Flow
What is Data Aggregation ?
Data aggregation refers to techniques for gathering individual data records (for example log records) and mixing them into an outsized bundle of knowledge files. For example, one log file records all the recent visits in a web server log aggregation. AWS EMR is very helpful when utilized for aggregating data records
It reduces the time required to upload data to AWS. As a result, it increases the data ingest scalability. In other words, we are uploading larger files in small numbers instead of uploading many small files. It reduces the amount of files stored on Amazon S3 (or HDFS), which eventually assists in providing a better performance while processing data on EMR. As a result, there is a much better compression ratio. It is always an easy task to compress a large, highly compressible files as compared to compressing an out-sized number of smaller files.
Data Aggregation Best Practices
Hadoop will split the data into multiple chunks before processing them. Each map task process each part after it is splitted. The info files are already separated into multiple blocks by HDFS framework. Additionally, since your data is fragmented, Hadoop uses HDFS data blocks to assign one map task to every HDFS block.
SFigure 2 : Hadoop Split Logic
While an equivalent split logic applies to data stored on Amazon S3, the method may be a different. Hadoop splits the info on Amazon S3 by reading your files in multiple HTTP range requests because the info on Amazon S3 is not separated into multiple parts on HDFS. This is often simply how for HTTP to request some of the file rather than the whole file (for example, GET FILE X Range: byte=0–10000). To read file from Amazon S3, Hadopp ussed different split size which depends on the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) version. The recent versions of Amazon EMR have larger split size than the older ones. For instance , if one file on Amazon S3 is about 1 GB, Hadoop reads your file from Amazon S3 by issuing 15 different HTTP requests in parallel if Amazon S3 split size is 64 MB (1 GB/64 MB = ~15). Irrespective of where the data is stored, if the compression algorithm does leave splitting then Hadoop will not split the file. Instead, it will use one map task to process the compressed file.Hadoop processes the file with one mapper in casse the GZIP file size is of 1 GB. On the opposite hand, if your file are often split (in the case of text or compression that permits splitting, like some version of LZO) Hadoop will split the files in multiple chunks. These chunks are processed in parallel.
Figure 3 : AWS EMR pulling compressed data from S3
Figure 4 : AWS EMR using HTTP Range Requests
Best Practice 1: Aggregated Data Size
The suitable aggregated file size depends on the compression algorithm you’re using. As an example , if your log files are compressed with GZIP, it’s often best to stay your aggregated file size to 1–2 GB. The primary principle is that since we cannot split GZIP files, each mapper is assigned by Hadoop to process your data. Since one thread is restricted to what proportion data it can pull from Amazon S3 at any given time, the method of reading the whole file from Amazon S3 into the mapper becomes the main drawback in your processing workflow. On the opposite hand, if your data files are often split, one mapper can process your file. The acceptable size is around 2GB to 4GB for such kind of data files.
Best Practice 2: Controlling Data Aggregation Size
In case a distributed log collector is being used by the customer then he/she is limited to data aggregation based on time. Let’s take an example. A customer uses Flume to aggregate his organisation’s important data so that later he can export it to AWS S3. But, due to time aggregation, the customer will not be able to control the size of the file created. It is because the dimensions of any aggregated files depend upon the speed at which the file is being read by the distributed log collector.Since many distributed log collector frameworks are available as open source, it is possible that customers might write special plugins for the chosen log collector to introduce the power to aggregate based on file size.
Best Practice 3: Data Compression Algorithms
As our aggregated data files are depending on the file size, the compression algorithm will become an important choice to select. For example, GZIP compression is accepted if the aggregated data files are between 500 MB to 1 GB. However, if your data aggregation creates files larger than 1 GB, its best to select a compression algorithm that supports splitting.
Best Practice 4: Data partitioning
Data partitioning is an important optimization to your processing workflow. Without any data partitioning in situ , your processing job must read or scan all available data sets and apply additional filters so as to skip unnecessary data. Such architecture might work for a coffee volume of knowledge , but scanning the whole data set may be a very time consuming and expensive approach for larger data sets. Data partitioning allows you to create unique buckets of knowledge and eliminate the necessity for a knowledge processing job to read the whole data set. Three considerations determine how you partition your data:
1. Data type (time series)
2. Data processing frequency (per hour, per day, etc.)
3. Different query pattern and Data access (query on time vs. query on geo location) | https://hirenchafekar.medium.com/aws-emr-data-aggregation-and-its-best-practices-e89470a76fe5 | ['Hiren Chafekar'] | 2020-12-17 17:38:48.836000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Hadoop', 'Emr', 'Big Data', 'Big Data Analytics'] |
Ice-cream makes everything better | I’ve got a scar across my left eyebrow from an incident I had in Primary School. I’m not sure exactly how old I was at the time (I was at Kensington Public School from years 1–3, so I assume I was 7–8 years old), but I remember a couple of kids had formed a tank/battering ram with their bodies; each kid had one arm around each other and the other arm pointing at me in a fist (thus army tank like?!).
They shoved me into the toilet blocks and cracked my head open. I remember seeing their faces in shock. I remember looking down at both my hands which were covered in blood. I remember a teacher rushing over to me. I have vague blurry images of being in an ambulance, but in the front seat, not the back.
I remember seeing my mum at the hospital and a nurse asking if they turned the sirens on for me (they didn’t). I then remember having a cloth put over my eyes whilst I listened to nurses as they stitched me up. I couldn’t feel any pain, but felt immense pressure on my head every time a stitch went through.
I remember them talking about my mum outside, and one of them saying an ice-cream will fix me right up. I remember getting that ice-cream too, and my grey school shirt was unbuttoned all the way down and my Clarks Koala singlet was bloody to my belly. | https://medium.com/@justinfox_30083/ice-cream-makes-everything-better-1a09b07aa18e | ['Justin Fox'] | 2019-01-23 22:27:11.492000+00:00 | ['Ice Cream', 'Racism', 'Asian', 'Bullying', 'Bully'] |
What Mattel’s Accounting Mistake Teaches Us About Material Weakness and Deferred Taxes | Who knew that Thomas the Tank Engine could stir up so many problems?
Mattel, the owner of the toy brand and PwC, Mattel’s external auditor, did not take proactive steps to correct an accounting error.
The company and the auditor have paid a heavy price.
This excellent article from the Wall Street Journal, “Mattel and PwC Obscured Accounting Issues, Former Executive Says”, lays out a great example to explain a material weakness, and how deferred taxes work.
The story begins when an error is discovered.
What is a Material Weakness?
Mattel is a public company, so it makes sense to refer to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB). The Board was created after the Enron collapse, in an effort to improve the amount and timeliness of accounting disclosure.
Here’s how PCAOB defines a material weakness in Auditing Standard 5:
“A material weakness is a deficiency, or a combination of deficiencies, in internal control over financial reporting, such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of the company’s annual or interim financial statements will not be prevented or detected on a timely basis.”
Let’s break that down, starting with materiality.
Materiality
The term “material” refers to a dollar amount that is large enough to change the opinion of a financial statement reader. The level of materiality is a judgment call. A $5 error in a $2 million inventory balance isn’t material, but a $10,000 mistake is probably material.
Firms needs controls in place to prevent material errors.
Internal controls
A business needs controls in place over inventory, including physical inventory counts.
During the count, the internal auditors compare items in the detailed inventory listing to the physical items in the warehouse. This procedure is the strongest evidence that the inventory exists.
Companies also need to control how goods move in and out of the warehouse, so that accurate records are maintained.
If controls are weak, the company will not report the inventory balance accurately. A material weakness means that a firm’s accounting system does not produce reliable reporting.
Timing is particularly important.
Timely basis
When you find a material error, you need to disclose it and correct it right away.
But that’s potentially embarrassing- and may change how investors view your firm. Which brings us back to Mattel and PwC.
Why Earnings Restatement Are a Disaster
Here’s a quote from the article:
“The accounting problem was tied to Mattel’s ownership of Thomas & Friends, an animated children’s show about talking trains. The finance team discussed fixing the problem and restating earnings, with the expectation that Mattel would have to admit to shortcomings in its accounting and reporting procedures…”
Ouch.
Restating earnings is a problem, for two reasons:
Analysts and investors will have less confidence in Mattel’s management
PwC, the auditor’s reputation will be damaged, as well as the firm’s reputation with the client (who they’ve audited for decades)
So, what did Mattel and PwC do?
“… senior finance executives and Mattel’s auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, decided to change the accounting treatment of the Thomas asset, effectively burying the problem, according to Mr. Whitaker and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The executives agreed not to tell Mattel’s then-chief executive or its board of directors, an internal investigation found.”
They buried the problem- so the public (and particularly investors) didn’t know about the mistake right away.
There was a great deal of fallout. The Mattel CFO left the firm, and the PwC partner was put on administrative leave and is expected to leave the audit firm.
Let’s shift gears and talk about intangible assets, and the accounting error itself.
Reviewing Intangible Assets
Intangible assets include patents, copyrights, and other assets that are not physical.
Goodwill is a common intangible asset category. If you pay more than the book value for a company, some of the purchase price may be posted to goodwill. This video explains accounting for goodwill.
Intangible assets are amortized, which reclassifies the asset balance into amortization expense over time. It’s similar to depreciation expense for physical assets.
When Mattel buys an intangible asset, the company has to review the asset for possible impairment.
Impairment
GAAP requires that intangible assets must be evaluated each year for impairment.
If the fair value of the intangible asset is less than the amortized balance in the intangible asset account, the asset is impaired.
Here’s an example:
Let’s assume that you buy a copyright for a book that generates $100,000 in sales a year. Time goes by, and the annual revenue for the book declines to $30,000 a year. Obviously, the value of the copyright has declined.
But by how much?
Estimating the fair value of an intangible asset is a complicated issue. This blog post from the CFA Institute goes into detail on the valuation process, if you want to know more.
Writeoff
If an intangible asset is impaired, you must write off the impairment amount to expense.
That’s consistent with other areas of accounting. We never want an asset on the books to be overstated. If an asset is overvalued, we generally expense the overage amount.
Here’s the Mattel accounting issue:
“The accounting error was tied to a $562 million valuation allowance — a reserve for a potential loss in value — that Mattel created against its deferred tax assets in September 2017.”
Reserve for Potential Loss
Reserve accounts help a business comply with the principle of conservatism.
This principle states that, when in doubt, choose the accounting method that generates less net income.
So, if Mattel is considered that an intangible asset may be worth less in the future, why not set aside some dollars now to address the issue?
That’s taking a conservative approach.
Banks use reserve for loan loss accounts to set money aside for potential loans that aren’t paid. In fact, the amount of a bank’s loan loss can be an area of dispute between bankers and their external auditors.
Let’s talk about deferred taxes.
Deferred Tax Asset
The concept of Deferred taxes is one of the toughest topics in accounting. This video and the video here both explain the topic.
The journal entry for the Mattel error was a debit to Deferred Tax Asset and a credit to a Reserve for Loss account.
A deferred tax asset means that you have a tax expense in the future, which reduces your tax liability in the future.
Depreciation expense can be different between book (accounting records) and the tax return. These temporary differences create deferred tax assets.
Let’s say that you have $30,000 more in depreciation for taxes than book depreciation in 2021. Higher expenses means less net income- and a lower tax liability.
You would have a $30,000 deferred tax asset.
A deferred tax liability means that you have a higher tax liability in future years.
So what, exactly, was the big problem with the Mattel accounting?
How Mattel Made a Mistake
“The allowance was reduced by $109 million, which came from deferred tax liabilities related to the company’s 2011 acquisition of HIT Entertainment Ltd., which included Thomas & Friends, Barney & Friends, and Bob the Builder. Reducing the allowance lowered Mattel’s loss for the quarter.
Soon after, the company did an internal review of its intangible assets. Finance executives discovered that because of the way the HIT liability had been categorized, it shouldn’t have been used to reduce Mattel’s loss …”
Mattel mixed apples and oranges.
The reserve for potential loss for “A” should not have been reduced by an event from acquisition “B”. Events A and B were not related to each other.
My next book, 25 Intermediate Accounting Spreadsheets (and How to Use Them) will be out in 2020. The format will include a written discussion of a spreadsheet, with spreadsheet images, and a related video.
To learn more and get sample chapters of the book, watch this video.
For live CPA exam prep and accounting classes, join Conference Room for free. Members will be notified of course dates, times, costs, and how to attend these courses.
Get your questions answered to pass the CPA exam, and to learn accounting concepts.
Go to Accounting Accidentally for 300+ blog posts and 450+ You Tube videos on accounting and finance:
Good luck!
Ken Boyd
Author: Cost Accounting for Dummies, Accounting All-In-One for Dummies, The CPA Exam for Dummies and 1,001 Accounting Questions for Dummies
(email) [email protected]
(website and blog) http://www.accountingaccidentally.com/ | https://medium.com/@kboydstl/what-mattels-accounting-mistake-teaches-us-about-material-weakness-and-deferred-taxes-dcbaf2a95c19 | ['Ken Boyd'] | 2019-11-15 17:01:42.748000+00:00 | ['Finance', 'Accounting', 'CPA', 'Business'] |
Summer of Open Data Panel #10: Defining the Value Proposition, Building Common Infrastructure, and Avoiding Missed Use | Summer of Open Data Panel #10: Defining the Value Proposition, Building Common Infrastructure, and Avoiding Missed Use Andrew Young Follow Sep 23 · 5 min read
The Summer of Open Data is a three-month project spearheaded by the Open Data Policy Lab (an initiative of The GovLab with support from Microsoft) in partnership with the Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub, Open Data Institute, the Open Data Charter, and BrightHive. Each week, we speak with data experts in local and regional governments, national statistical agencies, international bodies, and private companies to advance our understanding of how to establish a vision of open data focused on collaboration, responsibility, and purpose.
The Panel: Moderated by BrightHive CEO Matt Gee, the cross-cutting panel featured:
In a 45-minute conversation, Matt and the panelists spoke on a variety of issues, including incentives for data collaboration and reuse, the need for repurposable legal and technical infrastructure, and avoiding missed use of potentially valuable data.
The full conversation, as well as a brief overview of highlights, is below:
Leveraging Administrative Data and Avoiding Missed Use
Matt kicked off the discussion by asking Felix to reflect on how the Commonwealth of Virginia is unlocking the value of administrative data to support workers and learners across the state.
Felix described the importance of laying the groundwork for Virginia’s moves toward inter-agency and inter-departmental data sharing. Many of the early, difficult challenges on data integration, political territory, prioritization of certain information streams, and which data systems should be treated as the authoritative source of “truth” in different contexts have been hashed out over many years. As a result, much of the state’s current work focuses on the operational aspects of data sharing and re-use, instead of getting bogged down in foundational questions that have largely been addressed.
With that said, redundant data processing and analysis — as well as missed uses of data that already exists — can slow the impact of institutional data.
“The great irony of state government is that we rely on multiplying factors derived by the census to estimate populations when we possess data within the Department of Tax and other data systems that we could use to objectively answer questions about the commonwealth and the population we serve,” said Felix Shapiro.
Defining the Value Proposition and Building Networks
Reflecting on National Student Clearinghouse’s efforts to understand the return on investment of various education and workforce credentials, Vanessa shared lessons from her organization’s partnership with Workcred and the creation of their Voluntary Data Sharing Network, established earlier this year. The network includes 30 credentialing bodies that collaborate not just on data integration and sharing, but in co-designing the intended value proposition of the collaboration and its joint data offerings. More recently, the Clearinghouse has been able to share initial labor market outcomes of making this data available, further clarifying the value of the collaboration.
“It opened a lot of eyes and broke down a lot of barriers,” Vanessa said.
She further highlighted the importance of defining the value proposition to incentivize action from various stakeholders. New uses of data require new processes and policies, and people need to be motivated to take on this additional work.
This “incentive compatibility,” as Matt called it, was also important for Daniel. He described how critical it is to “lead with problems of practice that educators actually face and build solutions that educators are actually asking for.” That means focusing on school improvement, he argued, not just compliance or scrutinizing teacher performance.
Felix pointed to a failed data system project in Virginia that created significant, persistent transaction costs for users. He urged practitioners to collaborate early in the process of designing a data initiative to ensure costs make sense and do not disincentivize engagement. The system’s failure was not due to technological issues, but to a misalignment of costs and incentives.
Building Flexible, Extensible Infrastructure and Reducing Transaction Costs
Daniel then reflected on lessons from previous failures in the education data space, including the InBloom platform and how Infinite Campus aims to support data-driven research. His current work aims to create a flexible technical infrastructure that alleviates the need for significant investment in ensuring the interoperability of various data systems, standards, and formats. According to Daniel, Infinite Campus aims to create unified, national technical infrastructure and common, automated business processes while minimizing the requirements on researchers seeking ways to use that data.
“We want to reduce the marginal cost of every new research question,” he noted.
Vanessa pointed to work being done with the network of credentialing bodies to create flexible infrastructure from a legal perspective rather than a technical one. The group is working to establish reusable templates for data-sharing agreements and similar legal instruments to lower the transaction costs of establishing a new collaborative or data-sharing initiative.
Daniel agreed and noted the importance of investing in legal data protections when establishing research data collaboratives. More automated, repeatable processes, such as legal templates, are critical for scaling.
Impacts of COVID-19
Daniel then highlighted the new challenges and demands facing Infinite Campus and other education data providers since the start of the pandemic. He noted that teachers are being forced to learn and switch between different learning apps while students are engaging with data and technology in new ways, including through hybrid online–classroom models.
As such, funders are more interested in supporting pandemic-focused research. Needs and expectations are changing across the landscape of demand for education data, and educators and data custodians like Infinite Campus are navigating that shifting demand in real time.
These challenges, he argued, cement the case for creating modular data infrastructure that allows for new analyses of data that already exists.
Felix noted similar challenges in the face of COVID-19, noting that, “When you’re falling out of an airplane, it is a bad time to design a parachute.”
Final Thoughts: Building the Human Infrastructure
The conversation ended with a clear call for building and connecting human capacity across the data landscape.
Daniel argued that despite the focus on technology, the two biggest challenges in computer science are people and convincing developers that the biggest challenge is in fact people, and not every solution can be solved through a technical fix.
For Vanessa, evangelists are key. Data providers need people who can accurately assess stakeholders’ needs and communicate the incentives and value proposition for engaging.
Felix encouraged people to seek out collaborators within their institutions eager to make progress on purpose-driven data use in the public interest.
“Don’t lose hope. There are more allies than you realize,” said Felix.
Next Steps
This panel marks the conclusion of the Summer of Open Data. The series tapped into the wisdom and experience of 31 open data experts from around the world.
This initiative provided clear lessons for accelerating and maximizing the public value of the Third Wave of Open Data. The GovLab and its partners will synthesize and share learnings from across the series in the coming days.
In the meantime, please visit us at opendatapolicylab.org or participate in the conversation by tweeting with the hashtags #SummerOfOpenData and #3rdWaveOpenData. | https://medium.com/open-data-policy-lab/summer-of-open-data-panel-10-defining-the-value-proposition-building-common-infrastructure-and-763baf4d1785 | ['Andrew Young'] | 2020-09-23 16:36:35.542000+00:00 | ['Open Data', 'Data Stewardship', 'Workforce Development', 'Education', 'Data Collaboratives'] |
How to start your tech startup for real estate. Part 2 | We continue talking about real estate tech startups.
Property management systems have become more and more popular today. They solve many problems in real estate: operation management, logistics, and hospitality. It replaces a lot of time-consuming and inefficient spreadsheets and paper processes related to booking reservations, guest checking-in/out, KPI reporting, accommodation rates, billing, etc. It substitutes many time-consuming and ineffective spreadsheets and paper procedures relating to KPI reporting, booking reservations, guest check-in/out, accommodation rates, billing, etc.
Modern custom property management software solutions are operated by online and cloud technologies, surpassing the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model beyond the traditional front desk.
Types of Property Management Systems
Practically, PMS types are connected to types of property.
Residential PMS. If you own houses, duplexes (triplexes), or apartment buildings, this residential PMS will suit all your needs.
HOA and Condo PMS. For condominiums, townhouses, and co-ops, you can develop property management software and thus manage many tasks.
Commercial PMS. You will need to build a commercial property management system, whether you are targeting consumers who work in retail, banking, insurance, or IT.
Hotel PMS. With proper PMS support, hotel owners don’t just save their time and nerves, but save on budget and raise revenue significantly.
Industrial PMS. Industrial PMS is for warehouse owners, logistics facilities, and industrial property owners.
If you’re willing to learn the specific features for each type of real estate property management system, check them in the article.
Advantages of a Custom Real Estate Management Software Development
Lower cost
Efficient data storage and protection
Multiple property management
Automatization of the tasks
Scalability
Localization
5 Steps Make a Property Management System Software
Set your goals, choose concept, and strategy.
For this step, you may need the help of marketers and business analysts besides the development team. Define your target audience to see your goals.
2. Make a wireframe.
The wireframe is a designed prototype of your future product. In this step, you should think about various user journeys, flows, and processes.
3. Creating UI/UX design of the property management software features.
At this stage, you decide how to make your future product look. Please notice that both sides need to be taken into account: because the management and tenants and applicants will use it, the UIs of the owner portal and user portal should be considered.
4. Front-end and back-end development.
Here, the team of developers makes your dream come true. Processing of QA and feedback typically comes along with production. You should answer all questions and problems a user may have.
5. Post-launch support.
It’s very important to maintain your property management system and keep in touch with the development team. They’ll help you fix bugs and add new features.
Though fully prepared platforms are popular among various property managers and agencies, they can not compete in any way with tailor-made solutions. In the long-term, the performance of a custom PMS is unbeatable, which is an indisputable advantage. | https://medium.com/@exceed-team/how-to-start-your-tech-startup-for-real-estate-part-2-12d0c32caed3 | ['Exceed Team'] | 2020-12-22 09:28:00.911000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Property Management', 'Real Estate', 'SaaS', 'Real Estate Tech'] |
Table Partitioning with MySQL and Django | Partitioning is a process by which a very large table is split into multiple smaller parts to aid table manageability, query access time and availability. Partitioning allows table, it’s indexes and sub-indexes to be subdivided each of which has their own name and possibly it’s own storage characteristics. We must be aware that table partitioning is fairly complex think and it’s advantages will not come in light unless queries from the Application layer are optimized to take advantage of partitioned table.
The table partitioning table operation requires proper planning and through understanding of low level SQL queries which your application is generating. If you are in doubt whether to partition or not probably you wont need table partitioning as proper indexing of you tables will aid greatly for optimization. However if you are dealing with increasing data and performance issues even after indexing that partition might be what you are searching for.
The partitioning can be done in two ways either by splitting the records itself based on some column value(Horizontal Partitioning) or by splitting the columns of a table and storing them in separate tables(Vertical). Now let us discuss each of them briefly.
Horizontal Partitioning
It involves putting different rows of a table into different table based on a value of a column in the row. For example, If we have an Employees table with columns emp_id, emp_name and emp_salary we can partition according to the emp_id such that records with id less than 10000 are in one table and elements with emp_id greater than 10000 are in another table.
Horizontal Partitioning for Employees Table
Vertical Partitioning
This method involves creating table with partition with fewer columns and using another table to store the additional columns. This method is useful when the query doesn’t need to access all the columns of a row in most of queries and columns with long and less frequently accessed data can be partitioned to another table. For example: If we have an employees table with fields emp_id, emp_name and address than we can partition emp_id and emp_name into one table and address which tends to be long field into another partition.
Vertical Partitioning
Partitioning Implementation in MySQL
MySQL supports only horizontal partitioning and vertical partitioning is not yet supported. The beauty in partitioning in MySQL is that it provided native database level implementation for from version 5.7.12. Before going to the implementation let us discuss points regarding table partitioning in MySQL
Partitioned table cannot have foreign key to other tables and other tables also cannot have foreign key to the partitioned table
All the Unique and Primary key constraint must include partition key as it member.
Only horizontal partitioning is supported by MYSQL
In this article I am going to explain partitioning with help of Employees Schema. Employees schema consists of following fields:
id: An integer field that represents classical unique key for each user
name: A string field which stores name of the employee
joining_month: An integer in range [1,12] representing the month which the employee joined
address: A text field which represents the address of the employee
I am going to create partition with joining_month as key such employees having joining_month Jan to June are in one partition and July to December are in another partition. For doing this I have to define joining_month in every Unique constraint including the Primary Key. This type of partition is known as Range based partitioning and there are other types of partitioning methods as well.
-- Creating schema CREATE TABLE EMPLOYEES( ID INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, NAME VARCHAR(50), JOINING_MONTH INT NOT NULL, ADDRESS TEXT, PRIMARY KEY(ID, JOINING_MONTH) ) PARTITION BY RANGE (JOINING_MONTH) ( PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (6), PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (13) ); -- Inserting Records INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Sulav", 1, "Bhaktapur"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Bipul", 2, "Bhaktapur"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Lava", 3, "Kaadbhitta"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Binod", 3, "Jhapa"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Sushma", 4, "Bhaktapur"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Kush", 5, "Darjeeling"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Sangita", 10, "Bhaktapur"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Jamuna", 1, "Pokhara"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Lava", 12, "Bhaktapur"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Nani", 11, "Bhaktapur"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Prajesh", 9, "Chabahil"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Arpan", 7, "Baneshowr"); INSERT INTO EMPLOYEES (NAME, JOINING_MONTH, ADDRESS) VALUES ("Sahil", 6, "Chabahil");
Now by doing this I have partitioned the Employees table to 2 different parts. The thing to note here that the partition is done in Engine level and SQL layers or your queries will not be aware of this and you can query it like normal. Now let’s throw some queries to our newly created schema.
As seen in the screenshot above we have two partitioned and SQL has selected both partition for querying. When we supply a partition key in the ‘ where ’ clause the SQL engine only searches the matching partition or filtered partition. For example if joining_month < 5 is given that only partition 1 (p0) is searched. This is known as Partition Pruning.
Partition Pruning
The thing to be noted here is that we need to select partition key wisely and include it in the where clause to take maximum advantage of partitioning. Failing to choose correct key will have negative impact on query performance.
MySQL also supports other types of partitioning inside horizontal partitioning. The various types of partitioning supported my MySQL are listed below:
Range Partitioning
LIST Partitioning
HASH Partitioning
Key Partitioning
You can find more about these types of partitioning in MySQL manual. You can choose whatever according to you need.
Django Implementation Tips:
Partitioning is a database level thing but your application layer must be configured to take full advantage of this. I could only find two packages that could helps in partitioning tasks.
These packages do most of the thing in database level for MySQL because of no support for dynamic triggers in MySQL. Apart from these packages you will be also need to do some changes to the foreign key constraint. You need to set db_constraint to False to prevent adding the actual foreign key index in the database.
from django.db import models
from department.models import Department class Employee(models.Models):
name = models.CharField(null=False, max_length=100)
joining_month = models.IntegerField(null=False)
department = models.ForeignKey(
Department, null=False,
db_constraint=False, #Create not FK index in db
on_delete=models.CASCASE
)
Final Notes:
Perform proper research before implementing table partitioning as it may backfire sometimes if not designed properly.
Most of the RDBMS support Table Partitioning and implementation and features may vary accordingly.
References and Links: | https://medium.com/@abhiyantimilsina/table-partitioning-with-mysql-and-django-2fd5a0c82ed4 | ['Abhiyan Timilsina'] | 2020-12-20 09:30:49.299000+00:00 | ['MySQL', 'Table Partitioning', 'Database', 'Django', 'Python'] |
Why Agile is the only way for building ventures | Do you want to deliver high quality products ⚡fast⚡? There is not other way for building ventures fast, reliable and quality-complete than with Agile.
With Agile, I don’t mean user stories, scrum, or standing up during meetings. I am talking about the core values of Agile and how they fit into your team. All other things are just tools and methods. If you can work Agile while everybody is sitting at a desk talking about requirements, then go for it.
Agile is building ventures in iterations
A lot of other people have written about how to use Agile in general. Fast, short sprints. Write requirements as you go. Create a backlog instead of a fixed scope. Go to the scrum alliance, or the agile manifesto or any of the other 20.000 articles written on the core values of Agile. I’ll go over the values that we use at 0smosis. I’ll explain how we make sure we are able to deliver fast, focused and full-quality.
I’ll start with some context about Agile on the 0smosis way.
One week sprints
No standups
3 teams (Helder, 0per and Diavest)
3–4 people per team
These are not super common but don’t set us apart. It is the way in which a small company with different teams works. But the following values are common across all our teams. It’s ingrained in the way we go for building ventures.
Learn by experience
Prioritisation
One team mentality
Learn by experience 🤓
I wish I could say we did everything right the first time. But we didn’t. We make a lot of mistakes. We start with building a new venture, let’s say a new app. Then we realise we need to check if there could be a market. Then we realise we need money for this. Our culture allows for this. We always make sure we do it better next time.
Prioritisation 1️⃣ 2️⃣ 3️⃣
We prioritise the hell out of our tasks. If it doesn’t fit into the current goal we are trying to reach, we don’t do it. And more important, we also review our prioritised tasks every week. When building ventures, priorities can and do shift quickly. For example, one week you might work on creating a front-end for Tillid. And then while working the next week, priorities change and you focus more on creating the story. This might seem wasteful. But lets up focus on the things we are doing the right thing. And together with the last one, we make sure we learn.
One team mentality 👨🎨 👩💻 👩💼 👨💻
Lastly, you need a mentality that you’re all in it together. This has a couple of facets.
You need a good team spirit. Everyone should at least not hate each other 😉.
You all need to work towards the same goal. If one succeeds, everyone succeeds and if one fails, all fail. Don’t fall into the us-them mentality.
You need a complementary and interdisciplinary team. Because you have one team, all aspects need to be there in the team. That means business, developers, marketing, managers… You need all aspects to succeed and you can’t do it with one division.
Building ventures in Agile
Many of these aspects seem obvious. Of course you need to have a good team spirit. Of course you need to know what to work on. But you also need to work on these things. It’s not easy to drop work on something half-way because there might be more important aspects. Or even that that venture is not useful anymore. | https://medium.com/0smosis/why-agile-is-the-only-way-for-building-ventures-c1d208b19bfb | ['Anton De Meester'] | 2018-11-19 09:54:02.892000+00:00 | ['Learnings'] |
I feel so bad for your Mom. | I feel so bad for your Mom. I also have an inkling of the surprise she felt but thankfully not of the bad/confused/upset she rightfully felt.
I was a teen mother. When it came time to take Jeremy to a pediatrician when he had a bad cold and an earache, I never thought about taking him to anyone other than my lifelong pediatrician, Dr. Luther Beazley in Donelson, on the outskirts of my native Nashville. He was a really good physician though he was short on words and always went straight to the point.
So after examining Jeremy that first trip, he said a shot of penicillin would do the “medical magic” and added:
“And after listening and looking at you, you’ll be getting one exactly like it. Oh, and ‘Mommy,’ I only want to hear one squeal out of here, if any. Understand?”
I will always remember that day fondly.
Please tell your Mom I hope she puts that doctor in her past so deeply that he no longer exists so that he has no power or part, whatsoever, in any future medical decisions or her memories of being a wonderful, loving daughter. | https://medium.com/@susanmossthomas/i-feel-so-bad-for-your-mom-8f6385c60dab | ['Susan Thomas'] | 2019-11-27 05:39:39.769000+00:00 | ['Flu Season', 'Medicine', 'Flu Shot', 'Medical', 'Doctors'] |
Affordable, TOC, GIS, and Client Project Capstone | The Fall Quarter 2020 round-up
This was a pretty good quarter. I got a lot of my required classes out of the way last year so this quarter was more free-form and it seemed like there were more overlapping connections between the classes. This quarter I had Affordable Housing, Transit-Oriented Communities, Intro to GIS, and our Client Project class for Capstone.
Affordable Housing
This is my third and final class taught by the affordable housing “queen bee” Joan Ling
“Unless you learn the rules, and learn why they’re stupid, you’re never going to change the world.” — Joan Ling
As usual, a challenging but good class where we got deep into the weeds. We dove into low-income housing tax credits and the various funding programs that need to be pieced together to make a project pencil out in the proforma. Our team (Muthia Faizah, Gerrlyn Gacao, Rumsha Sajid, Ellie Troxell, and I) picked a site in Southeast LA for our proposal and worked on the site analysis, design, and financial analysis. We wrote up a whole long report but we also have this shorter final slide presentation that summarizes it up if you’re interested.
Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC)
Our TOC class actually has a much longer full title that summarizes the whole class pretty well actually: “Just Transport and Inclusive Economies: Land-Use and Financing Strategies to Create Equitable Transit-Oriented Communities.” It was taught by Richard France of Estolano Advisors, and covered a wide range of topics centered on equity, and had lots of great guest speakers. The core piece was a group project that ran through the whole quarter. Our group (Bryan Graveline, Steven King, Shinah Park, Will Proctor, Noy Ramon, Zack Zeilman, and I) picked a site at Wilshire & La Brea, a future stop of the Metro Purple Line. We analyzed the current conditions of the site and created a proposed strategy. This also produced a super long report but the short and sweet version is this final slide deck.
Intro to GIS
This year’s Intro to GIS class, taught by Yoh Kawano, was the first time the program has tried a more “data sciencey” approach to GIS, and I’m glad we got to be the guinea pigs. In the past, the class mainly focused on learning proprietary tools like Esri’s ArcGIS. But this time, our class used Python and Jupyter Notebooks. I was pretty excited about this change because it felt a lot more modern and relevant. And the outputs look way cooler. This was my first time using Python and found it to be a relatively friendly language.
I also thought the class was interesting because the majority of the people had never programmed before and I am always interested in seeing how beginners experience programming for the first time. I’ve taken a lot of random programming classes over the years and I actually think this was one of the best in terms of how the programming concepts were taught to beginners and applied to a meaningful project. Yoh also has a good level of empathy for beginners and explains things patiently.
“Python and computer science won’t tell you anything about how to ask an interesting question” — Yoh Kawano
Screenshot of one of our interactive maps showing CalEnviroScreen scores in the census tracts, overlaid with affordable housing projects funded by HCIDLA. Try it out here
I really appreciate how it is centered around an interesting research question and then learning the tools needed to answer those questions. It feels a lot more purpose-driven than some other classes that are more about the tools or mechanics, with little consideration for the end value.
For this class, we paired off for our project. Laura Daza and I worked on a project about Affordable Housing & Environmental Vulnerability and compiled our final report as a Story Map, which you can check out here.
Client Project
And finally, the capstone class. Our capstone project is a year-long endeavor so this first class is really about keeping us on track with various checkpoints and milestones to get us to that end goal. I’m going to be working with SCAG on creating an equitable scorecard/prioritization tool for grants. Still pretty early in the research phase but looking forward to sharing more once it starts coming together.
Overall
I think this quarter was one of the more fun ones because it was a lot of project-based work, which I’ve always enjoyed more than just doing a bunch of theoretical readings. And I don’t know how else to wrap, so I’ll just end with another one of my favorite Joan quotes from this quarter: | https://medium.com/coburb/affordable-toc-gis-and-client-project-capstone-7aded90ecf64 | ['Jayne Vidheecharoen'] | 2020-12-18 22:20:03.229000+00:00 | ['Graduate School', 'UCLA', 'Urban Planning'] |
The Investigations Timeline of Chad and Lori DayBell | 2001- Lori Vallow marries Taylees Father
Lori had married her daughter Taylees father, Joseph Anthony jr. in 2001 and Joseph adopts her son Colby, who she had in her previous marriage. Joseph and Lori filed for divorce soon after in 2004 and Joseph died later on in 2018 of a heart attack and was immediately cremated.
2006- Lori Vallow marries her fourth husband and adopts “JJ”
Lori and Leland “Charles” Anthony Vallow got married in las vegas in February of 2006. The couple adopted a son named Joshua Jaxon which is commonly referred to as JJ Vallow, which was the biological grandson of Charles’ sister Kay Woodcock. Kay Woodcock's husband would later raise concern to law enforcement over the disappearance of JJ and Tylee Vallow.
2014- Charles and Lori Vallow Move to the Hawaii Island of Kauai
Exactly a year after the couple moved to Hawaii with both of the children, Lori became obsessed with books written by a man named Chad Daybell. According to a friend of Loris that has remained anonymous, Lori was obsessed with a fictional series written by Chad Daybell that were centered around apocalyptic events, loosely based on Mormon theology. Lori began buying these books for her anonymous friend and explained to her that she needed to read them. Lori's friend believes that Lori began a relationship with Chad Daybell through his writing.
2016–2017
The family packed up and moved to Arizona sometime between 2016 and 2017.
2018- Lori meets Chad Daybell
Lori met Chad Daybell when he was teaching a class at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which she attended. Lori and Chad reportedly became very close immediately and started traveling together to religious conferences regarding his books. The two reportedly talked daily since the day they first met.
2019- Lori Vallows brother murders her husband Charles Vallow
Court documents suggest that the marriage between Lori and Charles started to unravel, they filed for divorce and Charles reportedly said he feared she would kill him and went on to say she had developed cult-like beliefs. Charles said that Lori had claimed she was “a god assigned to carry out the work of the 144,000 at Christ’s second coming in July 2020.” The family lived in the Phoenix suburbs, when Lori's brother, Alex Cox, had shot and killed her husband Charles. Cox asserted that he had shot him in self-defense after Vallow came at him with a baseball bat. The case did not move much farther after that due to Alex Cox developing a blood clot in his lungs and was declared deceased in late 2019.
2019- (continued) Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell Married, Tammy Daybell Dies.
Lori Vallow packed her things and her children and moved to Idaho, getting an apartment and spending a large portion of time with Chad Daybell. They participated in podcasts about the end of times and aimed their endeavors at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At the time Chad was married to Tammy Daybell, Tammy died in October of 2019, her obituary stated that her cause of death was natural and declined an autopsy before she was buried in Utah. About two weeks later Chad Daybell married Lorri Vallow in Hawaii. The quick marriage drew suspicion to officers who had Tammy Daybells body exhumed for the start of an investigation. The results of the autopsy have not been released.
2019- (continued) The children Disappear.
Tylee had last been seen in September of 2019 headed into Yellowstone national park with Lori and other family members for a day trip. JJ had last been seen by school officials several days later. JJ’s grandparents, Kay and Larry Woodcock started growing increasingly worried about the children. The couple said that the frequent phone calls with JJ grew scattered and then nonexistent Kay and Larry regularly asked Lori why their grandson was never available and Lori could never give an explanation. In November of 2019, the Woodcocks asked the Rexburg police to perform a well-visit on the children, when the officers questioned Lori and Chad Daybell, they lied about the children's whereabouts. When the officers returned the next day to follow up on the family, Lori and Chad Daybell were gone. Law enforcement began an investigation thereafter and continued their investigation of the death of Tammy Daybell, initially, they searched the Daybell home, collecting over 40 items including software and computer data. A few days later the grandparents posted a $20,000 dollar reward for information on the children's whereabouts.
2020- Lori and Chad Daybell quietly move to Hawaii
In January of 2020, the couple quietly moved to Hawaii, the investigations pushed forward drastically in Arizona, Idaho, and Utah. The couple was found in Hawaii and ordered to hand over the children to officials to prove that the children were safe. Lori Daybell refused and was charged with Child Abandonment and other crimes and extradited to Idaho.
2020 (continued)- Human remains found on the Daybell Property.
. In February 2020 a document stating Lori and chad Daybells beliefs surface off of a computer found in the home, it states that they believe in zombie-like possession, dark immortal beings working on the Rexburg police force, and spiritual rankings of one’s libido. April 10th of 2020, the attorney general's office declares Lori and Chad are being investigated for attempted murder and conspiracy regarding the death of Tammy Daybell. On June 10th of 2020 Authorities uncovered Human remains on Chad Daybells property as they investigated the disappearance of Lori’s two children and the disappearance of Chad Daybell’s first wife. The remains were found buried in the Daybell backyard. Chad is taken into custody and later arrested for two felony accounts involving the concealment of human remains. July 22 of 2020 was the day the couple claimed to be the end of the world. August 8th Chad Daybell pleads not guilty to the charges he held, and in September Lori Daybell pleads not guilty as well.
Upcoming
In January of 2021, the hearings are to proceed for both of them regarding felony and misdemeanor charges, and in march 2021 Loris hearings regarding the death of her children will proceed until the estimated date of April 2nd. | https://medium.com/@tatiana2417/the-investigations-timeline-of-chad-and-lori-daybell-860e98847aa4 | ['Tatiana Santana'] | 2020-12-22 15:02:38.761000+00:00 | ['Criminal Justice', 'Investigation', 'True Crime', 'Crime', 'Murder'] |
if you can think, wait and fast, you can get everything you need in life. | if you can think, wait and fast, you can get everything you need in life.
Especially in our fast-moving, hectic times, the three abilities of the Siddharta are particularly valuable. Those who possess them cannot be put under pressure to go in a direction in which they do not want to go.
If we want to take our life into our own hands, we need these abilities. Thinking, waiting and fasting do not make us slow and weak but independent and unstoppable. | https://medium.com/illumination/if-you-can-think-wait-and-fast-you-can-get-everything-you-need-in-life-72bf4ccfe009 | ['René Junge'] | 2020-12-08 12:14:34.889000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Thinking', 'Self-awareness', 'Buddhism', 'Philosophy'] |
Pain is temporary until it reaches your mind through your heart and rests in there, in the name of… | Pain is temporary
until it reaches your mind through your heart and rests in there, in the name of memory.
So you unstitch
So you unstitch frantically
And you unstitch till the very end — all the moments spent with her.
Uncared if anything within you
falls out,
for you really don’t feel anything.
It all went numb inside out, the instant you realized that she is the queen who loves everyone and you, the king
is no different.
You can’t change the way you care for her
and she can’t change herself for you, for she is happy with who she is. And you know, that’s right.
