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How to Connect and view your Connections on Bixex | Although Bixex is a platform focused on making it easy for anyone to make money online, it also provides an option for socializing and building your network. If, for instance, you are a starter on the platform, you can easily connect with influencers on the platform and build your connections. Below are five steps on how to do this:
Sign in to your Bixex account, navigate to the Connect & Follow option, and click to open.
option, and click to open. When you open, you would be provided with these 4 options
Your community My connections Invite in Invite out
Your community
Your community stands for people within the location you filled in when creating your Bixex account. For instance, if during the registration process, you filled in Lagos as your location, your community would include influencers within Lagos. This option displays influencers within your community with a connect option at the end of each profile. Click on the option to send out an invite. When you do, go back to the Connect & Follow option to send out more invites.
My connections
This stands for those you are connected with. If you have no connection, use the “your community” option to start building a network of influencers.
Invites in
This stands for those who are willing to connect with you and have sent out an invite option. When you click on the option, you would be provided with an option to either accept their connection invite or reject it. If there are no invites, it would show “no data found.”
Invite out
This option shows the number of invites you have sent out and the state of your invitation. You can also use the “invite out” option to cancel your invitation request.
Grow your network on Bixex following the above steps | https://medium.com/@victorialaz/how-to-connect-and-view-your-connections-on-bixex-382ff52fa99 | ['Victoria Lazarus'] | 2020-12-09 15:38:23.493000+00:00 | ['Bixex', 'Networking', 'Connections 2025', 'Influencers'] |
LEDU Token Swap: LEDU Tokens on Gate, Bibox & Bitforex to be Excluded from Swap | A new LEDU token smart contract will be released to replace the current smart contract. Education Ecosystem will be conducting a token swap which will see our current ERC-20 Education (LEDU) token converted into another ERC-20 token to be used on the Education Ecosystem platform.
The current LEDU smart contract will be locked soon and when it is locked no LEDU tokens can be moved. If you want to move your LEDU tokens before the smart contract is locked, do it now. Make sure you are holding your LEDU tokens on a private wallet address before the token swap. A private address is an ERC20 compatible address where you control the wallet key.
Gate, Bibox & Bitforex are not authorized to trade or hold LEDU tokens. LEDU tokens on these exchange will be excluded from this swap. When the token swap happens, all LEDU tokens on the Gate, Bibox and Bitforex exchanges will become worthless as they will be issued no new tokens! THERE WILL BE NO EXCEPTION MADE TO THIS RULE. If you still have LEDU tokens on these exchanges your best option is to move them before the smart contract is frozen. In certain cases, Gate, Bibox or Bitforex originating tokens will be asked for additional KYC verification. We are advising all LEDU token holders to move their tokens away from their Gate, Bibox & Bitforex wallets before the tokens are locked.
The new token issuance will be done in a way that current LEDU token holders that follow the steps above have no additional work. The new LEDU tokens will be sent automatically to their address.
Get LEDU Coin
Get LEDU coins now on LATOKEN, Exrates, Livecoin, Mercatox and IDEX or use the LEDU OTC Trading program for large purchases. Read more about LEDU coins on our project page and ask any questions you might have on our Twitter page. | https://medium.com/ledu-tokens/ledu-token-swap-ledu-tokens-on-gate-to-be-excluded-from-swap-6bdafc1c9706 | ['Dr. Michael J. Garbade'] | 2019-05-30 19:50:14.119000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Tokenswap'] |
Hainan Government chooses MXC for Green Smart City Initiative | Hainan is swarming with unspoiled nature and stays true to both its natural and ethical nature. Hainan is separate from Chinas mainland, which gives it a unique appeal, teeming with forests and beautiful beaches. In order to preserve their natural haven, the green Smart City initiative will see MXC and Huawei Tech working together to roll out a series of smart lighting solutions for Hainan, with an initial focus on the government district of FullSing Town. Smart lighting solutions will not only make the city greener and more inviting, it also has the potential to boost the tourism industry.
In a pledge of full support, the Hainan government has agreed to invest in MXC Foundation and to further support MXC Foundation and Huawei with technology and external aid. One of the noticeable parts about this initiative is that working with the Hainan government allows the MXC Foundation to gain valuable access to the government’s expansive network — including key corporations such as Alibaba.
Why is smart lighting necessary?
Smart lighting predicts the foot traffic flow of the people, enabling the government to allocate its lighting resources more efficiently. Which, in turn, saves costs and reduces pollution. From a social standpoint, well-lit areas are much more welcoming and safer. This can motivate members of the public to walk to an event for example, or, to feel safer walking from home. All of these people that will now choose to walk home due to smart lighting can reduce the pollution in Hainan.
“MXC is not only connecting smart devices, we connect people! By working together with Huawei Tech and the honorable Hainan Government we are connecting data to improve the lives of citizens and improve environmental conditions for generations to come”. Aaron Wagener, Co-Founder of MXC
The Government of Hainan chooses MXC and Huawei Tech
MXC’s vast, scalable LPWAN network and the reach in the region make both MXC and Huawei an attractive match to tackle the issue. MXC has been generating impetus with the M2 Pro miner, which provides cryptocurrency incentives for anyone to provide LPWAN coverage in their region and to become a part of a substantial data network. This innovative, smart lighting solution will begin taking its course in 2021 but the preparation has already begun. The Government of Hainan will further provide support to MXC by providing both financial and technical support as well as connecting MXC to other giants within the nation.
As an MXC miner, what can you expect?
Miners can expect to see a surge in demand for their network that has the potential to further their earnings. Meanwhile, MXC token holders can see a rise in demand for the MXC token and look forward to future partnerships with the support of the Hainan government. | https://medium.com/@mxcfoundation/hainan-government-chooses-mxc-for-green-smart-city-initiative-d09b125b31e6 | ['Mxc Official'] | 2020-12-25 08:52:15.148000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Mxc Foundation', 'Crypto', 'China', 'IoT'] |
Abstractions in Software Are Like Boxes | How To Apply Abstractions in Software
Let’s say we have a function to get an address book (phone book):
sample code that gets an address book represented by a map
The function gives us a direct mapping from a person’s name to a number. This seems straightforward and harmless but it is not. It has made the software more complex and hard to maintain!
All developers who use this function need to be aware of its internal representation as a Map<String, String>. When they think about an address book they will always see it only as a Map, but an address book can be so much more!
What happens when a person gets a second phone number?
Using a Map<String, String> to represent an address book is like giving someone a box with the insides exposed. It does not look clean and they have to take extra care of it.
A messy box representing messy code — Photo by RoseBox رز باکس on Unsplash
In reality, it is much better to model this AddressBook (or phone book) as a class, so it looks like a well packaged box. When you hand it to someone you should package it neatly so it is easy to handle.
A cleanly packaged box is easy to handle — Photo by RoseBox رز باکس on Unsplash
Here is an example of how we can convert the above code into a clean abstraction of an AddressBook class:
sample code demonstrating the principle of Abstraction
This is a lot of code — 20 lines instead of 7 lines (excluding comments). Yet, this is a much better model for an address book. We have created a good abstraction.
Where is our Abstraction? — it’s the “AddressBook” class that we created, of course!
Exactly like our example above about a “Home”, an “AddressBook” is an Abstraction. Our codebase now understands the concept of an “AddressBook”, what it can do, and how we can create a new one. Our code can now use this new “word” that we created in it’s conversations.
We should avoid using a Map<String, String> everywhere and instead use an “AddressBook”.
To add many phone numbers for each person we can update the internal representation in the AddressBook class. We can have a new function on the AddressBook class called getFirst(…). We can add complex logic inside AddressBook to handle a daytime and nighttime numbers. The AddressBook can get data from a database or a file and yet the caller does not need worry about these inner workings. All that the callers care about is that it can perform a get(…) call to fetch data using an individual’s name. | https://medium.com/swlh/abstractions-in-software-are-like-boxes-b4f536228cfe | ['Nikhil Saraf'] | 2020-07-19 17:23:34.659000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Computer Science', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'JavaScript'] |
How to find that elusive “Passion” | My journey and a tool to pave your path
Struggling with finding your passion just like I did? Let me take you through the events and actions that helped me in my quest. I will further introduce you to a tool, Ikigai, that may provide insight.
Frequently, we need a nudge and “critical” feedback from people we trust to know our capabilities — we ourselves may be blind to them. I was lucky to have Kathy Baldanza, my mentor, who helped me find my groove early on.
I was in my second job, a startup. I was a software quality engineer. One day, Kathy asked me to lead the team. I felt nervous, awkward, and excited at the same time. As expected, Kathy took my enthusiasm for new technology and my strive for technical competence into account. However, she paid equal or more attention to my soft skills such as my ability to connect the dots, supporting my teammates, and conflict resolution skills. Her assessment got me thinking: doesn’t everyone do that? The answer is no. I didn’t realize that what was natural and effortless for me, what I am good at, was what made me uniquely qualified for the job.
That realization was the first step of my journey.
The next step was to make myself more effective by spending time honing my inherent abilities. The new role was a breeze some days when we were collaborating on solving a problem or creating a new tool to test efficiently. It was boring and arduous on days when I had to update 100 tests to execute reliably. I needed to sharpen and practice mundane skills such as time management by learning from experts. It took hard work and tenacity to turn some skills into habits. If Kathy hadn’t pointed out my strengths explicitly, I may have continued to ignore them and not refined them.
Fast forward a few years…. I learnt to pay attention to what I like, what I don’t like, and what gaps I needed to fill. I loved my field — anything and everything to do with engineering services. Among the multiple facets of my job that I enjoyed, I learnt that building relationships was the most rewarding for me. It required time investment and nurturing, which I was willing and able to do well. I appreciated the nuances of conflict resolution and I got better at it with each incident.
I found an experience that is extremely rewarding but required setting boundaries. I have always had people gravitate to me when they are attempting to find clarity around personal issues. I love exploring and helping. At the same time, I fulfill a need that people have by just being myself. Over time though, I have found that if the situation has to do with a troubled marital relationship, I may get emotionally exhausted (have not figured out why yet). So, why do I continue? Because I find the experience vastly enriching. All I need to do is to learn my limits. Paying attention to my feelings and doing the best I can allows me to continue down my chosen path.
I tried out things that I believed I wanted to do. My thinking and reality were sometimes different. At one point, I dipped my feet into technical writing. It was not my thing. However, the sheer fun I am having writing this article needs further exploring.