So the space you are struggling for — just doesn’t exist.
And you realise — all this time,
letting her peek
making her peek through the crack in the doors to your heart, was simply meaningless.
Pain is pain.
Those polar opposites who begin to bond, are weaklings who unsee their own antitheticality and toil to bridge the gap — near immense pain.
That pain sees not, the days spent in bridging the gap but the degree of toil.
Indeed, this is
an abrupt ending, I brood,
why was it — what it was
and why did it all even begin?
P.S.: Partly inspired by ‘False Alarm’ by The Weeknd and partly by you, free bird. | https://medium.com/@spandan-misra/pain-is-temporary-until-it-reaches-your-mind-through-your-heart-and-rests-in-there-in-the-name-of-11364440cc11 | ['Spandan Misra'] | 2021-07-15 09:04:44.182000+00:00 | ['Pain', 'Rest', 'The Weeknd', 'Mind', 'Heart'] |
Soulmates | Soulmates
A Journey Together
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
He feels so close to me
Yet so faraway from reach
But my heart is comforted
Solely by just that proximity
Created by my thoughts
Slowly and steadily we shall
One day sooner or one day later
Grasp in our hands and squeeze
With pleasure and accomplishment
Those coarse sheets that announces…
Only then I know shall this feeling
Culminate into a real expression
And the beautiful fantasy that comforts
Be more than our imaginations
As we may now walk hand in hand…
Our joining transcending the physical
And our souls resonating with power
The highest compassion ever found
The magic of being manifesting for years…
In a litter of beings made of me and him
In our arduous journeys we share our strength
And as our brood prospers and find their paths
The seasons too gradually herald the greys
As our spirits ebbs with the night we hold on still
Till together alas we bid our final adieus!….. | https://medium.com/illumination/soulmates-e91644b73fef | ['Lady Foxx'] | 2020-10-24 15:11:47.027000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Relationships', 'Illumination', 'Soulmates', 'Poetry'] |
A classic bedtime story: Cinderella of Neural Networks | Endgame for “AI Winter”
A classic bedtime story: Cinderella of Neural Networks
How a competition, ImageNet, along with a noisy algorithm, Stochastic Gradient Descent, changed the fate of AI?
Picture from The Elders Scroll | Skyrim
In the early 1980s, Winter was coming for Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a period of reduced funding and interest in AI research, which will later be called the “AI Winter”!
During this cold-weather period which lasted until the mid-2000s, almost no research paper on Neural Nets was published because of the lost interest in the field. The reason was simple: no effective algorithms had been put forward against the traditional ones.
AI’s misery changed dramatically when Geoffrey Hinton, you can call him as the godfather of Deep Learning, and his team submitted their research in a famous object recognition competition called ImageNet in 2012. “This ImageNet 2012 event was definitely what triggered the big explosion of AI today” quoted Matthew Zeiler, CEO of Clarifai.
Picture Source: ImageNet
Before Geoffrey’s work, accuracy of object recognition research under algorithms had been pretty poor with classification error rates more than 25%, while error rate of human eye performance around is 5%. But as the team of Geoffrey implemented neural networks beautifully, they managed to reduce the error rate dramatically by more than 40 percent !! Following his steps, deep learning has been so intensely used such that algorithms yielded much lower error rates than human eyes only 2 years later!! Currently, in object and speech recognition areas, almost all research is performed by AI, a sub field of deep learning.
I should also mention that, while moving away from ‘AI Winter’ period into glorious ‘Great AI Awakening’ period, AI received substantial support from the improvement in GPU (careful, not CPU) computing, thanks to NVIDIA, and availability of massive data sets, thanks to all of us by creating more than 2.5 quintillion ( 10¹⁸) bytes of data every day.
Let’s turn our attention back to the back-bone algorithm of Deep Learning. As you know, algorithms try to optimize problems by minimizing the error functions, generally known as cost functions. Efficient algorithms complete in nanoseconds, others may need to run for many hours.
Machine Learning algorithms require efficient optimization techniques to solve either convex problems or non-convex ones. Minimizing the error can be performed best in convex functions, because wherever your starting point is, you will always find the global minimum point! That’s why we love SVM (Support Vector Machines) or other linear functions because they have convex loss functions and you are guaranteed to find the global minimum!!
But, in real life, optimization functions are generally uglier. They live in non-convex spaces, which consist of many local minima (“valleys”) and maxima (“hills”). Neural Networks are no exception and even worse!
“Visualizing the Loss Landscape of Neural Nets”, Hao Li et al., 2018
Neural Networks have 1,000+ of local minima, so you will, for sure, be trapped into one of those and will never find a global minimum! (Tell me if you disagree after peaking at the graph on the left which shows only a small section of a nonconvex function.) Depending on where your “initialization” point is, you will always end up in a different local minimum (this issue is generally dealt with by random initializing, or perhaps adding some Gaussian noise). The reason why no one really liked Neural Networks was due to its highly complex nature in the absence of an affordable algorithm.
In the quest of a reasonable local minimum, researchers first used aggressive methods, like Gradient Descent or even faster approximate Newton or approximate Hessian methods (as the data size and dimensionality increase, convex optimization methods are adversely affected. For example, Hessian-based approaches which optimally handle convex optimization problems do not scale up and so approximations are required [Martens et al., 2012]). These methods are so perfect to find a minimum that they find the “closest” hole instantly. Although this sounds perfect, it is actually not! - closest holes unlikely have the ideal minimum, and you need to look for somewhere further away.
Also, even if you manage to look further away, you need to look for wide valleys rather than tight depths. A deep hole found while using train data may not be that deep while using test data. However wide valleys are likely to be there under both train and test data sets.
Which algorithm is capable of avoiding the nearest hole and settle in the wide valley space? This is exactly what SGD is actually capable of! (even though it took a lot of time for people to find this out). Who would think that the algorithm once labelled as inefficient and redundant will turn out to be the key optimization tool of almost all deep learning models? Fantastic!
picture source : https://wikidocs.net/3413
How did this happen? How “Stochastic” Gradient Descent (SGD) approach works as a very effective technique for training deep neural networks with linear computational complexity in the size of the dataset, given its very noisy and random nature?
SGD is very noisy compared to Gradient Descent (GD) because while GD uses the entire data set to calculate its path (gradient), SGD uses only one single example, a batch size of 1 which is chosen at random, per iteration; therefore, it follows a random path, but ultimately in the right direction. Randomness means it doesn’t converge to the nearest hole but only settle in large valleys! This is a quality that many other algorithms do not possess!
Well, in our fairy tale, before the wheel bend, and the story end, I should tell you that, our main character, SGD, has two main limitations due to learning rate (step size): if you choose it too large, then the learning trajectory leads to horrible situations; if chosen as too small, its convergence takes ages. So, be wise to choose the right step size. You can either use one of the several variants of SGD, such as Momentum, Averaging, Implicit updates (ISGD), AdaGrad, Adam, etc., or listen to my suggestion which is to take large steps at first, and when it starts to jump back and forth, start lowering your learning rate, i.e. take smaller steps. That’s it!
Now the bridge was mended and my story’s ended. | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-classic-bedtime-story-cinderella-of-neural-networks-fa9a3414286f | ['Eyup Gulsun'] | 2019-09-28 16:28:53.372000+00:00 | ['Gradient Descent', 'Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Stochastic Algorithm', 'AI'] |
Was NASA’s Historic Leader James Webb a Bigot? | Was NASA’s Historic Leader James Webb a Bigot?
He’s been vilified for years on the internet by some astronomers and physicists — but is it true? Hakeem Oluseyi Jan 23·18 min read
Artists model of James Webb Space Telescope with Sun shield deployed as it will look once in space. (NASA)
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s next great flagship observatory. It’s set to continue — and extend — the illustrious scientific tradition established by the Hubble Space Telescope, while peering deeper into the universe and observing what Hubble could not.
James Edwin Webb, the telescope’s namesake, was the second person to ever lead NASA, at the helm from 1961 until 1968 during the storied Apollo era. Thanks to his forward vision and administrative skill, Webb is credited with establishing NASA’s aerospace infrastructure and scientific focus that has made NASA the undisputed worldwide leader in space exploration and research for the half century since Apollo 8, the first mission to take humans beyond Earth orbit. In the heat of the space race, Webb emphasized that NASA maintain a balance between its mission of placing humans in space and on the Moon and its mission of scientific exploration realized mainly through uncrewed missions.
Now to the point.
I’m writing this article to address rumors that have circulated in the astronomy and astrophysics community for over a decade and finally burst into the public a few years ago: allegations that James Webb was instrumental in initiating and carrying out efforts to remove “homosexuals” from the federal government in the late 1940s and 1950s when he held a high position in the State Department.
In full disclosure, I never met James Webb, who died in 1992. I have no idea what was in his heart and mind. But what I can say conclusively is that there is zero evidence that Webb is guilty of the allegations against him.
Rather than exposing a bigot — as Webb was described in two popular articles reporting this story in 2015 — my research suggests that the purveyors of these allegations wrongly accused an innocent man who was, among more well-known achievements, a hero of diversity and inclusion in American government. He worked with Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy to use NASA facilities in America’s southern states to promote racial integration and equal opportunity in employment.
As described here, here, here and here, NASA was widely recognized as the leading federal agency in racial integration prior to the passing of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and throughout the duration of Webb’s tenure.
Admittedly, matters of discrimination can be more complex upon deep examination than they appear on the surface. Civil Rights hero Lyndon Johnson is a prime example of such complexity. But in the case of Webb purportedly persecuting gays while at State, it’s a case of mistaken identity. Apparently, the actions of his Department of State colleagues, John E. Puerifoy and Carlisle H. Humelsine, have been misattributed to him.
I first became aware of the allegations against Webb in the summer of 2015 through an article on Forbes.com bearing the provocative title The Problem with Naming Observatories for Bigots. In its opening line, the author labels Webb as, “an actively homophobic man who helped ruin the careers of LGBT scientists and civil servants.” The article goes on to assert that Webb led “State Department witch hunts” and participated in “anti-gay” activities.
After reading the forbes.com article I performed an internet search and found an article published five months earlier in January 2015 at a Seattle-based website thestranger.com titled Should NASA Name a Telescope After a Dead Guy Who Persecuted Gay People in the 1950s?
Inspired by a question from a reader who had learned of the allegations from reading Webb’s Wikipedia page, this article alleged that Webb was the catalyst for, and eager implementer of, the Lavender Scare — an effort to remove “sex perverts” from federal service in the late 1940s and 1950s.
I went to the Wikipedia page and found a sentence dating back to its creation in 2004: “Webb testified to a Senate committee that most of the people removed from the government for moral turpitude were homosexuals.”
In 2011 Webb’s Wikipedia page was modified to include an alleged quote from Webb: “It is generally believed that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons.”
Over the next few weeks, I continued to search online to find more about Webb’s reputed homophobia but was unable to discover any more sources addressing his alleged role in the Lavender Scare. So, I turned to the private Facebook group (since disbanded) of astronomers and astrophysicists assembled online to discuss issues of equity and inclusion in the profession.
A vigorous discussion of Webb’s supposed role in the Lavender Scare had already been underway for six months since the January 2015 article had been published. Based on the comments therein, the community appeared to have accepted that Webb was in fact guilty of the allegations. Since the group was private, its policy prohibits quoting or naming members, so I will not. However, I will say that group members called for confronting NASA and demanding an answer to why they would choose to name a premier high-profile observatory after such an individual. Within the long discussion, I could find only one scientist who questioned the allegations. To be precise, this person did not question them per se but rather cautioned the group that they should perform their own investigation, get the full story, and verify it in its details prior to confronting NASA. I have found no evidence of anyone having undertaken the task of investigating the story more deeply. But the articles repeating the allegations against Webb have continued.
In this 2019 article titled The Lavender Scare, which references the 2015 Forbes article as its source, the author states:
In 1950, the U.S. State Department fired 91 employees because they were homosexual or suspected of being homosexual. In the next two years, nearly 200 more state employees were dismissed for the same reason. The man who oversaw the purge was Undersecretary of State James E. Webb. Later, as administrator of NASA, Webb enlisted the assistance of the Nazi war criminal Wernher von Braun to help put Americans on the moon.
From this point forward, I describe my research into the topic to understand exactly how The Lavender Scare was initiated and implemented within the U.S. Department of State, and exactly what role James Webb played, if any.
To begin, I looked up the primary reference for the James E Webb Wikipedia article, which at first glance appears to be the origination point for the story. I acquired the book Toward Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World by retired University of Virginia Professor Nicholas Edsall, which is the reference for the Wikipedia entry on Webb’s alleged role in initiating the Lavender Scare. On pages 276–277 I found the following:
The politics of anti-Communism dated back to the beginnings of the Cold War in 1947–48 and were first broadened to include homosexuals in 1950, when an undersecretary of state testified to a Senate committee that most of the government employees dismissed for moral turpitude were in fact homosexual. Sensing that they had uncovered a potentially disastrous weakness in the Truman administration, Republicans took up the issue with enthusiasm, and Democrats, suddenly placed on the defensive, felt compelled to follow suit. The Senate appointed a committee to investigate the employment of homosexuals in the federal government. Though cautious in estimating the number of “sex perverts” in government service, the committee report, issued in December 1950, nonetheless painted an alarming picture of their character, their influence, and their potential threat to the nation’s security.
This passage does not name Webb explicitly as the person who testified before the Senate. It only states that “an undersecretary of state” testified. Through a quick internet search I was able to find several authoritative sources that corroborated that Webb was indeed the Under Secretary of State in 1950. Unfortunately, no reference was provided for Webb’s alleged Senate testimony.
The book continued:
“It is generally believed,” the report noted, “that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons. In addition there is an abundance of evidence to sustain the conclusion that indulgence in acts of sexual perversion weakens the moral fiber of an individual to a degree that he is not suitable for a position of responsibility.” What is more, the committee “investigation has shown that the presence of a sex pervert in a Government agency tends to have a corrosive influence upon his fellow employees. These perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices. This is particularly true in the case of young and impressionable people who might command the influence of a pervert…. One homosexual can pollute a Government office.”
The first sentence of this passage contains the quote attributed to Webb and added to his Wikipedia article in 2011 and repeated in the article on thestranger.com. The passage does not place the words in Webb’s mouth directly, however, but attributes them to a report issued by the Senate appointed committee. To determine which is correct, I performed an internet search for the quote keeping in mind that the quote could be from a Senate appointed committee and Webb, provided he was a member of said committee.
I quickly found the quote’s source. It appears in a Senate Committee report titled Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government submitted to the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments by its Subcommittee on Investigations (i.e., the Hoey subcommittee) and dated December 15, 1950. The report’s second page lists the members of the Committee on Expenditures and also of the Subcommittee on Investigations. The first committee consisted of 13 senators including Joseph McCarthy plus a clerk, and the second consisted of seven senators plus a legal counsel. James Webb was not a member of either committee. Clearly, the quote was misattributed to him. Nonetheless, it had remained on his Wikipedia page and claimed to be his words, for just over four years from May 7, 2011 until July 1, 2015.
I next sought to obtain a copy of Webb’s alleged 1950 Senate testimony. After an unsuccessful search of online congressional databases, I contacted NASA historians and archivists at two Centers and NASA Headquarters to enlist their assistance. None of them had ever heard of the allegations against Webb. This was not completely unexpected as Webb did not start at NASA until 1961 and was out of government service completely from 1953 until he began his tenure as NASA’s leader in 1961.
On the other hand, they had plenty to offer on Webb’s actions regarding the hiring of African Americans at NASA facilities in the early 1960s. Not only did Webb, at the instruction of President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson, make sure that NASA Centers in the Deep South were racially integrated, based on letters I’ve read between Webb and others, he appeared to have been personally motivated to take on the Southern politicians to achieve this goal.
At this point in my research, I wondered if Webb was just a “good soldier” who when ordered to persecute gays while in the State Department did so, and when ordered to integrate NASA facilities in the South he did that, too. But as a scholar, I could not simply wonder. Academic rigor required that I obtain Webb’s Senate testimony and also figure out exactly what his activities had been while at the State Department.
I found that the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri contained the James E. Webb Papers covering the period from 1928–1980. I performed an online search of the library’s holdings on Webb and found several boxes that contained detailed files on his State Department service. As I searched through the contents of the boxes one by one, I was again unsuccessful in finding the particular testimony referenced in Toward Stonewall and his Wikipedia page.
As you can imagine, it is literally impossible to find official documents for an event that never happened.
Webb never testified before a Senate committee in 1950 about gay people removed from federal service for “moral turpitude” as his Wikipedia article has said from the day it was written in 2004. As far as I can tell, James Webb never played a role in the Lavender Scare at all. It was a case of mistaken identity.
The “undersecretary of state” referred to in Toward Stonewall was in fact John Peurifoy, not Webb. Confusingly, both held jobs at the Department of State that included the phrase “Under Secretary,” though their job functions were entirely different.
Webb held the job title that was simply, Under Secretary of State. According to the Department of State’s Office of the Historian, the Under Secretary position was second in command at the Department from the position’s creation on March 1, 1919 until July 1972.
The Under Secretary functioned as the principal deputy and chief assistant to the Secretary of State, served as Acting Secretary of State in the Secretary’s absence, and provided guidance and direction to the activities of the Department.
For three years from January 28, 1949 until February 29, 1952 Webb reported directly to Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Webb’s main work involved first reorganizing the Department of State during the first half of 1949 and then working with Acheson to define America’s foreign policy during the Cold War. For example, on June 25, 1950 the North Korean Army invaded South Korea and Acheson and Webb devised a strategy for the U.S., which they advised to President Truman, encouraging him to intervene.
By contrast, the positions held by Peurifoy and Humelsine supervised the internal running of the State Department including matters of security, personnel and human resources.
Peurifoy was the Assistant Secretary of State for Administration from March 15, 1947 until August 10, 1950. He also held two additional titles that are likely what led to the confusion with Webb. Starting May 26, 1949 he was designated as the Deputy Under Secretary for Administration as well as the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Management. He held all three titles at the time he testified to the Senate in February 1950, sparking the Lavender Scare.
Humelsine was the Director of the Executive Secretariat, Office of the Secretary of State from 1947 to 1950 . He then succeeded Peurifoy as the Assistant Secretary of State for Administration beginning July 29, 1950 until February 13, 1953. Humelsine also served as the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Management from August 11, 1950 until February 13, 1953.
What I describe next comes primarily from three sources: a 1950 memo from Humelsine to Webb, the State Department’s freely accessible web-based document titled History of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security of the United States Department of State, and the book Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy by Robert D. Dean, which is freely accessible in part through Google Books. It is notable that within the detailed accounting of the Lavender Scare as described in these sources, Peurifoy and Humelsine are mentioned as actors throughout, but Webb is not.
As I shall illustrate in the following paragraphs, while Peurifoy and Humelsine were the foot soldiers who carried out The Lavender Scare within the State Department, the chain of events leading up to it began in 1943 with the actions of Republican Senator from Nebraska, Kenneth Wherry. Starting on page 76 of Imperial Brotherhood we find:
Kenneth Wherry considered himself the Senate expert on “homosexualism.” He boasted of his attempts to eliminate “from the Department of State procommunists, subversives, and other alien-minded radicals of low standards of morality,” efforts dating from his 1943 election to the senate. Wherry, joined by Senator Lester Hill, a Democrat from Alabama, conducted his own investigation into homosexual “infiltration of the government.”
Continuing on page 79 we find the connection with Peurifoy:
Undersecretary John Peurifoy testified to senators Wherry and Hill that the State Department maintained its own blacklist, accumulated since January 1947, “of about 3,000 names of persons in this country and abroad who are homosexuals or alleged homosexuals.” Wherry tried to get the list to check names against Blick’s roster, but Peurifoy denied the request, invoking Truman’s executive order closing personnel files to the congressional branch. Peurifoy, however, assured the counterperversion crusader that “applicants for positions in the State Department as well as the 23,000 employees of the Department in this country and abroad are checked against this list.”
Wherry’s demands for an investigation of homosexuals in government spurred the formation of the Hoey subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Expenditures to investigate the “alleged employment by the departments and agencies of government of homosexuals and other moral perverts.”
According to the Department of State’s The History of the Bureau document, the work of “removing homosexuals” from the Department was performed by the Division of Security (SY). On page 124, Figure 3 is an image of a chart titled Chain of Command for Personnel Security. It states that the Secretary of State: Delegated full authority on Security matters to Humelsine February 18, 1947.
On page 127, Figure 6 is titled Enforcing the President’s Loyalty Program and presents a flow chart that describes “the stages of security and loyalty reviews.” It shows that if questions were raised by an “FBI Record Check” of an individual, there was a “FBI Full Field Investigation” followed by a State Department Loyalty and Security Board recommendation to Carlisle Humelsine for action, resulting in the employee’s separation or clearance.
By the time Webb joined the Department in January 1949, Peurifoy and Humelsine, had already been working to remove gays from federal service for two years.
The only evidence I could find that links Webb to the Lavender Scare is a memo Humelsine sent to Webb dated June 23, 1950, two days before the North Korean invasion of South Korea. The document titled Problem of Homosexuals and Sex Perverts in the Department of State appears to serve the purpose of bringing Webb up to date on the perceived security risk posed by “homosexuals” and the ongoing efforts to remove them from federal service; in essence, illustrating that Webb was ignorant of the effort though he’d been at State for about a year and a half.
Humelsine’s memo also illustrates that not only did Peurifoy trigger the Lavender Scare with his February 1950 Senate testimony, he was primarily responsible for implementing the effort to remove gays from State beginning in 1947. Humelsine’s memo states:
It was not until January 1947 when Mr. Peurifoy became Assistant Secretary for Administration that the problem of homosexuality in the Department of State was dealt with in a direct and forthright manner.
[Text below in brackets was added two days after initial publication.]
{Humelsine composed the memo in preparation for a meeting Senator Hoey requested with Webb and two counsels to President Truman: Charles S. Murphy and Stephen J. Spingarn, held June 28, 1950 to discuss operating procedures for the Hoey subcommittee investigation.
A detailed description of the June 28th meeting compiled by Stephen J. Spingarn is available from the National Archives catalog, confirming that the meeting was about the Hoey subcommittee’s activities and whether hearings should be private or public.
Ultimately, guidelines were laid down for how the subcommittee would operate and how the Department of State would interact with subcommittee, the latter titled Organizations and principles to govern the Department’s participation in the Committee Inquiry. Four elements were laid out, the first of two germane to the issue:
1. The Deputy Under Secretary for Administration or his Deputy should be named as the Department’s spokesman for dealing with the Senate Committee, with individual members of Congress and with the press. All actions and pronouncements of the Department relating to this subject shall be exercised by him or under his personal direction. The Secretary and Under Secretary should be kept informed of all significant developments and should be available for behind the scene activity, when necessary. 2. There should be an Ad Hoc Committee at the immediate disposal of the Deputy Under Secretary (or his Deputy) to serve as his sounding board and to advise him on courses of action under varying circumstance. …
Here, the record shows that the Deputy Under Secretary provided Webb the information he needed for his meeting with the Hoey subcommittee and once the way forward for the subcommittee was decided, it was determined that the Deputy Under Secretary would not only serve as the Department of State’s spokesperson for dealing with the Senate Committee, but that “All actions and pronouncements… shall be exercised by him or under his personal direction.”}
So what did Webb do at the Department of State?
Webb began his tenure as the number two leader at the Department of State during one of America’s most dangerous eras. In 1948 a Soviet Union sponsored coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Czechoslovkia turning it communist. That same year the Soviet Union blockaded all ground access to Berlin resulting in the Western Allies undertaking the Berlin Airlift to supply West Berlin citizens with food, fuel, and other necessities. The spread of communism across central and eastern Europe led to the formation of NATO in April 1949, three months into Webb’s tenure.
At the time Webb started at State in January 1949 America was the world’s lone nuclear power. That changed in August 1949 when Soviet Russia exploded its first nuclear warhead. Two months later in October 1949, China too became a communist nation with Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China. Then in 1950, communist North Korea invaded South Korea. Once the U.S. intervened and China backed North Korea, World War III and the use of nuclear weapons was a serious world concern.
Given the urgency of Webb’s roles working with Acheson to develop America’s diplomatic and intelligence strategies during this time of international upheaval and crises in the heat of the Cold War, it seems unlikely he would have been concerned with the Department of States’ internal personnel matters that already had firm ownership within SY.
However, I do take caution. It is well known that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Nonetheless, on the specific allegations against Webb the evidence is clear. He was not the initiator of the Lavender Scare and he was not in charge of investigating allegations of “homosexuality” or deciding the fate of accused individuals. The evidence shows conclusively that those actions are to be credited to Wherry and Hill in the Senate, and Puerifoy and Humelsine in the Department of State.
Ultimately, in 1953, after both Webb and Peurifoy had left State, a new structure was created within SY with the specific purpose of investigating allegations of “homosexuality” among the State Department employees. According to the History of the Bureau:
SY created the “M” (Miscellaneous) Unit to investigate charges of homosexuality. The M Unit consulted police and vice squad records, and briefed chiefs of mission on how to recognize homosexuality. Staffed by two full-time agents and several part-time staff, the M Unit primarily used personal interviews and an occasional polygraph test (legal at the Department since 1950).
According to Peurifoy’s Senate testimony and statistics from SY there were indeed many careers ruined: 91 people were fired from January 1, 1947 through February 28, 1950; 54 were fired in 1950; 119 in 1951; 134 in 1952; 99 in 1953; and 27 in the first three months of 1954.
According to director Josh Howard’s documentary The Lavender Scare, based on a book of the same name by David Johnson, several of the people outed and removed from federal service committed suicide and ultimately, more than 10,000 people were removed from their jobs across the federal government. The Lavender Scare was an injustice of immense proportion.
Wrongly convicting one innocent person is also an immense injustice. The layers of failure that led to this misattribution of appalling behavior to James Webb, which has persisted for a decade and a half, are themselves appalling. This entire episode represents an example of shoddy investigative rigor from both scientific scholars and journalists. They all should have known better and they all should have done better.
Toward Stonewall did not properly cite the sources for the Senate testimony that ignited the Lavender Scare and was loose with language, thus facilitating the Wikipedia misattribution to Webb — in conflict with the Wikipedia pages on Peurifoy and The Lavender Scare, which both explicitly name Peurifoy’s 1950 testimony as the prime initiation event.
The two authors who wrote the articles on forbes.com and thestranger.com did not apply proper journalistic rigor. They accepted the rumors without corroboration from authoritative sources — and worse, piled on.
The author of the forbes.com article references a professional astrophysicist as his original source for learning of the allegations against Webb. This scientist propagated unsubstantiated false information as if it were true without performing proper scientific rigor to investigate its veracity.
The community of astronomers and astrophysicists in the online social media group who blindly accepted the allegations also piled on and were ready to confront NASA although they did not apply proper rigor.
Personally, I find Webb’s life story quite compelling. From his work at the Department of State helping to define America’s Cold War strategies — including recruiting a physicist to assist with assembling a team of scientists to begin implementing a plan of psychological warfare — to his efforts to implement equal opportunity hiring at NASA facilities in America’s south, to his establishment of NASA infrastructure and strategy in the 1960s.
Webb also encountered many obstacles ranging from political rivalries within State that led to his departure due to health concerns, the 1967 loss of the Apollo 1 crew to fire, and ultimately his resignation from NASA for political reasons. Given the many ups and downs, Webb’s career is a great American story of political intrigue, triumph and disaster, fit for the big screen that I hope the public may come to appreciate.
But most of all, I hope that members of astronomy’s LGBTQI+ community will now be freed of any burdens that may have borne from encountering the misinformation on Webb.
As a Black scientist from the Deep South who’s had to navigate the shoals of a scientific establishment where I’ve not always felt welcome, I imagine how I would feel if I faced the equivalent — a flagship national observatory named after someone who was accused of being a staunch racist and national enforcer of racial segregation. Thankfully, Webb was not the bigoted homophobe who led State Department witch hunts as rumored.
Naming a flagship space observatory after Webb is a fitting recognition of his contributions to NASA science, even if he was just an administrator. I eagerly look forward to the wonders of the universe that the James Webb Space Telescope — and the application of rigorous scientific scrutiny — are expected to reveal. | https://medium.com/@hmoluseyi/was-nasas-historic-leader-james-webb-a-bigot-131c821d5f12 | ['Hakeem Oluseyi'] | 2021-01-27 07:06:11.507000+00:00 | ['NASA', 'Diversity', 'Jwst', 'Space Exploration', 'LGBTQ'] |
A Forever Friendship: Dee and Khadija | Written by Julie Craven, a senior at Assumption College. Julie is majoring in writing and mass communications with a minor in community service-learning.
The ACE Mentoring for Empowerment & Exchange program pairs students and mentors together — like Khadija and Dee.
Dee Bagley remembers the day, four years ago, when she first met her mentoring partner, Khadija Bilal, on the second floor of the Fanning building.
“I remember you told me you liked my hair,’’ Dee said, looking at Khadija, sitting beside her outside the ACE homework room. “I said that I liked your smile, and you made me laugh.”
Listening, Khadija flashed that same smile again, laughing with Dee.
This small but meaningful interaction hinted at their chemistry — the same chemistry that has kept them together for four years.
“Having a mentor is more fun. I didn’t even know about mentoring. Then, I heard of it, and then I found her,” said Khadija.
Khadija’s mentor Dee, from Oxford, MA, has always had a passion for volunteering and thought that ACE would be a good fit for her. After volunteering for some time, ACE posted a position seeking a new dance instructor. Since Dee is an experienced dancer, she eagerly signed up. Dee remembers meeting Khadija on her first day of teaching; they started bonding immediately. Dee soon joined ACE’s mentoring program and has been mentoring Khadija since 2016.
Khadija is a proud Ethiopian. While born in Nairobi, Kenya, she spent many years living in Ethiopia and then came to the U.S. She has lived in Worcester for five years and is a first-year student at North High. Her favorite subject is English, which is the subject Khadija and Dee work on the most.
The mentoring program is much more than just homework help. Mentors and mentees share a close bond outside of ACE and learn from each other throughout the process.
“Not only am I here to help with homework and help Khadija, but you form a relationship with each other. She’s here for me, too,” Dee said. “It’s a friendship, and the more you put into it, and the effort you give towards your mentee, you feel rewarded watching them grow over the years. It’s the best feeling watching her go from a 12-year-old to just turning 16. Now it’s like, ‘Please don’t start driving!’”
Khadija has come a long way since she started out four years ago. Dee said Khadija’s English has improved immensely. Dee remembers Khadija carefully studying the words of different poems.
“The first year we were paired, it was pretty set. We did homework for the hour and fifteen minutes and then typically, back then, we would finish early because you weren’t getting as much homework,” said Dee, speaking to Khadija. “Now that you’re at North High, the homework keeps coming like crazy. We have a pretty good balance with working on homework, studying, and the activities we do.”
They both talk about the different ways they bond together — one of them being a beach trip.
“We went to the beach, and it was supposed to be nice out. We drove two and a half hours. When we got there, it was down-pouring, but we still went and had fun. It makes me laugh every time,” Dee said.
“I went in the water, and it was so cold,” said Khadija laughing.
A favorite memory of Khadija’s is their trip to Six Flags where Khadija had an adventure on a roller coaster.
“When I go on a roller coaster, I pass out,” said Khadija, laughing. Dee admits Khadija’s reaction made her nervous, but Dee looks back on the memory quite fondly, laughing at the moments she was shaking Khadija to make sure she was okay before they jumped on more roller coasters.
Ayman Abdelgadir, the Volunteer and Mentor Coordinator at ACE, could see their close-knit bond. In 2017 Khadija and Dee were awarded “Mentoring Match of the Year.”
“Dee and Khadija are one of our highlight mentoring matches,” Ayman said. “The two of them have established a unique bond that perfectly demonstrates the power of mentoring at ACE. Mentoring is a seed that needs to be watered by support and requires time. Dee and Khadija’s seed has fully blossomed.”
Dee and Khadija are a team and bring out the best in each other, which is why they have been a pair for so long. Whether doing homework or hanging out, they always have a good time with each other.
“I have never thought twice about not being together. It’s part of my life, and you are in it,” said Dee, smiling at Khadija. | https://medium.com/aceworcester/a-forever-friendship-dee-and-khadija-ee448e95ea10 | ['Ace Editors'] | 2020-05-07 18:21:21.416000+00:00 | ['Mentoring', 'Refugees', 'Volunteering', 'Mentorship', 'Nonprofit'] |
Germany’s prevarication on Huawei 5G is sad news for the free world | Brexit trade talks stuck on three critical issues as ‘significant differences remain’, say UK and EU leaders
Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen issue a joint statement, with talks to reconvene in Brussels.
By David Mercer, news reporter
Saturday 5 December 2020 22:43, UK
BREXIT
Play Video — EU: Still ‘significant differences’ over Brexit
EU: Still ‘significant differences’ over Brexit
Why you can trust Sky News
Negotiations over a post-Brexit trade deal are stuck on three critical issues and “further effort” is needed to break the deadlock, UK and European Union leaders have said.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen issued a joint statement following an hour-long discussion on Saturday.
They said that while “progress has been achieved in many areas… significant differences remain on three critical issues: level playing field, governance and fisheries”.
Image:Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen spoke in an hour-long phone call on Saturday
The level playing field refers to state subsidies and standards: the EU fears that Britain could become a low-regulation economic rival, cutting standards and heavily subsidising its industries.
In the statement, Mr Johnson and Ms von der Leyen said: “Both sides underlined that no agreement is feasible if these issues are not resolved.
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“Whilst recognising the seriousness of these differences, we agreed that a further effort should be undertaken by our negotiating teams to assess whether they can be resolved.
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“We are therefore instructing our chief negotiators to reconvene tomorrow in Brussels.
More from Brexit
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Post-Brexit talks deadlock: What are the obstacles?
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Brexit: Boris Johnson to hold crisis talks with EC chief after ‘significant divergences’ on key issues
Brexit: Trade talks put on hold as UK and EU say ‘conditions not met’ for deal
Brexit: Michel Barnier set to stay in London as trade talks go down to the wire
“We will speak again on Monday evening.”
Following the joint statement, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said: “We will see if there is a way forward. Work continues tomorrow.”
Image:Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen issued a joint statement on Saturday
The negotiations on a potential trade deal between the UK and EU have gone down to the wire, with time for an agreement rapidly running out.
It comes after a week of intense negotiations in London, with late night sessions fuelled by deliveries of sandwiches and pizza.
Britain wants to “take back control” from Brussels and set its own economic policies.
The fishing industry is another obstacle — a small part of the European economy at large, but very important to nations such as France.
The EU wants to continue to fish in British waters, but the UK wants to control access and quotas.
What is unclear from the joint statement from Mr Johnson and Ms von der Leyen is whether either — or both — of the two leaders was prepared to shift ground during the call in a way that would enable their negotiators to bridge the gaps.
In the run up to the call, the UK accused the EU side of seeking to introduce “new elements” into the negotiations at the 11th hour.
The British side was angered by reported demands by Brussels that EU fishermen should continue to enjoy the same access to UK waters for another 10 years.
There was concern that Mr Barnier was coming under pressure from French President Emmanuel Macron at the head of a group of countries which feared he was giving too much ground to the UK.
Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheal Martin said he welcomed news that negotiators would resume their discussions in Brussels on Sunday.
“An agreement is in everyone’s best interests,” he tweeted.
“Every effort should be made to reach a deal.”
Analysis: A deal remains favourite — but it’s not certain
By Adam Parsons, Sky News Europe correspondent
On the face of it, this is like putting a cup more petrol in an empty fuel tank. The car might trundle on for a mile or two, but it won’t get you home.
Brexit talks have been stuck for months now over the familiar themes of fishing, governance and competition rules, known as the level playing field.
For day after day, negotiators have wrestled with how to find an agreement — and have consistently failed. So how will a few more days help?
If it was just down to the pressure of time, that would have worked by now.
What’s required now is for new instructions from above — and in the case of the EU, that means giving more wriggle room to chief negotiator Michel Barnier.
The problem is that some countries — including France, the Netherlands and Belgium — have already complained that they think he’s giving away too much to the UK. Would they really be happy to let him make further concessions?
The same challenge faces Boris Johnson and Lord Frost (the UK’s chief Brexit negotiator) — how to strike a deal that looks sufficiently hard-won to satisfy Brexiteers, but is also palatable to the EU.
It will take compromise, and at pace. Proper diplomatic high-wire stuff and, among senior sources I speak to, there is no consensus about what will happen.
Most still expect a deal, but perhaps because that’s how negotiations often work — crisis, anger, broken deadlines and then agreement at the last minute. The choreography, they insist, is part of the process.
But there has never been a deal quite like this one.
On Monday, the Internal Market Bill, which is utterly hated by the EU, is back in the House of Commons.
The European Council meets on Thursday. And the French have already said they would be prepared to veto a Brexit deal if they hate it.
The truth is that, right now, nobody knows what’s going to happen. A deal remains favourite, perhaps because no-deal is seen as so economically damaging. But it’s not certain. | https://medium.com/@usa24news/germanys-prevarication-on-huawei-5g-is-sad-news-for-the-free-world-8b63399c1475 | [] | 2020-12-05 23:13:28.671000+00:00 | ['Germanys', 'Huawei', 'News'] |
Does Money Make You an Ignorant Douche? | Exploring the psychology behind why the super rich sometimes act like they have been compensated very less mentally.
Does Money Make You an Ignorant Douche? (Thumbnail)
Although the central theme of this article is a global event which is now a decade old I am certain that this brief discourse will add a new perspective to the discussion around it- one that I did not seem to find elsewhere.
About a week ago, I read the book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America,” by economist Charles H. Ferguson. Those of you that have watched the award-winning documentary, The Inside Job, might find his name familiar. Yes, it was he who had directed the documentary. And yes, the book- akin to its audio visual counterpart- also presents a critical analysis and probe on the 2008 global financial recession, its causes and the men responsible for it.
The book’s bright red cover page with a rather bold symbolism (see image below) led to my intrigue in giving it a read. The book was most definitely worthwhile a read and impeccable in its detail.
Predator Nation Book Cover
In summary, the book provides a detailed discourse on the causes behind the global recession- especially the people running the financial system at that point in time. It names and points out several individuals- bankers, regulators, lobbyists, financial analysts, and others involved in the banking industry who- the author suggests- were in the wrong.
For those reading this that might be unaware, the alleged misdoings of these individuals range from false financial reporting, and selling deceptive financial products, to facilitating money laundering, among numerous other breeches of the many laws that a business must abide by. For more context on the discussion in this video, I’d recommend you either give the book a read, or watch the documentary.
The author characterizes the banking industry’s decision makers as money-hungry and deceptive thugs, willing to stake every ounce of their integrity to defraud their clients in every way possible. He describes CEO personalities that raked in nine figure incomes, owned multiple properties and luxury ‘toys’, while indulging in personal misdoings such as drug use, prostitution and the like- essentially unethical people who couldn’t care less about their employees, company, or clients from within the self-indulgent bubble that they lived in. He described banking executives who were so distanced from reality that they traveled to and from work in private helicopters, private luxury vehicles and even private elevators within their own office buildings, in an attempt to cushion themselves form the outside world as much as possible- visualize the typical rich gangster that you see in movies, and quadruple the character’s ego.
The question that I want to put forth is the following; were these men inherently insensitive, deceitful and selfish or was it their unfathomably large sums of money and influence that had blinded their vision of reality? This is what came to my mind as I read more and more of the cases in the book. As someone who is passionate about behavioral psychology, I almost always tend to peer into other people’s psyche and try and understand the reason for their actions.
In my opinion, I think it was the latter. Not every single one of these men were devilish or unethical by nature, but rather it certainly must have been the lust for material wealth and pleasures that took over their sense of rationality.
You see, there is this primal instinct in most of us that prevents us from handling unfathomable amounts of power in a righteous manner. Here’s what I mean. If we look at most animals in the wild, the primary form of power that they tend to exhibit is physical power. Physical power limits you to exerting only as much power as you are capable of by yourself in the present moment. Or in other words there are seeming limitations to how much of it you can exert. We humans, obviously, don’t live in the time of brawn anymore, but rather our brawniness has taken on another form- currency. For most people however, they have very tangible limits to how much power their money allows them to exert. But for those at the very top of the social hierarchy, who have more money than they know possible ways of spending; they face a whole another challenge. At that point, you have access to more power than your mind is capable of contemplating. Being rational in such a state is not just improbable, but some might argue- biologically impossible.
There have been studies that have validated how earning money stimulates the same areas of the brain that consumption of psychoactive drugs, and indulgence in sexual pleasure stimulates. It is the type of mental stimulation that typically over-rides one’s rationality. (Money.Com- What Money and Cocaine Have in Common in Your Brain)
Think back to the very first paycheck you ever brought home. I’d be willing to bet, eight cases out of ten, you did not spend it wisely. Well, there’s obviously the naivety of a young mind, but the fact that money can override your sense of rationality cannot be ignored.
So the moral of this little discourse of mine, is that we must come to terms with the fact that money- and the resulting pleasures and power that it can buy- can most definitely shake one’s rationality. More so when one starts to pull in sums larger than they know what to do with.
So, how can we deal with this as a society? Just to be clear, I do not think settling for less is the right way to go. Money predicates your status in society’s dominance hierarchy and there is a great sense of achievement that one can experience as they scale up this hierarchy. However, becoming a public spectacle because of your foolish behavior driven by the lust for money, is not nearly as gratifying in the long run.
The best solution to such a problem, I think, is to educate young men about the fact that money can, and will, most likely override their sense of rationality and one must be cautious of this to avoid being carried away.
The last point that I want to touch upon is the Fundamental Attribution Error that most of make when judging other people’s behavior. More often than not we assume that people who do things that which may be subjectively bad, are terrible people inside, without taking into account the impact of their situational influences. I wrote an entire article about this topic which you can find here. This often makes for a very toxic framing of individuals that get caught doing the wrong thing, which subsequently results in them wanting to distance themselves from others and reality even more.
Until next time.
You may write to me at [email protected]
Find me on YouTube: bit.ly/alphaspath | https://medium.com/@alphaspath/does-money-make-you-an-ignorant-douche-17e0247db2ef | ["Alpha'S Path"] | 2019-05-09 03:44:45.044000+00:00 | ['Banking', 'Wall Street', 'Money Mindset', 'Finance', 'Money'] |
If you are afraid of getting wet, you will never learn how to swim | If you are afraid of getting wet, you will never learn how to swim. Yes, that’s right.
One of my good friends Diego recently said that don’t wait for it just get yourself in the water.
So the next time you ask me, “hey why are you doing videos and stuff?”Some of you guys might say well you look stupid in front of the camera. Yes. I probably do look stupid.
But I always ask myself, is that really going to affect my actions?
If my parents are still going to have me with them for lunch, my sister is still going to be my sister and my close friends are still going to be my close friends.
So the question is why do we care so much about what our so-called friends are saying or thinking.
Also, I am not saying get rid of those friends, what I am saying is stop caring so much and that is it.
People don’t like change, do they?
That is the reason when you try to do something new or different they just try to stop you from doing that.
All you need is a little patience and carefreeness.
So the next time you try something new or different.
You just keep on doing it and you just stop caring about what other people think.
Conclusion:
There you have it.
Let me know what were the key factors for you ( and feel free to add yours in the comments.)
If you have any doubt or need any help just give me a knock on Instagram it is @creatorharsh
I will see you soon champion. | https://medium.com/@creatorharsh/if-you-are-afraid-of-getting-wet-you-will-never-learn-how-to-swim-bdb83aae5e2f | ['Harsh Bhat'] | 2020-12-21 06:34:38.329000+00:00 | ['Opinion', 'Grow', 'Growth Mindset', 'Self Help', 'Mindset'] |
Xcode: 8 SwiftUI Keyboard Shortcuts That Will Make You Even Faster | Xcode: 8 SwiftUI Keyboard Shortcuts That Will Make You Even Faster
Photo by Aryan Dhiman on Unsplash.
As software developers, we not only love to build applications, but we also love to find and use the best tools available in order to do so.
As iOS developers, we are very lucky. With Swift, we have a modern programming language in our tool belt. Additionally, Apple released a brand new, modern, and declarative UI framework in 2018 called SwiftUI.
That means we are well prepared for the future with the instruments we have.
However, we also love to work efficiently with the technologies we have. One easy way to increase our productivity and get more code written is to use keyboard shortcuts.
Sadly, there are not that many keyboard shortcuts available for SwiftUI (or they are not documented that clearly). Nevertheless, getting to know the ones that are already available is a good way to prepare for the future while having more time for the things that really matter.
You can accomplish the following things with keyboard shortcuts:
Resume the preview feature of SwiftUI. Show/hide the preview pane. Open the library of controls, modifiers, etc. Open the Quick-Actions menu. Show the inspectors of the SwiftUI view. Get quick access to the attribute inspector of a view. Select the preview destination (devices). Switch to the previous or next preview destination.
There are tons of helpful Xcode shortcuts out there that can be used when creating UIKit and SwiftUI views. However, this article will cover the ones that are specific to SwiftUI. | https://betterprogramming.pub/xcode-8-swiftui-keyboard-shortcuts-that-will-make-you-even-faster-bc3967b75224 | ['Manuel Schulze'] | 2020-12-14 21:10:11.799000+00:00 | ['Swiftui', 'Xcode', 'Mobile', 'Programming', 'Swift'] |
Hustling for Self-Love | Hustling for Self-Love
“Dollhouse,” by: Jess Moor
“You’re something special,” said my client Don, sliding into a navy sport coat. I watched him from the bed, still donning the lacey lamé stockings and garter belt from the previous evening.
“Have a wonderful day,” I responded, breaking free from an entanglement of white sheets. As I wrapped my arms around him, I wondered why he felt so distant. The faraway look in his eyes seemed to serve as an omen for an outcome that I wasn’t prepared to face.
Since high school, I’ve had an affinity for older men, a sort of gravitational pull, derived from my inability to fit in with the kids my own age. In junior high, I was the only person at school who was out and proud, which was a frightening trek for a 12-year-old black boy in a conservative town. I grew up in the Triangle area of North Carolina, among a family of fervent Pentecostals. I lost my virginity at 16, to a man that was two-and-a-half decades my senior.
At 16, I didn’t trade sex for money. Instead, I bartered my body for more ethereal concepts, such as: confidence among more socially adept peers, misconceptions about love and worth, along with the occasional dozen of Krispy Kreme doughnuts to placate my loneliness. Too easy to please for my own good. My technical introduction to the world of sex work came at age 19, after my first semester of art school ended, a financial aid shortage leaving me homeless in a city 24-hundred miles from home.
It was following this foray against societal convention that I realized my lucrative effect on the hearts — and the loins — of older men. Whereas, I’d always felt ostracized at school for my nonconformist personality, my peculiar nature was revered by those that were willing to purchase my company. This made the commodification of my affection a logical outlet for self-expression. Being coveted by benefactors that fed me with the golden crumbs of their wealth provided a safe place for me, in a world where my existence had felt forbidden.
I opened the door to a stocky woman with a gracious smile, ready to sweep the room of dust and detritus. She reminded me of my mother, casually dressed in jeans and a gray t-shirt, but nonetheless dignified in the way she conducted herself. She walked as if possessed by a factory worker from Metropolis, on robotic feet, chin slightly elevated from an intrinsic nobility often perpetuated among those who — like my mother — have dedicated their entire lives to the blue collar vocation of serving others.
Service had led me to where I was on that day, the Intercontinental Hotel in Times Square. I’d been invited as a weekend companion for a man named Don, a venture capitalist who recently returned to the States, following a residency overseas. On my first date with the 50-year-old venture capitalist, we never made it past second base. He took me out for sushi and sashimi after watching me go-go dance at a bar in the Castro, San Francisco.
“I didn’t mean to intrude, but I wanted to catch a glimpse,” said the silver fox, his ice-blue eyes burning brightly against Irish skin.
“No intrusion,” I responded over the crowd. I’d changed into a mesh leotard, one that complimented my legs and showcased the glute workouts, newly incorporated into my fitness routine.
“From Rentboy,” he verified. Days prior, we began our correspondence on the infamous website that would fall prey to a government raid soon after, resulting in the subsequent shutdown of the melting pot for male escorts. “You’re an amazing dancer,” said Don, his Yankee accent thick and assertive. “Although, I do admit, this is the last place I’d expect to see someone like you.” He nodded his head, his eyes lingering, his body tense, his energy — all at once — contracting, yet fully engaged.
“Why is this the last place, of all places?” I asked, genuinely intrigued.
“Well, for one thing, you’re sober. How many manage to stay sober, while dancing all night at a bar?”
It was a good question, and “not many” was the answer. During my years as a hustler, I’d managed to pick up a vipassana practice, to which I’d become quite faithful. In addition to making me more aware of the polarities of reality (the false dual between forces of light and dark), it increased my sensitivity to external stimuli, especially alcoholic beverages or mind-altering substances. Later on, when a Buddhist mistress of the same style of meditation moved in across the hall from me, I gleaned valuable insight from our synchronistic exchanges. I came to understand that the guidance I sought in outward practice had been revealed within the caverns of my own heart.
For the first time in my journey as an escort, I was inspired to approach soul in tandem with the body; self-awareness became the foundation upon which my spirituality was built. Don became one of the first benefactors to embrace my conscious approach to sex work and started to explore the metaphysical perspective for himself, yearning for ways to imbue his material success with a deep-rooted sense of purpose and truth. We began using desire as a pathway to awakening, whereas it had once been feared and condemned as a weakness. Our time together became a sanctuary, a consecrated temple, where conversation, contemplation and intimacy were powerful outlets for communion.
Four years after my first meeting with Don, he reached out to me, insinuating a business proposition. Upon request, I sent him explicit compositions of my nether realms, self-portraits I shot in the apartment of a previous suitor. After a week of him ogling my photographs, he remunerated me with a 2,000-dollar apex of an allowance, rebooting the dalliance that had ended back when he moved to Italy with his wife and two children.
“I feel at home with you,” Don gushed from across the bed, as I reviewed the breakfast menu. The night before, we spent hours ruminating on eastern philosophical concepts, like vibration, chakra alignment and the deceptive glamours of maya. I professed my obsession with Osho and Alan Watts; we discussed my budding expertise in the fusion of sex and meditation, a form of magic, ascertained from years of research and practice. I persuaded Don to confess the type of details he’d never felt brave enough to discuss: his decade of marriage to a woman, the subsequent divorce, the co-parenting of pre-teen children. We discussed travel plans for the future, and for a moment we were headed towards something I’d always longed for — a permanent source of grounding and stability.
Shortly after leaving, Don texted me. “I want you to be mine.” Minutes later, he offered to rent me an apartment in New York City.
“Anywhere in Manhattan?” I inquired, my heart dancing to a giddy rhythm of its own. I took a pinch of the viscid honeycomb that resided beneath a glass covering on the dresser, a complimentary treat from the hotel.
“Anywhere,” he texted back with a row of pink hearts. A sudden frisson overcame me (part sugar rush, part thrill), but the excitement was quickly followed by grief. Somehow, I knew we were too good to be true — too good to last. The black rose of consternation in my chest bloomed like a portent.
Shortly after his departure, Don called a car to haul me off to JFK. As I was dropping my cell phone at the security checkpoint, I received an alert: two grand transferred to my account, with a note from Don: “Treat yourself to something special. You deserve it.” I nearly broke into tears on the way to my terminal. At 25-years-old, I felt more blessed than I ever did in the pews of my childhood church, in awe at this act of generosity that I was raised to believe wasn’t possible that this too was a form of God’s beneficence.
“Distance,” by Jess Moor
As a young boy, I was warned that — by being gay — I was opening myself up to grave danger, temporal, but especially metaphysical. I was taught by the church to believe I’d be shunned by the God of Abraham, that my peculiar nature would be a lifelong curse. I welcomed this danger as my daemon; I wielded the restrictions placed upon me as a road map of individualized will. I used my sexuality, my primordial disgrace, as a method of escaping my impoverished beginnings. To me, being born as a have-not — a person of color without social privilege — was a karmic noose that, in the haunting silence of solitary moments, threatened to snatch me back to origins of misfortune.
With Don, it wasn’t just about transactional intercourse; it was an opportunity to find redemption in an unlikely place. There was a mutual support that was extended, and it soared beyond the superficial or mundane. Not only did he remunerate me for my time, but he provided feedback on my writing, celebrated my aspirations, complimented my mind, and, most memorably, encouraged me to keep dreaming.
When I got the news of his cancer diagnosis, it broke my heart. I was sitting on the back porch of my best friend’s home, my spirit soaring to the sounds of an avian chorus; bluebirds were sprouted across the lawn, like winged blossoms, nature’s depiction of the joy I felt on the inside, until it was pummeled to dirt and root by a plague of bad news. When he revealed the extent of his illness and his treatment, I knew we’d never meet again, and that affected me in a way I didn’t anticipate. I lost the joy that I heard in the bluebirds’ harmony and, for a while, the turbulence was overwhelming. After all I’d poured into the arrangement, the universe was taking it away. I was being returned to the place I strived to escape.
A period of darkness inspired me to pay attention to the positive aspects of what I’d endured. I reminisced on the conversations between us, on the harmony we shared. I reminded myself of what a progression this had been from previous arrangements, where I may not have received the level of respect that Don showed me, which I deserved, even in this field of work. With these good memories, I befriended my sorrow in meditation and honored what reality had revealed through this lifestyle. I fell in love with myself — my entire self — the accomplishments and, especially, the shortcomings. Discovering peace, I wrote myself back towards the light.
Before meeting Don, I wondered whether I’d be accused of playing the role of a slave. Would others view me as a disposable boy-toy to the white man in power, a prey (or a predator?) of the appetites of older plutocrats who, without wanting to admit it, partake in transactions of fraudulent affection? Personally, I see reality from a more complex light: deeper tones, with vivid hues and broader strokes. If I’m agreeing to submit, then it is but a figment of my character, a materialized facet of my own imagination — a longing for knowledge of self, a quest for enlightenment — to be endured on my own terms, not on the terms of the men who want me, despite the cost.
Sex work allowed me to find a place in the world of relationships; it taught me compassion and acceptance for the complication of a human soul. For that, I honor the space it’s created in my world, not just as a transaction, but as a valid pathway to healing the heart. I am no longer in San Francisco, although I am still often supported by the intimate friends I’ve come to know along the way. While I may not appear to be much further from where I began, I feel different, more aware than I did in the beginning. Perhaps, that wakeful awareness is the grounding and stability I originally sought upon landing on this path. Either way, I am the hero and the villain of my own tragedy — flowing in harmony towards resolution — and that, to me, is plenty cause for celebration. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/hustling-for-self-love-266fac0f3bd9 | ['Jess Moor'] | 2019-09-28 20:40:29.702000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Sex Work', 'LGBTQ', 'Philosophy', 'Sexuality'] |
How To Workout A Desperate American Housewife | How To Workout A Desperate American Housewife
A special at-home workout
Photo by MAX LIBERTINE on Unsplash
I got the call from Ginny on a Monday evening. She explained she was friends with Polly Graham who had highly recommended me. Both Polly and Ginny lived in the salubrious neighbourhood of St Johns Wood in London.
In times of lockdown, I was happy to train new people as long as they had a space big enough to be 2 meters apart. I had successfully socially distanced a few regulars and was keen to meet Ginny.
Her New York accent was raspy, confident and sexy
She told me she’d been in self-isolation in London on her own, while her husband and children were in the Hampton’s. Work commitments meant she had to be here in London. She mentioned she was desperate to work out.
Something about how she spoke made my cock stir. It had been a while since I had had sex. To be honest, I’d not thought about it during lockdown. I figured there was no point in worrying about my lack of sex in these usual times.
I pulled up at the imposing double-gated house. Beautifully manicured gardens paved the way to a heavy, dark blue door with immaculate chrome fittings. Number 72 Acacia Road was the fruits of a hedge funders years of work. Very impressive.
The gates opened without me doing anything. It felt like I was under surveillance. Ginny told me she had a small gym and I didn’t need to bring anything. I rang the bell.
To my surprise, a middle-aged Spanish woman opened the door, “You must be here to see Ms Ginny.”
She led me through a cool marble entrance hall.
“Wait here, she will be down in a minute.”
Family photos adorned the walls. Everything was perfectly in place.
The sound of footsteps skipping downstairs proceeded the immaculate Ginny. Bra top, Lululemon leggings, tanned skin, DD tits, flat abs, and a peachy ass. Her swishy blonde ponytail highlighted her sharp cheekbones and green eyes.
She held out her petite hand as a greeting. The warmth and softness of her touch caught me off guard. I held her hand for what seemed like an age. As if it was a conductor of sexual energy, I was instantly aroused, my cock pushing against my white shorts.
“Can I get you a water?” She asked, wandering into the massive kitchen.
“Sure,” I followed the muscular lines of her back, which rippled as she walked.
The outline of her thong accentuated her pert and peachy ass
Another door led to the gym room. The light from the rear garden illuminated the room perfectly. It was a no-expense-spared gym space. I could see a Life Fitness cable station, Peleton bike, Woodrow treadmill, and a pilates reformer — it had the lot.
“I just need pushing, I’m such a lazy ass left on my own,” Ginny laughed lightly, as she hopped onto the treadmill.
She fiddled with her phone and seconds later, the sound of Drake filled the room. I held up my hand to tell her to run for five minutes while I went to set everything up.
The sound of the treadmill slowing down told me her five minutes were up. As I turned round to watch her walk towards me, I noticed her nipples were now erect. I found myself staring momentarily at her massive pushed up tits.
“ You’re the first person I’ve been in contact with apart from my staff,” She said.
My cock was pushing into a semi hard-on
Ginny glanced a look, then looked me in the eyes, “I need to stretch my hamstrings.”
She promptly lay down on the floor and raised her right leg for me to stretch it. Her leg felt weightless on my shoulder. I placed my hands firmly on her thigh. My cock was growing uncontrollably, it was now pressed on her leg. Her eyes were closed.
“A little more please,” She whispered.
As I pushed her leg back towards her head, the combined angle of my knee and shorts saw the end of my now fully erect cock force it’s way out. Her eyes opened as if she knew she was turning me on. Without a word, the fingers of her right hand ran down my inner thigh and drifted up the length of my cock.
She held the tip gently between her finger and thumb. Her French manicure had never looked so good.
Without blinking, she asked, “What are you going to do with that?”
I was in no-mans land, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. There was no time to hesitate.
“Kneel up please,” I told Ginny.
I stood up as she gracefully got to her knees. She looked up at me with her hands behind her back smiling. The door to the kitchen was wide open. The sound of the maid cleaning made everything more intense.
“Open your mouth Ginny.”
My cock sprang out of my shorts
I pushed it towards her face. She immediately spat on the end of it and expertly worked the lower part of my shaft with her hand and the upper part with her mouth. My eyes closed briefly. Her tongue danced in time with her hand.
Pulling me out of her mouth, she whispered, “Fuck me.”
She took her leggings off. I pulled her bra top over her head. Standing in her thong I could see how perfectly she was put together. I picked her up. She was light in my arms. I put one foot firmly on the bench in front of me, pulled her thong to the side, and lowered her onto my cock.
She felt tight
It took a moment or two for Ginny to fully take me inside her. My hands were firmly under her ass, as I furiously pummeled her. Her hands tightly gripped my back.
In one quick movement, she pulled my t-shirt over my head. I swung her around and smashed her back against the wall while forcing myself deeper inside her tight pussy.
I lifted and pushed her higher up the wall so her legs now hung over my shoulders and my mouth was planted on her smooth wet pussy.
“Started from the bottom, now the whole world fuckin here”
Drake filled the room as she grabbed my head with both hands and pushed herself onto my mouth. My thick thumb pushed inside her pussy while my index finger worked her ass. I used the flat of my tongue to rhythmically lick her clit. She began to shake.
Arching her back, she groaned deeply and loudly
Then to my surprise, she squirted as she came. My mouth drank the clear liquid gushing out of her pussy. Relentlessly, I continued to work her with my tongue, my face, and my trainers soaked, and the floor awash with her juices. Again she arched and squirted.
“Fuck, yes,” She gasped.
I helped her limp body slide helplessly down to the floor and onto her hands and knees. Before she had time to fully recover, I lifted her hips up and sank deep inside her.
My fingers made a deep imprint on her buttocks as I gripped her
I moved her rag doll-like body back and forth and up and down on my cock. Her head rocked in rhythm, her pussy dripping wet, her hand furiously working herself as she yet again squirted, this time all over the yoga mat.
The floor to ceiling windows made the view into the garden all the more impressive. The housemaid continued her laundry duties, totally unaware that the lady of the house was being given a thorough workout.
I pulled out of Ginny and sat heavily on the bench. My cock was raging and my mind all over the place. She started to crawl towards me, her hair now out of its ponytail, her eyes fixed on mine.
Lifting her head she deep-throated every inch of my cock
Her eyes flickered as my cock hit her pharynx. My hands gripped the bench. The speed of her hand and mouth were a magical blur. Uncontrollably, I pumped cum into her mouth. She eased back slightly and slowed her hands down.
Her crystal green eyes smiled mischievously at me, as she opened her mouth to show me a creamy white pool of cum sitting on her tongue. She swallowed it theatrically. I leaned forward, feeling the softness of her tits on my legs, and lifted her mouth to kiss her deeply.
She stood up, facing the garden, and reversed her perfect ass, and shaved pussy towards my still hard cock. Parting her pussy with my fingers, I guided myself into her again. My hands reached around the front of her sensitive nipples. She bounced up and down enthusiastically, as I bit her back and gripped her tits before we climaxed in perfect synchronicity.
An hour had gone by quickly. Ginny went upstairs to shower. It was time to go. The maid handed me my money and closed the front door. As I reversed out of the gates back into reality, I could see the curtains move slightly on the second floor. Ginny would need time to recover from her workout. | https://medium.com/sexual-tendencies/how-to-workout-a-desperate-american-housewife-bbc8ca4c1702 | ['T.J. Johansson'] | 2020-06-20 15:02:45.748000+00:00 | ['Erotica', 'Short Story', 'Fitness', 'Sexuality', 'Sex'] |
ELK deployment in kubernetes | This article describes the steps to deploy ELK components such as elasticsearch , kibana, apm-server , beats agents on to the kubernetes cluster. Though this whole setup is tested successfully , necessary tuning must be done in order to make it production ready.
Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) built on kubernetes operator pattern extends the basic Kubernetes orchestration capabilities to support the setup and management of Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM Server, Enterprise Search, and Beats on Kubernetes.
With Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes we can manage critical operations related to ELK, such as:
Managing and monitoring multiple clusters Scaling cluster capacity and storage Performing safe configuration changes Securing clusters and agents with TLS certificates Setting up hot-warm-cold architectures with availability zone/environment awareness
Deploying ECK on kubernetes cluster
Steps to install
· Install custom resource definitions and the operator with its RBAC rules:
· Monitor the operator logs:
kubectl -n elastic-system logs -f statefulset.apps/elastic-operator
Above steps will create all the resources needed for ECK operator. A dedicated namespace called elastic-system will be created with one ECK pod running in it. For further details refer documentation
Deploying Elasticsearch Cluster nodes as Stateful Sets
Elasticsearch needs persistence in storage volumes to store its workloads. This feature is provided by kubernetes’ StatefulSets. Other feature that justifies using elasticsearch nodes as Statefulset is , pods created as statefulsets are not interchangeable and each maintain persistent identifier across any rescheduling.
Pre-requisites for deploying the elasticsearch cluster:
1. Load Balancer should be configured so that elasticsearch http service can use it as it is going to be load balancer type of service
2. Storage class which allows for volume expansion must be available.
Manifest file:
Deployment specifications:
1. This is elasticsearch kind of deployment which will be managed by ECK operator
2. Name of the elasticsearch cluster is “quickstart”
3. Elasticsearch cluster version is 7.13.4
4. Elasticsearch service which will be receiving data from beats and apm server is of load balancer type. Docs
5. It will be 2 node elasticsearch cluster with each node having master, data, ingest, ml role
6. 4Gb of heap memory is allocated
7. Atleast 16 Gb of RAM is made available to elasticsearch cluster
8. 500Gb of disk space is allocated to elasticsearch cluster using storage class “essc” which allows volume expansion . Docs
Steps to get cluster health and secrets
· To get overview of elasticsearch cluster’s health, version and number of nodes
kubectl get elasticsearch
· To see the pods running
kubectl get pods --selector='elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/cluster-name=quickstart
· To get the elasticsearch http service
kubectl get service quickstart-es-http
· To get elasticsearch password
PASSWORD=$(kubectl get secret quickstart-es-elastic-user -o go-template='{{.data.elastic | base64decode}}')
· To see if cluster is running
curl -u "elastic:$PASSWORD" -k https://<load-balancer-externalIP>:9200
· To get the tls certificate from the secret defined by ECK for accessing elasticsearch http service (this certificate is useful for beats agents to access elasticsearch cluster from outside the kubernetes cluster) Docs
kubectl get secret quickstart-es-http-certs-public -o go-template=’{{index .data “tls.crt” | base64decode }}’
Deploying Kibana instance
Kibana can be deployed as custom resource managed by ECK. Its upgradation, connectivity with elasticsearch using basic authentication and ssl authentication will be taken care by ECK.
Manifest file:
Deployment Specifications:
1. Name of the kibana instance is “quickstartkb”
2. Kibana version is 7.13.4 which should be same as elasticsearch version
3. Elasticsearch cluster name, with which kibana will connect with the help ECK operator
Steps to access Kibana:
· Get the service load balancer external IP using
kubectl get service quickstartkb-kb-http
· Get the kibana password which is same as elasticsearch password using
PASSWORD=$(kubectl get secret quickstart-es-elastic-user -o go-template='{{.data.elastic | base64decode}}')
· Open https://<load-balancerIp>:5601 in the local browser and give “elastic” as username and password from above to access kibana
Beats Agents Configuration
Configuration described here is for beats agents deployed in other kubernetes cluster and so do not come under ECK. The official manifest file for kubernetes is used for each beats agent. Metricbeat configuration is described as follows , similarly heartbeat and filebeat configuration can be done. Autodiscover section needs to be uncommented for filebeat-kubernetes.yaml.
Metricbeat
Metricbeat will collect data related to the Kubernetes nodes, pods, containers, persistent volumes, services, stateful sets, daemonset, replicaset when kubernetes module is activated . System module is enabled to get data related to cpu/memory/disk usage of kubernetes nodes. It will also load dashboards into kibana if kibana access credentials are provided. Below are the steps to configure and deploy metricbeat:
· Download metricbeat-kubernetes.yaml from this
· Create “quickstart-es-http-certs-public” secret in the same namespace where metricbeat daemonset will be running with following command (tls.crt is extracted as described in elasticsearch deployment section)
kubectl create secret generic quickstart-es-http-certs-public --from-file=ca.crt=tls.crt --from-file=tls.crt=tls.crt
· Add following configuration in “Volumes” specification of daemonset to create “certificate” volume where tls certificate will be stored which will be extracted from “quickstart-es-http-certs-public” secret
- name: certificate
secret:
secretName: quickstart-es-http-certs-public
· Mount the the above created volume in “volumeMounts” specification using
- name: certificate
mountPath: /home/<user>/certificate/ca.crt
readOnly: true
subPath: ca.crt
· Put below configuration in “metricbeat-daemonset-config” configmap , under elasticsearch.output.password specification
ssl.certificate_authorities:
- /home/<user>/certificate/ca.crt
· Add the appropriate values for “metricbeat” daemonset
env:
- name: ELASTICSEARCH_HOST
value: https://<IP>
- name: ELASTICSEARCH_PORT
value: "9200"
- name: ELASTICSEARCH_USERNAME
value: elastic
- name: ELASTICSEARCH_PASSWORD
value: <password>
· Deploy metricbeat using following command
Kubectl apply –f metricbeat-kubernetes.yaml
APM Server Configuration
APM server collects the metrics gathered by apm agents attached to the applications to be monitored and ingest this data into elasticsearch which further can be visualized in kibana’s APM app. In this case ECK will operate the APM server and manage its connection with kibana and elasticsearch
Manifest file:
Specifications:
Name of the APM server
2. APM http service type is loadbalancer to make it accessible outside the cluster
3. TLS security for APM http service is disabled as token can be used for authenticating apm agent
4. Name of the elasticsearch cluster to connect to
5. Name of the kibana instance to connect to
Important Secrets and Service
· quickstartapm-server-token : this secret stores the token needed to connect to APM server by apm agent. This token can be extracted by following command
kubectl get secret quickstartapm-apm-token -o go-template='{{index .data "secret-token" | base64decode }}'
· Following is the command to see the APM server http service which runs on port 8200
kubectl get svc
APM agent configuration
APM agent can be deployed as part of the application deployment without affecting the application’s image. Based on service name , apm agent configuration can be done from the Kibana APM app. Following are the steps to configure application’s deployment file to attach APM agent with it
Sample manifest for application with apm agent attached can be found here
Specifications:
APM server URL to send the APM agent data
- name: ELASTIC_APM_SERVER_URL
value: "http://<apm-server-apm-http>:8200"
2. Name of the application where APM agent is attached
- name: ELASTIC_APM_SERVICE_NAME
value: "petclinic"
3. Application packages
- name: ELASTIC_APM_APPLICATION_PACKAGES
value: "org.springframework.samples.petclinic"
4. Environment name where application is deployed
- name: ELASTIC_APM_ENVIRONMENT
value: test
5. Secret in which APM server token is embedded.
- name: ELASTIC_APM_SECRET_TOKEN
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
name: quickstartapm -apm-token
key: secret-token
This token can be created using following command
kubectl create secret generic quickstartapm-apm-token --from-literal=secret-token=<token> -n <namespace>
6. APM agent version
- name: elastic-java-agent
image: docker.elastic.co/observability/apm-agent-java:1.25.0
Conclusion
Deploying ECK operator provided by elasticsearch and supported by Kubernetes, is one of the simplest way to deploy ELK components. It also ensures tls layered security between elk components and also between the elasticsearch nodes thereby enhancing data security. Storage requirement changes for elasticsearch cluster can be done easily by changing some values in deployment file and redeploying it. Similarly necessary module activation can be done just by changing the manifest files of the ELK components. | https://medium.com/@ak20102763/elk-deployment-in-kubernetes-a7a41fb5acbd | ['Akash Tangde'] | 2021-09-08 06:21:25.191000+00:00 | ['Elasticsearch', 'Eck', 'Beats', 'Kubernetes', 'Kibana'] |
Cloudy Celebration | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/chalkboard/cloudy-celebration-cd2dfc849206 | ['Joanna Vang'] | 2020-11-25 19:40:22.148000+00:00 | ['One Line', 'Celebration', 'Approach', 'Poetry'] |
You say this like it’s a fact. | Russia’s plot to wield social media sites to divide Americans and aid Donald Trump in the 2016 election was even more massive and sophisticated than previously understood…
You say this like it’s a fact. But even mainstream sources disagree. In reality, it has been documented that the effort to reach US residents via social media was “small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the election.”
Facebook’s General Council Colin Stretch said that posts from the Internet Research Agency represented a tiny fraction of the social network’s total content. “This equals about four-thousandths of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content,” Stretch writes. “Put another way, if each of these posts were a commercial on television, you’d have to watch more than 600 hours of television to see something from the (Internet Research Agency).”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said “we undertook a very thorough investigation, and, in 2016, we now know that there were two main ad accounts linked to Russia which advertised on Google forabout $4,700 in advertising.”
Those are the findings of two independent groups of researchers tasked by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee.
Not only is “New Knowledge” not independent, they’ve actually been caught doing what they claim “the Russians” were doing.
…[T]he reports describe…a consistent pattern of seeking to divide Americans…while boosting Trump and hurting Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The evidence that the Clinton campaign was seeking to undermine the candidacy of Bernie Sanders was much more extensive. You’re also ignoring the widely available evidence that much of the US corporate media was actively coordinating with the Clinton campaign.
The Russian accounts also boosted a widely debunked conspiracy theory that Seth Rich, a slain Democratic National Committee staffer — and not Russian hackers — was responsible for the DNC’s emails making their way to Wikileaks in 2016.
You’re twisting reality here. The “Russian hacking” you refer to is the debunked conspiracy theory. Both Seymour Hersh and Kim Dotcom have directly stated that Seth Rich was the leaker, and Julian Assange has implied that that is the case.
Support for Trump started in the early primaries…
That’s true, but it wasn’t at the behest of Russia. It was because the corporate media were dutifully following their marching orders from the Clinton campaign to elevate Trump and the other “pied piper” candidates Cruz and Carson.
Most of all, you ignore the mounting evidence that “Russiagate” was a fictional construction of Clinton campaign insiders and that Clinton’s own ties to Russia are substantial. | https://medium.com/@jjkimball01/you-say-this-like-its-a-fact-but-even-mainstream-sources-disagree-a959c30afd3a | ['Jonathank X'] | 2019-01-07 14:58:38.472000+00:00 | ['Wikileaks', 'Russia', 'Politics', '2016 Election', 'Propaganda'] |
Best Friends | Image by pixabay.com
I didn’t expect for someone to be standing there as I climbed over my backyard fence. We had moved in a few months before but most of the houses in the new development were vacant. The Harris’ lived 3 doors down and I had met Judy. She and I were the same age and getting ready to start the 3rd grade. Pam lived up the street at the top of the hill. Pam, Judy and I were friends by default. I liked them well enough, but Pam could be bossy and Judy liked to have tea parties in her bedroom with her toy troll dolls and talk baby talk to them. I loathe baby talk, so my visits to her house lasted until she started to pull that shit.
Her dad was some type of an engineer and her mom was an anomaly; she worked full time as a nurse. This caused the housewives on our block to cluck and sneer with disapproval behind her back that she chose — or maybe she had to — work outside her home and not dedicate her entire heart and soul to her family. I don’t know why she worked, but I liked the fact that often times, Judy and I had her house to ourselves for an hour after getting home from school. We mostly spent it in front of the TV watching “Dark Shadows” and gorging on as many cookies as we thought we could get away with. We thought that her mom wouldn’t notice as if she couldn’t count. Once we heard her car pull into the garage, we quickly turned off the TV, no matter what was happening with Barnabas, and brush the cookie crumbs off the couch and our mouths. We’d grab a book — usually the latest Nancy Drew, and pretend to read when she came through the garage door and walked into the kitchen.
I first met Kathy a year after Judy’s family moved in and we were best friends even though she knocked out her front tooth in my garage when we were going round and round with our skates in a hula hoop.
“Hello. Who are you? My name is Kathy,” I heard as I hoisted myself up the fence and straddled the middle in preparation of jumping down. I was planning on playing in the yard without the prying eyes of my older brother who had been left to babysit me while my Mom ran to the store. Eric thought this made him the boss of me. It didn’t but rather than have another argument about it, I decided to go play in what I considered my own personal backyard next door.
Now someone else was here and I didn’t know why. I looked at her for a moment and suddenly felt as if I had done something wrong. I knew it wasn’t really my backyard, but until someone bought the house and moved in, I figured it was free for the taking. There wasn’t anything special about it; there was minimal landscaping for show, a cement patio without any shade and a lonely palm tree in the corner. It was that no one else used it and it was a space where I could pretend I owned. I envisioned 10 dogs running around in the yard while I sat under a fabulous patio umbrella, smoked cigarettes and read. I saw myself as having 2 cars in the garage, a refrigerator full of my favorite snacks and no stupid brothers running around, breaking my toys and spying on me. To me, that backyard was as close to heaven in my mind that I could imagine and it belonged to no one but me.
“I’m Sam. What are you doing here?” I asked as I jumped down. I almost landed on her. She stepped back but continued to smile. She was about my height but thinner. Her hair was so blond it was yellow. She had enormous blue eyes with pale lashes. Her nose was large and her skin was so white it was almost translucent.
She was wearing a starched white blouse that was tucked into her pants. Her socks had lace on them and she was wearing white saddle shoes that didn’t have a mark on them. Her hair had a ribbon in it which matched her shirt.
“Sam? Really? What kind of name is that..”
“It’s short for Samantha,” I said and sighed. It always irritates me when I had to explain.
“I live here now,” she said. She began blinking rapidly and her eyes darted for a moment. She smiled nervously and looked down at the dirt.
“What do you mean you live here now?” I asked. I quickly looked into the living room window. “I don’t see any furniture.”
Her smile got wider. “Oh, that’s because we haven’t actually moved in yet. The movers come on Saturday. We’re staying at a motel until then.”
“I see,” I said as I wiped my hands on my jeans. I wasn’t wearing any shoes and my feet were dirty. I tried to smooth my hair down but it was pointless. It was curly and stuck out everywhere. My Mom gave up trying to comb it so she cut it short and hoped it would somehow stay put.
“Do you live next door?” she asked.
“We moved here a long time ago. I know everyone in the neighborhood,” I said as if that would mean something.
“Kathy? Where are you?” I heard a man’s voice call out. Kathy turned and I saw a man approaching us.
“Hi Dad. This is Sam. She lives next door,” she said. He walked over and stuck his hand out. I shook it and hoped it was clean.
“Nice to meet you…did you say Sam?” he asked. He was tall and younger than my parents. His hair was cut short and his teeth were so straight that I wasn’t sure if they were real or not and tried not to stare.
“Yes, my name is Sam, short for Samantha.Thanks, nice to meet you too,” I said and pulled my hand away. I didn’t roll my eyes at him when I explained my name. He already looked tightly wound up.
“How did you get in the yard? I didn’t see you go through the gate,” he asked and looked directly at me.
This was the second time in 2 minutes that I felt as if I had done something wrong. “I climbed over the fence like I always do,” I said.
“Oh well, please be sure not to do that anymore. This is our house and you should come to the front door from now on.” He turned and looked down at Kathy and put his arm around her shoulders. He had spoken and I had been dismissed. “It’s time to go,” he said and turned her around. “It’s nice to have met you Sam,” he said as they walked away. Kathy turned around, smiled and waved.
I waved and walked through the gate. I left it open. I figured if he had such a bug up his ass about it, he could close it himself.
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Photo by Chris Benson on Unsplash
It was such a beautiful Saturday morning so I jumped on my bike and pedaled as fast as I could to Kathy’s house. I had so many things to tell her about my new crush in Junior High that I couldn’t wait. We weren’t in the same classes anymore and had different schedules. Since she wasn’t allowed to use the phone during the week, the only time we had to talk was on the weekend. Sometimes we would catch each other in the cafeteria but she had new friends I didn’t like.
One of her new friends was a girl named Helen. They sat next to each other in English class and often did their homework together. The previous year, Kathy’s parents bought a bigger house 1/2 mile away. It was still in the same neighborhood, but in a new area of nicer and bigger homes. We used to play together every day after school until we were called in for dinner, but now I only saw her on the weekends and that was only if her parents let her out of the house.
They were strict, said grace before every meal. We didn’t pray in my house and often had food fights at the dinner table. My dad was the biggest instigator of said fights. He’d usually start them when you asked him to pass the bread. Instead of handing you the plate, he’d toss a piece of bread and off we would go. Our family time was always filled with laughter and jokes; Kathy’s family time consisted of being quiet, saying grace and not interrupting the adults when they spoke. You had to ask permission to speak, so I rarely ate with them. They made me nervous and I never knew how to behave.
I once tried to tell a joke and was met with stern looks. I made the mistake the first time I had dinner with her family of tossing a piece of bread at Kathy when she asked me to pass it. She laughed and them immediately turned red.
But I learned to live with it and told myself to be nice and calm as I pedaled over to Kathy’s house and patiently waited after ringing the doorbell.
Kathy’s mom opened the door. I had parked my bike exactly where they had told me. Everything in their house was always in the exact right place. It was spotless and I often felt that if I moved wrong, I would knock something over and they would banish me forever.
“Good morning Samantha,” she said and just stood there. She always did this. I always had to tell her I was there to see Kathy even though it was obvious. She refused to call me by the name I preferred. I always wanted her to and hoped she’d choke on it, but she was an adult and whatever they said or wanted was the way it was going to be.
“Hello Mrs. Monroe. How are you?” I asked and waited. This ritual was usually short.
“I’m well. Are you here to see Kathy?” she asked.
I wanted to tell her I wasn’t. I wanted to say that I was there to visit with her even though I knew she didn’t like me and never had.
“Yes I am,” I said and continued to stand there and wait.
She looked me up and down. I automatically reached up and flattened down my hair.
“She’s upstairs in her bedroom,” she said and opened the door wider. I walked through it and started to go up the stairs.
“Thank you Mrs. Monroe,” I said.
I heard her close the door. “Kathy has a lot to do tonight, so please be back here by 4:00,’ she said as she walked into the kitchen.
I rolled my eyes but made sure she couldn’t see it. “No problem,” I said as I sprinted up the stairs and into Kathy’s room.
She was sitting at her desk. She jumped up and hugged me. I closed the door and flopped down on her bed. I wanted to leave as soon as we could. I felt like I was in jail.
“Are you ready to go?” I asked.
She turned around and smiled. “Yep. Let me just grab my purse. You want to grab some food for our bike ride? We could ride up the trail and there’s a bunch of nice spots where we could stop. Angie lives somewhere near the lake. Maybe we could go over to her house…”
“No, I don’t like Angie. I know she’s your friend but I don’t think she likes me,” I said.
“Oh, that’s not true! She does like you,” Kathy said. Kathy only saw the goodness in people. She didn’t like it when I said something unkind or mean. She would always tell me something positive. It annoyed me at times but I had grown used to it. That was just the way she was.
Her door opened and her father was standing there. They never knocked. They just walked in. Kathy never did anything wrong and I wondered if they were like that when I wasn’t around.
He stood there and I saw he was holding a book in his hand. He had a serious look on his face. I looked down at the book. It was “Soul on Ice” and right then I knew I was in trouble.
“Where did you get this book Kathy?” he asked as he held the book in front of him. Kathy looked at it and then immediately looked at me. She blushed when she realized that she had just answered his question without saying anything. She looked back at him and then down at her lap.
“Well? I asked you a question young lady,” he said.
“I gave it to her,” I said. She couldn’t lie to her father and didn’t want to get me into trouble. It was easier for her if I just told the truth.
He looked at me and slowly shook his head. “Did you…read this book?” he asked.
I nodded my head. I felt my face getting red. I knew what parts he was talking about. I looked down at my shoes. At 13 years old, much of the book I did not understand but the sex scenes were vivid enough.
“Do your parents know you read this book?”
“I have no idea. It was given to me. I read it. I gave it to Kathy to read. It’s just a book and a popular one,” I said. I did not like anyone talking to me as if they were my parents.
“Well I may have to talk to them about. I’m sure they would not approve. I think you are both a bit too young for this type of…book. There are parts that are fine. I stapled the pages that you are not to read Kathy, but you can read the rest of it,” he said and handed her the book. She took it and nodded and placed it on her desk.
He turned and looked at me. “But the next time you want Kathy to read something you find so…interesting, please give it to me first,” he said and walked out. He left the door open. I got up and closed it.
I looked down at Kathy. She was still red and was wringing her hands slightly. “Sorry I got you in trouble,” I said and took the book. I started to take the staples out of it. Kathy reached over and took the book from me.
“You can’t do that! He said I couldn’t read those parts!”