To me, my passion and the search for “meaning of life” are interrelated concepts. I find that the Japanese concept of Ikigai, a reason for being, is useful in exploring these concepts. Be mindful of not expecting instant insight; it may take years to understand and achieve your “Ikigai”. I started off on the edge of the diagram and have ended up close to the middle through personal development and external forces. I have successfully helped a few of my teammates explore their passions by using a similar mechanism. Measure of success? They have admitted being much happier.
A great pictorial representation of Ikigai that I have found by Millenial Coach is shown below
In my profession, I love the concept of what I call “effortless quality”. I am good at finding opportunities for “continuous improvement” and executing on them. I am fortunate enough to be able to combine my love and skills in my job to get “paid”. I find immense satisfaction in helping individuals who approach me with a variety of issues. Maybe, I fulfill what the world needs at a very small scale. However, that is enough for me. I feel purposeful and whole. I know I am on the right path because I am internally motivated. My teammates confirm the fact by frequently letting me know that my passion is contagious; it makes them enjoy their work in turn.
Since you are here, you probably want help in your quest for passion. My recommendation is
Find a theme in things that bring you joy . The exercise may provide clarity
The exercise may provide clarity Investigate and try new things — there are free resources just waiting to be utilized; people willing to help
Get feedback from people you trust to identify your skills, strengths, and weaknesses — listen with an open mind, create an action plan, execute
Just the discovery itself is not enough. Take concrete steps towards that direction, even if they are small steps. The path itself may point you to a different direction
See if you can incorporate the elements you have identified in the pursuit of passion within your current job — it will allow you to practice building your muscle in these areas
There can be more than one thing that excites and motivates you. Come up with a plan to do one or multiple at different phases of your life
Passion evolves over time. There is always one more door to discover and open. Therein, lies the joy…. | https://medium.com/@mamtagoyal/how-to-find-that-elusive-passion-cd02d22cf7cf | ['Mamta Goyal'] | 2020-12-21 15:30:37.908000+00:00 | ['Continuous Improvement', 'Life', 'Professional Development', 'Self-awareness', 'Career Change'] |
Coding Meets Baking | One of my favorite activities is baking. I love baking cakes, tarts, cookies, macaroons, brownies, or all sorts of sweet things. It is not new to me; baking has been my long time hobby. What is new to me is (learning) programming! Of course, I shouldn’t be so surprised as these two activities have many things in common, like creativity, attention to detail, problem-solving and step-by-step instructions. But I would have never thought that I would be able to enjoy these activities combined as a Christmas project, and as it turns out, they work out very well together.
At seerow, we decided to surprise our customers for Christmas with custom made cookies. For this, we created a cookie configurator, a website where our customers could design their choice of cookie. First, they could select the cookie dough (from vanilla, chocolate or gingerbread) and icing (milk chocolate, white chocolate, dark chocolate or sugar glaze). They could also select from various topping options as caramel cubes, mini marshmallows, smarties, gummy bears or even sriracha sauce or vinegar chips. We received over 70 cookie requests with so many different (and crazy) combinations. Then, we collected and analyzed the inputs.
The number of the different toppings ordered
We baked a few test runs to ensure that the ingredient combinations were feasible to make. We also designed our cookie shape, an “S”, as seerow. Luckily, one of our colleagues had a 3D printer at home, and he implemented our design and printed the cookie cutter. Then, of course, another test batch was made to try out our cookie cutter and check the packaging of the cookies.
3D printing the cookie cutter
After high tech design, planning and testing, we were ready to bake 100 giant cookies. We used almost 1,5kg of butter and sugar and over 3kg of flour for the cookie dough. With team effort, we baked the 100 cookies in no time!
The seerow team is baking.
Freshly baked seerow cookies
And then comes the best part, the decoration of the cookies! It is the most enjoyable and creative part of baking and the most critical one. So first, we set up a “production line” to create the various unique ingredient combinations that the customers ordered: starting with the cookie base, adding the requested icing, and finishing it with the topping combination. Fortunately, as developers, we have a great eye on details and a lot of experience with structured thinking, so we had a great time decorating the cookies.
The “production line.”
Adding toppings to the cookies
Adding more toppings to the cookies
Some cookie creations
So here are our extraordinary, high tech, seerow cookies. How special they are. Everyone can decide whether or not they are beautiful, but they are delicious. And we made them. And we tried our best. And we had fun. So they are unique. We will probably not include cookie making in our business for now, but it was an excellent experience for us as a project. | https://medium.com/seerow/coding-meets-baking-1ea56ffdb19d | ['Lilla Csanaky'] | 2021-12-14 16:32:23.457000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Baking', '3D Printing', 'Handmade', 'Xmas'] |
Blockchain & EU-GDPR: How it can work out | How to overcome the challenges EU-GDPR legislation puts up for the blockchain technology?
It has now been one year since the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (hereafter GDPR) came into effect. This regulation aims to strengthen privacy and personal data protection in the EU countries by giving private persons more control over their data. At first view, some GDPR provisions seem in direct conflict with the fundamentals of blockchain technology, and may even be intrinsically incompatible with what the new GDPR rules seek to uphold. For blockchain the most controversial GDPR mandate is the “right to be forgotten” by article 17, giving individuals the right to request that their data be removed from a record. Because of its decentralized character with immutable blockchains, data, however, cannot be deleted (in general). Blockchains are designed to last forever. That puts blockchain in direct opposition to the EU-GDPR, at first glance.
The new European data protection law raises several questions and in particular the compatibility of the GDPR and the essential feature of blockchain, which practically forgets nothing. The possible compatibility concerns both the legal issues and technical challenges.
Legal and/or dogmatic approaches:
The “data subjects” have a right to obtain from the controller confirmation as to whether or not their data is being processed, including the information on recipients to whom the personal data have been or will be disclosed. They also have the right to ask the data controller to correct his or her personal information in case it is inaccurate (the „right to rectification“).
In this respect, there is first a legitimate question about the legal approaches that allow the co-existence of the GDPR and the blockchain.
Article 23 para. 1 GDPR in conjunction with Recital No. 73 – Restriction of the right to be forgotten
According to article 23 para. 1 GDPR the right in article 17 para. 1 may be restricted by way of a legislative measure the scope of the obligations when such a restriction respects the essence of the fundamental rights and freedoms and is a necessary and proportionate measure in a democratic society to safeguard.
Thus, a theoretical approach is advocated in the literature, which refers to a legal analysis of the expression of the right to be forgotten and the possibility of resetting the right to erasure by resorting to protection objectives in Art. 23 para. 1 GDPR (Martini/Weinzierl: Die Blockchain-Technologie und das Recht auf Vergessenwerden, in: NVwZ 2017, 1251 (1255 f.)). The GDPR already allows Member States de lege lata to repeal the right to erasure by resorting to the protection objectives set out in article 23 para. 1. Article 23 para. 1 (e) in conjunction with the recital No. 73 of the GDPR confers on the Member States, in particular, the right to allow derogations from the rights of the interested parties for “keeping public registers for reasons of general public interest”. This opening clause can be used for many state blockchain applications. In comparison to classic server solutions, a blockchain opens up a significantly higher potential for preventing manipulation of the data structure. Insofar as the benefits so obtainable outweigh the personal interests involved, this may justify a restriction of the right of cancellation by the Member States. As a minus to the complete waiver of deletion is next to a blocking of the data into consideration. Although the GDPR already standardizes such a right to restriction of processing in Art. 18. In very few cases, article 18 para. 1 (c) GDPR can help: insofar as the personal data stored in a blockchain are no longer for processing, but only for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims of the person concerned are required, the GDPR gives the normative way of blocking. Besides, the Member States have a minimal right of restriction in article 23 para. 1.
The author Dennis Hillemann is a blockchain enthusiast. He works as a lawyer in Germany with a BIG4 company.
Modification of the right to erasure to the right to pseudonymization
This approach is logically due to the possibility of restricting the right to erasure and merely represents the variation of the restriction to the right to erasure (Scholtka/Kneuper: Lokale Energiemärkte auf Basis der Blockchain-Technologie, in: IR 2019, 17 (20)).
Article 4 in conjunction with Recital No. 26
Due to the very young age of the GDPR, there is currently no court case law for this topic. Another legal approach is based on the decision of the Austrian Data Protection Authority (GZ: DSB-D123.270 / 0009-DSB / 2018; 5.12.2018), but in non-blockchain case. It refers primarily to the situation of the practical impossibility of access to the data and can therefore insofar be compared with § 275 para. 1 2nd case German Civil Code (in German: BGB). However, the argumentation line is not entirely convincing. The decision was made in a non-blockchain case, so the transfer of the argumentation line of reasoning to blockchain matters should be restrictive. The main difficulty of this approach is the dependence of the application of article 4 in conjunction with recital 26 on the exact technical situation. There are situations where there is a purely theoretical possibility of deriving personal information from some data in the blockchain. However, with all the resources available, this is not possible. The application of recital 26 as an interpretative aid is not convincing in such cases. It is not the purpose of the GDPR to create other grounds for exclusion in recital 26, which are not mentioned in article 2 para. 1. The GDPR does not know the threshold, whether the technical possibilities exist purely theoretically. Even the theoretical option of removing personal data opens up the material scope of the GDPR by articles 2, 4, and recital 26. In a situation where it is practically possible but complicated to derive some personal information from data in a blockchain, there is legal uncertainty. When considering how difficult it is to derive personal data, there is a particular need for regulation solely for the blockchain-based cases. The issue of importance should be located within the scope of application of GDPR. Here, too, the room for legal uncertainty remains, as there remains a dependency on the correct interpretation of recital 26 by the legal users concerned.
Technical challenges:
The possible compatibility of the technology with applicable European law poses several technical challenges.
Forking
Fork describes a process in which two miners create a block almost simultaneously and send it to the network, causing two different chains to exist in parts of the system for a short time (full systematic explanation by Bechtolf/Vogt: Datenschutz in der Blockchain – Eine Frage der Technik, in: ZD 2018, 66 (70)). In regular operation, one of the two chains gets lost due to the propagation speed and the principle of the longest chain, and the other one becomes invalid. Ultimately, a fork is thus a division of the blockchain. In addition to the accidental emergence of a fork, this can also be explicitly triggered. For this purpose, a new program version is provided by the programmers of the software on which the blockchain is running, which alters the validation process of the blocks. In simple terms, new rules are defined for the validation of blocks. With the old version of the program, these new rules are incompatible, which means that nodes with the older software will invalidate the blocks of the latest software and discard them. The result is the division of the blockchain. Due to the consensus principle of the blockchain and its decentralized structure, such a fork cannot be imposed on the participants of the network by the software programmers, but that each node and each miner can decide for themselves if he installs the new software version or not. For this reason, forks are an excellent challenge for the networks and always involve the risk that in the long run, not a program version prevails, which would lead to a final dichotomy and thus devaluation of the values stored in the blockchain.