“So what? It’s my book and he had no right to ruin it. If I want the staples out of my book, I’m taking them out!” I said. I snatched the book back and began to pull out the staples and sneered every time they tore a page.
“You can see the pages that had them and if you don’t want to read them, then don’t,” I said and handed her back the book.
She shook her head. “No, that’s OK. I’ll read something else,” she said and got up and picked up her purse.
I took the book with us. We found a place to eat. I read the parts he told her not to read. Technically, she didn’t read them. I just happened to be reading out loud while Kathy was sitting there.
I never saw her blush so much for so long. It was worth it. From then on, anything I wanted her to read, I kept in my locker at school.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I could hear her guitar as I came out of my last class for the day. Her last class for the day ended an hour before mine. She had taken up the guitar and would use that hour while she waited for me to practice. We took the same bus home and that gave us time to catch-up on the day. It was my most favorite time of day except my English class because Ted was in it. I had had a crush on him since 6th grade and 6 years later, he still didn’t know I existed.
I found her sitting on the stairs near the girl’s gym. She was in her own world as she sat and strummed her guitar. Her hair was almost to her waist. She was wearing a long dress and boots with a headband and flowers pinned into it. The sun was hitting her back and her hair looked like corn silk. I tried to flatten my hair down and forgot for a moment that it was also long. I wore it pulled back most of the time and I could feel the long ponytail hit my waist as I jogged towards her.
She was practicing “Dark Side of the Moon” by Pink Floyd. It had been the number one song on the charts for a few weeks. I wasn’t sure if I liked them or not. No one would ever replace The Beatles for me. I walked up and stood in front of her and waited for her to stop.
She looked up and continued to strum her guitar. She was getting better and better. She taught herself much of what she played. She had taken lessons but she had a talent for it. I tried to learn but had no patience. I wanted to pick it up, play it perfectly and refused to practice.
“You ready? I want to have a smoke before the bus comes,” I said. She stood up and walked with me to the parking lot. That was where some of us went to in order to sneak a cigarette.
As we were walking, I heard someone crying. I looked around. “Did you hear that?” I asked Kathy and stopped. She listened and then we heard it again. We looked around and followed the sound. It was subtle but someone was sobbing.
We saw a girl standing behind the partition in front of the girl’s gym. I had never seen her before. She had her face pressed against it with her hands covering her face. Her body was shaking as she sobbed and tried to be quiet. We looked at each other and walked over to her. Kathy didn’t know who she was either.
“You OK?” I asked. She jumped back and a slight scream left her mouth. She quickly put her hands over her mouth and nodded her head. She was a mess. Her face was soaked from her tears and they had dripped onto her blouse. Her nose was running.
She was a large girl with hair worse than mine. Hers stood straight up as if she had stuck her finger in a light socket. Everything about her was wrong. She was wearing a pleated skirt that was plaid with a large sweater and knee high socks. She looked as if she had just been transported from the 50’s. I looked to see if there was a poodle on her skirt. She had the thickest glasses I had ever seen and when she looked back and forth at us, only one of her eyes moved. Her left eye stared straight ahead.
Kathy stepped forward and put her hand on her arm. “What’s your name?”
She wiped her nose on her sleeve and tried to breathe. “Dawn,” she said and attempted to smile. All you could see was a mouthful of braces and she was wearing a headgear.
“I’m Kathy and this is Sam. Why are you crying?”
Dawn looked around and then stared at her shoes. She shrugged her shoulders.
I already had a good idea of what happened. She was near the girl’s gym when the cheerleaders came out. I hated those girls even though we had all been friends since 3rd grade. Something happened to some of them during the summer between Junior High School and starting our sophomore year. They had grown-up suddenly and were pretty and thin and popular. Suddenly I wasn’t allowed to have lunch with them or talk to them. My greetings went unanswered or even laughed at as they flipped their hair and wiggled their butts as they walked away.
I didn’t want to hear what they had done. Those girls had turned into demon spawn. Dawn was a perfect target. I grabbed her hand and started walking. “Come with us and don’t worry about it,” I said as I headed towards the parking lot and began to pull my cigarettes out of my purse.
I found a spot to sit where I wouldn’t be seen and could hear if anyone was approaching. I had Dawn sit down between us and lit up. Her face was beginning to dry. She looked back and forth between us. Kathy picked-up her guitar and started strumming. I leaned back, inhaled deeply and watched the smoke rise in the air.
“What happened to your eye?” I asked Dawn.
She looked at me and I saw a horrible look as it passed over her face. I wasn’t trying to be mean or rude but it was like a huge elephant sitting in the middle of a living room and no one was saying anything.
“Some girls picked on me and bullied me for a long time where I used to live,” she said. Her hand went to her eye and she rubbed it. “We just moved here. My dad lost his job, so they haven’t had any money to get me a better eye.”
“A better eye? What does that mean?” I asked.
“This is a glass eye,” she said and pointed to it. “One day, those girls held me down and one of them stuck a needle into it. They laughed. They thought it was funny.”
Kathy had stopped playing her guitar when Dawn started talking. I looked at her. Tears were in her eyes and her hand went to her mouth. I looked at Dawn as she looked out into the parking lot.
There wasn’t anything left to say.
I watched the side of Dawn’s face as she gazed at the cars coming and going. Her jaw was tight and her bottom lip quivered. I put my hand over hers and squeezed it.
We were graduating in a couple of months. Kathy was going off the college. She wanted to be a teacher. I had no plans. I didn’t want to go to school for a while. I wanted to write and be someone. Even then I knew that High School would have a memory that would never die. I sat there and felt the story Dawn had told go into my bones. I knew that it would stay there forever. I would never forget it. I saw what they did to her in my mind and I knew that memory would affect me for the rest of my life.
I was an adult and I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to sit in parking lots and smoke cigarettes and not have to think about what some people did to other people.
I saw our bus pull up. “What bus do you take?” I asked Dawn.
“I don’t. My mom will pick me up in a few. I’m OK now. Thanks,” she said.
I held out my hand and helped her up.
“Kathy and I meet for lunch under the tree in the courtyard everyday at noon. Be there or be square,” I said.
Dawn smiled and blushed. I chuckled that I now had two friends that randomly looked like beets.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Image by https://pixabay.com
“Would you like some more punch?” Mrs. Monroe asked me. She was smiling and her eyes were still judgmental. I concluded that she was born that way, had lived that way and would die that way. No matter how old I got, the lack of respect in her eyes when she looked at me would always make me feel inferior.
“No thanks. I’m good,” I said. She nodded her head and walked away. I took a deep breath and turned and watched Kathy continue to open her presents and chat with the other women. She was getting married in a few weeks. She had not forgotten to invite me to her shower even though we had not seen each other for 4 years. She graduated with her degree. I was proud of her for doing what she wanted. Being a teacher was met by approval from her parents and her entire family.
She was doing what she wanted and would soon be married.
“Are you seeing anyone?” I heard someone ask. I looked around and saw it was Debbie who had asked me the question. She was Kathy’s younger sister.
I felt my hackles go up. Once again I was about to be subjected to the third degree by women who I didn’t know but yet wanted to know all about my love life. I didn’t like Debbie and she didn’t like me. I remembered her as sneaky and quite often running to her parents to tell them something I had said.
“Yes, but no one you know,” I said. I decided it was easier to lie than explain why I wasn’t dating someone.
“Oh, please, tell us all about him!” she said and moved her chair closer. “Kathy said you weren’t seeing anyone. Is this someone new?”
I wanted to scratch her eyes out. She knew damn well I wasn’t seeing anyone but now was talking loud enough for everyone to hear. A few of Kathy’s relatives stopped talking and began to listen.
Debbie had a smug look on her face. I wondered for the millionth time if Kathy wasn’t adopted.
“What makes you think it’s a man?” I asked and batted my eyelashes.
Debbie looked confused for a moment and then she blushed. I could see the top of her head turn red where she had pulled back her hair. She put her hand to her mouth and gasped. A few of the women looked at each other.
Mrs. Monroe stood up quickly. “Would anyone like some cake?” she said and told everyone to go into the kitchen. She glared at me and told Debbie to come help her.
I chuckled as I watched everyone leave the living room. Once they were gone, I leaned back against my chair and looked at Kathy. She was blushing and shaking her head.
“What?” I asked and started to laugh.
“I can’t believe you said that! You would think that after all these years, I would get used to you, but I haven’t,” she said and laughed.
I knew our friendship was ending. She vowed that it wouldn’t, but she was getting married and moving away. I had met her fiancé Michael and I didn’t like him. He was rude and abrasive. Kathy never stood up to anyone in her life. I had not been around for the last 4 years to stick up for her and speak for her when she couldn’t. I never told her I didn’t like Michael. She wasn’t going to teach. After all she had worked for, Michael wanted her to stay home. He wanted a family right away.
“You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” I said and held her hand in mine. She still looked 8 years old to me even with the shorter hair and breasts. I looked down at her hand and back at her.
“What are you talking about? You’re not going anywhere,” she said.
I wasn’t going anywhere but Kathy was. She didn’t understand how everything had changed over the last couple of years. We had grown up and gone our own way. She was on her way to start a new life and I was stuck in mine. I didn’t have much of a future but she did.
I no longer fit into her life.
“No, of course not. I’ll always be around,” I said. I stood up. “I have to go but I’ll see you at the wedding, OK?”
She hugged me and then stood back, held my hands and smiled. “Yep. I’ll see you at the wedding! I can hardly wait!”
She had a smile that lit up the room and I was the only one in her life that knew that. | https://medium.com/from-dumb-ass-to-bad-ass/best-friends-d5fc3c4444c | ['Susan Lewis'] | 2019-07-08 02:27:35.691000+00:00 | ['Friendship', 'Best Friend', 'Short Story'] |
Emotional Intelligence and The Media | In Becoming Emotionally Intelligent and A School of Emotion, we explored how emotional intelligence is usually given the back seat when compared to more tangible achievements. We are subconsciously discouraged from picking at our emotional knots, on the premise that they are not worth bothering with and will sort themselves out over time.
“ignoring emotional pains and hoping they will sort themselves out is a dangerous route to take. It’s like holding off a major, life-saving operation with hopes that our body will miraculously fix itself.”
Whilst time does tend to be a healer, ignoring emotional pains and hoping they will sort themselves out is a dangerous route to take. It’s like holding off a major, life-saving operation with hopes that our body will miraculously fix itself. Whilst I wouldn’t call it impossible, a positive result is unlikely at best. So why do we hold off healing ourselves emotionally? Although we all have personal motivators, a common tendency is to dismiss them as first world problems.
Mass media is very effective at bombarding us with anything unpleasant, distressing, or horrific that happens to be occurring anywhere on our planet. Whether it be forest fires, terrorist attacks, or the occasional pandemic, our news channels and streams will ensure we know all about it. When we (subconsciously) compare our emotional troubles to the physical hardships around us, they may seem petty — almost insignificant.
Ever heard someone complain that their charging cable is too short, or the fact that they can never find their AirPods? No matter how strong a case they put forward, such first world problems will always sound insignificant when compared to notions of hunger or absolute poverty (unless we are the ones complaining, that is). The same applies to our emotional state; we feel as though the knots in our stomach should not be given the same importance as more pressing, public catastrophes.
“Mass media is very effective at bombarding us with anything unpleasant, distressing, or horrific that happens to be occurring anywhere on our planet.”
So should we just go with it? Should we treat our feelings of loneliness, anxiety, rage, and humiliation with the same level of substance as an incorrectly chilled wine? To do so would be a grave mistake. As we highlighted in a previous article, humankind has always felt the need for a vent; somewhere to safely discharge pent-up emotions. This may have taken different forms; religion or culture to name a few, however, it has always been there.
Allowing the media to indirectly persuade us that there are more important matters in life than our personal trials can have very serious consequences. Rising depression, anxiety, and suicide rates are all indicators of this.
“we feel as though the knots in our stomach should not be given the same importance as more pressing, public catastrophes.”
The issue isn’t helped with our present society's constant push towards economic growth. We are led to believe that to succeed in life if we need to be financially stable and capable of living, not just surviving. Ironically, our struggle towards economic security will only be worthwhile if we feel fulfilled, otherwise we run the risk of neither living nor surviving — just merely existing.
The conditions of relative abundance we are surrounded by tend to be our worst enemies, making us work harder just to remain ‘in-line’ with those around us (at the detriment of our emotional selves).
“Should we treat our feelings of loneliness, anxiety, rage, and humiliation with the same level of substance as an incorrectly chilled wine? To do so would be a grave mistake.”
So what’s the moral here? Should we ignore material wealth and live off a heavy dose of emotional and spiritual guidance? The fact that even this article is monetized tends to beg the contrary.
Our best bet is to perceive emotional trials for what they are; perhaps secondary issues when compared to global catastrophes, but not something to be ignored.
Acknowledging the fact that our emotional beings need as much care and attention as our physical selves is a good start to building ourselves into more emotionally resilient and intelligent beings. | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/emotional-intelligence-and-the-media-ec7f2b1e694a | ['Daniel Caruana Smith'] | 2020-12-28 12:52:45.726000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Emotional Intelligence', 'Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology'] |
Why I Had to Google “How to Cry” | There’s no crying in quarantine
Nine months ago, the stay-at-home order sent me into a tailspin. I didn’t know how to create an engaging learning environment for my children, stay productive at work, and be the wife and mother I needed to be.
Like many of you, I embraced a new mindset. I made it my mission to embody a gratitude attitude.
I thought to myself, I might have zero control over what’s going on in the world right now — but I can control my response.
I blocked the pain. I held back all the feelings. But, looking back, I can see how I needed to just fu*king cry.
My tough chick mentality wouldn’t allow me to cope with the circumstances in any other way than to avoid the darkness. I couldn’t cry. That was pretty typical for me. Even after my mother’s life-threatening heart attack right after Christmas in 2019, my eyes were completely dry.
I was aware of the disembodied feeling, but some invisible force pushed them down every time the tears would bubble up. There was just lots of numbness. Which I thought was healthy compartmentalization. After all, this technique has allowed me to succeed in my career without fearing rejection. It allowed me to compete as a collegiate athlete without feeling broken when I didn’t set a personal record at a swim meet.
Dry eyes have always served me so well, or so I thought. | https://medium.com/the-masterpiece/why-i-had-to-google-how-to-cry-f3c7062236f2 | ['Kristina Jancar'] | 2020-12-26 12:17:20.740000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Life Lessons', 'Feelings', 'Self Improvement', 'Growth'] |
The Smartest Wall of All | Moses Ma/DepositPhoto
All the United States can think and talk about these days is “The Wall.” The reality is that this unrealistic and likely-to-fail campaign promise is actually a distraction from real emergencies… and not just opioids and climate change. America needs to realize that — in terms of our economic future — there was recently a major Sputnik moment. The Chinese government has launched a “Manhattan project” to insure they are the ones who make the major breakthroughs in quantum computing and communications — by building the world’s biggest quantum computing research complex, called the National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences in Hefei, the capital of the eastern province of Anhui. They have committed $12 billion to win the quantum computing race.
What’s more, Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings — the Chinese internet triumvirate known by the acronym BAT, which boasts a collective market cap of $1 trillion — are spending aggressively because they agree with the Chinese government that whoever builds a fully functioning quantum computer first will likely rule the world. Alibaba alone recently announced investing $15 billion into next-generation technology such as AI and quantum computing.
These efforts have already hit paydirt: A couple of years ago, Chinese researchers launched the world’s first quantum satellite into space from a launchpad in the Gobi Desert, to accelerate their efforts to build an unhackable quantum internet. And China was first to pack 18 qubits — the most basic units of quantum computing — into just six quantum entangled photons. That’s an unprecedented three qubits per photon, and a record for the number of qubits linked to one another via quantum entanglement. This is significant technological momentum.
America, it’s time to wake up and smell the quantum coffee!
Here’s something to consider: China already knows that physical “walls” don’t work, because it’s a lesson learned centuries ago. In 1644, Manchurian forces were able to breach the Great Chinese Wall, not just for raiding parties, but to conquer all of China. The pain of first hand experience has taught China that Great Walls and Great Pyramids are things that emperors may want, but are, in reality, nothing more than monuments. But what if China had invested all the money that went into building something monumentally useless… into developing more advanced military weaponry? Would China have prevailed against the Mongols and Manchurians if they had spent that money more wisely? Would they have fared better against the British? Note that the Chinese are not rushing to keep up with America with a “wall race”, they are implementing wiser investment strategies that can insure the future.
It’s instructive to estimate the cost of building China’s Great Wall. This could tell us how much could have been invested into more effective military technologies. If the per mile construction cost were $5 million/mile in today’s dollars (the cost the wall in the US is estimated at $23 million/mile, but things are cheaper to make in China), and then multiply by 13,170 miles and we get roughly $70 billion in today’s dollars.
So what’s the cost of Trump’s wall? When Trump tells people “I can build it for $12 billion”… it reminds me of a shady contractor promising to remodel my kitchen and bathroom for only $12,000. The minute I require a fixed price contract with penalties, he’ll change his tune. The DHS and others estimate a more realistic figure between $22–25 billion, but that’s just to build it and doesn’t include maintaining the structure. The Senate Democrats did a more thorough analysis of the hidden, total costs of ownership, and the price tag skyrockets to just around $70 billion!
In other words, Trump is trying to build the equivalent of China’s Great Wall in America, using roughly the same amount of money, creating something that will serve as his lasting monument. But the reality is that if it is built, it could very well someday be known as Trump’s Folly. It would be so much better to put that money into something that passes muster in terms of ROI, in terms of insuring America’s future. Allow me to put my innovation skills where my mouth is, and propose a solution that might work better and cost less to secure the border.
Here’s the idea: What if we deployed a network of tethered drones along the border? By tethering drones to solar panels, we won’t need to maintain an army of drone operators. Plus, we can build sensitive seismic monitors in each base station to detect tunneling efforts. And use a long range mesh network to connect them. This technology would allow the US to invest in advanced drone technology, like night vision cameras that don’t require IR illumination or artificial vision to discern the difference between coyotes, and well, human coyotes, attempting to camouflage their efforts. And we’d need a much smaller flying drone operation (recharging at base stations) to deploy when needed or for backup. The TCO (total cost of ownership) would likely be much less than a concrete wall or untethered drones requiring pilots, and likely more effective.
Technology works. So let’s use it. Let’s build a smart wall instead of a dumb wall, and learn how to bring America back together again in the process. Perhaps we can ask a number of high tech geniuses to roll up their sleeves and demonstrate their patriotism by improving on this idea, or coming up with better ones. Maybe we can ask Elon Musk to design and build this for America at cost instead of using traditional defense contractors seeking a profit. Doing so, we could possibly secure the entire border for less than the $1.375 billion lawfully allocated in the budget.
The bottom line is that America would be extremely foolish to hand over what will likely mushroom to $70 billion to a guy no U.S. banker would touch, to build a wall that no one really wants, and — depending on what the Mueller reports ends up saying — could likely end up serving only as a monument to someone America will someday want to forget.
Instead, what we need to build is the smartest wall of all: a wall of quantum computing, blockchain and AI patents. The caravan to worry about isn’t formed by refugees, it is the long march of Chinese scientists and engineers, building their own wall of patents as fortifications on emerging economic battlefields.
If our elected representatives could work together, all the way from the President down to mayors and local boards of education, in order to do the following, it would make for a bold step toward a better tomorrow for America:
1. Through the National Quantum Initiative Act (H.R. 6227), the US government has proposed to devote a paltry $1.275 billion over five years to support research in quantum technology. (Remember that the Trump administration has proposed to cut science research and development deeply in the 2018 budget.) If we want to win this new space race, America needs to invest more than China on quantum computing. Think $20 billion. Think of building our quantum future instead of a physical wall.
2. Relax investment requirements for quantum computing based startups. This means that the SEC needs to find a way to allow qualified and self-compliant quantum ventures to launch next generation blockchain-based ICOs and STOs. This will enable a global pool of investors to rapidly back US-based quantum startups. Maybe throw in some tax benefits too!
3. For quantum-enabled technologies to be realized, the U.S. needs a workforce with new skills, so make it possible to for quantum mechanics to be taught in high schools as part of the Advanced Placement system. And while we’re at it, let’s offer special interest free educational loans to PhD students studying quantum technologies and AI. These are strategic technologies, and the country that has the most PhDs will win, so we need to implement a quantum computing brain drain strategy.
4. Have the DOD rapidly fund the development of an unhackable quantum communication network. It’s vital to adequately fund this program, and not just academic scientists, but red team hackers as well. This is a true emergency, because if China achieves quantum decryption first, the cost of retrofitting all U.S. and European computer systems reactively would exceed a trillion dollars.
5. You know the X Prize? The government should team up with private industry to offer a $100 million prize for the first running general purpose quantum computer. All you have to do is require that the winner be a US company, that will pull the top quantum computing startups to the US.
Taking these first five steps would insure a solid start and would help American retain its place at the leading edge.
People, let’s make this happen! | https://medium.com/@moses.ma/the-smartest-wall-of-all-701436cd20fd | ['Moses Ma'] | 2019-03-03 17:53:53.355000+00:00 | ['Quantum Computing'] |
😸 What NFTs mean for ETH | 😸 What NFTs mean for ETH
An under-appreciated part of its fundamental narrative
Ryan Sean Adams, Founder of Mythos Capital, posted a short but thought-provoking tweet storm this morning about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and Ethereum that is worth reading:
I’ve been thinking more about the NFT opportunity lately and I don’t think it’s getting enough attention, maybe because it’s still pretty nebulous as a concept. But I happen to agree with Ryan that (1) NFTs could become a trillion dollar asset class, (2) Ethereum is best-positioned to win this category, and (3) NFT scaling is much closer than we think. I also like NFTs because they don’t carry much regulatory risk.
Above all else, NFT platforms need to optimize for immutability and censorship resistance. If they don’t, the digital analog of something like this isn’t possible —
Therefore Ethereum, which makes a number of tradeoffs in favor of security, makes a lot of sense as the platform best positioned to secure valuable NFTs when you think about it.
Finally, it’s also worth considering what underpinning a huge NFT economy could mean for ETH’s perception to investors as a store of value. I happen to think it will have a profound impact, which ties in nicely to our thesis at DTC that Store of Value will be a fragmented category with multiple long-term winners.
Crypto Kitties are just the first application!
Want this in your inbox every day? Here you go. Feedback is always welcome too — hit me up on Twitter! | https://medium.com/provably-neutral/what-nfts-mean-for-eth-23fc7d5b6a0b | ['Spencer Noon'] | 2018-04-13 16:51:10.598000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain'] |
Top 5 unusual mining techniques | - Hey girl, how did you buy such an expensive car?
- Have been mining a lot…
The cryptocurrency fever has gone away! Things will never be the same, when having a good graphics card and capable hands meant that you are a miner with rather high incomes that allowed you to buy an iPhone…
Everything is different now. Mining is expensive today. Moreover, you should be tech-savvy and well informed if your goal is to make money. However, thanks to cryptocurrency freaks, the romance and hype about mining are not fading away.
Top 5 unusual mining techniques
Technique №1: for those ready to work up a sweat
One very specific European institute that is remote from mining like David Duchovny from Grammy Award invented a mining method that uses heat produced by the human body. Scientists of The Hague University of Applied Sciences designed a special suit that transforms heat energy into electricity.
As part of the experiment, around 40 people wearing special suits managed to mine 16,954 units of different cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ripple, and Litecoin) within 212 hours.
The core idea of this method is in tune with the notion of mining: the more you work and sweat, the more you earn.
A life hack for footballers: team members can put on crypto suits and by doing so increase their efficiency. Moreover, they will get a real chance to improve ROI! J That is an ideal option, as there is no need to score goals. The most important thing is just to run!
Technique №2: tesling
To put it bluntly, this technique is very exclusive, but if you have Тesla S, it is an ideal match for you.
Yes, I know, this car is insanely expensive, but maybe you are a young crypto millionaire, or a sun of some politician, or saved money from your scholarship allowance.
So, it is easy as pie: you buy Tesla S for tens of thousands of dollars, put a mining farm into the trunk compartment and here you go — you have a car with ‘green pricing’.
Owners of such car farms state that the mined cryptocurrency covers car expenses.
As a result, you have a completely autonomous car, make Bitcoins by driving, and do not spend money on petrol, saving your funds!
Technique №3: bicycle mining
Everyone knows that European people are crazy about bicycles. They ride bicycles to work, travel to other towns… Isn’t that amazing?
The British company Toba releases bicycles that will mine cryptocurrency while you ride.
Bicycle owners will be able to monitor the process of mining using a special program uploaded to a smartphone. Private keys that confirm ownership of coins will be stored on a device attached to the bicycle. The reward for every 1600 km will be £20 ($26.56).
If you are tired from the noisy city and want to visit your granny in the village, pick up mushrooms or cowberries, take your bicycle and ride it there. Then, when you come back home, you will check your account and find out that you mined $200. Nice!
Technique №4: tooth mining
You clean your teeth twice a day and do not use it for earning cryptocurrency yet? You are wasting your time!
The Chinese company 32 Teeth is working on a high tech toothbrush that will allow users to mine cryptocurrency.
This hygienic device will have many functions acting like a mirror, alarm clock, toothbrush, and even a home dentist.
The device will offer 16 modes. It will record and analyze the process of tooth brushing, remind users to clean teeth in the morning and evening. But its main distinctive feature will be the possibility of mining!
While brushing their teeth, owners of the device will earn AYA tokens that will be exchangeable for new toothbrushes, toothpaste, and dental services.
Technique №5: stalker’s mining
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
S.T.A.L.K.E.R
Perhaps, the most profitable mining method.
The recipe is simple:
Take one secret nuclear base in Sarov town, add one supercomputer and some closed territory.
Connect a powerful cooling system and add several artful nuclear experts. That’s it! The most profitable mining method with a criminal flavor is ready!
It is a real case and not the fruit of the author’s sick imagination.
Adventurous nuclear experts that worked at the federal nuclear center decided to make money using the secret project (a supercomputer). Why not?
It has enough power; the territory is guarded and protected against strangers and tourists. The place is so secret that it cannot be found on the map.
Scientists understood that and started mining… They received excellent results, as the machine provided power that allowed making from $500 to $700 per day.
Unfortunately, there was no happy end. When the inspired physicians were working in the laboratory and planning where they would spend money, people in black suits were coming to their place…
Overall, mining is a profitable activity, but you will not be able to start without initial investments and knowledge. To gain success, you need good theoretical training, financial resources, and some luck. | https://medium.com/smile-expo/top-5-unusual-mining-techniques-4f6c983af486 | [] | 2018-08-17 10:11:26.063000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Mining', 'Blockchain', 'Technology', 'Bitcoin Mining'] |
Beautiful Christian Wedding Gifts Await at J Devlin Glass Art | A wedding is one of the most cherished occasions that we hold dear in our hearts, not only as participants but as well-wishers, observers, and loved ones. So when the people that mean the most to you in this world decide to make their lives one with another soul, it’s natural to want to give something meaningful in celebration of that divine union. There are so many ways to celebrate holy matrimony and so many gifts that can be given to celebrate and commemorate an occasion, but sometimes the most thoughtful and heartfelt gifts hearken back to simple things — a celebration of a life lived in the Christian way, a reminder of faith, a memory of good times. Though the reasons are many, these are a few that might drive you to Buy Christian Wedding Gifts for the most important people in your life.
Furthermore, when you want to buy Christian wedding gifts for the special couple in your life, there are quite a few avenues you could take. You might want to find a personalized ornament inscribed with names or dates. Perhaps even a commemorative box with a religious or biblical inscription, or a picture frame for the couple’s most cherished memory or photographs. Either way, when gifts of such ilk are appealing for the purposes of offering, one of your best bets to buy Christian wedding gifts is J Devlin Glass Art. Nowhere else are quality, craftsmanship, and design so highly esteemed and presented than at J Devlin Glass Art, where all the gifts you will find are meticulously designed and carefully handcrafted from stained glass using an age-old method that has been trusted for well over a hundred years. Quality is of such standard that each piece is even waxed to preserve its sheen clarity for time to come. Each unique wedding gift that comes from J Devlin Glass Art will not only bear those marks of originality and uniqueness but may be personalized and will even ship free to you.
These are of course just a few extra reasons to love the already exquisite ornaments, frames, and boxes from J Devlin Glass Art, which are so striking in their aesthetics that they hardly need aggrandization. Their glass picture frames offer beautiful metal paneling and scrollwork to accentuate the sometimes gently textured and sometimes smooth glass paneling in a rainbow of delightful tints. Each is as intriguingly unique as the last, and many feature tasteful Christian ornamentation such as crosses and enable you to make engravings to immortalize the couple with a date or your preferred quote celebrating faith. Somehow even as attractive are their memorial glass boxes that make perfect gifts not only for the bride and groom but for members of the bridal party. With the same care of manufacture and emphasis on quality as all of their products, their keepsake boxes are fixtures of art as much as gifts, creating a distinct show of light when they are given the right spotlight of honor, whether that spotlight is natural or artificial.
You can even choose thoughtful Christian gifts like any of the personalized ornaments available from J Devlin Glass Art. Crosses, Angels and even plain pieces can be personalized with quotes, phrases, names, and dates to make a wedding even more special. There’s little as personalized and thoughtful as a handmade work of glass and metalwork that will last a lifetime and bring fondness and glory to the memory of a wedding day. When you set out to buy Christian wedding gifts, be sure to explore the beautiful artwork at JDevlinGlassArt.com. You’ll find many pieces that will bring light and memory for a lifetime, and be held in high regard by the bride and groom.
For more information about Amazing Anniversary Gifts and Glass Night Lights Please visit : J Devlin Glass Art | https://medium.com/@jdevlinglassart/beautiful-christian-wedding-gifts-await-at-j-devlin-glass-art-864407701009 | ['Sadie Halligan'] | 2019-11-14 11:09:02.985000+00:00 | ['Weddings'] |
The Virus That Crushed the Roman Army | The year was 164 AD.
The Roman Empire was near the height of its powers. Its borders extended across most of Europe and well into Asia and North Africa.
Marcus Aurelius’s co-emperor, Lucius Verus, was leading an army to the city of Seleucia in what is now Iraq. There had been an uprising against Roman control. He planned to crush all involved.
When his massive force arrived at the gates to Seleucia, the city’s leadership knew they couldn’t withstand the assault of an experienced and well-trained Roman Army. Their losses would be devastating. And so, quite wisely, they surrendered, opened their gates, and hosted the army.
Within days, Verus noticed several soldiers coughing and develop fevers. Some of them worsened and developed sores. A few of them never left the city.¹
As they began their long march home, the disease began to take its toll on other soldiers. There were several stops for extra rest and, eventually, stops to bury the dead.
With tragic irony, the army that had been tasked with defending the Roman Empire would soon be the harbinger of a terrible scourge. As they stopped in local towns to rest, they left an eager contagion to do its work.
The widening impact
After the army reached Rome and dispersed into the city, the virus swept across all of Europe. Entire towns and communities were ravaged. Death toll estimates vary but most agree that around five million died, including at least 10% of the Roman population.²
The Angel of Death depicted visiting during the plague. By Ellie Delaunay. (Source: Wikimedia Commons pic)
The virus was particularly devastating to the military. They lived in close quarters. They trained and fought to the point of exhaustion which weakened the immune system. They also had gaps in rations (nutrition) which further predisposed them to the disease.
Those afflicted typically developed a severe fever, diarrhea, and visible sores that spread across their entire body. Soldiers who survived were often hampered by disabilities and weakness. Their bodies were marked by terrible scars and pockmarks which announced they’d survived the infection. Most scholars now agree the disease was smallpox. But it is commonly referred to as the Antonine Plague.
All offensive military campaigns were postponed. Rome’s fighting force was cut in half. Their recruiting pool ran dry as people became wary of the close confines of military service. People didn’t understand virology like we do today, but most knew to avoid those who were visibly sick. | https://medium.com/publishous/the-virus-that-crushed-the-roman-army-f6754a062062 | ['Sean Kernan'] | 2020-09-15 01:01:01.383000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life', 'History', 'Sean Kernan', 'Military'] |
Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market to 2025 scrutinized in new research including leading players… | Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market to 2025 scrutinized in new research including leading players: DigitalGlobe Inc., Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc, Google LLC, Harris Corporation, Hexagon AB diksha golait Dec 2, 2019·4 min read
Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market
The Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market is expected to grow from USD 3,925.45 Million in 2018 to USD 22,123.49 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 28.02%.
The positioning of the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market vendors in FPNV Positioning Matrix are determined by Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) and placed into four quadrants (F: Forefront, P: Pathfinders, N: Niche, and V: Vital).
The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market including are DigitalGlobe Inc., Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc, Google LLC, Harris Corporation, Hexagon AB, AeroVironment Inc., Autodesk, Inc., Bentley Systems, Inc., Fugro N.V., KeyW Corporation, Planet Labs, Inc., RMSI Pvt. Ltd., Satellite Imaging Corporation, Trimble Inc., and UrtheCast Corporation.
Get sample copy of this report: http://bit.ly/35NLeTg
On the basis of Type, the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market is studied across Imagery Analytics and Video Analytics.
On the basis of Collection Medium, the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market is studied across Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Satellites, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).
On the basis of Vertical, the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market is studied across Agriculture, Defense & Security, Energy, Utility, and Natural Resources, Engineering & Construction, Environmental Monitoring, Government, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Insurance, and Mining & Manufacturing.
For the detailed coverage of the study, the market has been geographically divided into the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The report provides details of qualitative and quantitative insights about the major countries in the region and taps the major regional developments in detail.
In the report, we have covered two proprietary models, the FPNV Positioning Matrix and Competitive Strategic Window. The FPNV Positioning Matrix analyses the competitive market place for the players in terms of product satisfaction and business strategy they adopt to sustain in the market. The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisitions strategies, geography expansion, research & development, new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.
Research Methodology:
Our market forecasting is based on a market model derived from market connectivity, dynamics, and identified influential factors around which assumptions about the market are made. These assumptions are enlightened by fact-bases, put by primary and secondary research instruments, regressive analysis and an extensive connect with industry people. Market forecasting derived from in-depth understanding attained from future market spending patterns provides quantified insight to support your decision-making process. The interview is recorded, and the information gathered in put on the drawing board with the information collected through secondary research.
Get Complete Report: http://bit.ly/35NLeTg
The report provides insights on the following pointers:
1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on Geospatial Imagery Analytics offered by the key players in the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market
2. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments in the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market
3. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets for the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market
4. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new products launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments in the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market
5. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players in the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market
The report answers questions such as:
1. What is the market size of Geospatial Imagery Analytics market in the Global?
2. What are the factors that affect the growth in the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market over the forecast period?
3. What is the competitive position in the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market?
4. Which are the best product areas to be invested in over the forecast period in the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market?
5. What are the opportunities in the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market?
6. What are the modes of entering the Global Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market? | https://medium.com/@dikshagolait123/geospatial-imagery-analytics-market-to-2025-scrutinized-in-new-research-including-leading-players-1fc7aadc99fd | ['Diksha Golait'] | 2019-12-02 10:42:38.020000+00:00 | ['Geospatial Imagery', 'Geospatial', 'Technology'] |
I am an innovator | Routine could be monotonous, but hackerspaces weren’t. Academic and career structures strangled the life out of me, but hackerspaces allowed my mind to roam and renewed the easily dissipating belief that I live in an interesting world. Academia and jobs were sterile, performance-based, angry, ruthless severe hard places where I’d have to assume a false identity to reflect the organization in the way it demands to be represented. If I had somehow failed to conform to a job or school’s standards, I am ostracized. Hackerpsaces were a place to breathe and let go of that false image of being industrial and “put together”, and just free to explore science and innovation without rigid social constraints. I could come in with ordinarily unacceptable tattoos and wear red ribbons on my hair in these spaces, at hackerspaces I’d be judged by my work rather than the social image and pedigreed. Being intellectually curious and image-consious, you’d assume that the world I belong to is in Academia, but I was never as free to let my mind roam and discover as I did in SF Hackerspaces. The best innovators do not come from academia, they come from space where there is no pressure to conform.
I belong to a group of innovators. I am lofty, and I doubt I will succeed but I have always been drawn to people who broke the status quo. Hackerspaces were the world of Aaron Tarwick, a biohacker and transhumanist who injected an HIV virus into himself to prove that his HIV-treatment will solve the unsolvable virus . The world of Aaron Swartz, who while is scorn of academia, made tremendous contributions to the accessibility of research papers.Those accessible research papers, while punished severely under intellectual property laws, were used by Jack Andraka, 15 year old who made considerably more cost efficient cancer diagnosis tools than the other famous and well-funded biotech company Theranos. Or the internet pirate queen, Alexandra Elbakya who made news headlines by establishing Scihub for research papers. While condemned for the legalities of these actions, she is toasted by innovators world wide for her contribution to the accessibility of research journals. All of these people believed in the accessibility of information, because of its role to push technology and medicine to new limits if given the opportunity. While it is important to keep my works legal, I would be beyond delighted to join their ranks as an aspiring science communicator. Joining their ranks breathes life into me in a way that the acceptable pursuit of prestige and respect does not.
There are internet white hats, transhumanist, and longevity activist. An incredibly interesting underground world that, in a short word can be described as unconventional. While the movement may consist of intellectually driven people, it does not have the same rigidity and absurd acceptance hurdle academia has. Simply contributing and participating in activities, qualified someone to gain acceptance. People would teach coding, share mathematical absurdities like the “hairy ball theorem”, and just crack jokes. Be casual. Unlike a well respected academia setting, unconventional underground spaces allowed you to “be yourself”. There is no penalty for cursing, or legal worries about much of anything. The best part is being part of the community does require someone to go to a prestigious school, or have a number of respectable statuses put in place. You could be unemployed, or flunking out of school, suffering from terminal, immunal, or chronic illness, and so long as you are intellectually driven and a contributor, you were a hacker. What other structured academic organization could offer the same? I think that is why some people like me may feel more as a part of unconventional groups like this than a more structured organization. Our sense of belonging isn’t as conditional as it is in universities or companies where you are only accepted based on performance.
Being in an academic environment, there was a sense of feeling disposable. When an institute’s funding is based on the amount of research it could produce, it could feel like a more competitive environment than a collaborative one. There is always going to be another bright-eyed student to replace someone more brilliant, productive, industrious, and conscientious. In addition, it was hard to feel as though anything done had a lasting impact, given that the friends and colleagues made would simply leave the moment their time at a university is finished. Any unfinished project is just doomed to stay unfinished. But spaces where there isn’t a structure, or that one was replaceable. Acquiring knowledge, tinkering with electronics and code, was somehow more enjoyable when it did not have to produce economic or academic results. It is like a forgotten feeling of pursuing knowledge, and being part of a community because it was enjoyable and spontaneous. People at hackerspaces did not have to manage
Innovative people are attracted to hackerspaces. At hackerspaces a person’s worth is not based on social status or forgettable pedigrees, it is based on what a person could reasonably contribute to a community. The spaces do not accept members based on performance or economic status, rather their ability to innovate and tinker. And spaces are not afraid to challenge the status quo, and to believe in accessibility of information. If academia seeks to attract the movers and shakers of the upcoming technological and medical revolution, it may be missing key qualities hackerspaces have and academia doesn’t: acceptance and collaboration among the intellectually driven. | https://medium.com/@bedcloud/i-am-an-innovator-90a20edbd676 | [] | 2020-12-21 07:55:59.752000+00:00 | ['Academia', 'Innovation', 'Schools', 'Hackerspaces', 'Education'] |
Nostalgia | in In Bitcoin We Trust | https://medium.com/@cariarechiga28/nostalgia-28ac43109038 | [] | 2020-12-11 04:04:48.149000+00:00 | ['Nostalgia'] |
Why we simply should not care | People buy crystals on Amazon which say they contain magical powers or can take negative energy away from your life. Some people believe that if you write someones name on a piece of paper, they will fall in love with you. The TRUTH is that you just believe what you want until you die. Anyone can tell you differently and change your mind and your subconscious can make up whatever it wants and you live your life by it. Being good at school, getting a great job, it can make you happy. But everything comes with a price. Your family, your social life, does it really matter? Does the fact that your best friend stole your boyfriend really matter? Stop crying and being sad for hours over something that will only be a faded memory in a while. In the end, NOTHING MATTERS. You will just be lying there, dead in a box. And sure, everyone will mourn you and try to tell your family you are in a better place and is it true.. maybe? Anyway, my point is that we are all ants living on a rock in the middle of nowhere. There might even be extraterrestrial life out there and you are sitting here worrying about your math test? YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME. People sit on a desk working a 9–5 and go home. You might as well stare at a screen until you just start withering away. This is precisely why we should not care. Go fuck whoever you want without giving a fuck because what is the point of living if you never really lived. | https://medium.com/@pradamarfa/why-we-simply-should-not-care-86923b393377 | ['Katerina Prada'] | 2020-12-22 21:52:02.795000+00:00 | ['Ethics', 'Universe', 'Subconscious', 'Freedom', 'Psychology'] |
Love Relationship Problems Solution |
Are you looking for an astrology solution to solve your love related issues? If you want true love and lost love back in your life then love relationship problem solution is a perfect solution for you. Love describes the peace and happy life. Love is all about to express feelings in front of someone that you like. But some people are shy and they are afraid to tell their love feelings. Nowadays some people lost their lover. It is difficult to forget someone that you like most in your life. So if you are facing such types of love problems and want instant solution then you should try Vashikaran love solution.
Vashikaran is an Indian astrology solution. You can try this solution to get the right partner for your whole life. Love is the most important thing that feels happiness in life. You can also feel love with the help of Vashikaran love mantra. Vashikaran solution to love problems is used to increase love in someone’s heart that you want in your life.