Hacking “51% attack”
Another option for the technical approach is the hacking “51% Attack” (full systematic explanation by Bechtolf/Vogt: Datenschutz in der Blockchain – Eine Frage der Technik, in: ZD 2018, 66 (70)). It is an enemy attack on the blockchain, which is made possible by controlling more than half of the network’s mining power. A successful “51% attack” with back-calculated blocks would not lead to a permanent deletion or modification of data once stored in the blockchain.
The development of a subsequently changeable blockchain database
Only an administrator with the right to make changes in the blockchain can achieve the subsequent editability of data entries while maintaining authenticity. The essential advantage of a database based on the blockchain – decentralization, and protection against manipulation – would be lost.
Root key
This would allow so-called “root keys” to be created for each transaction, which would ensure that the individual hashs could no longer be linked to each other. It provides the highest level of security and data integrity. Each user thus receives such a key for each transaction, and the hashs cannot be linked. Therefore, the basic idea of the GDPR is correctly adhered to, because the sovereignty over one´s data is held by each blockchain user himself.
Conceptual (mixed) approach
Advanced new blockchain prototype: as it is currently technically impossible to modify data in blocks, the question arises as to whether the structurally new blockchain models cannot solve this problem. The conceptual approach is based on a blockchain prototype, which was presented and patented by the consulting firm Accenture. Under certain circumstances, this prototype enables the subsequent modification of the data in a blockchain. However, this model is based on the model of a permitted blockchain. Thus, in advance, individual administrators should be able to make changes according to agreed rules without breaking or sharing the chain. Modified blocks should have an unchangeable digital “scar” to indicate the change. Blockchain purists reject such changes, saying that in this way one would create nothing but a particularly expensive and inefficient standard database. Despite the blockchain purists´ criticisms, the authors believe that it will be necessary to push ahead with the development of these new models to meet the regulatory requirements (and not just privacy).
Conclusion and outlook
In addition to the problems that blockchain technology creates for privacy law, there is an unimagined potential for its implementation of the privacy protection principle of privacy by design. This principle is now explicitly set out in article 25 GDPR. It standardizes that the person responsible takes appropriate technical and organizational measures to effectively implement data protection principles – such as data minimization – to comply with the requirements of the GDPR and to protect the rights of data subjects.
The first approaches in science show the variety of possible issues that will occupy both law and computer science and technology in the coming years. It is probably only through the decisions of the courts that the first interpretative approaches are developed, which are then applied with the same standards. In line with the current state of jurisprudence and technical literature, the method of resetting the right to erasure, despite the different possibilities of design in the signatory states, is legally founded, especially as the legislature itself creates it.
Regulators should not wait too long in giving clarity on their future approach of blockchain. Long-lasting legal uncertainties around GDPR could signal an early end to blockchain progress. A practical instead of a systematic approach by GDPR is thereby recommended. For blockchain to be able to become compliant, the GDPR should change some of its conceptions, taking account of the specifics of blockchain technology. | https://dhillemann.medium.com/blockchain-eu-gdpr-how-it-can-work-out-877a13d0f3b5 | ['Dennis Hillemann'] | 2019-05-25 11:45:02.842000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Gdpr', 'Privacy', 'Blockchain Technology'] |
The Baby is Where? | The Baby is Where?
How my parents scarred me for life trying to get me excited about my new sibling
Photo by Colin Maynard on Unsplash
I don’t remember my younger sister Anji being born. She has always just been there. I’m 18 months older, and we are worlds apart. But, I have always had a little sister, just like I have always had ten fingers.
I do remember finding out we were getting another sibling.
I’m sure my parents were trying to do their best. They had probably been reading parenting books. I know Mom frequently turned to Family Circle magazine for parenting advice.
Maybe she read some articles about how to tell your children you’re about to destroy their lives by bringing yet another competitor for love and affection into the home.
All I know is that my parents scarred me for life.
Mom and Dad sat us down on the brown and red plaid couch in the family room. The sofa pattern was trendy in the 70s. But, it was now 1981, and the material was thinning on the seat cushions.
If the couch material came into direct contact with your skin, you would break out in red hives. you would find yourself compulsively scratching yourself. It was worse than the worst winter sweater. The couch was probably stuffed with asbestos.
It was impossible to sit still on the damn thing. But, that didn’t stop our parents from yelling at us about it.
“Stop squirming and listen!” was our family motto.
But, on this occasion, there was no reprimand.
Mom and Dad were grinning. Their enthusiasm was contagious. I thought we were finally going to go to the circus. I’d been begging for weeks since I first saw the ad for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, Circus commercial during our Saturday morning cartoons.
They were actually coming to our town. They were coming to Colorado Springs, and not far distant Denver, like every other amazing thing always did.
But, no.
Our parents told us we were going to have a baby.
Anji was not impressed. She immediately asked, “Why?”
She was three and a half, and I was five. Dad started to say something, but a penetrating stare from Mom cut short his explanation. It was the kind of stare where Mom looked at you over the top of her large, bug-eyed glasses and raised her eyebrows. Her lips disappeared, and her mouth became a straight line — as if she were some kind of muppet.
Mom redirected the conversation. “Aren’t you excited about having another brother or sister?”
Anji nodded her head up and down with intense vigor.
I wasn’t so sure.
“When will the baby get here?” I asked.
Dad fielded this one. “We don’t know for sure, but in about six months, Mom will go to the hospital, and she will have the baby.”
“The HOSPITAL! Why does she have to go to the hospital?” I stood up.
This baby thing was disturbing.
Dad smiled uncomfortably. Mom explained that the baby was growing inside of her and that when the baby was ready, Dad would take her to the hospital, and the baby would be born.
“The baby is where?” I asked.
Mom tried to explain pregnancy as best she could without mentioning anything about sex or science. This left me deeply confused.
You’re just walking around one day, and suddenly something is growing inside of you? Not only is a baby growing inside, but you have to go to the hospital to get it out?
I worried for a long time that a baby might be growing inside me.
Luckily, when Grandma visited a few months later, she explained that only mommies have babies. This left many questions unanswered — but it did mean I could stop checking my belly in the mirror.
Things began to change in our family. We got another car. Our family had been a one-car family, proud owners of a glorious midnight blue Chevrolet Nova. It was the only car I’d ever known. In my five-year-old imagination, the Nova was the Batmobile.
We all went to the dealership the day my parents bought the new car. My sister and I mostly stayed inside a building and sat in chairs just outside an office and ate every piece of candy offered to us by the passing salesmen.
We thought it was cool that there were cars inside the building. I began to wonder if when I was old enough to drive, I could get a job driving the cars in and out of the building.
We ended up getting a burgundy Buick Regal. My parents beamed with pride whenever the car was brought up in conversation. They had bought it new! It was the first brand-new car either one had ever owned.
To my parents, the Buick symbolized success, true hard-working American prosperity; it was their little slice of the American Dream. To me, the Buick wasn’t anything. I liked the Batmobile better.
Once we were a two-car family, Mom dragged Anji and me all over town looking at boring baby things after I got home from school and before Dad got home from work.
The Buick had nice soft, cloth seats and a fantastic new car smell. But it was not cool like the Nova. You couldn’t hear the engine working in the Buick like in the Nova. Your butt didn’t slide all over the seat with every stop or sudden acceleration. The Nova seemed faster too. But, now only Dad got to be in the Nova.
One winter evening, our family was driving in the Buick to some store. Dad asked us if we wanted a brother or sister. It was the first time my parents had consulted me on an important family decision.
“I don’t know,” Anji said.
Her nose was pressed up against the window, and she was puffing, trying to fog up the window so she could doodle. She couldn’t be bothered.
I felt the pressure now as I realized the future makeup of our family rested on my recommendation. Dad asked me again what I wanted, a brother or sister.
I looked over at Anji. She was trying to draw a smiley face with her nose.
“I already have a sister, so a brother, I guess.”
My parent’s laughter made the car windows pulse.
I was trying to take the decision seriously. I realized I was the only one.
Anji grew more and more excited about the baby coming. She would play dolls and have Mom show her how to hold a baby. She asked lots of questions that I had no interest in. I had bigger problems.
I was trying to survive kindergarten. I didn’t have time for baby stuff.
A few months later, Mom and Dad told us that the doctor believed we were having a girl.
Another sister.
Nobody ever listened to me.
Mom was sure the doctor was wrong and that she was having a boy. Dad wanted Mom to think he agreed with her, but he trusted the doctor.
I was with Mom. After all, I had decided I needed a brother — not another sister.
Mom was unfazed by the latest developments in medical thought and technology. She bought every piece of blue baby clothing our local Sears had in stock. Anji and I were there for every single purchase.
My only solace was that the toy aisles were right by the baby section, and I was allowed to wander. This concession from Mom had only come after much pleading, whining, and the accidental, I swear it was accidental, tipping over of a display table of carefully folded and arranged baby blankets. I thought the table was sturdy enough for me to pretend to be Superman as I lifted it from underneath.
There were three aisles of toys: A boy aisle, a girl aisle, and a baby toy aisle. I spent all my time studying the Star Wars toys. I looked at all of the action figures, but I coveted the spaceships. The X-wing fighter had wings that popped out at the press of a button! The Millennium Falcon had secret storage compartments!
I dreamed of all the fun I could have with those spaceships while Mom asked the lady behind the counter if they had any other baby boy clothes in the back.
In the middle of one April night, I woke up dying of thirst. This happened frequently. I usually went into the bathroom and took a small Dixie cup from the dispenser and got a drink.
But, this night, there were no Dixie cups. I went into my parent’s room. I tried to wake Dad, but I couldn’t rouse him. I went over to Mom and barely got out a whispered “Mom” and touched her hand before my very pregnant mother flew into the air. She was lying down on the bed one moment, and then the next she was in the same prone position, but in the middle of the air, almost floating over the bed.