Solution For Love Problems
If you want to know about how to perform solution for love problems then you can consult to our Vashikaran specialist astrologer Rakesh Shastri. Love Vashikaran Specialist will provide you the complete guidance on Vashikaran for lover. You can use these Vashikaran remedies for love problems and get the desired person in your life. When you can get your lover then your life will feel with happiness and love. Love is the special thing by which you can easily live your life without any tension. Love makes you Strong.
If you believe in yourself everything is possible. Just chant these mantras with all your heart and then you will get your love. Chanting these astrology love mantras is very effective and this solution resolves your problems as soon as possible. Just try love problem solutions and live your life with your loved ones. If you have any query about astrology love mantra then you can contact us. The contact details are as follows:
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Email: [email protected]
Website: https://durgadarbar.com/
Original Source: https://durgadarbar.wordpress.com/2020/12/22/love-relationship-problems-solution/
| https://medium.com/@durgadarbar/love-relationship-problems-solution-263cd77afd7a | ['Durga Prasad'] | 2020-12-23 13:58:00.431000+00:00 | ['Astrologer', 'Relationship', 'Solution', 'Love', 'Problem'] |
Part 1: My Mental Health Journey | Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
Disclaimer: Everything I talk about in this post are solely my experiences and what has helped me, I’m not a therapist or licensed physician. There’s mention of suicide and death in this so please don’t read this if you feel this may trigger you.
For as long as I can remember I’ve struggled with my mental health. Through out my life there have been times when I’ve been afraid of my own thoughts and afraid of just being alone. My intrusive thoughts would take over my day to day life.
The earliest memory I have of getting these intrusive thoughts are from when I was about nine years old. The first thought I distinctly remember having was if I didn’t turn the sink on and off eight times someone I love would die. I was so scared after having this thought I turned the sink on and off eight times. From here on out I just remember being extremely obsessive about doing things in even numbers because my brain would tell me that if I didn’t do these things someone I love would die.
I was so terrifyed I would do whatever my brain would tell me to. There were times when I would open and close the door eight times because that’s what my brain would tell me to do. If I didn’t I was afraid that someone in my family would be harmed. This is when my obessesive compulsive disorder started to make itself known. The more I did what my brain and my intrusive thoughts would tell me to the worse I got mentally because I gave into whatever was asking me to do these things. I was also young so I believed that I was the only person having these types of thoughts and I was so so scared. I didn’t dare tell my parents because I thought I would get in trouble for having these thoughts in the first place.
My sleepless nights followed shortly after. I would be extremely afraid to go to sleep because I was afraid that if I fell asleep I would die. With this fear came my severe panic attacks which I didn’t know were panic atatcks at the time. I would wake up gasping for air, thinking I was dying. I would wake my parents up and tell them I couldn’t breath. My brother has asthma so they would start running around the house trying to find an inhaler to give me. They had no idea it was anxiety, so they would be pretty freaked out. I remember the very first time I woke up struggling to breathe, I scared my parents to the point where my dad ended up having to take me to the hospital because they thought I was having an asthma attack or something. From what I can remember the doctor said that I just had a nightmare which is why I woke up so afraid and gasping for air.
With all of this I started to struggle with focusing on my daily tasks whether it was homework or watching tv. I had a hard time focusing in school which is when my grades evidently started dropping. When I showed my parents my report card they were less then impressed. My mom told me I couldn’t watch tv for a week and obviously being so young I was devestated. I was so upset by this punishment that my intrusive thoughts worsened to the point where I started to expereince suicidal ideations at the age of nine. I think these thoughts terrified me more than anything else. I remember having these sucidal ideations at random moments in the day and if I was in a room alone when these thoughts seeped into my mind I would go and find one of my parents and sit with them because I was terrified I would act on these sucidal thoughts if I continued to be in a room alone.
My ideations started to worsen as time went on and it made me so terrified I couldn’t sleep alone anymore. The ideations started becoming even scarier because they started to combine with my intrusive thoughts. I started having thoughts that were along the lines of “If you don’t kill yourself someone you love will die”. This is when I was too scared to continue dealing with this on my own and I decided to tell my mom.
Thank you for reading part one of my mental health journey. There’s so much more to this story that I’ll be sharing. | https://medium.com/@prernamaj/part-1-my-mental-health-journey-c36f3b8c7ba6 | ['Prerna Majumdar'] | 2021-01-08 23:55:51.557000+00:00 | ['Mental Health Awareness', 'Psychology', 'Self', 'Mental Health', 'Stress'] |
Introducing Hello Buddy, the Smart Pop-up! | Hey everyone, we’re wrapping up what has been a fantastic year for all of us (we hope this includes you). We’d like to share a super exciting product update we’ve just launched, the Hello Buddy.
Hello Buddy, the Smart Pop-up.
We’ve worked really hard on this one over the past weeks. A few hundreds of you had sent us emails requesting a pop-up feature and through our vision to make your websites perform better, it totally made sense. The Hello Buddy is the perfect tool to increase your shares, subscribers and redirect traffic to specific pages.
So, how does it work?
First of all, you’ll be able to include in your Hello Buddy, one of the following GetSocial features:
Then, we made it very easy for you to define when you want the Hello Buddy to be triggered. We’ve covered some interesting options here:
Time on Page : triggers the pop-up after the user spent x seconds on the page;
: triggers the pop-up after the user spent x seconds on the page; Page Scroll: triggers the pop-up after the user went through y% of the page’s content.
triggers the pop-up after the user went through y% of the page’s content. Exit Intent: triggers the pop-up when the user is about to close the page.
There’s some other options on the Hello Buddy feature that optimize the end-user experience and give flexibility to your design but I don’t want to spoil everything.
Shall we create your first Hello Buddy? | https://medium.com/getsocial-io/introducing-hello-buddy-the-smart-pop-up-5cb5c66ae246 | ['João Romão'] | 2017-07-07 09:07:28.745000+00:00 | ['Product Development', 'Features', 'Product', 'Product Management', 'Startup'] |
Assertions considered Harmful | Assertions are the go-to checking mechanism in unit tests. However, when applied to testing interfaces, specifically GUIs, I consider them to be toxic. Thankfully, there is a promising alternative.
JUnit was a huge success, being the single most used library in all of Java. And JUnit brought with it the famous Assert.assert… statement. This mechanism is designed to only check one thing at a time in isolation. And when testing a single unit, this is the most sensible approach: we want to ignore as much volatile context as possible. And we want to focus on ideally checking only a single aspect of only the unit under test. This creates maximally durable tests. If a test depends only on a single aspect of the code, then it only needs to change if that aspect changes. Assertions are a natural and intuitive mechanism to achieve that. Being “inside” of the software during the test, where practically all of the internals are exposed in one way or another, all else wouldn’t have made sense.
Because of its success, JUnit is considered the state-of-art of test automation—and rightfully so. As such, its mechanisms were also applied to non-unit testing, i.e. they were applied to interface testing (e.g. GUI testing). And intuitively, this makes sense. Because, as the individual features stack up towards the interface, the interface become very volatile. Testing only individual aspects of the system seems to solve this problem.
Except that it doesn’t. It is already hard, albeit still feasible, to achieve that grade of separation on the unit level. On the interface level, where integration is inevitable, it is outright impossible. And practice shows exactly that. One of the reasons of the shape of the famous test pyramid is that tests on that level tend to break often and require a lot of maintenance effort.
A practical example
Imagine that you want to test a single aspect of the code—the calculation of the number of items a single user has ever bought. On the unit level, all you need is a user object and some associated items or transactions. Depending on the complexity of the system, you can create these objects either on demand or mock them. Then you can test just the code that counts the items.
However, on the GUI level, you first need to log into the system with an existing user. Then you need to navigate to a certain page where the relevant information is shown. So even if you create only a single assertion to check the number of items, your code still depends on a working persistence layer, a predefined state (e.g. user existing, and correct number of items), on the ability of the user to log in and on the navigation. How well is this test isolated?
In an integrated test, it is basically impossible to ignore context. Involuntarily, we always depend on numerous aspects that have nothing to do with what we want to test. We suffer from the multiplication of effects. This is the reason for the famous test-pyramid. However, if we cannot ignore context, maybe we should embrace it instead?
Embrace Context
Imagine, just for a second, we could somehow mitigate the multiplication of effects. Then we could check the complete state of the system instead of individual aspects. We could check everything at once!
So because interfaces are fragile, we now want include more context, making our tests even more fragile? Because instead of depending on single aspects, the test now depends on everything at once? Who would want that? Well … everybody who want’s to know if the interface changed. If you think about that, the same question applies to version control. A version control system is a system with which, every time you change about anything in any file, you have to manually approve that change. What a multiplication of efforts! What a waste of time! Except that not using one is a very bad idea.
True for both Manual and Automated Test Execution
Because people change things all the time without meaning to do so. And they change the behaviour of the system without meaning to do so. Which is why we have regression tests in the first place. But sometimes we really wanted to change the behaviour. Then you have to update the regression test. Actually, regression tests are a lot like version control.
With the mindset that software changes all the time, an assertion is just a means to detect a single such change. So writing assertions is like blacklisting changes. The alternative is to check everything at once, and then permanently ignore individual changes—effectively whitelisting them.
Whitelisting of changes vs. blacklisting of changes
When creating a firewall configuration, which approach would you rather choose? Blacklisting (i.e. “closing”) individual ports or whitelisting (i.e. “opening”) individual ports? Likewise with testing … do you want to detect a change and later recognise that it isn’t problematic, or would you rather ignore all changes except the ones for which you manually created checks? Google introduced whitelist testing, because they didn’t want to miss the dancing pony on the screen again. Whitelisting means to err on the side of caution.
Tools for pixel-based comparison aka visual testing
Of course I am not the first one to come up with that idea. In his book Working with legacy code, Michael Feathers called this approach characterization testing, others call it Golden Master testing. Today, there are two possibilities: pixel-based and text-based comparison. Because pixel-based comparison (often called visual regression testing) is easy to implement, there are many tools. For text-based comparison, there are essentially two specific testing tools: ApprovalTests and TextTest. But both pixel-based and text-based approaches suffer from the multiplication of effects.
Multiplication of Effects
On the GUI level, many things depend on one another, because isolation is not really possible. Imagine you wrote automated tests naively, as a series of actions. Then, if someone changed the navigation or the login screen, this single change would most likely affect each and every test. This way, the implicit or explicit dependencies of the tests potentially cause a multiplication of the effects of a single change.
How can we contain that multiplication of effects? One possibility is to create an additional layer of abstraction, as is being done by single page objects or object maps. But, in order to later reap the fruits in the form of reduced efforts if the anticipated change happens, this requires manual effort in advance. According to YAGNI, implementing that abstraction “just in case” is actually a bad thing to do.
What other possibilities do we have, to contain the multiplication of effects? When doing refactorings in programming, we happen to be in the same situation. One method is probably called in dozens or even hundreds of places. So when renaming a single method (please only do that in internal, not-exposed APIs), we need to also change every place where that method is called. For some cases we can derive these places from the abstract syntax tree. For other cases (properties files, documentation, …) we have to rely on text-based search and replace. If we forget or oversee something, this often shows only in certain situations—usually when executing the software. But for tests, this is different. Because tests, by definition, are already executing the software. So we get shown all the places where something changed (i.e. by failing tests). Now we just need a mechanism to “mass-apply” similar changes.
There are two different kind of changes: differences in layout and differences in flow.
Differences in Layout
If, for instance, the login-button now is called “sign in”, has a different internal name, XPath or xy-coordinates, this is a difference in layout. Differences in layout are relatively easy to address with object maps.
But, surprisingly, differences in layout are also relatively easy to address if we have more context. If we know the whole puzzle instead of only individual pieces, we can create one-on-one assignments. This makes for very robust object recognition.
Imagine, we have a form where some elements are added. And we want to recognize the “Accept” button to submit the form. If everything about the button changes, we can still recognize it, based on a one-on-one assignment of the remaining unused UI-components.
And mass-applying these changes is also easy. We can just apply every similar change. E.g. combine all instances of the change of “Accept” to “Save” into a single change, that needs to be reviewed only once.
With such a strong mechanism, redundancy is suddenly not a problem anymore. So we can suddenly collect many attributes of our UI-components, making our recognition of them even more robust.
So we can gather XPath, name, label and pixel-coordinates. If some of the values change, we still have the remaining values to identify the element. And mass-applying makes this still easy to maintain.
Differences in Flow
Sometimes, the use-cases or internal processes of the software change. These can be minor changes (e.g. if an additional step is required—filling a captcha or resetting a password). Sometimes these are major changes—a workflow changes completely. In the latter case, it is probably easier to rewrite the tests. But this happens seldom. More often, we need to just slightly adapt the tests.
Differences in flow cannot be addressed by object maps. Instead, we need other forms of abstractions: extracting recurring flows as “functions” or “procedures” and reusing them. This can be achieved with page objects, but requires manual effort and the right abstraction.
Instead, I propose a different approach: passive update. What do I mean by that? Traditionally, we have to actively identify all the occurrences of a specific situation in the tests and update them manually. So if we need to adjust the login process, we have to find all the instances where the tests log in. Then we manually need to change them accordingly. This is active update.
Passive update is to instead specify the situation we need to update together with a rule about how to update. So instead of finding all the login attempts, we specify the situation: the login page is filled with credentials and the captcha is showing. Now we add a rule about how to update a test script that finds itself in that situation — filling the captcha. We do this by deleting or inserting individual actions, or a combination thereof. Then that update is applied passively, upon execution of the tests. This means we are essentially turning the extraction of a procedure on its head.
This approach has various advantages: | https://medium.com/hackernoon/assertions-considered-harmful-d3770d818054 | ['Jeremias Rößler'] | 2018-01-03 09:45:51.455000+00:00 | ['Harmful', 'Testing', 'Test Automation', 'Quality Assurance', 'Software Development'] |
Jio and Facebook — A Perfect Match? | Note — The article was originally published on my LinkedIn account on April 29, 2020. This is a re-post of the same.
The Deal
Facebook acquired a 9.99% stake in Reliance’s Jio platform for an investment of Rs 43,574 crore valuing it at Rs 4.36 lakh crore in an all-cash deal. That’s 56% of the market cap of RIL (~7.8 lakh crore). And this investment knocked up the value of Mukesh Ambani’s star-child Jio to almost Rs 4.62 lakh crore.
About Facebook and it’s motive
So talking of Facebook, it has approximately 330 million users and since it has acquired Instagram and WhatsApp back in 2012 and 2014 respectively, users of those platforms come to about 500 million and 400 million respectively.
Facebook’s 98% revenue comes from advertising, a space that is dominated by Google & increasingly being affected by Amazon, Twitter, and a host of other players that also have a dedicated user-base. So growth is critical for Facebook. Hungry for growth, Facebook was wanting to enter the Indian markets for quite a long time and has done enough deals in India but not all have gone down well.
One deal that seems relevant to discuss in this context is Facebook Free Basics that was launched back in 2016. Free Basics is a Facebook-developed mobile app that gives users access to a small selection of data-light websites and services. The websites are stripped of photos and videos and can be browsed without paying for mobile data. That is if you want to surf the internet especially Facebook you won’t be charged for the data. That deal obviously didn’t succeded because of net neutrality — the principle that Internet Service Providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites which Free Basics was a bias of and Facebook has been plotting to re-enter the Indian Markets in a big way ever since. Facebook has also been trying to enter India’s payment space through WhatsApp pay and compete with Paytm. But despite some tedious efforts with the National Payments Corporation of India ( NPCI ) Facebook has not been able to turn cards in his favor. Facebook has also been at the receiving end of issues with data, privacy, and fake news. A local partner with “reach” was needed and there comes Jio.
In the current scenario where a lot of companies have been affected and most of the consumers will think to move online for their future purchases, this deal will eventually help Facebook gain the customer base of Reliance Jio, start its own Payment Gateway, and ultimately attract transactional revenue.
About Reliance and its motive
So talking about Reliance Industries, Reliance Jio is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries and Reliance Infocomm is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Jio that provides a connectivity platform to over 388 million users of Reliance Jio. Reliance Industries also owns Reliance Retail Ltd. (99.95%) having various outlets that offer foods, groceries, apparel, and footwear, electronic goods, and much more.
The very same year when Facebook launched Free Basics, Reliance Jio entered into the Indian telecom industry with tariffs so low that made competitors cry. There were data plans so cheap that most people thought it was some joke going on. But at the end of it all, Jio shook the fundamentals of India’s telecom industry and added a whopping 388 million subscribers, most of whom were first-time users.
On the competition front, Jio is expected to become the №1 telecom network in India by the end of the fourth quarter for the financial year 20–21, taking the share from Vodafone-Idea whose subscriber base is expected to see some decline in the wake of poor network and hike in prices. Jio’s investment in superior fiber-based 4G technology and various technology services has ensured a good customer experience and gain users every quarter. At this end, Jio had proven to be a force but was facing its own share of battles. The ever-growing debt was an issue. Jio had to borrow huge sums of money to build the infrastructure needed to facilitate the company’s massive plan. In fact, only last year, Jio had close to 1.5 lakh crore worth of debt on its books but after some successful attempts by transferring debts to various other entities of Reliance Industries, Jio was left with a debt burden of about 40,000 crores. It needed a partner with money and user reach, hence Facebook. So out of the money invested by Facebook, Rs 28,574 crores will be used by Reliance Industries, and the rest Rs 15,000 crores by Jio, for now.
Add alt text
So at one end, Reliance had the physical assets ( Retail, Fibre, and Mobile Broadband ), at the other end it was building digital assets in the form of new apps and services like Jio Digital Life, JioMoney, JioTV, JioFibre, JioFi to name a few and what it now needed was a fabric that ties it all together under one window and there came JioMart, acquired by Reliance Retail. JioMart platform follows the offline-to-online (O2O) model. This marketplace model allows products to be sourced from nearby merchants without requiring any native warehouses, allowing on-time hyperlocal delivery, particularly efficient for perishables and fresh food. The main advantage of Jio will be here to easily understand the preferences of customers by using various models of Facebook.
In this current scenario when businesses are not running smoothly, oil prices are down, more about the oil market in my previous article -
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oil-market-what-happened-means-investors-india-aakash-shah/
this is a great deal at the right time. This deal here will help further Jio’s ambition in bridging the rural-urban divide in almost all segments and help Jio achieve its goal to be a debt-free company.
The Plan
This union between Facebook and Reliance is a match of equals, convenience, and massive possibilities. A commercial partnership will take place between Reliance Retail and WhatsApp. This partnership aims to create a hyperlocal delivery network by connecting Kirana shops on JioMart with customers using the FB-owned WhatsApp. One should note here that 75% of the Kirana market is completely unorganized. And as noted earlier Whatsapp has over 400 mn users in India, JioMart plans to enable nearly 30mn local Kirana shops to digitally transact with every customer in their neighborhood through WhatsApp. Meanwhile three days into the deal and on April 25th, the delivery network has already started in Navi Mumbai, Thane, and Kalyan, and saw a significant increase in sales and margins for the participating merchants.
The Reliance Jio-Facebook partnership is also expected to flip the digital payments sector, remember how Facebook was wanting to enter the payments sector by using WhatsApp Pay? Well, they can use it here and there is always JioMoney. Besides working with 30mn Kirana shops across India to help them transact digitally with customers in their neighborhood, they will then extend the digital payment service to farmers, teachers, students, and small and medium-sized enterprises. The move will help WhatsApp directly take on established players Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm, possibly even dominating the sector. WhatsApp is waiting for final clearance to launch its WhatsApp Pay service, which is designed to run on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). WhatsApp has the technology and reach, while Jio has a huge network among corner stores across India. The move will certainly help the Kirana stores in getting access to a huge market that will ultimately lead to huge growth in customers.
With Whatsapp Pay and a dedicated Whatsapp Business app, this is very much possible in India. Imagine being able to check what’s available at your local Kirana, ordering online, paying on Whatsapp Pay, and getting it in an hour. Seamless, convenient!
Final Verdict
Seeing both the company’s product portfolio and its reach this seems to be a perfect match with a great synergy between them. “All In One” is the word one can use to describe this entire system.
You want to start a business there’s Reliance Mart, You want to sell your products there’s Reliance Mart, As a consumer, you want to buy a product there’s Reliance Mart, If you want to inquire about a product before buying there’s WhatsApp Chat, If you want to see the product there are WhatsApp images, You want to make a payment there’s JioMoney and WhatsApp Pay. Well, we don’t know if this will kill the competition or lead to a monopoly in the market but once they get the customer base they can take it to a very high level, and we all saw that tactic in Jio.
Time will tell if this really is a Perfect Match. | https://medium.com/@stocksmaniac/jio-and-facebook-a-perfect-match-a3dad335a913 | ['Aakash Shah'] | 2020-12-05 04:29:26.168000+00:00 | ['Reliance Jio', 'Equity', 'Investment', 'Stock Market'] |
Santa Claus | Saints & Angels
Santa Claus
St Nicholas of Bari, Bishop of Myra
Photo courtesy of Luisa Piccarreta Official Website
Vatican News Saint of the Day features St Nicholas of Bari, Bishop of Myra, more popularly known as Santa Claus:
A life of obedience
Nicholas was born at Patara, a seaside town in Licia, in southern Turkey, in the third century. He came from a good family that raised him as a Christian. His life, from his earliest days, was marked by obedience. When he was orphaned at a young age, Nicholas, remembering the rich young man in the Gospel, used his inheritance to assist the needy, the sick, and the poor. He was elected Bishop of Myra, and under the emperor Diocletian was exiled and imprisoned. After being freed, he attended the Council of Nicea in 325. He died in Myra on 6 December 343. Many stories have been handed down about Nicholas, all testifying to a life spent in service to the weak, the small, and the defenceless.
Defender of the weak
One of the most ancient stories about Saint Nicholas involves a man with three daughters of marriageable age. The family was poor, and the young girls were in danger of being forced into prostitution, because their father could not afford to offer a suitable dowry. One night, Nicholas went to the family’s home, and threw a bag of coins through the open window — then fled before he could be identified. With the money, the father was able to procure a marriage for his eldest daughter. Nicholas returned twice more, always at night so that he could not be identified. But the third time, the father rushed out of the house to identify his mysterious benefactor. Nicholas begged him not to tell anyone what he had done. Another story relates the fate of three young theologians travelling to Athens. Along the way, they stopped at an inn, where they were robbed and killed by the innkeeper, who hid their bodies in a barrel. Saint Nicholas, then a bishop, stopped at the same inn when he travelled to Athens. In a dream, he saw the crime that had been committed by his host. Turning to prayer, Saint Nicholas miraculously restored the three young men to life, and obtained the conversion of the wicked innkeeper. A third story tells how Saint Nicholas freed a young boy, Basileos, who had been kidnapped from his home in Myra, and forced to serve as a cup-bearer for a foreign potentate. While his parents prayed for his safety, Saint Nicholas appeared to Basileos, and miraculously restored him to his family — still holding the potentate’s golden cup. These and similar stories helped to spread devotion to Saint Nicholas as patron of children and young people.
Protector of seafarers
Photo courtesy of Salve Maria Regina
St Nicholas is also the patron of sailors and seafarers. When he was a young man, Nicholas boarded a ship to take him on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Following in the footsteps of the Lord, Nicholas prayed that he might be able to experience more fully the closeness of Jesus, and share in His sufferings. Returning to Greece, a frightful storm arose, and the ship he was on was in danger of flooding. Nicholas calmly prayed, and suddenly the wind ceased and the waves died down, to the wonder of the sailors, who feared shipwreck.
Saint Nicholas of Bari
After the death of Saint Nicholas, his tomb at Myra soon became a place of pilgrimage; his relics were considered miraculous on account of a mysterious liquid that flowed from them, known as the “manna of St Nicholas.” After Licia was conquered by the Turks in the tenth century, Venetians attempted to make him their patron — but sailors from Bari were able to acquire his relics first, and brought them to their town in Puglia in 1087. Two years later they were buried in the crypt of a new Church, which the Baresi had built over the place where a Byzantine palace had once stood. The relics were placed under the altar by the reigning Pope, Urban II, as the Norman rulers of Puglia looked on. The translation of the relics of Saint Nicholas was seen in the Medieval period as an extraordinary event, and his sanctuary soon became an important goal for pilgrims, with the result that devotion to Saint Nicholas “of Bari” (rather than “of Myra”) spread throughout the world.
Santa Claus
Photo courtesy of the St Nicholas Center
In the Low Countries, and throughout Germanic lands generally, the winter feast of Saint Nicholas (in Dutch, “Sint Nikolaas” and later “Sinteklaas”), and his patronage of the young, gave rise to the tradition of giving gifts on his feast day: on the Eve of his feast, children would leave socks or shoes on a chair, or next to the fireplace, and go to sleep trusting that the following morning they would be filled with gifts.
Ave Maria! | https://medium.com/ave-maria/santa-claus-d358d3b56e1c | ['Vic Alcuaz'] | 2020-12-06 08:13:58.410000+00:00 | ['Santa Claus', 'Saints Angels', 'Turkey', 'Catholic'] |
Why instant satisfaction is fundamental when you want to build new habits 😊 | In the last few days, I’ve been reading a book called “Atomic Habits” and I learnt a fundamental technique to start a new habit. The author (James Clear) said: “If an experience isn’t satisfying, we have little reason to repeat it”. That’s true, many times we continue to scroll social media or play videogames daily because we enjoy what we’re doing; if we follow this path, we can turn “boring” habits into something nice. We always do unproductive things because we can have immediate satisfaction; this is not achievable with habits like studying or training because we can’t see instant results.
A nice trick we can make is to create something similar to a “score bar” that we can see “growing” while we are doing a productive habit. For example, we can get 2 mugs, one empty and one full of marbles, and put a marble in the empty mug every time we finish a task (for example after finishing a math exercise or after doing 10 push-ups).
The goal we should pursue is to make our daily habits more fun, in this way we would repeat them and have a nice productive life! | https://medium.com/@ghallaleyahia/why-instant-satisfaction-is-fundamental-when-you-want-to-build-new-habits-503edec2c197 | ['Yahia Ghallale'] | 2020-12-27 19:34:35.699000+00:00 | ['Habits For Success', 'Life Lessons', 'Habits', 'Lifestyle', 'Productivity'] |
Apocalyptic Narratives, Climate Data, and Hope, with Zeke Hausfather and Diego Arguedas Ortiz | Jacquelyn Gill
Every few months, I hop onto Twitter for an AMA — “ask me anything.” I’ve done these for years, and the questions are usually really wide-ranging and fun, covering anything form the causes of ice ages or why woolly mammoths went extinct, or even what my favorite books are, or how I got into science. About a year ago, though, something changed. Instead of questions about Earth’s climate or my favorite fossils, people wanted to know if it really was too late to do anything about climate change. A lot of people wanted to know if the world was really going to end in seven to ten years. One person even asked, “Is there any point in having kids?”
And in the months since, I’ve seen this sense of hopelessness growing — especially among youth. When I first started talking publicly about climate change over a decade ago, it felt like very few people were paying attention. It was rarely mentioned in the news, and a lot of the focus in the climate conversation was on getting Americans to believe that human-caused climate change was real in the first place. And then, the conversation pivoted, really quickly — public belief in climate change increased, and so did the media coverage, but there was also this growing emphasis on apocalyptic futures. It’s like the public anxiety about climate change and the click-bait nature of modern journalism started this feedback loop, and the media that had largely ignored climate change was now confusing what was possible with what was probable.
And that’s a problem, because we’ve somehow left a lot of people with the impression that there’s nothing we can do about climate change — and that’s simply not true. It’s been frustrating to watch this new dynamic unfold — we’ve spent so much of the last decades trying to convince the public that climate change is real, but now we have a completely different problem: convincing people that it’s not too late to do something about it. I do think a lot of this has to do with the way the media talks about climate change, but we’re also starting to see the signs of a warming world in our own backyards. As I record this introduction, it’s one of the last days of a genuinely terrible year for climate extremes. The wildfires in California, Australia, and Siberia were the stuff of nightmares, and the 2020 hurricane season had us running out of alphabet and naming storms after Greek letters for only the second time in history.
These are the kinds of impacts that climate scientists have been warning people about for decades. But what I don’t think any of us predicted is that instead of being motivated by these kinds of headlines, a lot of folks feel immobilized by despair. Even worse, some people (mostly white men) feel an almost evangelical need to convince others that it’s too late; climate writer and podcaster Mary Heglar calls them “doomer dudes.” And while anxiety or despair are perfectly natural responses to really awful news, I think doomerism actually represents a distorted understanding of the science. You’ve probably seen messaging like this: “1.5° is okay, but 2° means the total collapse of civilization and life as we know it. If we don’t hit net-zero emissions in ten years, it’s game over for planet Earth.” These kinds of narratives represent climate action as a binary: we win, or we lose big time. There are only two options.
The problem with this framework is not just that it’s wrong — I think it’s actively harmful, because it gives us permission to give up if we fail to meet ambitious targets. We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know increasingly which futures are more likely than others. Last July, one of the most important climate studies in years came out, which answered a lot of our most pressing questions about something called “climate sensitivity” — which is basically how sensitive the Earth is to greenhouse gas emissions and how much it’s likely to warm as a result. That study found that the best-case scenarios are no longer likely — but neither are some of the worst-case scenarios. We’ve basically narrowed the range of possibilities, but what ultimately happens is still up to us. 1.5° warming is looking less and less likely, but the world looks very different with 2, 3, and 4° of warming.
Climate scientists will tell you that there is no magic number — no point of no return beyond which action on climate is meaningless. So instead of binaries, I prefer to think in terms of harm reduction, borrowing a concept from public health. When it comes to climate action, a no-harm scenario just isn’t possible, because harm has already happened. But the more we do now, the more harm we can prevent in the future. And that means that acting on climate change will always be worth it, no matter how bleak things may seem. We also know from climate communication research that fear by itself is not a great motivator — it can backfire, and cause people to fall into despair. There’s a line in Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic novel, Year of the Flood, that I come back to often: “We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, then they will do worse than nothing.”
So for this episode, we’re tackling apocalyptic narratives, as a first step in fighting doomerism and despair. We first walk through what the newest data actually tell us about our climate future. Then, we’ll talk about the role of hope in the global climate conversation.
Our first guest is climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, Director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute — an environmental research center based in Oakland, California. Zeke also worked as a research scientist with Berkeley Earth, was the senior climate analyst at Project Drawdown, and US analyst for Carbon Brief. So he’s spent a lot of time thinking about future climate scenarios.
So, Zeke: let’s get straight to the point here. How much warming are we looking at by the end of this century?
Zeke Hausfather
So it’s a tough question to answer, because a lot of it still depends on us. But if we look at what countries have committed to and codified in short-term climate goals so far (and I’ll get to why that’s an important caveat later), we’re probably on track for something like 3° centigrade warming relative to preindustrial (so about 2° warmer than today) by the end of this 21st century — so by 2100. But of course the world doesn’t end in 2100, even though a lot of our models do so as long as our emissions remain above zero, the world will continue to warm after that until our emissions get to zero.
Jacquelyn
Right, we know we’ve warmed about one degree Celsius since pre-industrial times and, by our current best estimates, we’re looking at another two° by the end of this century?
Zeke
Yeah. So we could end up worse than that. we could have a world where the Trumps and the Bolsonaros and the various other sort of populists of the world rollback climate policy and subsidize burning coal directly (as Trump tried to do in his first term) or you could have a much better world where all these targets that countries like China are starting to set around net zero by 2060 are actually met and we really have a good chance of limiting warming to well below two° above pre-industrial levels. We’re sort of at an exciting moment right now because there’s so many commitments being made by countries, but these targets are also still aspirations more than operations and a lot of countries are not doing that great in meeting sort of their existing Paris Agreement targets. So we’re in a weird world right now where there’s a lot of expressed ambition, but we’re all sort of waiting to see how it gets translated into policy.
Jacquelyn
I think that’s a really important point. We’re looking at two or 3° Celcius of future warming, which we can say is “likely” based on what we know right now, but that’s not the same thing as “certain,” right? And that eventual climate future will largely come down to what governments are deciding to do right now.
Zeke
Yeah, and 3° is in some ways becoming a bit of a conservative case, right? 3° is the most likely outcome if we don’t really do anything beyond what we’ve already committed to for the rest of the century. That’s a pretty low bar, especially because we’ve already seen commitments well beyond that made this year by China, by South Korea, by Japan that are not included in that number. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to get below that, and to be honest, I’m hopeful we’ll be able to get well below two° (though it is a big lift and requires getting global emissions to zero around 2070 or so). The one important caveat I want to give when I’m talking about all these numbers (like 3° by 2100 relative to preindustrial) is that’s a best estimate and holding sort of one set of uncertainties constant, which is our emissions. But there’s two other really big sets of uncertainties that we can talk about at length later if you guys want, which are sort of climate sensitivity (so how much it warms as CO2 in the atmosphere increases) and carbon cycle feedback — so how much of the C02 emitted remains in the atmosphere and how much that changes over time? Because of those a world that we think is going to warm 3° could really be anywhere between two° at the low end or even four and a half° at the high end (if we sort of roll sixes on all the climate dice). So we really have to be careful not to fixate too much on something like a 3 degree world (which would not be a good world by any means, particularly for natural systems), but if we go in expecting 3°, we could well end up with four and a half°. And so these sort of low probability / high impact outcomes should really shape our choices around emissions in the future
Jacquelyn
So it sounds like you’re saying we should be planning for the worst-case scenario of those potential futures (even though that scenario is less likely) and there’s really no real downside to that?
Zeke
Yeah. I mean, obviously there are trade offs at some point when it comes to the speed of our emission reductions; like if we were to literally stop all emissions tomorrow, it would have huge negative impacts on much of humanity because we still rely on fossil fuels for a lot of things. But broadly speaking, there are a lot of no regrets policies and, and the lower we get our emissions, the faster we lower emissions, the more we preclude these sort of really catastrophic possible outcomes.
Ramesh Laungani
So Zeke, you’ve highlighted a range of possible futures based on the decisions that we as humans make with our emissions. One of those futures that we hear a lot about is something called RCP 8.5. Can you give sort of a cliff notes version of what RCP 8.5 is for those people who might not be familiar with models or the IPCC?
Zeke
The RCPs were a set of future climate outcomes that were developed in the lead-up to the last IPCC report (the IPCC fifth assessment report). And the IPCC for a long time (ever since 1990) has as part of its process spearheaded or coordinated the development of future emission scenario, because one of the big uncertainties in the climate system that climate models are not able to calculate is what our future emissions will be, cuz those depend on economics; it depends on population; it depends on technology prices and all these other things. And so there’s a whole community of energy system modelers that in coordination with the IPCC has been creating emission scenarios since the ’90s. The previous set of emissions scenarios we’ll call the SRE scenarios and those were created I think around the year 2000. And so in the lead up to the fifth IPCC assessment report which came out in 2013, those were getting pretty old (the world had changed a fair bit since 2000) and so there was a desire to create a new set of of scenarios. Now the old SRE scenarios were sort of a set of coupled socioeconomic and emissions scenarios. They had population, GDP; they had some discrete assumptions about things like technology; and they laid out five different pathways the world could take in the absence of any new climate policy — they’re all sort of baseline work. There was a desire to do something like that for the IPCC fifth assessment report, and the energy modeling community started on that. But it turned out that they were running so far behind that they weren’t able to finish that modeling effort in time to create the scenarios that the climate modelers needed to run their climate models cuz climate models run on these giant supercomputers that takes years of processing time to do all the model runs needed for the IPCC. There was this bit of a challenge where they wanted to create this new set of scenarios. There wasn’t really time, and so they settled on this sort of stop gap called the representative concentration pathways, where they just created four sort of pathways of future radiative forcing and concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere that were broadly distinct from each other that that sort of represented four different end-of-century pathways: RCP 2.6 (which was sort of a below 2° scenario), RCP 4.5 (which is about a 2.8° scenario or so), RCP 6.0 (which was a 3.2°C scenario), and RCP 8.5 (which is like a 4.5° warming scenario) by 2100. They base these on a set of integrated assessment models that were run to generate emission scenarios. These integrated assessment models, three of them (the ones that used to generate RCP 2.6, 4.5 and 6.0) had some level of mitigation (you know, it’s very weak mitigation) and 6.0 had at least some level, and RCP 8.5 was the only one of the scenarios that was generated using an integrated assessment model that didn’t have any climate mitigation. It resulted in a very, very high emissions future. It was a world where we were using six times more coal by 2100 than we were using today — about eight times more than when the scenarios were first published. It’s a world where global emissions triple by the end of the century. Even at the time, it wasn’t really the sort of median baseline estimate in the literature. In fact, if you read some of the papers that first laid out the RCP 8.5 scenario, it was actually roughly the 90th percentile of no-policy baseline scenarios available in the literature at the time. So there’s a really big gap between RCP 6.0 (which was sort of at the low end of the baseline range in the literature at the time) and RCP 8.5 (which was the highest end — or the high end, I should say, not the highest — at the time). These scenarios, researchers started on them in the late 2000s; they were published in 2011, and the world has changed a lot since then. One of the problems is that because RCP 8.5 was the only sort of no-policy baseline scenario available in the IPCC fifth assessment report, it sort of became the business-as-usual scenario that a lot of modelers used for climate impact assessments. In fact, there’s thousands of papers that literally say, “in a business-as-usual scenario (RCP 8.5),” you know, “this level of sea level rise will happen; this level coral reef death will happen,” et cetera, et cetera. At the time you could have made the case that even though it was the high end of possible scenarios, it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. But from where we are today, the idea that we’d have six times more coal use by 2100 is just not gonna happen. So there’s been a bit of a reassessment of where likely scenarios are headed and sort of how we should be using these scenarios in research going forward. I think we should still include these sort of scenarios in our modeling as worst case scenarios, but we should stop conflating the worst case with the most likely outcome — which is the problem that was pretty common in the literature in sort of the last five years.
Jacquelyn
I’d like to talk for a moment about the broader conversation around climate futures, and about how sometimes the messaging becomes decoupled from the actual science. What we think of a “business-as-usual” scenario is really changing in part because our business has been changing. But a lot of the reporting on climate models has focused on these high-emissions scenarios, even when those aren’t necessarily the most likely. In the last year or so, I’ve really started seeing people throw around this idea that we only have ten years to turn everything around and prevent catastrophic climate change. So can you talk a little bit about where this idea comes from? Why did people latch onto this idea of a ten-year window? And how accurate is it, exactly?
Zeke
So the “ten years to save the planet” number actually came from a Guardian headline writer; [laughs] it didn’t come from the IPCC. It was their interpretation of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°. It sort of took on a life of its own and ran wild. But essentially what the number is based on is that if you want to limit warming to 1.5°° above pre-industrial levels (and bear in mind we’re at 1.2° today, so we’re talking about a very, very small level of additional warming in terms of how much emissions we can allow — so incredibly tight), we have to reduce our emissions or cut our emissions roughly in half in the next ten years and all the way to in the next twenty years, in a sort of very simple calculus. Now that calculus is actually not what is really used in most of the scenarios in the IPCC 1.5°C report. Rather, most of the energy system models that were tasked to create 1.5° warming scenarios essentially decided that that was impossible. And so what they do instead is have a more gradual decline, reaching net-zero emissions around 2050 (say so thirty years instead of twenty years) and make up for that by sucking an immense amount of carbon out of the atmosphere later on in the century. To put it in perspective, some of these models have two-to-three times the land area of India devoted to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere every year in order to meet these targets. So you were talking about like planetary engineering type things that are a little mind boggling in their scale. But that’s the problem with having a target where we can only warm by 0.3°C more than where we are today; you’re really stuck with that choice. Either you have to get all emissions to zero incredibly quickly in twenty years (which it doesn’t violate the laws of physics, but I really don’t see that happening in terms of political or anything else) or you overshoot and you have to suck a bunch of carbon out of the atmosphere late in the century. That’s sort of the brutal math of the 1.5° target. Now 1.5° is a target for a reason, though the way it came about was a bit of a sort of “tail wags the dog” type thing. In the context of the Paris agreements, all the discussion and (to be honest) most of the scientific literature at the time was all about limiting warming to well below 2°. And what “well below 2°” means is taken to mean essentially is the RCP 2.6 scenario (which has about 1.8°C warming by 2100 above pre-industrial) and also conveniently has about a 66% chance of avoiding 2° warming, because again there’s this uncertainty in climate sensitivity. That’s where almost all of the scientific literature was in 2015 or so. Then in the Paris agreements, a lot of Small Island Nations got together and said, “Wait a minute! At 2° warming, we’re mostly underwater. That’s not acceptable,” and so they pushed for sort of a greater ambition. The way that that ended up getting resolved is the Paris agreement authors essentially said, “Okay, well, we’ll make the target still well below two°. And then we’ll say with sort of a goal of 1.5°.” But then the scientific community was like, “Huh, now there’s this new goal, but we don’t have any literature at all on 1.5° cuz we didn’t have any scenarios to run for that.” There weren’t any climate model runs that limited warming to 1.5°, available. Then the UN framework convention on climate change asked the IPCC to put together a special report on 1.5°, and it led to this huge amount of energy system modeling and simplified climate modeling (there weren’t too many actual fuller system models run for 1.5° because there wasn’t time) and a lot of sort of climate impact studies then using the output of those simple models to try to look at exactly what the differences between 1.5° and 2°. They published a big report (I think it’s two years ago now) and then it led to this sort of “ten years to save the planet” thing.
There are real differences between 1.5° and 2° warming, particularly for coral reefs; most coral reefs are probably not going to be able to survive 2° warming. There’s real impacts on sea level rise for Small Island Nations. There’s real impacts on things like agricultural yields. That said, a world of well below 2° is still one where humanity will by-and-large manage to adapt to. It’s not a catastrophic scenario by any stretch of the imagination. If we ended up at 1.8°, instead of 1.5°; it’s just not the best outcome. And so that’s one of the reasons I sort of take issue with this “ten years to save the planet” thing. Not only is it misrepresenting sort of what most of the models they get to 1.5° actually have us doing (which is this sort of overshoot plus negative emissions) but it also is sort of drawing this line of catastrophe after 1.5° in a way that’s really not supported by the scientific literature. Certainly there’s some specific ecosystems (coral reefs are probably the biggest example) where you can draw to an extent those sort of lines, but for the world as a whole, it’s certainly not defensible to say that like 1.5° is fine and 2° is catastrophe. You can say, “Look, four degrees is catastrophe.” You could even argue that 3° is catastrophe, though that’s a more challenging argument to be made for human systems, but certainly one that’s easier to make for natural systems. Two degrees is not where we want to end up in a perfect world, but it’s not the end of the world.
[music]
Justin Schell
Hey everyone, producer Justin Schell here. For the rest of the season, we’re featuring other climate change podcasts we think you should check out. On today’s episode, Thimali Kodikara (the producer and co-host of the podcast Mothers of Invention) talks about how the show focuses explicitly on feminist solutions to the climate crisis.
Thimali Kodikara
I’m Thimali Kodikara and I series produce and co-host a podcast called Mothers of Invention on feminist solutions to the climate crisis. I co-host it with Mary Robinson (who was the first woman president of Ireland) and Mauve Higgins (who is a very funny comedian), and we chat with mostly Black, Brown, and Indigenous women and girls from around the world who are fighting from the front lines of the climate crisis. And I wanted to share some data with you all that I found whilst researching our episode three this season on climate migration. It’s estimated 200 million people around the world will become climate migrants by 2050. So to understand what that will feel like, we spoke to Ursula Rakova from the Carteret Islands and Melanesia because her people are the first population in the world relocating due to sea level rise. And we also talked to Colette Pichon-Battle in the Louisiana bayou, who watched folks leave en masse after Hurricane Katrina. But the thing is Ursula is doing unprecedented work, bringing her indigenous community to mainland safety. And Colette founded the Gulf Center for Law and Policy to claim climate justice and ecological equity for her community. So we know that climate change is a manmade problem with a feminist solution, because who better to ask what to do than the folks who’ve been surviving it for generations. And if we support the most marginalized people in the planet, we know we’re supporting everybody.
Justin
You can find Mothers of Invention wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to our conversation with Zeke Hausfather.
Jacquelyn
What I find so frustrating is that when I’ve pushed back against this kind of binary thinking, I often hear people say things like, “Well, maybe we need to scare people a little bit because we’re not decarbonizing fast enough and we need to get people out in the streets,” etc. So, do you think that that Guardian article has a net positive or a net negative on the climate movement?
Zeke
It’s a hard question to answer. I’m not a fan of it, cuz I’m worried it’ll come back to bite us in a big way and we’ve certainly seen a rise of sort of doomerism in a way that we didn’t see five years ago. Now climate scientists like my friend Michael Mann spend more time on Twitter arguing with the doomists than they end up then they spend arguing with the climate skeptics, which is a bit of a change. But at the same time it is important to have impetus for action. That said, [sigh], it would be so easy to frame a two degree target in the same way. If we really want to limit warming to well below two degrees (the sort of primary Paris agreement goals), we can’t wait ten more years and do nothing. We need to start reducing emissions now, regardless. It’s not like we can bide our time if we have a slightly more realistic target we’re aiming for. The need for climate action is not necessarily predicated on this incredibly difficult to achieve target of limiting warming to only 0.3°C more than where we are at today. I’m worried that it sets us up for failure in a few more years when we’ve made modest progress but not transformational progress, and it becomes increasingly clear that the 1.5° target is sort of off the table — barring magical negative emissions late in the century. And so that’s my real worry, that we’re setting ourselves up for failure by focusing too much on what is almost impossible to achieve.
Ramesh
So you highlighted China pledging carbon neutrality by 2060, and other nations are trying to aim for carbon neutrality by 2050. But you hear a lot of doomers say that it’s too late. So in your opinion, is it too late?
Zeke
It’s a good question. You certainly can say if we have like three or four or five degrees warming, corn growing in Nebraska is going to be in pretty bad spot. Though even then, it really depends on what happens with agricultural technology. Are we genetically engineering more heat tolerant variants of corn? In human systems, there’s always this sort of race between adaptive capacity and climate impacts, to an extent that there isn’t necessarily in the natural world (and it’s important to distinguish those two). I’d be much more worried about farmers in Bangladesh than farmers in the Midwest in a warming world in terms of our ability to respond. But more broadly, though, a lot of climate discourse gets framed around thresholds and climate change is really a matter of degrees, not a matter of thresholds. The warmer it gets, the worse the impacts get in a non-linear way, right? Three degrees is a lot worse than two degrees. Four degrees is a lot, lot worse than three degrees. But at the same time, we don’t really have much evidence from climate models or from studying other systems that there’s global scale climate tipping points that could lead to runaway warming, that could lead to a massive amount of additional warming beyond what we expect to happen. There are a lot of processes in the Earth system that are non linear (coral reefs as an example I gave earlier, ice sheets is another good one) where once you pass a particular warming level over the long-term it’s really hard to get ice sheets to recover, and you’re sort of condemning them to a long, slow melt — at least in the absence of a world of large scale, negative emissions, but that gets complicated. And things like Arctic permafrost where at a high enough warming level, it is slowly going to melt and contribute to more warming going forward. But those are all fairly slow processes. They’re not, suddenly we go from having two degrees warming to having four degree warming between 2050 and 2080, because we hit some tipping points. To the extent that there are tipping elements in the climate system that affect global temperatures, they’re very slow gradual processes. They’re certainly worrisome (we don’t want a world where we’re committed to five or ten meters of sea level rise in the next five or six hundred years), and you could make the argument that two degrees we could end up there, but that’s a very different type of argument than like, “We’re all going to be dead in ten years,” cuz the timescales are simply just very different. Now, the only real climate tipping point I’ve seen in the literature that could be the sort of doomsday type thing is still a very tentative one that was published by a Tapio Schneider down at Caltech and some other folks last year or two years ago, I think now, where they looked at what would happen to stratocumulus cloud decks (which covered much of the world’s oceans) in very high warming worlds. They found that in worlds when you get above about 1300 parts per million CO2 (so we’re talking like high end RCP 8.5, four to five degrees warming), suddenly most of the world’s stratocumulus cloud decks disappear and you end up with about six degrees, additional warming in the course of decades beyond what you’ve already had. And so a world where you suddenly go from 4° to 10°C warming, that would be pretty apocalyptic. But at the same time they found that that was only really possible at very, very high levels of CO2 and, importantly, it could also help explain some of the climate conditions in paleoclimate periods under very, very highest CO2 levels. It was a very interesting study but again it was a very simple model (like single-column convective model) not like a global scale thing, because you can’t really do that level of sub-scale physical parameterization for a global climate model. But we don’t see anything like that at 1.5° or 2° or even 3°, though. You know, the challenge with warming is we have models, they’re not perfect. The earth system is complex. We know it’s changed rapidly in the past, through all of our paleoclimate research. And so the further we push the climate system past the bounds of where it’s been in the Holocene (the last ten thousand years) the greater the chance that “there be dragons”, right. There are “unknown unknowns”, to quote the one good thing Donald Rumsfeld ever said. That does give us reason to be cautious, but at the same time those are unknown unknowns. We don’t have these specific thresholds where we know that everything blows up. We should be cautious; we should really try to limit warming to below two degrees (and maybe if we have really good negative emissions technologies even further down than that) but at the same time, we shouldn’t worry that we’re all gonna die if we end up muddling through and have a 2.5° world by 2100. It’s not a world that will want to live in (a world that has a lot of impacts on human and natural systems), but it’s not the apocalypse.
Jacquelyn
And as I think Kate Marvel put it, the apocalypse is kind of an unnecessarily high bar to take action, right?
Zeke
Almost every other problem we deal with as a species, it’s not literally a human extinction issue — with possibly the exception of nuclear war. And yet we still deal with these problems like poverty, like malnutrition in a big way. And so I think it’s better to think of climate change in a similar vein than like this “The world is going to end” or “Everything’s going to be fine” dichotomy.
Jacquelyn
Are there any other nightmare scenarios that you see people worrying about that probably aren’t going to happen? I’m thinking about the Arctic methane bomb story that also came out in the Guardian. It wasn’t even about a published study; it was about fieldwork that was still in progress, and it turned out that there was a lot of reason to be really skeptical about catastrophic warming caused by Arctic ocean methane. Can you think of anything else that you might be able to alleviate people’s concerns about, in terms of our anxieties about potential apocalyptic futures?
Zeke
So that one is a big one that a lot of people talk about and there is real concern around permafrost, but that’s more of a long-term feedback that affects CO2 more than methane just cause methane has a very short atmospheric lifetime. If you look at some of these higher emissions scenarios, we could end up with another a hundred parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere from permafrost by 2300, in a world where we sort of keep emitting at our current levels — even outside of these worst case scenarios. Permafrost is certainly a really important part of the climate system and a really big impact, but it’s at least to the best of our knowledge not a sudden impact. There are small-scale sudden impacts in the context of permafrost (you can have regional methane sudden methane releases), but they’re not big enough to have very large global climate effects. The frozen methane on the seabed (these sort of methane hydrates or clathrates), they get a lot of attention. There’s been a lot of research done on them in recent years and there’s two things that come out of that. One is that when they do melt or destabilize through landslides or things like that, a lot of the methane ends up being absorbed by the ocean waters and by biological processes before it gets out to the atmosphere. And the second is that these methane hydrate deposits, when they do dissipate or melt they do so very slowly from the top down. So there’s not too many mechanisms apart from regional landslides or sea slides that could trigger very, very large volumes to be released. It’s certainly something we should keep our eyes on, but there’s not much evidence that there’s a looming methane bomb that could lead to a very notable amount of additional global warming in the short term.
Another area where there’s been sort of a lot of popular media discussion that’s varied a bit from the state of the sciences around the, the thermohaline circulation (or the AMO); it’s often called the ocean conveyor belt. Essentially what happens is that there’s big circulations in the ocean that are driven by changes in salinity of surface water. So as water moves up North through the Atlantic it evaporates, and as it evaporates it leaves behind the salt content of the seawater. That means the surface waters get saltier and saltier as more evaporation occurs and salty water, it turns out, is dense. And so this dense salty surface water starts sinking down into the deep and that drives a lot of ocean circulation — that process. So the worry is that as Greenland starts to melt in a big way, it’s putting a bunch of fresh water into the North Atlantic; we already see this showing up in many of our observations. And that fresh water reduces the salinity of the surface waters; it counteracts the effect of the evaporation. What that means is it can slow down this ocean conveyor belt. This was most famously dramatized in the movie of The Day After Tomorrow, which had so many scientific issues, I’m not even going to start.
Jacquelyn
But I love it. Sorry.
[Laughter]
Zeke
No worries. It is a very entertaining movie. There’s a real worry that’s been dramatized that this conveyor belt would shut down and it would stop bringing up warm waters that makes places like New York or the UK or even Iceland much more habitable than similar high latitude regions and other parts of the world that don’t have currents like that. What we actually see in our climate models is that the odds of a sudden shut down at thermohaline circulation are very low. It has happened in the past, but mostly because there was a giant inland lake covering much of the Americas caused by melting ice sheets that suddenly burst into the North Atlantic and poured an immense amount of fresh water in at once and that shut it down. What’s happening in Greenland is really concerning, but it’s much more gradual. So what we expect to see is a slowdown of the thermohaline circulation over the course of the century — not a stoppage — and that would cool (all things being equal) some of these higher latitude regions but at the same time the world is warming. So scenarios where you have a very large degree of slowdown — these very high emission scenarios — are also scenarios where the world is warming a lot. That warming, it turns out at least in most models in most regions is bigger than any cooling you’d get from a slow down to the thermohaline circulation. So at best, it’s probably just going to counteract or lead to slightly less warming we’d otherwise see in some of these regions — not like plunge the world into an ice age or anything crazy like that. That’s another thing that’s, that’s certainly worth watching and there’s a lot of other potential regional effects of that on things like precipitation that are certainly meaningful and could impact crop yields and things like that, but it’s not a global catastrophe that could strike at any minute,
Ramesh
So Zeke, throughout this whole discussion we’ve been using the words “possible” and “probable” and “likely”. I know when I’ve talked to my students about climate models I explicitly distinguish between “possible” and “probable”. How much of the concern about apocalyptic futures comes out of our inability as humans to grapple with uncertainty and how do we as scientists better distinguish between words like “possible” and “probable” and “likely” to help the public gain a clearer understanding of our climate future?
Zeke
That’s a good question. We shouldn’t necessarily discount low probability/high impact outcomes. In fact, there’s a great quote the late Marty Weitzman (who is a great climate economist at Harvard) where he said that, “When it comes to the damages of climate change, the sting is in the tail,” which is a really nerdy phrase because it refers to the tail of probability distributions. But essentially that these low probability/high impact outcomes make up a disproportionate amount of the damages in a lot of climate scenarios. It’s not the three degree world, it’s the non-trivial chance of the five degree world that really should scare us, so it’s important to model those. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s also just important to be clear when we’re talking about them, what is a worst-case outcome and what is a likely outcome. And that applies both to our emission scenarios and our scenarios of climate impacts. I feel like where we’ve sort of run into trouble at times is because a lot of the climate impact literature unfortunately conflated one of the worst case emissions scenarios with the most likely scenario in a world of no climate action. We sort of ended up with a literature of climate impacts that also implicitly portrays what are relatively low probability outcomes (because they occur at a five degree warming world), with most likely outcomes in a world without climate action. Better treatment of a futures emission scenario helps there. But when we were also talking about things like tipping points, then we’re also talking about low probability impacts even at high warming scenarios, it becomes even harder to effectively discuss. It’s a challenge; I don’t have an easy answer on that one. But I think that more clarity both around the scenarios we use and how we talk about low probability/high impact events is important.
Jacquelyn
We’ve spent a lot of time focusing our discussion on what could go wrong and the likelihood of various apocalyptic futures. So as we focus on the negative, what are we maybe missing in our discussions in terms of what’s going right? With all of the focus on the possibility of methane bombs in the Arctic or the extinction crisis, what are the reasons that you find for hope right now? I know “hope” can be a loaded term, but I think a lot of our listeners would appreciate some positive news, because that can be really empowering for people.
Zeke
So I think there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful, and much more in the last few years than even a few years ago. I think some people are worried about talking about the hopeful things too much because they think it’ll distract us from the importance of climate action. I feel like that’s a problematic framing. The need for limiting warming to below two degrees is not predicated on a counterfactual scenario of five degrees warming, right? If we’re on track for three degrees instead of five degrees, it doesn’t lessen the need to get to two; there’s a reason we chose that as our target. But what makes me hopeful is a couple of things. One big one is the degree of technological progress we’ve seen, and the degree of success we’ve seen in making clean energy cheap. The prices of batteries, of solar panels, of wind turbines (both onshore and offshore) have fallen much faster than anyone even predicted five, ten years ago. In fact as a great example, all of these integrated assessment models that are used to create future emission scenarios that I was talking about earlier (that are going to be used in the next IPCC report), were created around 2014, 2015, 2016. So their price in those models for solar panels in the year 2050 is higher than the price of solar panels in most countries today. We’ve seen such a degree of technological advancement that it’s really gone outside of what our models predicted. That’s why we’re now on track for a current policy scenario that’s very much in the low end of the sort of baseline scenarios in those models. The fact that China is willing to commit to a 2060 goal is almost entirely, in my view, because we see a pathway from where we are today to get there that is not extremely costly because we have a lot of these alternatives with help. We don’t have all of them; there’s certainly some sectors of the economy like industrial heat or aviation or agriculture that are a lot harder to decarbonize, and we need a lot more innovation there. Even in energy and electricity, you can’t just power a country by wind and solar easily; there’s other parts of the system that need improvement. But we can get a long way with the technologies we have today, and the fact that they’ve gotten so cheap gives me a lot of hope. That’s really what sort of helped bend down some of these future emission curves.
The other thing that gives me hope is that there just seems to be a lot more political will to make meaningful commitments on climate change now than there was a decade ago. The Paris Agreement was a great start, but particularly this year with China, Japan, Korea, the EU, all of these big emitters committing to reduce their emissions to zero by mid-century, we’re sort of at tipping point (so to speak) in climate action. If we see the US joining that effort under a new Biden administration, we’ll have more than half of global emissions (well more than half of global emissions today) committed to getting to net zero by mid-century, and that would really be game changing for the climate. We certainly have a long way to go still and words on paper are not worth that much until they’re turned into actual policies on the ground, but things are moving in the right direction in many ways even if they’re not quite as fast as we’d want. We just need to keep pushing in that direction. We’ve taken a lot of the worst case outcomes off the table, even if we’re not quite on track for the best case outcomes yet today.
[music]
Justin Schell
For this episode’s Data Story, we turn to Dr. Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie, who talked about not only the kinds of data she works with in studying climate change, but also the effects it has on the world her daughter will grow up in.
Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie
My name is Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie, and I’m a visiting assistant professor in environmental studies at Colby College. I studied the timing of leaf out and flowering. As temperatures warm, leaf-out and flowering advance earlier and earlier in the spring. These are some of the most visible signs of the ecological impacts of climate change. To get really long term records, my research depends on journals and diaries of old naturalists like Henry David Thoreau. Of course, when Thoreau recorded flowering dates he didn’t see it as a fingerprint of climate change, but his observations allow us to calculate how much climate change has shifted the environments that we think we know. Humans have been marking time by seasonal events for a long, long time; think Stonehenge and the solstice. And my research often feels like an extension of this cultural history — an effort to understand our place in time in the universe. The differences my observations reflect my own species actions. The work that I do now (my research, teaching, and advocacy) will determine when my daughters see flowers bloom, and what their seasons will look like in the future.
Justin
We’d love to hear your data story. You can leave us a voicemail by calling 586–930–5286, or record yourself and email it to us at [email protected].
Ramesh
Over the past few weeks, as the first batches of COVID vaccinations have been administered in the US, there is almost a nightly report on the news where a frontline healthcare worker talks about how getting the vaccination provides them with a sense of hope.
This got me thinking about the parallels with climate change and the nature of hope when facing down a seemingly impossible challenge. It also got me thinking about the idea that in the case of COVID-19, science can deliver hope right into the bloodstream.
In my Conservation Biology class, I often find myself having to give my students a similar shot of hope — if you will. In the class we examine a lot of ways in which human activities are impacting the planet — from biodiversity loss, to deforestation, to overfishing, to the negative impacts of climate change on marginalized communities. After having taught this class a number of times, the students follow a predictable arc during the semester, and at some point they fall into a bit of an emotional valley, that is often verbalized to me in a rather matter-of-fact way: “Humans suck!” As the students learn about these global changes, they feel like there are no ways to fix these big problems, someone always gets the short end of the stick, and that these problems are just too big to tackle. They feel hopeless. To help them climb out of this emotional valley, I bring in local environmental leaders from the Lincoln area who are making a difference in their communities. For example, my friend Tim Rinne started an urban agriculture project called the Hawley Hamlet. Tim and his dedicated neighbors have converted their lawns to garden space (about 65 yards in total) and they grow thousands of pounds of fruits and vegetables to feed their families and friends. I also have my students specifically collect news articles that give them hope. They collect all sorts of articles ranging from stories about waste reduction by the Philadelphia Eagles, to new technologies that help capture CO2 from the atmosphere, to financial firms accounting for climate change in their investments. More importantly, they also have to explain why the articles give them hope. I even had a student remark that seeing the collection build up through the semester gave him an even greater sense of hope.
Although my students have been able to find these moments of hope, they have to wade through a seemingly endless stream of awful news stories that make pretty dark predictions about the world in the near future. It’s tough to find that hope. That’s not just true for my students; it’s true for me too. It seems that every few months there’s an article that comes across my Twitter or Facebook feed that is predicting that we only have “seven years left”. These pieces put me in the same emotional valley that I work to help my students climb out of.
However as I was writing this for the podcast, I realized how much of my own sense of hopelessness is shaped by the broad narrative in the media about climate change: how the American media narrative focuses a lot on climate anxiety, and much less so on action to fight climate change. But I also realized that being a part of this podcast is fundamentally an act of hope; it’s an attempt to push back against these stories of despair. To be honest, if I truly thought it was hopeless I don’t know if I would spend that time making a podcast. I’d probably be checking things off of a list of places to see and things to eat. Sharing the science of climate change, sharing stories and conversations from those who are impacted by climate change, and talking about how people are using data about climate change to improve things on the ground — these are all fundamentally a manifestation of my own hope that we can create a more equitable climate future for all of us.
One piece that I came across in January of this year that gave me hope with each line that I read, was an article written by our second guest, Diego Arguedas Ortiz — a climate communicator who has written for such news outlets like the BBC and Univision. The piece, “Is it wrong to be hopeful about climate change?”, was published as part of a BBC series on climate emotions. Diego’s piece was an insightful exploration of how collective, action-driven, responsive hope is a deeply social phenomenon, and that the uncertainty about our future can in fact be seen as an opportunity for hope.
[music]
Jacquelyn
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Diego. One of the reasons Ramesh and I were so excited to talk with you is that so much of the recent media coverage on climate change tends to focus either on really negative news or catastrophic events or doom-and-gloom predictions of the future, and yet a lot of your work recently has focused on the idea of hope. So how did that come to be?
Diego
Thanks, Jacquelyn and Ramesh for the invitation. It was more of a good coincidence. I got an invitation from a BBC editor to write about a climate and emotion series they were running, and she offered several topics to me. I was a bit reluctant to engage in hope because I was very unhopeful, perhaps, myself. I was very dubious about the case for hope on climate change. Even if I wanted to, do we believe in full that it was necessary? I didn’t see it. But eventually she convinced me and I just started reading and asking people, and it has been something that fascinated me ever since. It’s such a deep topic to go through because it’s so relevant.
Jacquelyn
The piece that you wrote in early 2020 for the BBC remains my favorite piece about climate change this year, and that’s it grapples so well with a lot of these very messy and personal responses to the climate crisis. And one of the things that really struck me is that the word hope or just the idea of hope seems to mean a lot of different things to different people. Now I wonder, do you think that might be holding us back from effectively harnessing the idea of hope to promote action on climate change? Or do you think it’s a good thing, that this one word can have so many different definitions for different people?
Diego
Hmm, that’s an interesting question. It’s definitely tricky that hope means different things to different people. And it means for instance, for some people, things will be fine. I heard other people just describe it as fake optimism or more silly optimism, whereas for others it just means action. And I think it will be really useful to just move away from the definition of hope based only on things will be fine, like this messiah concept we have in Western society (things would just be fine because Elon Musk is going to come and save us) and then just engage more on what I feel is the more action-based definition of hope, and then hope as something you cannot achieve unless you’re acting yourself. I think at some point, Katharine Hayhoe was being asked so often, “What gives you hope?”, in her talks that then she started asking, “What brings hope to people?” And there was this big chunk of people just saying, “youth activists,” and generally like, “people acting on climate change”. But the issue is if you just base your hope on someone else and it’s something that many people have made the case about, then it is a bit unfair. It’s a bit unfair because there’s someone else working on this action and having this emotional burden. We’re basically outsourcing hope to someone else, so we’re just waiting on the good news to give us hope or the science or the technology. It’s frail, whereas if you build hope on your values and the things you know you can do (and especially on this collective aggregation of individual hopes into a collective one), then I think it’s a better place to start with.
Jacquelyn
I like that a lot for two reasons. First, I like the idea of turning that question around and asking: what do we need to do to give our communities hope, so that they feel like their actions will make a difference? And I also really like that the kind of hope that you’re talking about involves a sense of moral duty to act on climate; we can’t just keep assuming that someone else is going to fix this for us. We have to show up, whether that’s through activism or our own personal actions, or just getting out there and talking about climate change.
Diego
I think this is why many people are, I think, rightfully skeptical about hope, because hope then gets thrown around as (in a way) a way to make people more passive. If you think things are just going to be fine, then there’s no need to engage in it.
Ramesh
So in your BBC piece, you also talked about hope being a deeply social phenomenon and that responsive hope specifically is key to tackling big problems like climate change. Do you still think that type of hope is key?
Diego
Yeah. I came to this idea through the work of Victoria McGeer, and she argues that you need like this social scaffolding just to just work on anything in your life. You can have this stubborn hope that you (yes, you, with your actions and you with your power) can change the day, and then I think she calls it “stubborn hope” or something. Then something she calls more silly, silly hope or silly optimism, which is this idea like things will be fine. And then somewhere in the middle, there’s this sweet spot in between. Yes, you need to do your stuff, but then it’s impossible to do it alone. There’s literally no person in the world that can solve this. So if you don’t build collectively — even if you don’t make the responsive hope, as she calls it — then it will be really tricky. At some point you’ll feel I am not enough.
Jacquelyn
So what about the folks that have given up hope — the so-called “doomers?” These are the people who don’t believe there’s anything that we can do. Not only have they lost hope, but they seem to feel the need to kind of convince other people that there’s nothing we can do. Have you encountered this kind of emotional response in your work? And if so, what have those conversations been like?
Diego
Yeah, I think that doom and gloom is very real. I know a relatively high ranking UN organization official who was arguing against action on flights, for instance, because he felt it was a lost cause. I think it’s a way of self-denial; you just feel overwhelmed by the scale of it. So I think it’s just a sort of emotional response akin to denial. I think the way to deal with this, I think it’s similar to the way you deal with other sorts of emotional responses (such as denial, which is in an emotional way as well). There’s very little evidence that when you are in this stage of denial, more facts and data will help. You just need to find another emotional door to this person’s mind so you can talk a similar language, because basically the mind is closing in to external influence and saying, ”This is all threatening to me,” and because it is, “I would just not engage.” And so the way I see it and the way I’ve been trying to focus my work recently is science and data is the necessary foundation of everything and I think we all agree on that, but it’s never enough. It’s never enough because fear is such a powerful emotional response that you need equally powerful emotional actions or tools to respond to it.
Ramesh
So Diego, do you find yourself in these conversations trying to convince doomers that there is hope around fighting climate change?
Diego
I think I do because I’m also stubborn, so I think I find myself ineffectively arguing the case, I guess, for “This is not lost.” But I think I’m trying, because my own emotional response is this is something that feels a bit threatening to me as a climate communicator that someone is not engaging in this. So I guess my initial response is usually, especially people who have a background climate change, this is not entirely lost cause and can get more tourists and just I gave them like the full versus. But I think once my head goes down a bit, I try to see a different way. We’re trying to do something in Costa Rica which is called climate conversations, and it’s a methodology that we were trying to develop to make it easier to talk about climate change. It is a model that started in the UK. Basically you try to bring people together and then you start by talking about what emotions you get from climate change and how it makes you feel, and ideally you bring your group group together and talk about it. We’re trying more to frame the conversation in this way, hoping that it will bring a more positive effect moving forward.
Ramesh
Diego, you’re based out of Costa Rica and you’ve published internationally. How do you think the American conversation about climate change is different from other parts of the world where you’ve engaged in these climate conversations?
Diego
I think the American conversation is entirely distorted, maybe similar to Australia and Norway, perhaps where the presence of fossil fuel interests has been so massive throughout the years and so pervasive as well, that it’s left a mark that is really hard now to erase. I mean, the fact that still you have a Congress that will not support climate action just because, it’s very different to most other countries. And even more than that, the fact that polls still show a decent chunk of the population disbelieving climate science; that is very different. So the conversation in the US is very different as to what you would have elsewhere. I think a big issue with this is the cultural dominance the US has over the world means that your climate conversation (which is distorted) distorts the rest of the worlds in a way, because it makes it feel that the rest of the world is as divided as the US, which I think is not the case. I think most of the world (and polls show it) overwhelmingly support climate action, but because most of the global media is based in the US and most of the global scholars come from the US it seems less hopeful.
Ramesh
Do you think that the media should be reporting on climate change differently? And if so, how should they do it?
Diego
This is weird because I’m going to I guess point a finger at myself as well, but I think one of the biggest issues we have as climate reporters is that we tell a fragmented story in the sense that we report individually or independently on the impacts and the solutions or things you can do. So you have a whole school of X solutions focused journalism, which is doing really cool stuff on what are people doing nowadays to change and make the world better, and you have a very interesting sort of way of journalism exploring the implications of drought in Southeast Asia and in cyclones and hurricanes in the Caribbean. But then I think there’s not enough journalism on climate change that connects what we’re seeing right now with what people can do. I think that is in part due to the fact that it is really not clear what is the best course to do as a person and as a community. I mean, it’s such a messy problem that it’s hard to point in the right direction and lead the way if you want and I think journalism in this way is just a reflection of society. Society doesn’t really know what the best course of action is. Yes, we know we have to get to decarbonized economy as soon as possible and make it resilient and just go from fossil fuels, but where to start, it’s quite tricky. And especially if you have countries where you have interests that will be impacted by this. So let me give you the case of Costa Rica where we have a fairly clean and renewable electricity grid; there at 98% as being for the best ten years or so. But then the transport sector — it’s so tricky to make changes that would actually decarbonize it and move it towards hopefully non-motorized, but with an ideally clean engine system that people don’t really know where to start. So if you’re a reporter and you’re covering the impact of climate change in Costa Rica and then you you’re covering say the impact of drought in the Pacific, or if you’re covering the impact of how climate change is making people who live in the north and central America countries migrate to the US or elsewhere, if you finish that story which could be a fantastic story on the impacts of climate change in Guatemala or Costa Rica or elsewhere and you read through it, it’s very easy to feel gloomy, and that’s just the bad part of the story. I am definitely not arguing for rosy-colored journalism. I hate rosy journalism, and I think it’s generally bad journalism, but we need to find a balance as journalism and also society of how do we write in a way that or do journalism in a way that gives people more agency over what they are reading and watching and listening to.
[music]
Jacquelyn
There has been a growing number of articles in recent years that focus on climate grief or anxiety, but I’ve heard some people make the argument that this kind of response is really just affluent white people in the global North that are waking up to a reality that marginalized communities have known for decades. Do you think this is a fair criticism? And I’d also like to hear more about what the climate conversation is like in other parts of the world?
Diego
Hmm I’ve heard the arguments and I think that there is definitely something there. It’s really tricky to discuss this, to differentiated impacts. And I think the caveat here is that I’m also, I guess, somehow part of this well-educated Costa Rican, speaks English and studied abroad. I’m not sure whether anxiety or gloom is what you would get from a farmer that didn’t get crops for a couple of years. I definitely believe that people in the front lines have been getting this for many years, in a bigger and broader sense than people living in the big cities of the world or in San Jose, the capital where I live. I have never experienced a drought affecting my crops. I have never seen my family’s home get flooded. In a way, this climate anxiety is a bit of a luxury, this sense of what could happen now? That doesn’t mean it’s not real. These are valid concerns for lots of people, but the question is whether these concerns rightly placed in the global agenda of emotions is warranted. And I think we go again to the cultural dominance of English-speaking media around the world; the fact that if I write the same piece and hope in Spanish, it will not get one-tenth of the pickup that I did because I wrote an English. And then the culture and emotional landscape of these English-speaking countries and the English-speaking elites around the world also influence the conversation you have in climate change. I don’t know if you have ever read a peer-reviewed paper in Spanish? I know I have only a couple, I mean recently. Usually I just go to English. So that’s one, and then the other also in media. The biggest media in the world in Spanish might be El Pais from Spain, and you don’t get that much from Pais in non-Spanish-speaking countries. And the same goes also by these conversations. I mean, there’s a handful of outlets trying to cover effectively climate change in Spanish. But then that’s already a niche, a small niche. And if you go into a climate emotions niche in Spanish-speaking media on climate change, then it’s like *peep*, one person writing every six months on it. It becomes harder to talk about this because then also as a reporter on climate change, like me, you have more incentives to write in English than to write in Spanish.
Ramesh
I’m curious to know: as a journalist, how closely do you follow the data and the projections around climate change? And if you do, is the science a source of hope or despair for you? Or is it somewhere in between?
Diego
I think a fair bit and I definitely need like a translator sort of person that would get the models and then explain to me what they mean. I mean, I’m not well versed enough in this to just break down the models. But I think what you get from the models, from the science is the general trajectory of possibilities. The models give you politics of the probable, and then with your work and especially with this work and emotions, so you go to the politics of the possible. Just to give an example, I was working in a newsroom the day the 1.5° report came out, which was a bit more than two years ago (was October 2018, I think?). I recall clearly the flurry of headlines and tweets and everyone talking about the report, then I just gave it like a quick look at the summary for policymakers. And that report, I think that was the last day that I can recall, or the most recent date that I felt like deep paralyzing fear. It was very breathtaking, that report, and I think especially the global coverage it got because it feels so real. There are some moments and I think you guys have the same reaction where you just put up your emotional barriers and then you try to filter out some of the science in a way in a self-defense mechanism, because if you just keep reading every single paper comes out about prediction models, I think it will just beat you down. So there’s a mix of both. It’s a mix. It guides you in my digital trajectory of what I think is happening. And then I acknowledged them as an impossible-to-deny reality of “this is what’s happening”. This is what’s likely to happen. But then there’s also, “Okay, don’t engage that much in something that you don’t have control over right now.” Try to move your energy somewhere else.
Jacquelyn
One of the recurring themes that’s come up in our conversations this season is uncertainty and how we don’t know exactly what the future will look like, but we can say that some futures are more or less likely. How do you balance conveying the urgency of climate change with the uncertainty of all the different potential outcomes? I’m curious about this especially because uncertainty tends to evoke really different emotions in people, from anxiety to hope. How do you deal with that kind of complexity in your teaching and writing?
Diego
I think communicating uncertainty is possibly the most difficult of communication jobs because just communicating risk and risk probabilities and how this might impact any one of us is just . . . I think I don’t have a clear response for this because I don’t even know how to deal with it myself. I think the way I try to deal with this is just by this like difference that I describe which the problem on the possible. So we know what’s probable and I guess that is very clear, sadly, but even the probable like leaves many open possibilities of things that are less likely; I can go forward. I think a way I’ve seen recently to explore it is by scenario-making. It’s not necessarily journalism; it’s more like facilitation. It’s just like bringing people on board on a group workshop, can explore what unlikely scenarios can happen. And then in that way, if you can make policies or plans that would fit most scenarios (even the good, the bad likely or unlikely), then I think is a decent enough way to manage the anxiety. The trick is how you transform that into a journalism piece, which once again goes back to one of the issues of journalism is we cannot convey the complexity that you would like to in a novel, for instance, or in a report in one or two or three pieces, even in a special. One way to do it will be to focus. I mean, I guess what goes to the core of what I described with novels is to go to stories. If you’re reading, for instance, the Parable of the Sower, Butler, or New York 2140, they would convey uncertainty in ways very different. I mean, they are very unlikely worlds on very unlikely trajectories. So maybe stories are the way to show what could happen or what can happen in the future. Something journalists would need to change as well is how it focuses on local stories. And it’s also an issue right now because yes, you see subscriptions on the New York Times and Washington Post and big media outlets growing, but there’s a big issue with local outlets everywhere in the world. The issue is those are the outlets that cover the big stories on climate change or the important stories and climate change. Stories that impact people, that people know, that community feel. One of the things I would love to change in the future is generally how do we make local journalism more interested and engaged on climate change, and how to make climate change and climate change journalism focus more on local topics.
Ramesh
Do you think a focus on local climate change journalism would lead to stories being told in a more authentic way, because they’re at a scale that is more tangible to the viewer or listener?
Diego
Possibly, and I think this is why you’ve seen the rise of newsletters. Because you cater to a more specific audience, and locally could be like locally in your social group? But then also this locally on a specific topic, focusing on something very specific the specific audience wants. And if you tried something similar with local stories, people will feel themselves seen and part of the solution. The biggest issues we have with climate solutions is that the people we, you should represent solving climate change are people that usually don’t look like the majority of us. They usually look like scientists (sorry, guys), diplomats, engineers. And the vast majority of people who are not any of this, they lived their lives wondering, “Where am I in the equation?” And if you have more local stories and you focus more on local people, then maybe you have other people that you definitely need; you need like new carpenters, you need like new bus drivers; you need new teachers being part of the solution along with, of course, the diplomats and the scientists and the engineers. It’s just opening up more of the scope of who are we solving climate change and who are responding to climate change.
Jacquelyn
I really appreciate your perspective, because I’ve never quite thought about how the American model of climate reporting has focused so much on the topic of belief or disbelief in climate change, but there’s this real hunger for stories about how we make change within our communities. I think that such a different way of talking about the climate crisis, and it’s much more empowering. And you’re right; we don’t see those kinds of stories out there.
Diego
That action-based conversation is precisely how I see and many other people see hope. As Greta said a couple of years ago, it’ s something you have to earn. There’s this really beautiful line in this book, Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit. She says something like, “Hope is not a lottery ticket you sit on the couch and hold; it’s an axe to just break down doors in an emergency.” And if you make a conversation fit for action, then what you’re getting to the end is hope.
Ramesh
Warm Regards is produced by Justin Schell. Jo Stormer creates our transcripts, and Katherine Peinhardt is our social media maven. Music for this episode comes from Blue Dot Sessions.
You can find a transcript of this episode, listen to previous episodes, and find links to subscribe via the podcast platform of your choice on our website, WarmRegardsPodcast.com. Also, something that really helps more people learn about our show is if you could leave a quick review or rating, especially on Apple Podcasts.
You can reach us at [email protected] our find us on Twitter at @OurWarmRegards.
This season of Warm Regards is made possible by our patrons on Patreon. Their donations help pay our great team members Justin, Jo, and Katherine for all their hard work. If you’re interested in supporting the show, you can go to patreon.com/warmregards. There’s also a link to the page in our show notes and website. From all of us at Warm Regards, thanks for letting us into your head. | https://medium.com/@ourwarmregards/apocalyptic-narratives-climate-data-and-hope-with-zeke-hausfather-and-diego-arguedas-ortiz-8ed6506260d9 | ['Warm Regards'] | 2020-12-29 19:22:02.062000+00:00 | ['Climate Action', 'Climate Change'] |
A sex story to curl your mind | Curvy Girl doesn’t make it through to the end of this story, but don’t worry; it’s a happy ending. Stay with me.
I was raised in a tradition that stressed strict gender roles. For we girls, puberty meant modest clothing, long skirts or dresses, arms and shoulders covered.
And becoming the playthings of the older men in the community, as well as being the housework slaves. Arranged marriages to men at least ten years older, to cap off a life of perpetual subordination.
As anybody reading my writing will know, that wasn’t how my life turned out. I escaped all that, but one result was that during my formative years, I had an extremely limited view of gender roles.
The growing influence of LGBT+ folk in Australia was a challenge. We girls had been taught such activities were deviance — tolerated, but still not quite the thing — but when I discovered that these people thought their lives were not only normal but fun, I had to hammer that concept into my mind.
University and exposure to many different views helped. But still, at heart, I was the girl I’d been brought up to be.
Meet Curvy Girl
Curvy Girl was a few years older than me, but for some reason, we shared an elective class. A PhD student, she had travelled, she was very widely read, she was sexually experienced, she drove a car. I’d barely scraped the surface of that list. And she had the most fantastic pair of breasts in the world.
Like someone had stuck a couple of basketballs on her chest, painted them flesh colour, and topped them off with a couple of nipples in proportion. Men on the street — well, men anywhere — would stare at her, their eyes hanging out of their sockets, and their tongues drooling on the cobblestones.
Yes, cobblestones. She kick-started my own love of travel by guiding four of us undergraduates through Europe one summer. Luckily she shared the driving, so she sat in front. There was no room for her, her hips, and her “girls” in the back seat of our rental Mini, let me tell you! The skinniest of we teenagers sat in the back and enjoyed the view.
I fell in love with Curvy Girl. She knew everything. And she could sweet-talk men into doing us favours, just by bending forward a little. We got special rates on rooms, dinners, VIP tours. She was the woman I wanted to be when I grew up.
In a way, I did. Sex was my adventure, I began reading more than philosophy textbooks, I learnt to drive, I travelled the world, and I grew the most amazing rack.
Like hell I did! My own pair were nicely-shaped and nobody ever complained, but they weren’t that award-winning pair of Golden Globes that Curvy Girl sported.
Curvy Girl was my goddess that summer. She explained the finer points of the Bayeux Tapestry, she stood on an outcrop of rock over a Norwegian fjord like the world’s most impressive figurehead, she found us a restaurant in Barcelona high on Montjuic where we got bubbly on cava and looked out over Sagrada Famillia, and she got her bottom pinched so many times in Milan that she couldn’t sit down.
I had to spread some ointment over those equally fabulous cheeks, and they could have been mounted in the Louvre, so splendidly rounded and multi-coloured they were. Maybe they were; she had disappeared for half an hour with a Parisian boyfriend while we were craning our necks at the Mona Lisa.
Hitting close to home
After university, I stayed in touch. She got her PhD, got married, settled down, and then one day she turned up at my door, crying her heart out. Her husband had kicked her out. On her birthday. For another man.
How any man worth the name could toss out that brilliant mind, that fabulous body, and that loving heart was beyond me, but he had.
Over the next year, Curvy Girl became Curvy Crazy Cat Lady. She stayed in her room, eating slab after slab of chocolate, reading the trashiest of romances, and listening to Michael Bublé. It was a tragedy.
She doubled in size, her snores shook the house, her KFC packages choked our rubbish bin.
I could never ask her to leave, but the atmosphere got a little strained from time to time.
She left after a year. On her birthday. I was worried for her, but she checked in a week later from San Francisco, of all places, where she had found a job teaching at Berkeley.
Well, that was it, I figured. She’d smoke dope, run a boarding house in a muumuu, and develop an American accent. End of the line.