She let out a yell, which woke up Dad. He sprang up just as Mom landed on the bed, ready for battle. Mom’s submission to gravity shook the headboard and caused the bed springs to squeak like startled mice.
Later that night, Dad woke me up. We were going to my friend Jared’s house. Mom and Dad were going to the hospital. I had triggered the baby’s arrival.
He asked me to go down and turn on the porch light.
I knew he was counting on me. I ran down the stairs, and my feet slid out from under me halfway down. I landed on my butt and slid down the rest of the stairs like an out of control toboggan. I crashed onto the landing at the bottom of the stairs. But, I managed to get the porch light on before everyone came to see what the hell had happened.
Dad dropped Anji and I off and then sped away with mom in the Buick to the hospital.
After lunch the next day, Dad came to pick Anji and me up. Mom had had a baby boy. His name was Jacob. Dad and the doctors were wrong. Mom’s Sears splurges were vindicated.
Dad took us to go and see Mom and our new baby brother.
Mom was in a hospital bed when we got there. After some small talk, a nurse brought in our brother. I was not impressed.
He just laid there with his eyes closed. Mom said that was normal. I thought it was boring. Anji and I both got to hold baby Jacob. She was more thrilled than I was.
Mom showed us her scar. They had cut baby Jacob out of Mom. She said it was called a “see section” I assumed it was because they needed to “see” the baby. The scar was gross. It was long and had all these dark stitches across it. The entire having-a-baby process was as bad as I had thought. How scary to have something cut out of you. I imagined a long, serrated steak knife, like the kind they use at buffets to cut into the prime rib, slicing into Mom so they could yank the baby out. I shuddered.
Dad took over at home while Mom stayed at the hospital for a week.
This was back before hospitals were anxious to kick you out of your room as soon as possible. All because they want to fill your bed with someone else like it’s some trendy downtown San Francisco Airbnb.
Dad announced one day that Mom would be coming home. We had made several trips to the hospital, and I had decided that having a baby brother wouldn’t be so bad. All he did was lay there. That evening we went to the hospital again.
Dad spread a blanket on the floor and set up a TV tray and put out two cartons of milk and two packages of Twinkies. Anji and I each got to have our own package of Twinkies, which normally would have made me happy. But, when I looked up at where Mom and Dad sat, I saw that they were eating steak and mashed potatoes.
“No fair,” I said. “We get Twinkies on the floor, and you get steak!”
I was outraged. The laughter of my parents dealt another major blow to my dignity.
“The hospital gives this special meal to moms and dads before they take their new babies home,” Dad said.
“But, we’re his brother and sister! We only get Twinkies?”
I looked to Anji for support, but she was staring at the ceiling, her mouth stuffed with a Twinkie.
“Right, Anji?” I asked.
“I don’t like steak.” She said, spewing sponge cake and cream everywhere. It was her only comment on the subject.
In a bow to my demands, Dad did go out to the vending machine in the hall and bring me back a candy bar. He complained to Mom over his shoulder as he handed me the peace offering, “Most kids would be thrilled with a Twinkie dinner.”
Mom chuckled. I glowered and unwrapped my candy bar.
Little did I know just how much more unfair life was about to get now that I had another sibling. | https://medium.com/weirdo-poetry/the-baby-is-where-c62e02b9063b | ['Jason Mcbride'] | 2020-06-26 00:32:30.942000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Humor', 'Memoir', 'Family', 'Parenting'] |
Advent Luxe 2020 | Studying Scripture is an ancient Christian practice. Crossway has two beautiful reading editions that have matching fit and finish, with two different trajectories.
The ESV Thinline Bible, Top-Grain Leather is a wonderful, compact edition that is perfect to carry on the go. Made of durable leather it is built to weather the storms of daily readings on the go.
The ESV Wide Margin Reference edition (also in Top-Grain Leather) has more opaque paper and ample margins for deeper study, consideration, and engagement with the Biblical text.
Both are built to last, and both pair together for reading and study.
Unfolding Grace | https://medium.com/@jdsimcoe/advent-luxe-2020-5306692a050b | ['Jonathan Simcoe'] | 2020-12-11 22:47:56.483000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Writing', 'Books', 'Church', 'Gifts'] |
The Things We Must Face | Despite what we frequently read in the media, there is nothing unprecedented about 2020. We are experiencing problems that have been with us for generations, problems that stem from divisions. And those divisions are rooted in money, politics, religion, race, and other things one should not talk about in polite company. But these social taboos are the very things we must talk about — and face — as Mr. Baldwin also famously said, or they will keep splitting us in two over and over again.
A couple of weeks after the stay-at-home order went into effect, the half of us who remained in the city had to navigate a familiar but unknown landscape. My neighborhood was as empty and quiet as my office had been. When I went on walks or the occasional errand, I photographed the changes I saw. I also turned my camera inside (because we were inside all the time!); it was a natural response to the confinement. I began to see repeated images and symbols, sometimes subtle and sometimes overt. I realized that if I was sensitive to them, they could bolster the symbols of the past that Baldwin talked about and help me navigate what I was encountering and feeling. As Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, said, “the true symbol does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself.”
Making these photographs was a cathartic experience for me. It brought to the surface my human “constant preoccupation with pleasure and pain… our pursuit of this happiness,” as fourteenth-century Japanese writer Yoshida Kenko said. It also — thankfully — brings Merton’s new awareness that, without his and Baldwin’s help, I would not have found. This process and these writers taught me that before I say anything about the problems I see out in the world, I must first look inside and face myself. | https://medium.com/@matt-milligan/the-things-we-must-face-64f67351dc3e | ['Matt Milligan'] | 2021-03-12 23:13:20.095000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'New York City', 'Pandemic', 'New York', 'James Baldwin'] |
Vybe Lets You Discover Music & Interact With People That Have Similar Music Taste | One of our new favorite social networks connects users via music.
What is Vybe?
A social platform for you to connect with other people around the country based on your taste in music. It’s one of the best music social apps for people that like to find new music, share their taste, and build meaningful connections with music lovers.
Standout Features:
Easy to use and user-friendly
Social platform for connecting through music
Find music and build meaningful connections
A scrollable feed populated by countless users and Top 5s
Activity feed for seeing daily updates and content shared by your connections
Send messages and songs to connections in real time
Customize your profile with daily mood, favorite genres, photos and switch Top 5s at any time
Real-time notifications to keep you updated on content and profile activity
Uniqueness: High
Usefulness: High
Potential of going viral: High
IMPORTANT INFO
Compatibility: IOS 13.0 or later
Developer: Succeed Software LLC
Official Website: Vybe
App Store Download Link: Vybe | https://medium.com/@hightechholic/vybe-lets-you-discover-music-interact-with-people-that-have-similar-music-taste-e8231b326223 | ['Tech News'] | 2021-04-25 13:37:47.058000+00:00 | ['Music Business', 'Social Media', 'Music', 'Apps', 'Social'] |
Batch Processing- The Serverless Way | Devil Is In The Details
Alright, the stage is set to meet the devil and we will do so step-by-step (yeah, as if it could be done in a jiffy, right ?! 😏 ). We will assume that AWS CLI has been configured with region code and appropriate credentials that has the required permissions to create and configure the components mentioned in the schematic solution (a role with AdministratorAccess permission is a good start but does not follow the ‘principle of least privilege’). Here’s the link on how to install AWS CLI version 2
Once installation is over, we can check the installation and configure the credentials with following commands
$ aws --version # Check the installation
$ aws configure # Configure the credentials under default profile
In the steps that follow, CLI commands have used ‘<account-id>’ to represent AWS Account ID. These will have to be replaced with actual account identifier during execution. Also the region code will have to be appropriately updated, if required
A NOTE ON THE BATCH FILE
We assume the batch file is a Comma Separated Values (CSV) that contains a header row along with data rows. For this example, we also comfortable assume a simple record structure with student Id, first name, last name and course name. Here’s a snapshot of a sample CSV conforming to the aforementioned structure.
student_id,fname,lname,course
A10001,Jack,Reacher,"Advanced Physical Security"
A10002,Sherlock,Holmes,"Science Of Deduction"
A10002,Sherlock,Holmes,"Modern Forensics"
A10003,Jane,Marple,"Knitting For Pros"
Things to keep in mind: Process and validate the CSV header row, if applicable. Understand how an empty value is represented in the CSV (NULL, “”, etc.). Remember to validate each record against a schema.
CREATE DYNAMODB TABLE
We will generally have to put some thought to the design of DynamoDB table. Understanding of access patterns, selection of PARTITION key and SORT key is very important. Furthermore, there might be a need to set specific read and write throughput. For this example, we assume that there will be two types of access patterns for this data-set.
✓ Fetch unique record by student_id and course
✓ Fetch all the courses attended by a student (identified by student_id)
We can easily observe that primary key (to uniquely identify an item/record) for this data-set is a combination of student_id and course. This actually makes student_id the PARTITION key and course the SORT key (based on the access patterns). With this knowledge, we can now create a DynamoDB table
$ aws dynamodb create-table --table-name PRELIM_STUDENT_DATA \
--attribute-definitions \
AttributeName=student_id,AttributeType=S \
AttributeName=course,AttributeType=S \
--key-schema \
AttributeName=student_id,KeyType=HASH \
AttributeName=course,KeyType=RANGE \
--billing-mode PROVISIONED \
--provisioned-throughput \
ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5
Things to keep in mind: Select the partition or hash key (and optionally the sort or range key) based on access patterns.
CREATE SNS TOPIC AND SUBSCRIPTION
Create a SNS topic with the following command and subsequently create an Email subscription.
Note: We will have to confirm the subscription by visiting our mailbox
$ aws sns create-topic --name batch_processing_notification $ aws sns subscribe \
--topic-arn arn:aws:sns:ap-south-1:<account-id>:batch_processing_notification \
--protocol email \
--notification-endpoint [email protected]
CREATE S3 BUCKET
It’s time to create the S3 bucket where the CSV files will be pushed for processing.
$ aws s3 mb s3://inbound-file-drop
CREATE LAMBDA FUNCTION AND EXECUTION ROLE
Before creating the Lambda function, let’s establish the Lambda execution role. However, we have to understand the difference between a trust policy and a policy document, first.
A ‘trust policy’ simply defines all the trusted entities that can assume a role. In this case, the trusted entity is Lambda service which can perform “sts:AssumeRole” action on the IAM role. Here’s the trust policy document
>>>>>>>>>> File Name: trustpolicy.json <<<<<<<<<<
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Principal": {
"Service": "lambda.amazonaws.com"
},
"Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
}
]
}
A ‘policy document’, on the other hand, defines what all actions can be taken by the trusted entity(s) that are allowed to assume the role. In this case, we will allow the Lambda to perform the following actions:
✓ “s3:GetObject” on the inbound-file-drop S3 bucket
✓ “dynamodb:PutItem” on the specific DynamoDB table
✓ “sns:Publish” on the already created SNS topic
✓ Necessary permissions to log events into CloudWatch Logs
>>>>>>>>>> File Name: policy.json <<<<<<<<<<
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"s3:GetObject"
],
"Resource": [
"arn:aws:s3:::inbound-file-drop/*"
]
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"sns:Publish"
],
"Resource": [
"arn:aws:sns:ap-south-1:<account-id>:batch_processing_notification"
]
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"dynamodb:PutItem"
],
"Resource": [
"arn:aws:dynamodb:ap-south-1:<account-id>:table/PRELIM_STUDENT_DATA"
]
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"logs:CreateLogStream",
"logs:CreateLogGroup",
"logs:PutLogEvents"
],
"Resource": [
"arn:aws:logs:*:<account-id>:log-group:/aws/lambda/batch_processing_lambda:log-stream:*",
"arn:aws:logs:*:<account-id>:log-group:/aws/lambda/batch_processing_lambda"
]
}
]
}
Things to keep in mind: While we are going to use DynamoDB ‘PutItem’ to push the records in the database, often ‘BatchWriteItem’ is used for bulk data creation or deletion. However, we must understand the limits associated with BatchWriteItem. For example: individual items can be up to 400 KB max and each call may comprise of as many as 25 put or delete requests, etc.
Now we will create the IAM policy with the policy document defined by policy.json, followed by the IAM role with the trust policy defined by trustpolicy.json and finally attach the policy to the role.
$ aws iam create-policy --policy-name BatchProcessingLambdaPolicy --policy-document file://./policy.json # Create policy $ aws iam create-role --role-name BatchProcessingLambdaRole --assume-role-policy-document file://./trustpolicy.json # Create role $ aws iam attach-role-policy --role-name BatchProcessingLambdaRole --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::<account-id>:policy/BatchProcessingLambdaPolicy # Attach policy to the role
Having created the Lambda execution role, we can push forward in our journey and create the actual Lambda function.
Here’s a sample Lambda function that extracts the name of the bucket and CSV file from S3 event notification. Then reads that file from S3 bucket and transforms all the records into JSON and attempts to push the records in a DynamoDB table. Finally, the function sends SNS notification giving out some details around the particular batch run. The Environment variables needs to be set correctly for this Lambda to work
aws lambda create-function \
--function-name batch_processing_lambda \
--runtime nodejs12.x \
--zip-file fileb://batch_processing_lambda.zip \
--handler index.handler \
--role arn:aws:iam::<account-id>:role/BatchProcessingLambdaRole
While we assume a simple implementation of the batch processing Lambda function in this post, there are several interesting questions to be answered when implementing a batch processing solution:
✓ Do we need ordered processing of the files? If so, what is the sort key?
✓ Is there a need to process the files sequentially as they arrive?
✓ Is concurrent processing by Lambda, going to mess up the data?
Things to keep in mind: In case sequential processing is required, we will have to set the reserved concurrency setting of Lambda function to 1. However, we must also understand that this reserved concurrency is across all the versions of the function
ADD RESOURCE BASED POLICY TO LAMBDA FUNCTION
Now that the S3 bucket is enabled to push event notifications to the Lambda function, the Lambda in turn, should allow such an event to invoke it. Hence we add a resource based policy to the Lambda function with the following command.
$ aws lambda add-permission --function-name batch_processing_lambda --principal s3.amazonaws.com \
--statement-id s3invoke --action "lambda:InvokeFunction" \
--source-arn arn:aws:s3:::inbound-file-drop
CONFIGURE S3 TO SEND EVENT NOTIFICATION
In the event of an object being ‘Put’ in the S3 bucket, we will have to configure the bucket to send S3 event notifications to the Lambda function just created. For that, we will create a JSON file. We will additionally toss in a filter that will check if the file has an extension of ‘.csv’ and trigger the event notification only if the extension matches.
>>>>>>>>>> File Name: notification.json <<<<<<<<<<
{
"LambdaFunctionConfigurations": [
{
"LambdaFunctionArn": "arn:aws:lambda:ap-south-1:<account-id>:function:batch_processing_lambda",
"Events": [
"s3:ObjectCreated:Put"
],
"Filter": {
"Key": {
"FilterRules": [
{
"Name": "suffix",
"Value": ".csv"
}
]
}
}
}
]
}
Things to keep in mind: If name of the file to be processed has embedded spaces, then S3 will encode such characters as ‘+’ character
Finally, we will associate the notification JSON with the S3 bucket (inbound-file-drop) and we are done with the setup.
$ aws s3api put-bucket-notification-configuration --bucket inbound-file-drop --notification-configuration file://notification.json | https://medium.com/@adrin-mukherjee/batch-processing-the-serverless-way-5c176527533d | ['Adrin Mukherjee'] | 2021-01-01 08:03:35.091000+00:00 | ['Aws Dynamodb', 'Aws S3', 'Aws Sns', 'Serverless', 'Aws Lambda Functions'] |
Small CI-CD Integration and Automation Workflow that everybody could create plus Generator App Status Update | Small CI-CD Integration and Automation Workflow that everybody could create plus Generator App Status Update Toma Velev Mar 3, 2020·3 min read
In this article I’m gonna describe my inner setup I’ve done. I’ve automated several tasks around — building, testing, deployment, executing repeated scheduled tasks. For this purpose I’ve used Java Programs, Tomcat and Jenkins local installation. Jenkins Jobs have a nice option to be triggered and executed by several options:
By a CRON expression — starting the Job on a timely manner — every day, every five minutes, once a week or whatever you put in the scheduling CRON expression.
Whenever I commit something to the Git repositories that have some code used in the automation setup — a job is executed after hooking into git post update script — calling a simple cURL command.
After a job is executed — other job could be triggered in a hierarchical, chained manner — with additional conditions to proceed only in certain build statuses.
Deployment tasks — The most basic Jenkins tasks that I have are — after I commit something — a build script is executed with some result — WAR file, Zip File, Jar, EXE or whatever and — a post procedure uploads the result to my server. Theoretically the result may be emailed, uploaded to some cloud storage or even an app store. Haven’t done that but it is possibility.
Clear tasks, backup jobs — I have a job that backups the databases in my site. Having a recent archive is a saver. I also have several task that clear some special tables — the build finished tables — so after I have new versions of the building tools — all the “build app from a data model” tasks are executed again.
CRON tasks — the backup task is a scheduled Job. Also the tasks that build apps from data models are executed every “some” minute — 5,15, or whatever I considered appropriate.
Update the CRON executables — The data model builders are just simple Jars. They depend on several Projects or modules so when I have changes on the dependencies, after the successful deployment several “update the Jar” tasks are triggered.
GeneratorApp – This is one of my core projects. It has the core feature — the creation of CRUD operations, data model oriented layers and user interfaces based on — my own or publicly defined data models. It has a deployment job, after the deployment Update the CRON executables and Clean Build tasks are chained and executed in a work flow.
Android GeneratorApp Builder — This is an app for creating android apps from data models. It Generates offline CRUD operations on the records with your definitions. I have an idea extending this builder to not only offline data models. Will see how it goes.
Flutter offline Web app GeneratorApp builder — Flutter is a cross platform framework that I’ve spend most of 2019 on. In year 2020 I am considering moving away from it. The advantage of fast building interfaces for all platforms — Desktop, Mobile, Web — with close to only one source code repository — is for early stage products. Whenever a project succeeds getting fame and some money — the time saving feature is cleared out and killed by the disadvantages — bigger app size, integration issues, and the fact that — there is no true escape from the native part. Whenever an app does something more that simple CRUD operations or a “Hello World” — a native package is required. All the big platforms have moved or are moving to native — Uber, even Facebook — that have their own Cross Platform Framework.
As a part of the evolution of my tool I have a next version of my Flutter online Web app builder. It is still in BETA. It creates crud operations with association of the data models around the core data model — “The User/Profile/Registration”. In my own use of it I see more and more features needed, so the end result to require less and less actual code change or update. And all the new features require custom code beyond simple CRUD operations. Will see how things will go in 2020, but I’m definitely considering all kinds of directions. | https://medium.com/@tomavelev_40676/small-ci-cd-integration-and-automation-workflow-that-everybody-could-create-plus-generator-app-da019b28abcf | ['Toma Velev'] | 2020-03-04 08:03:53.247000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Flutter', 'Jenkins', 'Automation'] |
Like Light from Stars | There are sometimes moments that arrive,
bringing with them something deeper
than the usual and everyday,
a sense of touching into meaning
so profound it can’t be said,
and while it lingers briefly in our mind,
we’re lifted into contact
with a spacious inner sky,
a consciousness
seeming larger
than our separate self.
And though we may sometimes wake
in the rainy, windy dawn
and find no meaning in the life we live,
there’s always meaning and value
in being human,
and life is a river of dreams,
dreamt by a conscious Universe
that knows all of us within itself,
and flows continuously
through the present moment.
And every day we’re woven
into the mystery,
and our intuition
brings clarity
and wisdom into our life.
Like light from stars
becoming love and dreams,
consciousness in the Universe
becomes the ordinary
and everyday,
as endless cosmic skies
drift through inner space
inside all of us. | https://medium.com/assemblage/like-light-from-stars-789c8fce1d5f | ['Paul Mulliner'] | 2020-12-28 09:59:15.156000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Love', 'Life', 'Dreams', 'Philosophy'] |
Get Ready for Same-Sex Reproduction | Get Ready for Same-Sex Reproduction
When artificial sperm and eggs become a reality, the sex of your baby-making partner won’t matter.
The cluster on the right is a colony of iPS cells. Each one of them could become a sperm or egg cell under the right conditions, which scientists are trying to uncover. (Courtesy of UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center)
Renata Moreira’s 1-year-old daughter is just beginning to talk. She calls Renata “Mommy,” her other mother, Lori, Renata’s ex-wife and co-parent, “Mama,” and the man who donated the sperm that gave her life, “Duncle,” short for donor uncle. The couple’s sperm donor is Renata’s younger brother.