Her Facebook page indicated a certain degree of Californian oddness, but what set the cap on it was her profile shot a couple of years later. There she was in a tight t-shirt — hell, all t-shirts were tight on her — down a dozen sizes apart from her boobs, which had increased in amazingness during the chocolate shop phase. She looked taut, tanned, terrific, pedalling a bike beside the Pacific, Pamela Anderson eat your heart out.
That T-shirt, though. Purple with three words on it. “They. Them. Their.” I thought she was referring to her breasts.
I’ve only just begun asking others to use those pronouns for me, and it just feels so much more me, and better, than she and her. — Curvy Girl
Clearly, this was the beginning of the end. Her mind had gone. This was political correctness gone mad. California was described in some circles as being like breakfast cereal, chock full of fruits, nuts, and flakes.
Here was the proof. There could not be anyone more female than my friend.
I’m non-binary. That means I identify as beyond the two traditional genders. I’m not a woman, and I’m not a man, and I’m not nothing. I’m me!— Curvy Girl
WTAF? I’d seen every millimetre of skin she possessed, and she was definitely gloriously female in every bit of her body. My mind skidded helplessly over the idea that she didn’t consider herself to be a woman. How did that work?
I’ve always been a true feminist and I don’t believe women have to be built in an expected way to be female. — Curvy Girl
That made sense. Men can be feminists too, and body image issues are always problematic. The way I’d been raised gave definite roles to men and women, but also taught us that we were, at heart, not just equal but equivalent. We might look different on the outside, but the light of consciousness was the same for all, just looking out of different eyes in different bodies, as it were.
The body is not the soul. That was clear.
When I discovered the phrase ‘non-binary’ it was like the sun lit up my head. Suddenly, I knew who I really was. I knew why I’d had this unhappiness in my life, my childhood, my adulthood, my relationships, everything. When I came out to my Mum, she said, ‘Yes! That fits perfectly!”. So, even though I’ve only just revealed myself as non-binary, I’ve been non-binary forever. — Curvy Girl
All this was foreign to me, and I struggled a little with the changes in someone I thought I knew very well. But if I was hearing her right, she’d always been this way, hiding it not just from the outside world, but from herself — oops, themselves — and I had to adjust my thinking to meet the reality.
Busted!
But worse was to come. They had put their name down for “top surgery”. Breast surgery with extreme prejudice. Apparently the sight of that inspiring and uplifting chest was making it difficult for people to remember to use the correct pronouns.
Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash
But surely this was a crime? Burning down your own house is still arson. And that bust could have won a chestful of medals and awards. Don’t do it, I almost said. Think of all the guys — and gals — who look at you with awe in their eyes.
When the doctor was examining me, I realised just how divided I was from my boobs. I didn’t find it a violation of my body to be checked and poked, I felt like I had so little relationship to these bags of meat that just happened to be stuck on my body. That was the moment it resonated with true harmony; it struck me just how divorced I was from my breasts. — Curvy Girl
Now, I’ve heard of something similar. People who amputate a limb because it doesn’t feel right, like a chunk of meat that is inconveniently stuck on their body, like a piece of a stranger. It’s called xenomelia, or body integrity dysphoria. Apparently their brain isn’t wired up to accept the whole body, and it’s easier to slice off the flesh because, well how do you rewire your brain?
But expensive, especially in America. Curvy Girl gasped at the cost, but as they said,
This seemed more important. Why buy your dream house when you can buy your dream body?
And they did it. With full disclosure to friends, family, and workmates, so there was every chance to talk them out of it. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/curvy-girl-8736f425a078 | ['Britni Pepper'] | 2020-08-27 06:38:22.422000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Coming Out', 'Gender', 'Non Binary', 'LGBTQ'] |
World hugest Indigenous Mobilization | We have an Open Letter circulating with over 1,600 signatures and growing every day.
FlorestaTV — Open Letter of Indigenous People of Brasil — lauched on 28th July 2021 — Brasilia — Foto by Hugo Takemoto
We know that the Amazon Forest is considered the heart of the world for being the biggest biodiversity hub on the planet, and we live in a new era where the society is fully aware of the need to preserve the environment.
At the same time, according to our indigenous traditions, we are living the New Thought, known as Xinã Bena. After centuries of persecution, exploitation and conflict, we are gaining a voice in society and we believe that the time has come to open up to interact with the whole world.
In this New Time, we all collaborate and together we co-create a new world, made by us, Colored Peoples: all races of all colors reach a new way of feeling and integrating the true Xinã Bena and acting in favor of the forests. Aware of our importance and our rights, we want to show our cultural legacy and our way of seeing human beings as part of nature.
We’ve been screaming for attention for over 500 years. Our premise is to engage more and more people in the conservation of biodiversity and this ancestral culture that can help the planet so much with our millenary knowledge about living in harmony with the forest.
We ask for the REJECTION of Bill 490 of 2007, which is being processed in the Chamber of Deputies and deals with the change in the legislation on the demarcation of indigenous lands in Brazil. The text of PL 490, and its addenda, paves the way for our extermination and desertification of the Amazon Forest. Therefore, it is irrefutable that this bill must be REJECTED in its entirety by the Legislative House of this country, as well as other bills that are under the same theme and purpose.
Pajé Txaná Ixã, Pajé Txaná Kixtin, Ibã Huni kuin, Eduardo Pizaroli [Tete Beru], Shane Inu Bake [Guilherme Meneghelli], Camila Saibro, Mathilde Everaere, Flora Dutra, Advan Haschi, Rael Castro, Hugo Takemoto, Daniel Heberle, Graziele Borges, Gabriela Guidetti, Chloe Malkine, Nathalie Malkine [Pranad Monja do Amor], Vhera Xunú, Cacique Nasso, Cacique Geral da Nação Huni Kui Ninawa Inu Huni KuĪ…
Sign this letter and take part of this Global Movement that concerns all of us : | https://medium.com/florestatv/since-august-23rd-part-of-the-floresta-tv-collective-team-arrived-in-bras%C3%ADlia-federal-district-946e6a7157f7 | ["Ma'Ah Tribu"] | 2021-09-02 04:18:58.316000+00:00 | ['Florestatv', 'Floresta Amazônica', 'Indigenous', 'Amazon'] |
10 Effective Ways To Deal With Jealous People | 10 Effective Ways To Deal With Jealous People
Have you ever been on a once in a lifetime luxury holiday to post your experience naively with excitement only to be met with jealous friends when you come home that remain this way as if you owe them something.
What to do with these personality types if you come across this type of behaviour.
Empathize and identify with their viewpoint.
Channel their overcorrection to your advantage. You have more to give then what they serve you.
Research how to overcome narcissitic abuse and learn how to deal with the narcissist attitudes.
Avoid always talking about yourself and give them importance instead, these people like to be center of attention as if life were a show.
Take their hateful comments with a smile knowing the real truth behind the shade and misjudgment they throw your way.
Address the matter head-on and nip it in the bud so it begins to stop. Don’t fall into their agenda of targeted attacks.
Do genuine deeds of kindness towards jealous people who mislead you with forgiveness in your heart.
Limit your interaction with them or remove and don’t associate yourself with them in your life.
Life is tough but if you are able to deal with things effectively and not become too emotional when dealing with jealous mockers than you will be better off and happier for it.
It can be painful when people attack your credibility knowing how hard and how much dedication and discipline it took for you to serve with your gifts and passions .
People should not pick on you, bully or intimidate you using their authority or constantly find fault for pursuing your path and creativity in life
Painting and doing Art like anything is a discipline and is incredibly time consuming and labour intensive only to be glanced at, overlooked, scrolled by and taken for granted through green eyes.
Never to truely be appreciated by jealous contenders as a unique soul expression of something to be treasured in homes for a lifetime.
Building a bridge is a two way street.
If you found this helpful than recommend applaud and follow now. | https://medium.com/@angeliichoo77/10-effective-ways-to-deal-with-jealous-people-da60dab3a1c3 | [] | 2020-12-17 07:24:17.364000+00:00 | ['Friendship', 'Abuse', 'Travel', 'People', 'Jealousy'] |
Express your creative side with us | We at Agilemania believe everyone is creative and need a platform to demonstrate creativity. I am creative in writing and like to express my creative side through writing. OK, I may not be good at that, but I don’t give up easily. Agilemania has been a platform for me to demonstrate my creativity.
We are opening this platform for everyone willing to demonstrate their creative side. All kind of creativity is welcome. However, we want to limit to a few areas initially as we have limited capacity to support them. When we say platform, it is not just to demonstrate but also to earn praise and rewards.
What do you need to do?
Come up with hand-drawn sketches, doodles videos, blogs, research papers, case studies, posters, videos, articles, and stories about agile, product management, project management, software development, agility in social works, marketing, sales, and human resource management.
What can you expect from us?
We shall review your work, will guide you if any adjustment is needed, will teach you at our cost if needed, and will refine it together to make it releasable. Once you agree on quality, we will share it through the Agilemania website, which includes giving credits to you to promote our social channels.
Will there be any monetary rewards?
Yes. We can have an agreement on this either upfront or before publishing it. Content ownership will be with Agilemania once it is published. Rewards depend on quality and effort.
What kind of work is acceptable?
Blogs — a minimum of 500 words, no plagiarism, and align with the knowledge areas shared above.
Videos — 2–10 minutes of doodle video/whiteboard animation and character animations.
Research papers — research is done on any subject with complete raw data, the method used for research, and the white paper's compilation.
Graphics — hand-drawn graphics and posters.
Stories — Success, failure, and inspirational stories but professional stories.
Why are we doing it?
The idea was triggered by Agile 30 (a community supported by Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org) to build a common and safe platform to promote an individual’s creative side. This will help in creating a knowledge base of new people as well.
How to start?
Have conversion with us. 1st step is to share your interest through email at [email protected] | https://medium.com/agilemania/express-your-creative-side-with-us-61e4f71e0744 | ['Naveen Kumar Singh'] | 2020-12-25 05:46:19.886000+00:00 | ['Articles', 'Videos', 'Blogging', 'Graphic Design', 'Agile'] |
My Bias Statement | My Bias Statement
What is Bias?
If you Google the word “bias”, you’ll be met with the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, which is as follows
Bias is a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief. In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error. Statistical bias results from an unfair sampling of a population, or from an estimation process that does not give accurate results on average.
Basically, a bias is any existing predisposition that skews our thoughts, attitudes, or behaviors. While we often describe it as a negative thing, it’s mostly a human thing. Our backgrounds and experiences shape the way we see the world. These subconscious associations and assumptions come out in how we talk about the things that happen to and around us.
We’re all biased in one way or another. This helps our brain process our world quickly and helps us communicate to people who are like us. The problem comes when we don’t recognize and examine our biases or assume everyone thinks the same way.
Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash
My Bias(es)
I am married to a man who shares my values but not my worldview or background. This means we sometimes have heated discussions because we approach life differently. We usually want the same things, but we disagree on how best to get there.
Fundamental Thoughts About the World
We hear a lot about different stances in politics, faith, etc. but some of our core beliefs are actually responsible. Here are some things I believe about the world that you may not agree with.
People are fundamentally flawed.
I believe that people are capable of amazing things, but naturally respond in a self-centered manner. Everyone will fail at some point. Similarly… Things created or run by people are fundamentally flawed.
Any system or organization built or run by human beings is inherently flawed. Churches, businesses, the government — nothing is going to work perfectly, and we should expect that and account for it. 90% of things in the world have no “right” answer.
There are very few things that I believe to be absolutes in the world. Even things that are absolute (murder is wrong) may have multiple “right” solutions (how do we prevent murder?). The ends don’t justify the means. But means to no ends are just as unjustifiable.
Results matter. I think a lot of energy is wasted on things that don’t produce the actual desired outcomes. But if we throw away our morals to get the results we want, is the end result even valid? It is easier to change people’s behavior than their minds.
Our brains are making unconscious decisions all day long. It is easier to guide subconscious behavior through signals than *to try to reshape deep-seated thought patterns.
*Here’s an example of bias in action: I could just say “than to reshape…” but I wrote “to try to reshape…” because I think it’s incredibly difficult (maybe even impossible) to reshape a lot of core beliefs. I almost took out this sentence in editing, but left it to prove a point. Bias can be subtle, but that doesn’t make it less powerful. It takes time and energy to see when bias is influencing our thoughts or behavior. | https://medium.com/an-us-point-of-view/my-bias-statement-533d8d1a5c69 | ['Wei Styer'] | 2020-11-05 03:52:28.248000+00:00 | ['Perspective', 'Bias', 'Statement', 'Belief', 'Thoughts'] |
Myrtle Beach Bowl Betting Preview | Nothing better than two 6–6 teams going toe-to-toe on a Monday at 2:30pm!
Myrtle Beach Bowl
Tulsa (6–6) vs Old Dominion (6–6)
Monday, 2:30pm, ESPN
Tulsa -9/Total 52.5
Head to FanDuel Sportsbook to take advantage of your $1,000 risk-free bet
After a pretty entertaining first weekend, Bowl season rolls on Monday with a game that doesn’t seem very interesting on paper, but features two teams who had to fight to just reach bowl eligibility, so hopefully some of that will carry over to Myrtle Beach. Tulsa’s season by any tangible measure was disappointing. They made the AAC title game last year and had 18 starters back, but limped to .500. They had to win their final three games of the year to get bowl eligible and ended with a nice win over SMU. Old Dominion didn’t play football in 2020 and started 2021 1–6 and had to win five-straight elimination games to get here. It’s a heck of an achievement for second year coach Ricky Rahne and the Monarch program playing in its second bowl game since moving to FBS in 2014.
There are some positives for the Tulsa offense. They run the ball ok. Shamari Brooks is 78 yards away from 1,000 on the season. He’s backed up by Anthony Watkins and Deneric Prince who combined for almost 1,000 yards as a duo. Receiver Josh Johnson had a breakout season with 75 catches and 985 yards. The problem for Tulsa on offense is they turn the ball over…a lot. Only four teams in FBS turned the ball over more than the Golden Hurricane. Quarterback Davis Brin was largely responsible for that, throwing 16 interceptions. Brin also completes under 60 percent of his passes so they’re hoping he’ll be more efficient here. Brin is capable of putting up some numbers, he threw for 428 yards against Ohio State this year, but he has to work on his ball security. There’s nothing spectacular about the Tulsa defense, they’re just a solid unit. They’re 48th in pass efficiency defense and 61st in rushing defense.
The Old Dominion turnaround coincided with the insertion of quarterback Hayden Wolff and running back Blake Watson into the starting lineup. Wolff took over against Western Kentucky and improved upon the work previous starter DJ Mack had done to that point. Mack completes 51.5 percent of his passes and had a 5 to 7 TD to INT ratio. Wolff’s completion percentage is over 60 percent and his TD to INT ratio is 10 to 6. He’s not lighting the world on fire, but two of his picks were against WKU and two were in the season finale against Charlotte where ODU scored 56 points. Watson took the starting running back job against Marshall and ran for 168 yards. He’s only rushed for fewer than 100 yards in a game once since then. Old Dominion has been fine defensively, ranking 44th in EPA per pass play and EPA per rush play allowed.
There’s a pretty big gulf in quality between the American and Conference USA so these 6–6 records aren’t exactly equal, but this smells of the kind of game where the underdog hangs around. Counting the Celebration Bowl, underdogs are 6–2 against the spread in bowl games so far with four outright wins (the line in the WKU-App State game closed all over the place, but that was another upset win in some places). Old Dominion is going to be very excited to be in their second bowl game, particularly after starting 1–6. Tulsa is better, but I doubt they’re pumped to be in this game. I think Tulsa wins, but I’d take the points in this one if I was betting it. | https://blog.fantasylifeapp.com/myrtle-beach-bowl-betting-preview-f9eda559301e | [] | 2021-12-19 23:35:00.699000+00:00 | ['Sportsbetting', 'Collegefootball'] |
Digital Marketing Strategy: A Framework for Success | Arecent report revealed that nearly 50 percent of businesses don`t have a clearly defined online marketing strategy to steer their digital marketing efforts. social media marketing solution are investing their time, money and resources in paid digital marketing services without a well planned approach for goal setting and achievement, task prioritization, marketing direction and budget and resource allocation.
Route to Success Where are you now? Where do you want to be? What is the best approach to achieve your business goals? Where Is Your Digital Marketing Budget Going? Our digital strategy companies respond to these questions by helping you generate profitable online marketing ideas and reach your goals. social media marketing software Help build a robust framework for your brand’s digital marketing strategy. Launch a digital marketing campaign using the Thrive Internet Marketing Agency’s marketing strategy service.
cost effective advertising services bangalore. start with a strategy Discovering Market Opportunities and Increasing Sales Marketing your brand without an internet marketing strategy or with an improper online marketing plan is a surefire way to lose money, waste time and go nowhere. is. | https://medium.com/@johndavidmichael/digital-marketing-strategy-a-framework-for-success-a1ecd226404d | [] | 2021-12-14 04:53:08.056000+00:00 | ['Internet Service Provider', 'Seo Service Provider', 'Internet Marketing', 'Digital Marketing Agency'] |
Communication and Transparency in a Distributed Workforce | Whether you’re already a seasoned remote employee, or you’re just looking to get in to the space, there’s two terms you’re bound to hear over and over again, without fail:
Transparency and over-communication.
“We’re a transparent company,” they say.
“We work in the open.”
“We have a culture of transparency and over-communication.”
Sound familiar?
Transparency is, without doubt, a necessity for the success of a remote or distributed organization. Unlike a traditional office where information is consolidated in to one physical location and questions can be answered simply by stepping in to someone’s office for a chat, remote or distributed companies have to go above and beyond to combat one of the greatest time consumers people face: information access.
When you’re communicating asynchronously, this is especially true. A conversation that might take 1–2 minutes in an office, can — and often does — take 1–2 days in an remote organization. The reason for this? Communication and transparency.
In order to be transparent in your work, you must adopt a philosophy of over communication which, in itself, is a form of transparency. In essence, it’s a two step process.
Rather than define what it means to be transparent and over communicate (you can easily Google this), I want to show you some real-life examples of how to integrate this in to your day-to-day work.
Step 1 — Over Communicate:
For many companies (with few exceptions — I see you Automattic), email still reigns as the primary form of formal communication. I say “formal” because Slack and other collaboration platforms are highly active informal communication methods that are used by the remote / distributed workforce to keep in touch throughout the day. The problem, though, is that sending someone a DM on Slack for information may or may not ever net you a response. Posting important team updates in a channel likely means someone will miss it— either due to timezone discrepancies or because six other people posted updates right after you did; now yours has been lost to the scroll factor. Slack is ephemeral and, especially for distributed organizations with people around the globe, it can be the complete opposite of transparent.
But this isn’t an article on the downfalls of Slack, so let’s get back to email.
I use email as my fail-safe and I make it publicly known to my team that if they wish for information to reach me they should default to emailing me first. That being said, nothing annoys me quite like receiving an email that reads something like this:
“Subject: All Hands
Hey, do we have an All Hands coming up? I wanted to present something.”
Okay, so this is good — a team member (let’s call him Gabe) being proactive about wanting to present, right? Right. However, Gabe just created a time sink; what should have taken five minutes of both our time will now likely take at least a day. Let me explain.
I check my email three to four times a day (if you’re someone that checks their email 600 times a day, kudos to you, but I’m a firm believer in work / life balance). Assuming I received this at the end of the day, I doubt I would respond until the following morning. Without more information to go on, my response might look something like this:
“Re: All Hands
Hi Gabe,
Yes, that is correct. What were you thinking? Do you already have something prepared I can review?”
And now we wait for a reply:
“Re re: All Hands”
Great! I was hoping to present something on the new integration I’ve been working on — I have something sort of put together, would you like me to send it over?”
And so it goes, on and on until we’ve worked our way down to an answer. Hopefully before Wednesday arrives. I call this “the back-and-forth factor.”
When you’re distributed or working remotely and you need information from someone, always assume they have no idea what you are talking about from the get-go. The burden to find information should never be on the receiving individual. Any time you’re trying to solicit information from someone, any work that you’ve already put in to the topic should be outlined so clearly that only actionable feedback is necessary (ie: one email there, one email back).
Let’s rework this email with over-communication and transparency in mind:
“Subject: All Hands
Hey Sharon,
Happy Monday! I noticed that we have an All Hands call on Wednesday, the 6th at 11:00 AM PST. Last week Jamie mentioned there was an open invite for presenters on this call. I’ve put some thought in to it and I would really like to do a five minute presentation on the new integration I’ve been working on this quarter.
Here are some links to the work itself: (insert links here)
I’ve also included an draft presentation for your review, which I’ve attached here.
I’d love to get your feedback on the second and third points, specifically. If I do not hear back from you by EOD Tuesday, I will assume we are set on presentations and put this on the docket for next week instead.”
Notice the difference?
Everything I need to know has been outlined for me upfront. I know how long the presentation is going to be, I know the topic the presentation is on, I have direct access to the work, a draft of the presentation itself, and I know exactly which points this person would like feedback on so my response can be scoped accordingly.
This philosophy should apply to all areas of written communication. It doesn’t matter if your company uses Trello, Asana, Github, etc. to collaborate. If you’re writing an announcement, updating a project status, soliciting feedback, or shipping something out to the rest of your organization — there should always be background, links to relevant information about the topic, dates, timelines, and most importantly, direct questions.
Don’t be the person that wastes others’ time because you did not put in the effort to mitigate the back and forth factor.
Step 2 — Make it Transparent:
Long ago I started working as though no one had a clue what I was doing during the day. I stopped thinking that my manager would know what our priorities were when we met for our 1:1’s or that anyone followed my Github repo which beautifully outlined my to-do lists each week. I gave up believing that even emails sent to the right people were read and quickly became tired of getting emails back asking me where I was at with this project or that proposal.
If you’re a distributed or remote employee understand that posting information in one place is never going to be transparent enough.
Emailing the right people directly means still getting Slack DM’s that say, “Hey, what’s the status on X?” Writing an agenda for your team call ahead of time and posting it in the team channel doesn’t mean John is going to look at it and add his items as requested.
Keep in mind that people in distributed and remote organizations often work very differently; programmers might turn off their Slack notifications in order to focus on writing code, CEO’s might disable the email feature on Github because they’re already inundated with notifications from other outlets. The safest bet is to always assume at least one person is not following the platform you’re using to communicate.
Before a team call I usually write up an agenda in a Google Doc and make sure all of my major points are outlined. Then I email that agenda to my team (if you’re not familiar with Google Groups, you’re missing out on a useful transparency / mass communication tool), post it in the respective Slack channel, update my Github issue with a link to the Google Doc, and even add it to the department page so the rest of the organization can see what we’re discussing that day.
Let’s review this, quickly. For one meeting, I’ve sent out, or posted, an agenda through:
Email / Google Groups
Slack
Github
Drive
That’s four different outlets. If someone in Spain is asleep and misses the Slack notification, they have three more chances at finding that information in their email and through the team drive.
From there, to take it one step further, I add that agenda to my running weekly Task List that I keep pinned on my Slack profile. Anyone can view that Task List at any time.
In distributed work, very few things should be a surprise. If someone has to ask me where my proposal is or what my priorities are that week, I’ve done something wrong.
Let’s take that email scenario from a bit earlier and extrapolate that into transparent over-communication.
Assuming I agreed to add the integration presentation to the weekly All Hands call, the first thing to do is send an email back to my team member with my feedback points and ask them to add the new item to the All Hands Agenda (you wanted it, you need to make sure it gets on there). Because the presentation is now approved, it means there has been a change to the meeting schedule, so I’ll want to copy the relevant All Hands leads on that reply email to make them aware (and now they can see the email exchange up until this point) that we have a new demo to include.
Following the All Hands call everyone in the organization receives an email with a video recording of the call (in case they missed it) and a copy of the agenda. In that email, I should be able to click on the agenda item link for Gabe’s presentation and have it take me to his Github issue. In it, I can find copies of his slides, links to relevant code or work, and drop comments if I so desire. For transparency sake, we’ll also post the email notification to Slack and notify the @channel that a new recording is available. The agenda itself, along with the recording, will be saved in the All Hands Meeting folder, which can be accessed at-will by team members.
No one should ever have to say, “So, what did I miss?” in a distributed or remote organization. Ever.
Think of over-communication and transparency as a way to protect — not others — but yourself. When you adopt a philosophy of working this way, you’re opening up your work to an entire organization. You might receive feedback on a half-completed proposal, or have team members drop comments in to an outline that you’ve barely started, but that is the little picture. The point is that you’ve done your due diligence to make sure that you’re working in the open; you’re creating access to information, not blockers. More importantly, you’re saving yourself and your organization valuable time. | https://medium.com/@skylar.n.norris/communication-and-transparency-in-a-distributed-workforce-a7a84d0db3ba | ['Skylar Norris'] | 2019-06-17 17:36:47.365000+00:00 | ['Remote Working', 'Remote Work', 'Startup', 'Remote', 'Distributed Teams'] |
What My Time as a Management Consultant Taught Me About Parenting | What My Time as a Management Consultant Taught Me About Parenting
Somehow the “balls to the wall” culture made me a better mom.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
When I finally graduated from my doctoral program, I was living the dream. Well, maybe not the dream you’re thinking of. I didn’t have much money. But I was living the dream I embraced as a young impressionable kid watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was a single girl living in a teeny tiny one-bedroom apartment, making my way in the big city.
And I was ready to make my mark.
My first job out of grad school was as an associate consultant in a large international management consulting firm. My job was probably exactly like you’d imagine. Lots of smart, driven, competitive people traveling a lot, working hard and playing hard. At the end of each month, all of the consultants were rank-ordered in terms of billable hours. And the list was posted in the break room. True story. It was an intense culture.
I used the term “balls to the wall” in the title of this piece. I didn’t even know that phrase until I took this job. But I quickly figured out what it meant and how to live that motto even without the requisite balls.
I’ve often joked that years spent working in management consulting are like dog years. It felt like I got 7 years of experience in that very first year. I did some really cool projects and have some great “in the trenches” stories from those days. Like the time I arrived in Mexico City without a single peso. But anyway… Let’s just say, I learned a ton of things.
However, I wouldn’t say I learned many things that prepared me to be a mother. Quite the contrary, I might say that I learned a lot of things that had the potential to make me a very very bad mother. For example, I learned to push through even when I was exhausted. When I was a young fresh-faced associate consultant, that was fine. But given how short my patience tends to be when I’m tired, it probably wouldn’t be my best strategy for parenting.
As a consultant, I also learned how to manage projects like a boss. Kids are not projects, however. And they really don’t take kindly to being treated as such. There was no spreadsheet in the world that was going to get my toddlers potty trained any faster. Or make my first grader a better reader. Or make my anxious child adjust to a new school more easily. Or raise those scores on their college entrance exams.
Sadly, when I became a mom, I realized that some of my hard-won consulting skills needed to go. I worked really really hard at unlearning some of those very same skills I had been so proud of back in my crazy management consulting days.
I learned to stop looking at everything as a deliverable. I stopped seeing time as money. I learned to slow down and just enjoy the moment. Not perfectly… by any stretch, because some of those things weren’t really skills, but personality traits. Or just my temperament. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I’m pretty controlling and type-A by nature.
Traits and temperaments tend to be difficult to change. But little by little I’ve gotten better. My kids are teenagers now and I’m still unlearning some of those skills, traits, and lessons from my consulting days.
However, there is actually one skill from those days that has continued to serve me well as a mother.
Back when I started my career, corporate America was in the heyday of the vision statement. Do you remember the vision statement? Lots and lots of organizations hired people like me to help them craft the perfect set of words. Every single one of my clients assured me that their vision statement would not simply be something that they hung on the wall and printed in their annual reports.
However, that’s exactly what most vision statements ended up being.
It would have been easy to become disillusioned with the entire idea of a vision statement after seeing the fate of almost everyone I helped create. I definitely started to doubt that they mattered or that they affected corporate performance in any way. After a while, I started to feel a little like a snake oil salesman when I worked on yet another vision statement project.
However, deep down I still believe in the power of the vision statement. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I believe in the power of a clear vision.
Day-to-day of parenting isn’t particularly glamorous. On those days when you feel like you can’t look at another sticker chart, or listen to your burgeoning reader read another book, or play one more game of chutes and ladders, or even cook one more stinking dinner for people who would prefer a happy meal from McDonald’s anyway, a clear vision can really help you pull through.
A clear vision is also a great aid when making the 700 billion decisions and choices parents make for their kids or regarding their kids. Visions help us know what things to care about, what issues to take seriously, and which ones really aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of your vision. (And spoiler alert, it turns out most problems fall into the latter category.)
My vision as a parent is that I hope to raise nice, self-sufficient humans who have a pretty good idea of who they are, how they work, and how to be a good members of society. Now there are lots of details that fall under that big vision. But in a broad sense, that vision has been my touchstone for many years.
When the birthday party invitation didn’t arrive or the teacher assignment wasn’t what I had hoped, I asked myself, “will this prevent my kids from becoming nice humans?” “will they be unable to become self-sufficient adults?” Usually, the answer was no.
Of course, there have been times I’ve lost sight of the vision. I found myself twisted in knots over something that my vision would have said wasn’t worth getting so worked up about. Those are the times I am grateful that my wise friends would remind me to lighten up, or to sleep on it, or just asked me if I would still care about whatever I was driving myself crazy thinking about in a year or two.
And occasionally, there have been issues, problems, or setbacks that felt as if they might postpone the vision. But as I said, I stopped thinking about time in terms of billable hours quite some time ago. When it comes to parenting, time really isn’t money. Time is a gift. I tend to think of setbacks just as things unfolding on a different schedule now.
No one is more surprised than I am to realize that I actually learned something as a management consultant that has been so core to my life as a parent. It’s even more surprising when I consider the fate of most vision statements out there in the world.
Perhaps that’s the way life goes. Sometimes the things we least expect to have value actually stick with us for years. Sometimes the people we least expect to teach us things are the ones who impart the biggest lessons. And sometimes the things we thought might be a complete waste of time (or our client’s money), actually turn out to be valuable.
I’ll always be grateful for those “dog years” I spent as a management consultant. And perhaps I’m most grateful for what I learned about creating a clear vision.
And sticking with it.
*******************
I help parents of anxious kids and teenagers relax and enjoy parenting again while helping their children create the bright future they deserve. If you’re struggling to parent a perfect but anxious child, I’d love to give you a free downloadable copy of my book, Stop Worrying About Your Anxious Child. | https://medium.com/candour/what-my-time-as-a-management-consultant-taught-me-about-parenting-65e1a14442bd | ['Dr. Tonya Crombie'] | 2020-07-16 17:39:41.685000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Parenting'] |
State of Stake #30 | State of Stake is a series of curated news, research, updates, and events in the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem. Stay informed with the biggest PoS networks and all things Staking. Now weekly! This is our 30th report that we are happy to release it in collaboration with Staking Rewards! Staking Rewards provides trusted access to all passive income opportunities with regard to digital assets. They are curating knowledge and data to build a healthy staking and DeFi ecosystem. Staking Rewards’ core focus are Proof-of-Stake Protocols which enable passive returns through staking. They also cover Masternode Coins, Dividend Tokens, and Lending Protocols. In this update, we examine the period from 27th August — 3rd August with a general overview of the market, highlighted research in the space, news on all launched staking networks, updates on all the upcoming PoS networks, the latest developments from staking infrastructure providers and a handful of staking-related events.
Cosmos is currently positioned on the 7th place by locked in staking, right after the recently released Band Protocol. This is especially interesting since Band Protocol is built using the Cosmos SDK!
Minting Mechanism for Proof of Stake Blockchains by Dominic Deuber, Nico Döttling, Bernardo Magri, Giulio Malavolta, and Sri Aravinda Krishnan Thyagarajan
In this work, they initiate the study of minting mechanisms in cryptocurrencies as a primitive on its own right, and as a first step to a solution to mitigate coin hoarding in PoS currencies they propose a novel minting mechanism based on waiting-time first-price auctions. The main technical tool is a protocol to run an auction over any blockchain. Moreover, the protocol is the first to securely implement an auction without requiring a semi-trusted party, i.e., where every miner in the network is a potential bidder. The approach is generically applicable and they show that it is incentive-compatible with the underlying blockchain, i.e., the best strategy for a player is to behave honestly. Their proof-of-concept implementation shows that the system is efficient and scales to tens of thousands of bidders.
IRISnet Launched DeFi and Interchain Testnet Bifrost
Based on the latest version of the Cosmos SDK, irishub has made significant updates, undergoing functionality developments and crucial upgrades. The Bifrost testnet will test unique and innovative DeFi functions, including NFT, Record, Oracle etc. At the same time, Bifrost will test the integration of the new version of the Cosmos SDK and test the multi-Hub collaboration as well as existing IRIS Hub functions such as CoinSwap through the IBC protocol.
The Elrond Mainnet Token Swap Begins on Binance, And The New Economic Model Is Set In Motion
The new Elrond economic model is now ready to start an accelerated and sustained growth period. Starting with the 3rd of September they will officially begin the swap from ERD to eGLD. eGLD will be the native currency of the Elrond economy, and all ERD tokens will gradually be swapped to eGLD tokens. The eGLD ticker is an abbreviation for eGold, denoting the simplest, and most intuitively powerful metaphor of what the Elrond currency aims to become.
COTI Pay VIPER is here
A staking 2.0 console will be added to the wallet before the next staking cycle starting on October 1st, 2020. As the year progresses, they’ll be adding more features, such as an iOS/Android native apps, Multi-Asset support, Optimized Fiat On-Ramp, 1-click payments, DeFi, and Virtual Debit Card.
Stats of StakingDrop : Over $200M Bonded, Mainnet is Coming
More than $205M worth of staked assets have been bonded across 1767 addresses. In fact, 20% of the staking amounts were new staked assets and 40% are NEW staking addresses. This yet again shows that StaFi doesn’t only make staking liquid and enables new DeFi products — but also increase security of PoS networks
Got ETH? Time to prepare for Ethereum 2.0 by JK of Stake.fish
You have some idea about Ethereum 2.0 (if not — check their previous blog post). You know Phase 0, the launch of the Beacon Chain, is coming soon. You know it’s a groundbreaking upgrade. You know you’ll be able to stake. But, why should you stake in the first place? Are there any risks associated with staking? What do you need to do as an ETH holder to get prepared? This article will explore these questions today and help point you in the right direction as you start contemplating what to do with your ETH.
Cosmos Stargate Upgrade review: what’s new by Everstake
Recently, the Cosmos blockchain network released a major update to Stargate, which is aimed at increasing transaction throughput, cross-chain cryptocurrency transfers, speeding up and simplifying the development of the user interface, and more. In today’s review, they talk about what’s new came after the Stargate update and why this update is so important for the Cosmos ecosystem.
…and a lot more! | https://medium.com/paradigm-fund/state-of-stake-30-91cf4cb781af | [] | 2020-09-03 17:09:01.948000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Staking', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Blockchain'] |
Letter From Leah | Letter From Leah
Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
I shared their joy when they were freed
And earnestly prayed to be released
I am Leah, the lone Dapchi girl left in chains
A price I had to pay for my Christian faith
A faith for which I’ve been made a slave
Days became weeks and weeks now years
Each passing day increasing my fears
Whether or not I’ll ever be spared
And return to embrace family and friends
On one of those gruesome nights, I helplessly laid disrobed
As my captors stripped me of my cherished childhood
And added to my burden the travails of motherhood
But I’m more than conquerors, for I trust I’ll be freed
My hope has not failed me
Neither has Christ, for whom
I’m a victim
I am Leah the lone girl left behind
To suffer the fate of Christ divine | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/letter-from-leah-1f5bce9d335a | ['Johannes Mudi'] | 2020-11-09 11:17:21.503000+00:00 | ['Captivity', 'Women', 'Society', 'A Cornered Gurl', 'Poetry'] |
Colonialismo y desobediencia | Writer, amateur saxophonist, lawyer. My book “El constitucionalismo y la encerrona colonial de Puerto Rico” is available at the libraries of Princeton and Yale. | https://medium.com/@rafernandezlaw/colonialismo-y-desobediencia-88f74eaf2ab4 | ['Roberto A. Fernández'] | 2020-12-25 23:13:04.130000+00:00 | ['United States', 'Civil Disobedience', 'Puerto Rico', 'Colonialism', 'Vietnam War'] |
From funding projects to funding portfolios | UNDP is currently exploring mechanisms to shift from a logic of single, ad-hoc interventions to one of portfolios, driven by theories of change grounded in systems science. In Indonesia, Pakistan and Thailand UNDP partnered with the Agirre Lehendakaria Center to build Social Innovation Platforms (SIPs) for post-Covid economic recovery. In Zimbabwe, a data-driven systems portfolio is being devised to measure the magnitude of the informal food sector in urban environments, and use that information to provide economic actors financial access. As part of the deep demonstration program, UNDP country offices, from the Dominican Republic to Burundi are designing portfolios to tackle complex development challenges such as the recovery of the tourism sector or the prosperity of border communities. As part of this initiative, in Vietnam UNDP is uncovering the systems implications of a Circular Economic Rebound in the wake of COVID, including developing interventions focusing on redesigning mission oriented institutions, rethinking economic impulse and investment, exploring implications of a just transition as well as creating collaborations and coalitions for change.
Systemic development alters the way public value is defined and created through five mechanisms:
It seeks transformative rather than incremental outcomes.
It recognises that there is not one “silver bullet” solution to reach development outcomes. It is the combination of diverse interventions addressing multiple leverage points which ultimately provides pathways to address the complex issue at hand.
It enforces listening. Solutions are not proposed by unaffected actors; they are built while consulting, involving and empirically testing ideas with stakeholders too.
It accepts uncertainty and welcomes adaptation. Each systemic intervention uncovers new information, which is to be used to adapt actions and create new ones.
It does not discriminate against a long term perspective. Changing systems requires action that may not feature immediate effects.
Yet, as a recent Catalyst2030 report reminded us, systemic development struggles to be implemented and tested at scale as conventional financing mechanisms are not tailored for the paradigm.
Most development finance is biased towards single-point interventions and project finance. Operators deploying systemic interventions are thus compelled to coalesce around the single-point narrative, risking to miss the systemic approach along the way.
Development finance is also quite monothematic in the instruments it uses. Though actors are increasingly aware of the issue, development financing efforts are still skewed towards grant making. Systemic interventions, however, often entertain the concerted use of a diverse ecosystem of asset classes which may include not only different types of grants, but also return-driven categories such as equity investing, credit or infrastructure investments.
And most importantly, systemic development needs high degrees of independent decision-making in how to allocate resources. Rather than leaning on donors guiding priorities at the portfolio level, it is up to operators (and their stakeholders) who have deep contextual knowledge to define what interventions deserve resources, and in what forms. Operators should be, de facto, systemic investment strategists and managers.
Giving systemic development an institutional muscle
The experience of UNDP’s deep demonstrations is making it evident that systemic development needs an institutional muscle that translates systemic interventions design into action, moving beyond individual projects as the mental and operational framework of reference (which does not mean however dispensing from projects). One way to bridge the gap is the creation of Systemic Funds, financial institutions that accommodate the nature of systemic portfolios and their operators.
I think of a Systemic Fund (SF) as a pooled investment fund with the mandate and intent of allocating resources to systemic interventions with a multi-asset strategy for development.
Let me break down the definition to understand the concept better.
SFs are pooled investment funds. By that, I mean SFs are expected to manage a pool of donor/investor money, akin to how other realities (e.g. venture capital, private or public equity funds) operate. Several like-minded institutions interested in tackling a complex issue such as, for example, waste management through a systemic lens would have the opportunity to pool their resources together and scale the actions of systemic interventions.
SFs have mandates. Mandates refer to a common understanding and shared intent between investors and fund operators on how and on what the capital is being deployed. A mandate may include a specific topic of geography of interest (e.g. food security in Thailand). It also, and very importantly, implies independence. SF operators would have the full trust of their investors, thus allowing them to allocate resources to systemic interventions according to their strategies.
SFs have a multi-asset strategy. SFs must be able to flexibly deploy capital on a wide range of assets through a wide range of instruments. As mentioned, an effective systemic development portfolio of interventions may well include policy interventions financed by grants, credit to economic actors and infrastructure projects. While in mainstream finance multi-asset strategies are not uncommon, the same cannot be said in development, with some notable exceptions that are going towards that direction (e.g. the Gates Foundation’s institutional umbrella being able to deploy grants and strategic investments). Whatever the ultimate shape of systemic financial interventions, we must normalise and integrate multi-asset strategies.
This concept paper elaborates more on the Systemic Funds, on some of their inner workings and on three scenarios for turning them into a reality within the UNDP’s institutional framework. In the months to come, we will test and hone SFs against reality by partnering with like-minded donors to actuate first versions of them for some of the most promising systemic interventions designed by UNDP and its partners.
The world needs a redesign of the financial institutional framework to deliver public value, at scale. Should your organisation align with this vision, I would love to hear, learn from, and build with you.
With thanks to Marcos Neto, Lorena Sander, Ida Uusikyla, Shamiso Ruzvidzo for their comments.
Stefano Gurciullo is an investor and complex systems scientist. He is Partner at Redstone, a venture capital management firm, and has spent a decade working across financial stability and risk, sustainable finance and long-term finance. He holds a PhD in Financial Computing from University College London. | https://medium.com/@undp.innovation/from-funding-projects-to-funding-portfolios-b14c744f8adf | ['Undp Innovation'] | 2021-08-05 15:11:27.078000+00:00 | ['Sustainable Development', 'Systems Thinking', 'Portfolio Management', 'Funding'] |
The Next Generation of XR (Part 1.5) | The Next Generation of XR (Part 1.5)
Before I get into the ‘boring’ business model stuff, I want to make a sort of ‘amendment’ to my last article. Like a good UX designer, I am always hungry for feedback and to destroy my assumptions. I had a really great conversation with a fellow VR/AR enthusiast in my favorite private discord channel.