“I frankly never contemplated having kids because I didn’t have any role models,” Moreira begins as she tells her daughter’s origin story. But when she met Lori at a bar in New York in 2013, the gay marriage movement was in full swing. When the couple decided to marry, they saw many of their friends starting families because of the new legal protections that marriage offered LGBTQ families, and they too began thinking about their options.
After months of research and thinking about the values that were most important to their family, they decided that a genetic connection to their kid was a high priority. “It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in adoption,” says Moreira, who is executive director of Our Family Coalition, a nonprofit that works to advance equity for LGBTQ families. “But the idea was that we wanted a child that was related to our ancestors and the genetic code that carries.”
Moreira is Brazilian, of indigenous and Portuguese ancestry, and Lori is Italian. Given that they both wanted to carry on their genetic heritage, they asked Renata’s brother to donate his sperm, to be matched with Lori’s eggs. The family’s fertility doctor used in-vitro fertilization to conceive an embryo in a dish and implanted it into Moreira’s uterus, making her into her daughter’s “gestational carrier.”
Even as the social stigma around gay parenting lessens — the Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that as many as six million Americans have a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender parent — LGBTQ families that want a biological connection to their children have a lot to think about. A same-sex couple who make a baby must work through an arduous puzzle of personal values, technologies, and intermediary fertility doctors, egg and sperm donors, or surrogates.
But that could change dramatically before long. A developing technology known as IVG, short for in-vitro gametogenesis, could make it possible for same-sex couples to conceive a baby out of their own genetic material and no one else’s. They’d do this by having cells in their own bodies turned into sperm or egg cells.
The science of IVG has been underway for the last 20 years. But it really took off with research that would later win a Nobel Prize for a Japanese scientist named Shinya Yamanaka. In 2006, he found a way to turn any cell in the human body, even easy-to-harvest ones like skin and blood cells, into cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), which can be reprogrammed to become any cell in the body. Until that breakthrough, scientists working in regenerative medicine had to use more limited — and controversial — stem cells derived from frozen human embryos.
There is a small international group of scientists racing to reprogram human iPS cells into sperm and egg cells.
In 2016, researchers at Kyoto University in Japan announced that they had turned cells from a mouse’s tail into iPS cells and then made those into eggs that went on to gestate into pups. There are a lot of steps that still need to be perfected before this process of creating sex cells, also known as gametes, could work in humans.
If it does work, the first application likely would be in reversing infertility: men would have new sperm made and women would have new eggs made from other cells in their bodies. But a more mind-bending trick is also possible: that cells from a man could be turned into egg cells and cells from a woman could be turned into sperm cells. And that would be an even bigger leap in reproductive medicine than in-vitro fertilization. It would alter our concept of family in ways we are only beginning to imagine.
Today same-sex couples have to involve other people’s genetic material in making a baby. Artificial gametes could let them procreate with their own. (Illustration by Aart-Jan Venema)
Sex cells!
There is now a small international group of scientists racing to recreate the mouse formula and reprogram human iPS cells into sperm and egg cells.
One of the key players is Amander Clark, a stem cell biologist at UCLA. On a Friday afternoon, she walks me through her open lab area and introduces Di Chen, a postdoctoral fellow from China who’s working on creating artificial gametes. We enter a small room with a microscope, a refrigerator incubator, and a biosafety cabinet where students work with iPS cells. Chen invites me to peer down the microscope and shows off a colony of fresh iPS cells. They look like a large amoeba.
Getting cells like these to become viable eggs or sperm requires six major steps, Clark says. All of them have been accomplished in a mouse, but doing it in a human will be no easy feat. (In 2016, scientists reported that they had turned human skin cells into sperm cells, a development that Clark calls “interesting — but no one has repeated it yet.”) And no one has yet made an artificial human egg.
Clark’s group and other labs are essentially stuck on step three. After the steps in which a cell from the body is turned into an iPS cell, the third step is to coax it into an early precursor of a germ cell. For the work in mice, one Japanese researcher, Katsuhiko Hayashi, combined a precursor cell with cells from embryonic ovaries — ovaries at the very beginning of development — which were taken from a different mouse at day 12 in its gestation. This eventually formed an artificial ovary that produced a cell that underwent sex-specific differentiation (step four) and meiosis (step five), and became a gamete (step six).
Di Chen and Amander Clark in the lab. (Photo by Reed Hutchinson/UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center)
Other researchers, Azim Surani at Cambridge and Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, have gotten to step three with both human embryonic stem cells and iPS cells, turning them into precursors that can give rise to either eggs or sperm. Surani’s former student Mitinori Saitou, now at Kyoto University, also accomplished this feat.
It’s an impressive achievement: they’ve made something that normally begins to develop around day 17 of gestation in a human embryo. But the next step, growing these precursor cells into mature eggs and sperm, is “a very, very huge challenge,” Surani says. It will require scientists to recreate a process that takes almost a year in natural human development. And in humans they can’t take the shortcut used in mice, taking embryonic ovary cells from a different mouse.
At UCLA, Clark refers to the next three steps needed to get to a human artificial gamete as “the maturation bottleneck.”
Those amoeba-like iPS cells that Chen showed me are sitting in a dish that he lifts off the microscope and carries to the biosafety cabinet. There he separates the cells into a new dish, and adds a liquid with proteins and other ingredients to help the cells grow. He puts the cells into an incubator for one day; then he’ll collect the cells again and add more ingredients. After around four days, the cells ideally will have grown into a ball that is around the size of a grain of sand, visible to the naked eye. This ball contains the precursors to a gamete. Clark’s lab and other international teams are studying it to understand its properties, with the hope that it will offer clues to getting all the way to step six — an artificial human gamete.
“I do think we’re less than 10 years away from making research-grade gametes,” she says. Commercializing the technology would take longer, and no one can really predict how much so — or what it would possibly cost.
Some of these iPS cells have been coaxed to become early precursors to a gamete. The next steps will be much harder. (Courtesy of UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center)
Even then, same-sex reproduction will face one more biological hurdle: scientists would need to somehow make a cell derived from a woman, who has two X chromosomes, into a sperm cell with one X and one Y chromosome, and do the reverse, turning an XY male cell into an XX female egg cell. Whether both steps are feasible has been debated for at least a decade. Ten years ago, the Hinxton Group, an international consortium on stem cells, ethics, and law, predicted that making sperm from female cells would be “difficult, or even impossible.” But gene editing and various cellular-engineering technologies might be increasing the likelihood of a workaround. In 2015, two British researchers reported that women could “in theory have offspring together” by injecting genetic material from one partner into an egg from the other. With this method, the children would all be girls, “as there would be no Y chromosomes involved.”
Yet another possibility: a single woman might even be able to reproduce by herself in a human version of parthenogenesis, which means “virgin birth.” It could be the feminist version of the goddess Athena springing from Zeus’s head.
The genderqueer nuclear family
The question remains whether society will want this technology — and how often LGBTQ families will choose to use it. Current advanced reproductive technologies are already diversifying the ways we reproduce and opening reproduction to groups who previously may not have had access to it. This is expanding the concept of family beyond the traditional Ozzie and Harriet hetero-nuclear family. Many people who are single parents by choice now include their gamete donors as members. Many LGBTQ families are collaborations of friends and relatives who become egg and sperm donors and help raise the kids.
So it’s understandable that social and legal observers are already thinking about the potential consequences of artificial gametes for the shape of families. If the technology means that lesbian couples wouldn’t need a sperm donor, and gay male couples wouldn’t need a donor egg, it could, among other things, make it “easier for the intended parents to preserve the integrity and privacy of the family unit,” Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote in the Journal of Law and Biosciences.
A single woman might be able to reproduce by herself, the feminist version of Athena springing from Zeus’s head.
Ironically, however, the technology also could create something rather conventional — a biological nuclear family, albeit one that looks more like Ozzie and Ozzie. “Collaborative reproduction has paved the way for radical new definitions of family, which really helped to lead the movement for marriage equality,” says Radhika Rao, a law professor at UC Hastings law school. “Instead of challenging hetero-normative values, IVG could end up perpetuating them.”
That’s why Renata Moreira isn’t sure she would have chosen it. “It might take away from this great opportunity to challenge and expand the notion of what family looks like,” she says.
But new reproductive technologies are invented to expand our choices more than to limit them, as egg freezing and IVF allow women to pause and even extend their biological clocks. In the coming decades, IVG could let us bend biology to bring together the genetic codes, as Moreira puts it, of people who otherwise can’t. This would increase the freedom to shape our families to meet our personal values and desires, and push human evolution in an altogether new direction.
Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is the editor of The ART and Science of Family and author of In Her Own Sweet Time: Egg Freezing and the New Frontiers of Family.
This story was updated on March 1, 2018, to delete a reference to men not needing a surrogate. That would require additional technologies such as an artificial womb. | https://medium.com/neodotlife/same-sex-reproduction-artificial-gametes-2739206aa4c0 | ['Rachel Lehmann-Haupt'] | 2020-10-22 23:14:49.037000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Reproductive Justice', 'Fertility', 'Science', 'Reproductive Rights'] |
wastefully chasing nothingness | (wretched blue)
aboard a decrepit sailboat,
creviced in blankets,
of apprehensive wrath,
we slept, while nettled,
in the arms of disarray,
remorseful of our unkempt sins | https://medium.com/@paradigse/wastefully-chasing-nothingness-ba5496afc9d7 | [] | 2020-09-06 00:01:23.718000+00:00 | ['Songwriting', 'Song Lyrics', 'Lyrics', 'Poetry', 'Poems On Medium'] |
Breasts and Eggs | The right to question what is not right for us
I was sorting the notes taken throughout the reading. A pattern is obvious: the right to be who we are. As much as the title hinted to us about the main issues to be explored, it was the stand of Natsuko compared to her sister’s (Makiko’s) and her niece’s (Midoriko’s) that challenged my own assumptions about being a woman. Why do we accept what was cast to us without questioning its legitimacy? On top of that, the unchallenged rules and norms were conceived by a different gender with the power to make it last for centuries.
Reproductive rights from the lens of a child
I was drawn to the thoughts of Midoriko. As a child, she was quick to judge her mother (Makiko), but each judgment always came with a reason. As the International Safe Abortion Day (28 September) is around the corner, it is timely to look at her angst in the context of reproductive rights. Do children have no right to dictate if they should be born? While her personal experience in school drove her into more internal conflicts, we ought to reflect on how many burdens a child or youth needs to put up with due to some unconscious decision made by the parents. While many would say that having a baby is part of the life process and a big part of a family, have parents thought about why this is normal? If a father or mother says they want to have babies, does the desire justify on its own? | https://medium.com/fourth-wave/breasts-and-eggs-a35ee30b8e75 | ['Yong Yee Chong'] | 2020-10-06 09:28:58.904000+00:00 | ['Gender Equality', 'Women', 'Feminism', 'Japan', 'Books'] |
Sentiment Analysis using Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes | Sentiment Analysis using Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes
Photo by Raphael Schaller on Unsplash
Supervised ML
In supervised machine learning, you usually have an input X, which goes into your prediction function to get your Y^. You can then compare your prediction with the true value Y. This gives you your cost which you use to update the parameters θ.
But what is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information.
So, let's start sentiment analysis using Logistic Regression
Sentiment Analysis using Logistic Regression
We will be using the sample twitter data set for this exercise.
Given a tweet, or some text, we can represent it as a vector of dimension V, where V corresponds to our vocabulary size. For example: If you had the tweet “I am learning sentiment analysis”, then you would put a 1 in the corresponding index for any word in the tweet, and a 0 otherwise. As we can see, as V gets larger, the vector becomes more sparse. Furthermore, we end up having many more features and end up training θ V parameters. This could result in larger training time and large prediction time. Hence, we will extract frequencies of every word and making a frequency dictionary.
The idea here is to divide the training set into positive and negative tweets. Count all the words and make a python dictionary of their frequencies in positive and negative tweets.
For every tweet make a vector of bias unit, sum of all the positive frequencies(words from positive tweets) of all the words and also their negative frequencies. We will go into detail regarding this in further paragraphs.
Preprocessing a tweet
When preprocessing, you have to perform the following:
Eliminate handles and URLs Tokenize the string into words. Remove stop words like “and, is, a, on, etc.” Stemming- or convert every word to its stem. Like a dancer, dancing, danced, becomes ‘danc’. You can use porter stemmer to take care of this. Convert all your words to lower case.
In order to carry out the above steps follow the below-given code snippets:
Import the libraries and sample twitter data set provided by nltk (Natural Language Toolkit) package, which contains 5000 positive and 5000 negative tweets. Also, let's import some additional libraries which will help us in carrying out Regular Expression in python.
import re
import string
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
from nltk.stem import PorterStemmer
from nltk.tokenize import TweetTokenizer
import numpy as np
Here we remove stopwords (words which don’t and any value to the model, without these words the model will provide the same accuracy, ex: ‘the’, ‘is’, ‘are’, etc.) and carry out stemming (removing suffix of few words in order to reduce the vocabulary size). We also import English stopwords from nltk library
Note: Here we are also tokenizing the string into a list of words after removing retweets, hashtags, URLs.
#Preprocessing tweets
def process_tweet(tweet):
#Remove old style retweet text "RT"
tweet2 = re.sub(r'^RT[\s]','', tweet)
#Remove hyperlinks
tweet2 = re.sub(r'https?:\/\/.*[\r
]*','', tweet2)
#Remove hastags
#Only removing the hash # sign from the word
tweet2 = re.sub(r'#','',tweet2)
# instantiate tokenizer class
tokenizer = TweetTokenizer(preserve_case=False, strip_handles=True, reduce_len=True)
# tokenize tweets
tweet_tokens = tokenizer.tokenize(tweet2)
#Import the english stop words list from NLTK
stopwords_english = stopwords.words('english')
#Creating a list of words without stopwords
tweets_clean = []
for word in tweet_tokens:
if word not in stopwords_english and word not in string.punctuation:
tweets_clean.append(word)
#Instantiate stemming class
stemmer = PorterStemmer()
#Creating a list of stems of words in tweet
tweets_stem = []
for word in tweets_clean:
stem_word = stemmer.stem(word)
tweets_stem.append(stem_word)
return tweets_stem
Building Frequency dictionary
Now, we will create a function that will take tweets and their labels as input, go through every tweet, preprocess them, count the occurrence of every word in the data set and create a frequency dictionary.
Note: The squeeze function is necessary or the list ends up with one element.
#Frequency generating function
def build_freqs(tweets, ys):
yslist = np.squeeze(ys).tolist()
freqs = {}
for y, tweet in zip(yslist, tweets):
for word in process_tweet(tweet):
pair = (word, y)
freqs[pair] = freqs.get(pair, 0) + 1
return freqs
The required functions for processing tweets are ready, now let's build our logistic regression model.
Sigmoid Function
Logistic regression makes use of the sigmoid function which outputs a probability between 0 and 1. The sigmoid function with some weight parameter θ and some input x^{(i)}x(i) is defined as follows:-
h(x^(i), θ) = 1/(1 + e^(-θ^T*x^(i)).
The sigmoid function gives values between -1 and 1 hence we can classify the predictions depending on a particular cutoff. (say : 0.5)
Note that as (θ^T)x(i) gets closer and closer to −∞ the denominator of the sigmoid function gets larger and larger and as a result, the sigmoid gets closer to 0. On the other hand, (θ^T)x(i) gets closer and closer to ∞ the denominator of the sigmoid function gets closer to 1 and as a result the sigmoid also gets closer to 1.
As we have understood the sigmoid function now let's code it!
Note: The function should work for a scalar as well as an array
def sigmoid(z):
'''
Input:
z: is the input (can be a scalar or an array)
Output:
h: the sigmoid of z
'''
# calculate the sigmoid of z
h = 1/(1 + np.exp(-z))
return h
Cost Function and Gradient Descent
The logistic regression cost function is defined as
J(θ)=(−1/m)*∑i=1 to m[y(i)log(h(x(i),θ)+(1−y(i))log(1−h(x(i),θ))]
We aim to reduce cost by improving the theta using the following equation:
θj:=θj−α*∂J(θ)/θj
Here, α is called the learning rate. The above process of making hypothesis (h) using the sigmoid function and changing the weights (θ) using the derivative of cost function and a specific learning rate is called the Gradient Descent Algorithm.
Note: You initialize your parameter θ, that you can use in your sigmoid, you then compute the gradient that you will use to update θ, and then calculate the cost. You keep doing so until good enough.
Let's code what we learned.
def gradientDescent(x, y, theta, alpha, num_iters):
'''
Input:
x: matrix of features which is (m,n+1)
y: corresponding labels of the input matrix x, dimensions (m,1)
theta: weight vector of dimension (n+1,1)
alpha: learning rate
num_iters: number of iterations you want to train your model for
Output:
J: the final cost
theta: your final weight vector
Hint: you might want to print the cost to make sure that it is going down.
'''
m = len(x)
for i in range(0, num_iters):
# get z, the dot product of x and theta
z = np.dot(x,theta)
# get the sigmoid of z
h = sigmoid(z)
# calculate the cost function
J = (-1/m)*(np.dot(y.T,np.log(h)) + np.dot((1-y).T,np.log(1-h)))
# update the weights theta
theta = theta - (alpha/m)*np.dot(x.T, h-y)
J = float(J)
return J, theta
Now, let's create a function that will extract features from a tweet using the ‘freqs’ dictionary and above defined preprocessing function (process_tweet).
def extract_features(tweet, freqs):
'''
Input:
tweet: a list of words for one tweet
freqs: a dictionary corresponding to the frequencies of each tuple (word, label)
Output:
x: a feature vector of dimension (1,3)
'''
# process_tweet tokenizes, stems, and removes stopwords
word_l = process_tweet(tweet)
# 3 elements in the form of a 1 x 3 vector
x = np.zeros((1, 3))
#bias term is set to 1
x[0,0] = 1
# loop through each word in the list of words
for word in word_l:
# increment the word count for the positive label 1
x[0,1] += freqs.get((word,1),0)
# increment the word count for the negative label 0
x[0,2] += freqs.get((word,0),0)
assert(x.shape == (1, 3))
return x
Now, we will import the data set from nltk and break it into a training set and test set
# split the data into two pieces, one for training and one for testing (validation set)
test_pos = all_positive_tweets[4000:]
train_pos = all_positive_tweets[:4000]
test_neg = all_negative_tweets[4000:]
train_neg = all_negative_tweets[:4000] train_x = train_pos + train_neg
test_x = test_pos + test_neg # combine positive and negative labels
train_y = np.append(np.ones((len(train_pos), 1)), np.zeros((len(train_neg), 1)), axis=0)
test_y = np.append(np.ones((len(test_pos), 1)), np.zeros((len(test_neg), 1)), axis=0)
As all the required functions are ready we can finally train our model using the training data set and test it on the test data set
# collect the features 'x' and stack them into a matrix 'X'
X = np.zeros((len(train_x), 3))
for i in range(len(train_x)):
X[i, :]= extract_features(train_x[i], freqs) # training labels corresponding to X
Y = train_y # Apply gradient descent
J, theta = gradientDescent(X, Y, np.zeros((3, 1)), 1e-9, 1500)
print(f"The cost after training is {J:.8f}.")
print(f"The resulting vector of weights is {[round(t, 8) for t in np.squeeze(theta)]}")
J is the final cost and “theta” are the final weights after training the model.
In order to check it before testing on the test data set.