This unnamed hero questioned my assumption for the need for standalone VR headsets at all.
TLDR;
The next generation of VR should indeed have just about all those features I listed previously. However, it will be much more affordable and future-proof if the headset just houses the sensor and lenses rather than the processing chips as well.
Standalone VR is too much of a ‘dead-end’ technology to really become mainstream.
Most people would probably be better served with a wireless VR device that was an accessory to their current computing device, and an AR headset that replaces their smartphone.
A Change of Perspective
My argument from the last article was that we would need to invest in making standalone headsets that are almost as good as PC headsets so that the average person can have access to this technology. I was worried about prematurely limiting the growth of VR innovation in exchange for short-term gains in cheap headsets (a la Oculus).
His argument was that the use cases for mobile/standalone VR is likely better served by AR devices. Augmented Reality headsets would have many of the same utility (such as virtual workspaces, playing immersive games, and even haptic-enabled experiences) but running on a less powerful, (and more affordable) mobile chipset. AR devices can get away with running on lower specs because you don’t have to render an entire world around you at all times, you only have to render what you are augmenting!
I was worried about a gap in access, most people will never buy a gaming computer to run a PC headset that has the latest and greatest technology. This would shift investment away from innovation and into cheap, mobile headsets.
But he showed me that in reality, most people simply don’t have a need for fully immersive experiences in the first place. Gaming in VR is great, but consumer VR shouldn’t be limited to just games. When you look at other things people do in VR outside of games (check out this video for a list), almost none of these benefit from having a ‘mobile’ headset.
Standalone VR miiiight be a dead end
Wireless VR is absolutely a Must! However… what is really the point in standalone VR devices? You are almost likely never going to be using VR safely outside. If you want to walk around a huge space, you’d be better off going to some kind of arena-scale VR arcade where they can give you a backpack, more haptics, or even just run your device off of 5G wifi.
Just about any use case you can think of for standalone VR headsets will be better served with augmented reality headsets or wireless PCVR headsets.
Fully immersive experiences need far more rendering power than can be had on a mobile chipset to be as immersive as it truly can be.
All other experiences are actually more ‘spatial’ computing use cases more than anything else. Meaning they are concerned with using the space around you better, rather than putting you in a completely different space.
Standalone VR just puts us in a race against physics. How small or cheap can we really make chips able to render an entire immersive world in high resolution, with high framerates, and low latency all without heating up too much or having a super short battery?
We will keep worrying about how to make the same tech just a little bit smaller and cheaper and faster, rather than thinking about how to make the experience more immersive, empowering, and accessible.
We will not win that race.
Then again, as the unnamed hero also points out, there still may be some important niche for standalone VR. Perhaps it will replace the laptop and be a portable workstation. People often travel but still have need of most of what their PC can offer. The same can likely be said for VR, where you will need to make some edits for an immersive movie, game, or other media while on the go. And yet, even that may run on a — throwback warning — pocket or briefcase computer! 🤣
Granted, it would be more like an Apple AirPod case that can charge the headset with its own extended battery.
Okay, we can design better cases than this nowadays… but won’t that be fun! :P
Either way, standalone VR will likely not be the device of choice for most consumers like Facebook thinks it will be. It will be a strong subset of the market, but not something we should be putting all of our investment into. Simply because every generation will give increasingly diminishing returns.
To continue with the solution our hero has been leading up to, consider this:
If we really want affordable, wireless VR headsets, why not figure out how to make devices that can run on the computing devices we all already have?
That was a HUGE unlock for me!
In other words, the next generation of VR should instead focus on making VR headsets interoperable. It should be able to run on ANY device, whether that be a laptop, game console, or family computer. If we can make wireless headsets that can pair with the devices people already have in their home, you can still get the best of both worlds! (Okay, maybe not the best of PCVR if you don’t have a gaming computer, but good enough for the average consumer’s needs).
Limitations like heat, weight, graphics, computing, battery power, affordability, and technical literacy can all be mitigated by ‘simply’ creating a VR device that pairs with your computer as easily as a bluetooth accessory.
Obviously, it won’t actually be that easy… but it is certainly better than trying to setup a tethered PCVR device on a gaming computer.
Think streaming services like Shadow, for VR, but localized to your home!
If you take this further, you can even create dedicated home PC devices that are no-muss, no-fuss little home servers allowing the entire household to run all of their VR headsets off that device! So you are basically creating an all-in-one PC-server-router for all of your at-home computing needs. With this in place, most people won’t even need dedicated monitors, TVs, laptops, or any other device other than their VR headset(s) for the home, and AR headset for on-the-go.
VR is just one part of the XR spectrum
As we continued talking, he also brought up this idea of using varifocal lenses to replace foveated rendering inside the headset (since you don’t really have to worry much about saving rendering power as much)…. and then also scale that up so you can have an entire varifocal wall or window!!
Imagine being able to have something like this, but on your wall?? You could literally have ANY view you want, regardless of the constraints of your home.
Say goodbye to non-interactive TV screens, empty walls, boring pictures, and even dreary windows. With interactive ‘virtual monitors’ you can truly customize your room and feel immersed even outside the headset!
I’m not sure if you’re as excited as I am about this… but this gave me shivers. It’s like a real-life version of a Star Trek ViewScreen, but with the options of a HoloDeck!!
I originally actually wanted to make this series about XR in general, but I thought that would be too wide a topic to cover. After this conversation, I realized that these have to be talked about together. AR and VR are inextricably intertwined.
Many people like to think of them as some sort of competition. You often hear “AR is better than VR because of This” or “Why would people buy AR if they already have a VR?” but quite frankly, these are uneducated opinions.
AR and VR are pretty much opposite ends of the same spectrum.
The former is for augmenting the world around you, while the latter is for being immersed in a virtual world. They are NOT mutually exclusive. You can even have AR inside of VR experiences (the best kinds of AR!).
Therefore any conversation about VR, must also include AR. Because these work together. I was silly to try and explain the potential for mainstream virtual reality without mentioning the role of AR.
======== <PSA> ========
As I have always been saying, AR is going to be what massively changes the world sometime in this decade. VR on the other hand, is the endgame. That is where everything will evolve towards as we eventually figure out full-dive technology (putting your mind into a computer… or vice versa). VR will constantly be evolving and changing drastically over the decades to come, therefore it will not reach ‘mainstream’ levels of adoption simply because it changes too much for people to catch up with it. It is here to stay, but it is a long, slow-burn growth. AR on the other hand has just 1 major problem to solve in order to become a mainstream technology: form factor. This is not a simple problem. This includes things like field of view, resolution, and interaction. But it is a solvable problem that all converges into the look and feel of the device delivering AR experiences. Therefore, augmented reality will most likely be ‘figured out’ within the next 10 years. I’d give it 3–5, but I am an optimist.
======== </PSA> ========
So to circle back to the earlier hype, this means that the average person will be able to access AR technology, which in turn will get them prepped for VR experiences as well.
There are dozens of companies creating AR experiences for everything from enterprise training, to phone-based pass-through AR filters, to tabletop gaming.
People will therefore have a number of ways to get acquainted with this new tech. Millions of people already have been using AR filters and lenses on their devices through social media or Google/Apple phones.
I want to do some user research to say for sure, but based on my direct observations helping thousands of people use immersive experiences, I think people will mostly use AR for multimedia, entertainment, and work. Similar to how they use their current devices! AR is just a cooler, more empowering, and more immersive way to do so (the main problem is to make it easier than current devices too).
The best thing about AR is that you don’t need a headset to have that immersive ‘augmented’ experience! Imagine something like SpaceTop for a virtual workspace, family game night, or a cooking tutorial. Even the famed ‘infinite screens’ touted in VR will probably be better in AR through varifocal ViewScreens, since that is inherently more easily shared than a completely virtual field of screens. | https://medium.com/@elijah-claude/the-next-generation-of-xr-cont-d1f37d409e89 | ['Elijah Claude'] | 2020-11-23 04:31:04.875000+00:00 | ['Virtual Reality', 'AR', 'Future', 'VR', 'Future Technology'] |
Quantified Self: Clustering data from my Habit Tracker | I’ll be contributing to the Quantified Self movement by sharing the result of this clustering project.
The data exported from Loop — Habit Tracker. This is my friend for several months in my 8 to 5 job before. It helped me record the progress of my routine (what gets measured, gets done).
A habit is an action we do subconsciously or when there is no mental effort to it, otherwise it is a routine. These are the routine that I was trying to develop:
Morning Meditation, Morning readings, Midday Sleep, Out on time, Arthour (personal projects), Before sleep readings, Before sleep meditation.
Using the exported data from the app, I have different column and rows. Columns are the habit that I want to track, and rows are the binary values that show whether the routine was fulfilled or not (1-yes , 0-no) .
Raw Data
Bar Plot of fulfilled routine
Data Normalization
Pearson Correlation
Using correlation analysis, I discovered the strengths of relationships among my routines. This is worth exploring to establish a connection between these habits.
Interpreting Correlation Values
From the interpretation above we can see that:
Out on time routine (+0.63) has a moderate to strong positive linear relationship to Before sleep reading routine
Midday Sleep and Morning Readings routine (+0.73) have a strong positive linear relationship to each other.
Arthour and Before Sleep routine (+0.77) have a strong positive linear relationship to each other.
Before sleep meditation and Morning Meditation routine (+0.62) have a strong positive linear relationship to each other.
CLUSTERING
Clustering is an unsupervised learning algorithm that finds clusters or group in a set of data. These groups should have similar properties or features. This method is a common technique for statistical data analysis used in many fields.
K-modes Clustering. According to the documentation
K-modes is used for clustering categorical variables. It defines clusters based on the number of matching categories between data points.This is in contrast to the more well-known k-means algorithm, which clusters numerical data based on Euclidean distance.)
For simplicity, I used 3 number of clusters, this is a subjective judgement about the number of really distinctive clusters described here (I tried more K but it hurts my data).
These are different clusters derived using K-modes. I arbitrarily named my routines as: The Idealist, The Supervisor, The Visionary.
CLUSTER 1: The Idealist
This group has no Out on time and has a plenty of Midday Sleep routine. I remember I stay late at work to read or finish something that needed the next day.
CLUSTER 2: The Supervisor
This cluster has the least number of routines. These days could be tiring.
CLUSTER 3: The Visionary
This cluster has the most number of accomplished routines.
Analyzing such routines helps me understand better how my day looks like back then. From this data, I can design more meaningful routine towards a better day.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com. | https://medium.com/@carlosabiera/quantified-self-clustering-data-from-my-habit-tracker-e8af25d4db27 | ['Carlos Abiera'] | 2020-08-13 11:55:15.538000+00:00 | ['Habits', 'Routine', 'K Modes', 'Clustering', 'Quantified Self'] |
Red Collar Criminal | Red Collar Criminal
Former personal injury attorney Lori Deveny is scheduled to plead guilty this week, in the state’s criminal case against her, to 92 charges of identity theft, forgery, theft, and criminal mistreatment against 37 separate victims. Her federal criminal trial, on 24 similar counts including tax evasion, is still scheduled for mid-August.
Deveny is a serial insurance fraudster whose crimes remained undetected for decades, not only because she chose her victims carefully — many had cognitive difficulties from their injuries — but also because she carefully fabricated a respectable reputation in Portland’s legal community.
However, it was all a rickety façade built upon her victims’ naïvety about insurance settlements, and upon her own talent of fast-talking her way out of suspicion. That façade started to crumble in late 2017.
Many are now questioning whether her husband Robert Deveny was also one of her victims — in a different type of crime, ‘fraud detection homicide,’ a category of murder not widely understood by the public, but very familiar to forensic investigators and other experts. It is a kind of murder committed by white collar criminals when there’s a threat that someone will discover and expose their fraud.
These murderers are termed ‘red-collar criminals.’ And according to leading experts, nobody is or should be considered above suspicion, including women.
“There’s blood on me…”
Robert and Lori Deveny were prominent big game hunters and had taken a number of safaris to Africa. Their home and Lori’s office were covered with trophies and taxidermized animals, including the entire top half of a giraffe. They had many, many guns.
Robert Deveny, November 2017
Robert, himself a retired attorney, had just taken a solo trip to South Africa in November 2017, apparently unaware of the complaints against Lori that had begun to stream into the state bar. Her entire house of cards was collapsing, and Robert, by all evidence, had no idea.
On the morning of March 12, 2018, Lori called 911 tearfully reporting that Robert had committed suicide with one of their many guns, a Taurus .38 revolver.
In the 911 call, and in the report of the Portland Police officers who soon arrived at the scene, Lori repeatedly asserted that Robert had been struggling with “severe” or “significant” depression, was on medication for it, and that suicide had “been a topic of discussion on and off for years.”
She also claimed that Robert, who at age 68 was sixteen years older than Lori, was upset about aging and his mobility — he had recently had knee replacement surgery that, as Lori told the police, had possibly become infected. She stated that Robert had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for later that day to check on that possibility.
The police report detailed Lori’s account of the moments leading up to Robert’s death:
Lori told me that she and Robert have separate bedrooms due to his CPAP machine, but share the adjoining bathroom. Lori told me that around 0630 this morning, Robert came into her room and asked her to come to his room. Lori told me that Robert was very sweet and gentle with her, and that they ended up making love, though Lori told me it is complicated due to his [erectile disfunction]. Lori told me that after making love, Robert was lying on his back and she was lying next to him on her right side with her head on his left shoulder and her hand on his chest. Lori told me Robert told her that he loved her and then said that he was sorry. Lori told me that she briefly lifted her head up off of his should to look at him and that is when he shot himself.
Lori was also careful to explain that she wrapped the gun in a towel and moved it to the bathroom before the police arrived. The report states that, “she was not sure why she did, except possibly out of habit.” It is unclear if her “habit” was cleaning up after people who have killed themselves, or concealing evidence in general.
The full police report released in early 2019 is available here, as is the 911 call. Trigger warning: white women tears.
Too much information
The foremost problem with Lori’s story is that it is based completely upon Lori’s word — which, as police did not yet know at the time of Robert’s death, was almost entirely worthless. Lori was and is an accomplished con artist.
Now that more is known about Lori’s behavioral traits and the style of her criminality — and now that she no longer has a bar license to protect her — many people have questions about Robert’s death. So far, there is only one good answer.
Trying to make sense of Lori’s story becomes a treadmill shaped like a Möbius strip — there’s no place to get on or off, and if you assume one thing is true, something else becomes impossible. She tried to patch her story up by giving too many details. Liars tend to overexplain things, and often explain the wrong things. In doing so, they provide many clues.
For instance, the hardest thing to swallow in Lori’s story was her elaborate account of her final sexual encounter with Robert, which supposedly took place moments before his death. The details she volunteered served to defend why she was spattered with his blood. That is to say, having sex with Robert was her best explanation, ballistics-wise, for why she was within inches of him (and the gun) when the shot was fired.
It would also explain why police found him completely naked. It would not, however, explain why she had blood splatters on her clothes.
What Lori was most unable to explain (and she was apparently was not asked) was how a 68-year old man with a possibly infected knee replacement — a ferociously painful and dangerous medical condition — could have had sex to begin with, even if he was on the amount of painkiller needed to dull such excruciating pain. And if those painkillers were enough to dull the pain of his knee, what were they doing to his other body parts? Was Robert even awake at the time he killed himself?
Another revealing overshare is that Lori claimed that Robert suffered from erectile disfunction — a personal detail embarrassing even for a dead person, that seemingly added nothing to her narrative except degradation.
But to Lori, it may have actually been a key detail to support her story that they had just had sex, and to explain away the lack of semen on her, his body, or anywhere nearby — a substance that an elementary forensic examination with luminol and a black light would have instantly revealed.
Photos from Robert Deveny’s last safari in South Africa
The gun itself also raises questions. A Taurus is not the cheapest gun available, but certainly not an upscale brand. The .38 that killed Robert is a small, basic revolver intended for ‘entry level self-defense.’ To be plain, it is a women’s purse gun. As Robert was a man expert in firearms, this would not be the kind of gun he would want to kill himself with, or even be seen using.
The fact that Lori handled this gun immediately after the shooting “out of habit” makes it reasonable to believe it was actually her gun. The fact that Lori moved the gun to the bathroom and wrapped it in a towel not only altered the crime scene, but provided an explanation as to why her fingerprints might be found on it, rather than Robert’s.
As an aside, following her indictment on fraud charges, the court allowed Lori to sell her guns — including the Taurus — as long as she kept the receipts of the sales. She also did not have to pay any bail.
‘Red collar criminals’
White collar criminals like Lori Deveny, who commit crimes such as insurance fraud and money laundering, have long been thought to be non-violent by nature because of their class status. Their crimes are regarded as merely a lapse of judgment or a wrong turn from which these otherwise law-abiding people can be rehabilitated.
According to white collar crime expert and attorney Frank S. Perri, that stereotype is inaccurate. “Many white-collar criminals harbor the same deviant personality traits as street-level criminals,” such as the “behavioral traits of narcissism and psychopathy.” Those traits tend to serve them well when their fraud is being detected and someone is poised to expose them.
Mr. Perri coined the term ‘red-collar criminals’ to describe respectable-seeming fraudsters who turn to murder in order to keep their schemes concealed; and refers to their type of murder as ‘fraud-detection homicide.’ The term highlights how dangerous white collar criminals can be when cornered or threatened, and how often the exposure of fraud provides a motive for a murder that would otherwise go undetected. He and co-author Terrance G. Lichtenwald wrote:
[T]he link to each fraud detection was crucial in establishing a motive for murder when the prosecution had weak direct evidence, but supportive circumstantial evidence of guilt. Establishing fraud detection as a motive is especially important when the psychopath will attempt to use his or her lack of violent criminality as an advantage when the case against him or her may be entirely circumstantial.
The circumstantial evidence that Lori Deveny killed her husband is not only supported, it’s so classic that it borders on cliché. If the script were submitted to the Lifetime Channel, even they would demand a rewrite.
Mr. Perri recently released an excellent video lecture series on red collar crime, including an episode on victims of red-collar intimate partners, and another on female red-collar offenders. It should come as a surprise to nobody that females commit white collar crimes, have the same behavioral traits as the male offenders, and may also resort to murder when cornered.
Yet the opposite impression persists — and as a white female crying to every authority she could, Lori enjoyed a double dip of presumption that she was incapable of fraud, and incapable of violence. She avoided suspicion even when her stories no longer made any sense.
Interestingly, Mr. Perri points out that female red collar criminals frequently resort to drugging or sedating their victim, before murdering them. If Lori was telling the truth about Robert’s knee infection, he would have been on a massive dose of painkillers.
The fact that Lori was allowed to cremate his body without a tox screen means we will never know if Lori was lying about the infected knee replacement, what kind of painkillers he was on, or if he was simply roofied.
A motive for murder: The estate case of Kathryn Kennedy
It’s difficult not to look back on Lori’s off-the-rails criminal career and wonder what Robert knew (or should have known) and when he may have known it. Given not only the suddenness of his death but its timing, it is impossible not to wonder whether Robert had noticed Lori’s fraud and legal career coming apart, and realized that their finances were not as she claimed them to be.
We can be certain of several things, including that we should not rely on Lori’s version of events.
There is a case of fraud that has not been written about and that law enforcement does not know about, in which Lori stole the assets of the Deveny’s deceased housekeeper, Kathryn Kennedy. At the time of Robert’s death, Lori could no longer juggle the fraud of Kennedy’s estate. The records there help evidence possible motive and timing.
Kennedy died suddenly of unknown causes in June 2015. According to court documents, within 24 hours of Kennedy’s death, Lori and Robert had taken physical control of her house and changed the locks. They then installed an alarm.
While waiting for Kennedy’s death certificate to clear, the Deveny’s removed 24 banker’s boxes of papers and other valuables from the premises. They cancelled the automatic payments for Kennedy’s phone and mortgage, but did not cancel payments to her life insurance policy.
According to people with knowledge of the situation, Lori said that Kennedy had left her entire estate to the Devenys. Kennedy’s disabled adult son did not learn of his mother’s death for two months. By then, the Devenys had had her cremated, with no funeral, and her life insurance policy had been paid out. There is no record of who cashed the check, but I think we can all guess.
Kennedy’s house soon fell into foreclosure because of the stopped payments, and a court action was commenced by the lender in December 2016. Lori, and anyone else that might have had access to the house (or who was using it for storage) ducked service of court papers through 2017.
When the ethics complaints against her began to come in to the bar, in November 2017, Lori decided it was high time to make her looting of Kennedy’s assets look semi-presentable. She filed an estate case in December.
Interestingly, when Lori filed Kennedy’s will in the case, it turns out to have been written by Lori, who we now know is a habitual forger of victims’ signatures. Lori almost certainly forged Kennedy’s signature. Oddly, the will Lori created states that Kennedy left her estate to various family members, including her son, and left nothing at all to the Devenys.
Lori and the estate attorney she hired for the case filed a false declaration that the witnesses to the will’s signing could not be located to verify its authenticity. I found them by a simple internet search in five minutes. They also claimed they could not locate Kennedy’s son. I found him also, on Facebook, and was talking to him within days.
By the time Lori filed the estate case, though, there was very little left to dispose of. The house was heavily mortgaged and any other property or possessions that Lori had seized were long gone. Much of what was left over at the close of Kennedy’s estate ended up being paid to Lori and Tammi Caress, her attorney, as legal fees and reimbursable case expenses. And the little paid out to Kennedy’s family members Lois Fulgham and Elizabeth Garrett…who knows if serial-forger Lori forged their signatures also?
As for timing, just two weeks before before Robert’s death, Lori was added as a Defendant to Kennedy’s foreclosure case; and just four days before Robert’s death, the Plaintiff in that case filed a declaration. That declaration stated that a process server was trying to serve Kennedy’s son and the other family members — i.e. the same people Lori had vigorously tried to keep from learning about her looting of Kennedy’s assets. That is to say, shit was getting real.
If the shocking record of the estate case does not provide motive enough, I have also learned that Robert had promised to give one of his daughters $75,000 for a house. The money was supposed to be sent the very day he died.
Perhaps most tellingly, upon Robert’s death, Lori frantically used some of the payout of his life insurance policy to pay off the victims who filed the first two bar complaints against her, to stave off disbarment and criminal charges.
It didn’t work. Within six months of Robert’s death, an unprecedented number of claims had been filed with the bar and Lori had resigned her law license. The official total, to date, of Lori’s thefts is around $3.4 million. The true amount remains unknown. It is certainly much higher.
If nothing else, Robert’s death came at the precise moment that Lori lost control of the illusion she cultivated of being a respectable, white lady lawyer — and the very moment she was revealed as a predator in desperate need of money.
Too little, too late
One asks how things might have been different if the white-women-heavy state bar had treated Lori Deveny the way she should have been treated: as a threat to the public and a criminal suspect, e.g. meriting at least a press release.
Would Robert Deveny still be alive? Could Kennedy’s assets have been protected?
When the bar finally did move to protect the public, it was nine days after Robert’s death. Lori responded to them two weeks later, asking for sympathy for her “personal health issues and the recent, sudden death” of Robert.
Lori Deveny and Jaques Senekal in Minnesota
That should have been the final straw, considering that Lori was spotted on Facebook just three days earlier, grinning at a dead animal convention in Minnesota, with her arm around Jacques Senekal, the owner of African Maximum Safaris — who is also mentioned in Lori’s federal indictment.
Knowing what we know now, and what Lori knew at the time — that the first two victims she paid off were just a drop in a multi-million-dollar bucket — it’s astonishing that she thought, even for a minute, that she could pay her out way out of trouble, keep her license, avoid any reputational damage, and continue to perpetrate her fraudulent schemes on a new set of victims.
Therefore, no one should be surprised by Lori’s failure to publish an obituary or notice of Robert’s death and didn’t hold a funeral or memorial service for him. She instead had his body cremated at the maximum possible speed. | https://medium.com/@stephanievolin/red-collar-criminal-f3eddc892191 | ['Stephanie Volin'] | 2021-08-05 21:09:41.692000+00:00 | ['Oregon', 'Lawyers', 'True Crime', 'Fraud', 'Murder'] |
Reflection on Amal Totkay | Amal Academy is doing a great job for the development of mindsets.
Here are some totkay(Points) given by Amal for Growth mindset.
Amal Totkay
I found all these 5 tips very amazing and interesting to act on. I started to implement in my life.
By following all these tips one can change its mindset from fixed to growth mindset.
‘Self-talk’ and ‘fake it till you make it’ are my favorite tips.
Self-talk, I’ve started implementing this tip. And I found it impressive to change mindset.
Nothing more, just act on all these 5 tips. And you are not bound to follow these 5 five, having growth mindset means adopt new thinking and absorbs new actions.
Once you try all these important points (Totkay) then you will see a huge change in your mindset and personality.
#AmalTotkayReflection | https://medium.com/@muhammadbilal1047/reflection-on-amal-totkay-7531c1bf3c9d | ['Muhammad Bilal'] | 2020-12-26 02:40:11.838000+00:00 | ['Amal Academy', 'Amal Fellowship', 'Amal Totkay'] |
White teachers, please stop judging your black students | Get to know each student instead of lumping them into one group.
One of my favorite instructors in elementary school was a computer teacher named Mr. Clerk*. He was an older, white man who always reminded me of the game board character in “Operation.” Extremely sensitive, passionate and hell bent on teaching us how to type (asdf jkl;), he was adamant about us learning how to navigate computers when the Internet was still a foreign concept. (This was the very early ‘90s.) He was also one of very few instructors who I talked with for pleasure even when the bell rang.
When students would grow bored or impatient with lessons, he talked to us all one-on-one as human beings and wanted to know where our interests lie. We didn’t get passive aggressive questions about our upbringing or how disconnected we were in comparison to his own social circle. He just wanted to know what made us tick. Because he took an interest in my personal likes and urged me to push on with a mystery short story series I’d played around with (I still own copies of my “Mr. Slick” newsletter series), that lit a fire under me to pursue a career in writing and later self-publishing. When I wrote a short book in my Girl Scout days and dedicated it to him, I was startled when his eyes filled up with tears and he stared down at that simple read like it was a Nobel Peace Prize.
Photo credit: NESA by Makers/Unsplash
Remember they are children, first and foremost.
Mr. Clerk was a bit of a hot head and on several occasions would raise his voice when we were being restless children. We knew we had successfully pissed him off if his face turned beet red. The whole room would grow quiet, and he’d walk out the room. I caught on that he was outside counting to ten (sometimes 50 or 100). Then he would come into the room, apologize for his frustration and try explaining what he wanted us to do in a different way. As a yeller myself (who got it from my mother), I took that tip from him. Too often, teachers (especially white teachers) can completely overlook the fact that black children are indeed children. If you would not call the police, call the principal and/or kick a white student out of your classrooms for being little assholes (sorry, but sometimes we were), don’t do it to your black students. I cannot recall Mr. Clerk ever doing so. In turn, every single person in our class liked him. We often apologized if we were particularly annoying. If memory serves me correctly, somehow we even remembered his birthday and made him cards.
Read the room and guide the entire classroom.
In a prior public speaking meeting, I listened quietly while the same teacher (not Mr. Clark, the one who inspired this post) listed off a bunch of male members who he would want to be his mentors or to help assist him in his classrooms when he was having trouble. After he was done, a different member (also white and male) gave a diverse list of men and women of various races who have helped him throughout the years in his professional and personal growth. I smiled, appreciating the latter member for trying to seek expertise from a wide variety of people.
Afterward, I made a note on the teacher’s feedback form that all of his mentors were only men. His response was that he wanted male mentors because “I’m a guy.” He felt that men would be the best choice to assist him in classroom leadership, including one African-American club member. I assumed that he must teach at a boys-only school. That made sense to me.
Months later, I found out that he taught both girls and boys. Whether consciously or subconsciously, for a male instructor to decide that the only advice he wanted was from other males even if he’s teaching female students, that speaks volumes about how those female students are overlooked. Black women and girls have piles of examples of being underestimated and disrespected in work environments, social circles, religious and political organizations, etc. The last place we need to be undervalued is in our early years. If you cannot find any useful advice from women just because you’re “a guy,” there’s a pretty high chance that the girls in the classroom can feel that vibe from you, too. | https://medium.com/i-do-see-color/white-teachers-please-stop-judging-your-black-students-aca8151e7fa9 | ['Shamontiel L. Vaughn'] | 2020-07-25 16:22:37.227000+00:00 | ['African American', 'Racism', 'Education', 'Race', 'Discrimination'] |
Remote Year Month #6 in Review: Prague | And with that, my first 6 months of Remote Year have wrapped up. It is hard to believe that it has been 6 months since I was last working in Toronto. Now spending a few days at home in Winnipeg, it feels both strange and familiar to be home. I love seeing friends and family but also miss my Tramily (never really thought I would use that word). The Remote Year group really becomes part of everything you do and it feels a little strange to be removed.
Prague was the only city on my Remote Year itinerary that wasn’t new for me. I loved getting to see it from a more local side, learning about the nuances that make the city so unique. Below is my month in review. | https://medium.com/go-remote/remote-year-month-6-in-review-prague-f1a1230fa16c | ['Vanesa Cotlar'] | 2018-08-03 02:38:47.820000+00:00 | ['Remote Year', 'Digital Nomads', 'Lifestyle', 'Travel', 'Experience'] |
Daniel Bacchieri: Mapping Street Music Around the Globe | “StreetMusicMap is a global report on street music.”
Music reporter Daniel Bacchieri fell in love with music as a child. In his house in Rio Grande, Brazil, music was always on — jumping from jazz to tango, from bossanova to Brazilian pop and rock bands.
Daniel believes music is the most universal art in the world because people can enjoy it and understand it even without knowing the words. He especially loves rock ‘n’ roll from the sixties and the seventies, as well as jazz from the fifties. Sometimes, he wishes he could live in the old times.
In the first years after he completed school, Daniel worked as a radio and television reporter. After that, he focused on film and documentaries. During the last 12 years he has been woking as a freelancer film director focusing mainly on music and sports projects. For him, perfection means a mix of music, filming and journalism.
Although Daniel doesn’t play any instruments, he’s found his own way to celebrate his love for music — his own way to report on it and share it all over the world. Daniel approaches talented buskers, street musicians, in different cities and different streets to find new music. Everywhere from Porto Alegre and São Paulo in his home country of Brazil, to America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. When he finds something new and exciting, he shares it online.
StreetMusicMap Official Site: www.streetmusicmap.com. Created by Daniel Bacchieri and powered by Genosha.
He then turned that passion into a project: in 2013, during a trip to Ukraine, he first had the idea for StreetMusicMap. The next year, he made project that project into a reality. Today, StreetMusicMap has more than 1,200 talented street musicians from 93 countries documented on video filmed by more than 700 contributors — and the numbers are expanding daily.
Daniel wants to turn this project into the most comprehensive platform for street music in the world and promote exchange and networking between the musicians, fans and music business. He sees it ultimately as a platform where bands can connect with fans, and a place for everyone who wants to find the next big thing. | https://medium.com/journalism-innovation/daniel-bacchieri-mapping-street-music-around-the-globe-5a3aff2df8b0 | ['Barbara Yang'] | 2017-01-24 03:42:52.062000+00:00 | ['Photography', 'Buskers', 'Busking', 'Music', 'Street Music'] |
Documentation Best Practices | Last Wednesday, I hosted Pavi Sandhu to discuss the importance of building and maintaining good developer documentation. Pavi has more than 20 years of experience leading documentation and user education initiatives at companies such as Salesforce, Amazon, Mesosphere, and MongoDB. Pavi co-founded Salesforce’s learning platform, Trailhead, which now has more than two million users. Below we will discuss some key takeaways from the discussion.
Technical marketing vs. documentation. Technical marketing focuses on informational content like data sheets and white papers that are used to encourage product adoption. Documentation comes into play after someone decides to use the solution. It helps them learn how to use the product as quickly, easily, and efficiently as possible. The line can be blurry as good documentation can be part of the selling process because customers understand that they’ll be well-supported and have all the resources they need to use the product once they adopt it.
Content creation should be centralized. Often teams create documentation and technical content on different teams in an uncoordinated fashion. This can lead to duplicity and customer confusion because the same material is presented in different ways. By centralizing content creation you can make content development more cost effective and the common body of content can be assembled and shared with different audiences based on their needs.
There are five C’s of good documentation. Documentation should be correct, clear, complete, consistent, and customer-centric. You can evaluate any documentation or educational content by those standards and these factors can also then be a rubric for improving them.
Personas are important. Throughout the discussion Pavi emphasized that it is important when writing documentation to consider the different personas who may read it and develop content specifically around them. There could be different personas as part of the pre-sales process like the business decision maker, the CTO, and engineering managers. Post-sales personas tend to be engineers, engineering managers, and end users.
Writers should understand the customer journey of using the product by persona and then develop content that assists the customer in that journey. The role of great customer docs is to actually move customers across this journey as quickly and efficiently as possible. The technical sophistication of the persona affects how quickly they move through the adoption journey. Identify each persona, what they need to learn, and write documentation that maps their path.
Think of documentation as education. Define learning objectives which are simple statements that identify what the customer will be able to learn or do after they’ve gone through a particular set of documentation. Learning objectives provides a focus for defining the content and frames customer journeys as milestones. Documentation should be framed as helping users crawl, walk, run, and fly, which is advocacy.
Think about documentation as an educational course that has sequenced content. Each module should have concepts, tasks, and reference material. It should explain a concept, then it goes through the steps of doing a particular task, and then leaves the reader with reference information for further exploration. The relative portion of concept, task, and reference material will vary based on the stage of the readers’ understanding. For example, advanced user documentation may have a smaller portion of concept defining and a higher portion of task and reference material. When the user has completed the materials they should have gone from ignorance to mastery. Ideally, if someone has gone through the content, there should be a way to assess that they’ve learned it by doing a simple quiz or having them go through maybe a test exercise.
Framing documentation as educational content helps developer relations. It builds trust with the end user and presents an opportunity to be a thought leader for not just your offering but the broader space and vision of the future.
Docs should tell a story. Stories take readers from point A to point Z in a very structured, specific way such that steps have been organized for the specific customer persona. If you don’t take this approach docs can end up being feature-centric. In other words, when a new feature is built documentation simply showcases how it works. But customers don’t buy features. They buy benefits. They buy solutions.
Engineers should be involved in documentation writing. Engineers often reflect the end user and can best speak to how the tool works and fits into the readers’ workflow. Teams should create incentive programs to encourage developers to be involved in documentation. For example, set up a program where they have templates, editing support, and recognition for creating content.
10:1 is the optimal ratio of developers to technical writers. Pavi suggested one technical writer can typically support two scrum teams. When you have about 10 engineers it is useful to have a technical writer, suggesting that early stage companies should have a contract or full-time technical writer. As the team scales, it is useful to bring technical writers in house. Usually a 50 person company should have someone in house working on documentation.
A trend is authoring documentation in markdown. Authoring docs in markdown and saving them as plain text files in GitHub is becoming the norm. It’s a good practice because it makes it easier for people to collaboratively edit and upgrade the docs overtime. Engineers can contribute to it by responding to pull requests and providing feed all in Git.
Tracking documentation website traffic is a useful KPI. Tracking website traffic gives teams some sense of the relative level of interest and attention to the documentation overall and specific pages. Tracking analytics can be really valuable because you can find out if visitors are beginners, intermediate, or advanced so you can better understand the customer.
Documentation is part of the product. The planning, preparation, and creation of docs need to occur hand-in-hand as the product is being developed. Writers should be embedded with engineers as part of the agile process and scrum team. Docs highlight flaws and deficiencies in the product design. If a product needs a lot of documentation, chances are it’s not that well designed. It’s not that user centric. Documentation sheds light on product quality and usability. It can be a strategic asset that can give your product a competitive advantage. | https://medium.com/memory-leak/documentation-best-practices-b0de3cdc323 | ['Astasia Myers'] | 2021-04-06 15:50:07.476000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Engineering', 'Founders', 'Documentation', 'DevOps'] |
Bittrex and Invest.com Band to Create an EU-Focused Crypto Exchange Platform | The new crypto exchange will give EU-based customers a robust and reliable platform by two top brands in the blockchain and finance industries.
The new crypto exchange will give EU-based customers a robust and reliable platform by two top brands in the blockchain and finance industries.
Bittrex, a premier U.S. based cryptocurrency exchange platform, announced a partnership with Invest.com, a leading Fintech brand, to launch a new digital trading platform targeting EU based investors.
According to the official announcement, the new digital trading platform will operate under Invest.com’s brand name and will boast a rare combination of Bittrex’s innovative trading platform technology, a selection of nearly 200 digital tokens, Invest.com’s knowledgeable team of experts in derivative trading, portfolio management and equity trading. Invest.com’s spokesperson and co-initiator of the partnership, Itai Avneri, said,
We are very excited to form this joint venture with Bittrex. Innovation and determination have led invest.com to take a strategic step forward into the new world of trading. The brand will focus solely on the emerging crypto industry.
Bittrex CEO Bill Shihara stated that both companies hope to enable customers to get wider access to the world’s leading innovative blockchain projects, besides further increasing the adoption of the revolutionary blockchain technology. He added that the establishment of the exchange platform is only the beginning as they plan to expand globally through new services and strategic partnerships. Shihara further said,
Blockchain technology has the potential to provide groundbreaking solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. That’s why every action we take is geared toward advancing this emerging technology, including launching this new trading platform with invest.com […] Today’s announcement is another exciting step forward for the industry and Bittrex as we continue expanding our global footprint through new services and strategic partnerships.
Besides its robust token listing process, Bittrex will also provide the exchange with its fast trade execution, reliable digital wallets and security applications. Invest.com will contribute a decade of experience in portfolio management, derivative trading and equity trading. The initial focus will be on customers in the EU but the platform will eventually spread to limited to qualified regions and countries, based on applicable international laws and restrictions.
Disclaimer: information contained herein is provided without considering your personal circumstances, therefore should not be construed as financial advice, investment recommendation or an offer of, or solicitation for, any transactions in cryptocurrencies. | https://medium.com/bitrates-news/bittrex-and-invest-com-band-to-create-an-eu-focused-crypto-exchange-platform-5d6922c5990c | [] | 2018-07-08 08:55:12.190000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Crptocurrency', 'Investing', 'Bittrex'] |
Jesus Saw Me on the Swing | Photo by Raúl Nájera on Unsplash
There is a small park where I used to go to think. I was 26 and living with my parents at the time. The park was about a half-mile from their house, and I would drive my mobilized scooter there. (Yes, like the scooters old people drive. I have cerebral palsy, and the DMV hasn’t trusted me behind the wheel of a car yet!)
It was a rough time for me. I had just gone through a bad breakup, and it was made worse by an inability to see my own faults. I refused to see all the ways I messed up in the relationship. I played the victim; life wasn’t fair. So I would go to the park, sit on the swing, and cry to God. I would tell him all the ways I was hurting. I would beg him to snap his fingers and make things normal again (in this case, “normal” meant “dysfunctional”). But it didn’t seem like he was listening.
Under the Fig Tree
There’s a story in the Bible about when Jesus meets a young man named Nathanael. (You can read it in John 1:43–51.) Nathanael was the know-it-all, cynical type. He had a chip on his shoulder, much like I did.
Eventually, Nathanael crosses paths with Jesus. As Nathanael is approaching, Jesus calls out, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”
This was Jesus’s way of putting Nathanael at ease. Jesus was saying, Nathanael! Now here’s a real straight-shooter. This guy tells it like it is! (That’s the MMV translation of the text — the Michael Murray Version.)
Nathanael, stunned by Jesus’s greeting, asks, “How do you know me?” And the answer Jesus gives is incredible.
The answer Jesus gives is good news for anyone who ever sat crying on a swing in a park.
The answer Jesus gives is good news for anyone who needs a little hope. (Are you ready for it?!)
Here is how Jesus answered Nathanael:
Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.” (John 1:48)
Huh? What’s the Deal With That?
Okay, that might seem a bit anti-climatic. When I first read Jesus’s response, I thought I had missed something. So I went back and reread the passage. There’s no mention of any fig tree before this. So what’s the significance of it? After reading a few commentaries, I came to a realization: the fig tree has no significance!
Well, it has no significance to me.
Only Nathanael knows what happened under that fig tree. Just like only I know what happened on that swing in the park. Maybe Nathanael sat under that tree every day and cried out to God in anger. Maybe he expressed all his doubts. Maybe some girl broke Nathanael’s heart, and he cried and cried under that tree. Maybe that tree represented Nathanael’s pain and brokenness.
Whatever happened under that fig tree, Jesus saw it. Jesus saw Nathanael in his most real, vulnerable moments. And he loved him. He accepted him.
As I thought about this story, I wondered what it would be like to hear those words from Jesus. I imagined Jesus telling me, Michael, I saw you while you were still on the swing. I was there in the pain with you. In the mess. And I loved you in it.
And you know what? Looking back a decade later, I can see that it’s true. He was right there with me in that park. He never left my side on that swing.
Jesus Sees You
So, what about you? Where is your “fig tree”? The place where you cry out to God, where you express all your hidden secrets, doubts, and fears?
Where do you unleash your anger? Your frustrations?
Where do you go to release the flood of tears?
I had my swing. Nathanael had his fig tree. Where do you go to stop pretending and crumble into a mess?
Wherever it is, don’t lose hope. Jesus sees you. He’s there in the pain, in the mess, in the brokenness. And he’s loving you in it. | https://michaeljmurray.medium.com/jesus-saw-me-on-the-swing-a453d985582 | ['Michael Murray'] | 2019-10-02 02:25:50.611000+00:00 | ['Jesus', 'Spirituality', 'Bible', 'Personal Development', 'Christianity'] |
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