# Check your function # test 1
# test on training data
tmp1 = extract_features(train_x[0], freqs)
print(tmp1) # #### Expected output
# ```
# [[1.00e+00 3.02e+03 6.10e+01]]
Lets, write two more functions which given a tweet will predict the result using the ‘freqs’ dictionary and theta. The second function will use the predict function and provide the accuracy of the model on the given testing data set.
def predict_tweet(tweet, freqs, theta):
'''
Input:
tweet: a string
freqs: a dictionary corresponding to the frequencies of each tuple (word, label)
theta: (3,1) vector of weights
Output:
y_pred: the probability of a tweet being positive or negative
'''
# extract the features of the tweet and store it into x
x = extract_features(tweet, freqs)
# make the prediction using x and theta
z = np.dot(x,theta)
y_pred = sigmoid(z)
return y_pred def test_logistic_regression(test_x, test_y, freqs, theta):
"""
Input:
test_x: a list of tweets
test_y: (m, 1) vector with the corresponding labels for the list of tweets
freqs: a dictionary with the frequency of each pair (or tuple)
theta: weight vector of dimension (3, 1)
Output:
accuracy: (# of tweets classified correctly) / (total # of tweets)
"""
# the list for storing predictions
y_hat = []
for tweet in test_x:
# get the label prediction for the tweet
y_pred = predict_tweet(tweet, freqs, theta)
if y_pred > 0.5:
# append 1.0 to the list
y_hat.append(1)
else:
# append 0 to the list
y_hat.append(0) # With the above implementation, y_hat is a list, but test_y is (m,1) array
# convert both to one-dimensional arrays in order to compare them using the '==' operator
y_hat = np.array(y_hat)
test_y = test_y.reshape(-1)
accuracy = np.sum((test_y == y_hat).astype(int))/len(test_x)
return accuracy
On testing the model using the test data set we get an accuracy of 99.5%
Sentiment Analysis using Naive Bayes
Naive Bayes algorithm is based on the Bayes rule, which can be represented as follows:
P(X∣Y)=P(Y)P(Y∣X)P(X)
Here, the process up to creating a dictionary of frequencies (importing libraries, preprocessing, etc.) is the same. The way the algorithm works is as follows:-
Find the log of the ratio of the number of positive tweets and negative sentiment tweets. i.e.
logprior :- log(𝑃(𝐷𝑝𝑜𝑠))−log(𝑃(𝐷𝑛𝑒𝑔))=log(𝐷𝑝𝑜𝑠)−log(𝐷𝑛𝑒𝑔)
2. Instead of keeping the frequencies of each word with the positive and negative labels we take the ratio of their frequency in that label by the total number of frequencies in that label. This will give the probability of occurrence of that word given the tweet is positive/negative.
3. Then we make another property called loglikelihood. It is the log of the ratio of Positive probability to that of the negative probability of a particular word. But what if the probability of the word is zero ( frequency is zero in either positive or negative case) the log may become +/- infinity. Hence to overcome this we use additive smoothing. This wiki article explains more about additive smoothing.
Therefore, to compute the positive probability and the negative probability for a specific word in the vocabulary, we’ll use the following inputs:
𝑓𝑟𝑒𝑞𝑝𝑜𝑠 and 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝑞𝑛𝑒𝑔 are the frequencies of that specific word in the positive or negative class. In other words, the positive frequency of a word is the number of times the word is counted with the label of 1.
𝑁𝑝𝑜𝑠 and 𝑁𝑛𝑒𝑔 are the total numbers of positive and negative words for all documents (for all tweets), respectively.
𝑉 is the number of unique words in the entire set of documents, for all classes, whether positive or negative.
We’ll use these to compute the positive and negative probability for a specific word using this formula:
𝑃(𝑊𝑝𝑜𝑠)= (𝑓𝑟𝑒𝑞𝑝𝑜𝑠+1)/(𝑁𝑝𝑜𝑠+𝑉)
𝑃(𝑊𝑛𝑒𝑔)= (𝑓𝑟𝑒𝑞𝑛𝑒𝑔+1)/(𝑁𝑛𝑒𝑔+𝑉)
Notice that we add the “+1” in the numerator for additive smoothing.
And the loglikelihood can be represented as:-
loglikelihood=log(𝑃(𝑊𝑝𝑜𝑠)/𝑃(𝑊𝑛𝑒𝑔))
That's it! We just need to code the above written in order to train our Naive Bayes function. So, first, let's write a function that does all the above work.
def train_naive_bayes(freqs, train_x, train_y):
'''
Input:
freqs: dictionary from (word, label) to how often the word appears
train_x: a list of tweets
train_y: a list of labels correponding to the tweets (0,1)
Output:
logprior: the log prior. (equation 3 above)
loglikelihood: the log likelihood of you Naive bayes equation. (equation 6 above)
'''
loglikelihood = {}
logprior = 0
# calculate V, the number of unique words in the vocabulary
vocab = set([pair[0] for pair in freqs.keys()])
V = len(vocab)
# calculate N_pos and N_neg
N_pos = N_neg = 0
for pair in freqs.keys():
# if the label is positive (greater than zero)
if pair[1] > 0:
# Increment the number of positive words by the count for this (word, label) pair
N_pos += freqs.get(pair, 1)
# else, the label is negative
else:
# increment the number of negative words by the count for this (word,label) pair
N_neg += freqs.get(pair, 1)
# Calculate D, the number of documents
D = len(train_y)
# Calculate D_pos, the number of positive documents (*hint: use sum(<np_array>))
D_pos = sum(train_y)
# Calculate D_neg, the number of negative documents (*hint: compute using D and D_pos)
D_neg = D-D_pos
# Calculate logprior
logprior = np.log(D_pos) - np.log(D_neg)
# For each word in the vocabulary...
for word in vocab:
# get the positive and negative frequency of the word
freq_pos = freqs.get((word, 1),0)
freq_neg = freqs.get((word, 0),0)
# calculate the probability that each word is positive, and negative
p_w_pos = (freq_pos + 1)/(N_pos + V)
p_w_neg = (freq_neg + 1)/(N_neg + V)
# calculate the log likelihood of the word
loglikelihood[word] = np.log(p_w_pos/p_w_neg)
return logprior, loglikelihood
logprior, loglikelihood = train_naive_bayes(freqs, train_x, train_y)
Predicting using Naive Bayes
In order to predict the sentiment of a tweet we simply have to sum up the loglikelihood of the words in the tweet along with the logprior. If the value is positive then the tweet shows positive sentiment but if the value is negative then the tweet shows negative sentiment.
So let's write the predicting ( takes in a tweet, loglikelihood, and logprior and returns the prediction) and a testing function ( to test the model using the test data set).
def naive_bayes_predict(tweet, logprior, loglikelihood):
'''
Input:
tweet: a string
logprior: a number
loglikelihood: a dictionary of words mapping to numbers
Output:
p: the sum of all the logliklihoods of each word in the tweet (if found in the dictionary) + logprior (a number) '''
# process the tweet to get a list of words
word_l = process_tweet(tweet) # initialize probability to zero
p = 0 # add the logprior
p += logprior for word in word_l: # check if the word exists in the loglikelihood dictionary
if word in loglikelihood:
# add the log likelihood of that word to the probability
p += loglikelihood[word] return p def test_naive_bayes(test_x, test_y, logprior, loglikelihood):
"""
Input:
test_x: A list of tweets
test_y: the corresponding labels for the list of tweets
logprior: the logprior
loglikelihood: a dictionary with the loglikelihoods for each word
Output:
accuracy: (# of tweets classified correctly)/(total # of tweets)
"""
accuracy = 0 # return this properly y_hats = []
for tweet in test_x:
# if the prediction is > 0
if naive_bayes_predict(tweet, logprior, loglikelihood) > 0:
# the predicted class is 1
y_hat_i = 1
else:
# otherwise the predicted class is 0
y_hat_i = 0 # append the predicted class to the list y_hats
y_hats.append(y_hat_i)
# error is the average of the absolute values of the differences between y_hats and test_y
error = np.mean(np.absolute(y_hats - test_y)) # Accuracy is 1 minus the error
accuracy = 1 - error return accuracy
On testing the model on the test data set we get an accuracy of 99.4%. which is slightly less may be due to the assumptions that the Naive Bayes algorithm makes. In fact, it called “Naive” due to its assumptions.
The assumptions are as follows:-
Independence assumption
In the first image, you can see the word sunny and hot tend to depend on each other and are correlated to a certain extent with the word “desert”. Naive Bayes assumes independence throughout. Furthermore, if you were to fill in the sentence on the right, this naive model will assign equal weight to the words “spring, summer, fall, winter”.
2. Relative frequencies
On Twitter, there are usually more positive tweets than negative ones. However, some “clean” datasets you may find are artificially balanced to have the same amount of positive and negative tweets. Just keep in mind, that in the real world, the data could be much noisier. | https://towardsdatascience.com/sentiment-analysis-using-logistic-regression-and-naive-bayes-16b806eb4c4b | ['Atharva Mashalkar'] | 2021-03-07 18:06:50.265000+00:00 | ['Sentiment Analysis', 'Machine Learning', 'Algorithms', 'Data Science'] |
NEL First Bi-weekly Report of June | This report tells the NEL latest development in the first half of June
Neo-cli-nel
Followed up to V2.10.2 and the online version was upgraded to 2.10.2
NNSDEX
NNSDEX will be logged in using the Teemo wallet. The functions and testing of the NNSDEX trading section have been completed. It supports the use of CGAS and NNC for domain name auctions and purchases.
Added a new use case to NNC. Users need to stake NNC for an open order of pre-owned .neo domain names, and NNC will be returned after the pending order is canceled or closed.
We also added the email notification function to NNSDEX. You will be notified by email when someone buys or purchases your domain name.
We plan to integrate domain name binding, mapping, renewal, and auction functions all into the NNSDEX.
Due to transaction fee restrictions in the NEO, NNSDEX is temporarily unavailable. NNSDEX will go live after NEO changes its transaction charging strategy, which is expected to be in the second half of this year.
Trading market_buy
Trading market_order details
Account_my domain list
Account_Set email notification
Developed the query function for dex domain name holding information
Developed the query function for dex available domain name list
Developed dex open / bind / modify email functions
Developed the dex delete email notification function
Developed the dex email verification function
Developed the dex email status query function
Developed the dex automatically send verification information function
Developed the dex automatically send notification data function
Made .test and .neo domain name queries compatible with each other
Teemo Wallet
Fixed a bug where the transaction size that is large than 1024 bytes causes the transaction to be unrecognized. For transactions that are larger than 1024 bytes after packaging, the transaction is reconstructed and the transaction fee is automatically added to ensure that the transaction can be sent.
Followed up with node upgrade, upgraded the corresponding interface of Teemo wallet.
NELSwap
We developed the token decentralized exchange NELswap based on the constant product protocol, and users will be able to make market and exchange tokens on NELswap. NNC will provide liquidity for a variety of tokens.
The contract for NELswap has been completed.
The static page of the web-side trading and exchange page and the funds pool management page has been completed, and the function will be completed next week.
Real-time access to USD/CNY exchange rate data and GAS/USD exchange prices allow it possible to determine token prices at NELswap.
The development of the NELswap market price analysis page will continue.
Like NNSDEX, NELswap is temporarily unavailable due to transaction fee restrictions. It will go live after the NEO fee strategy has been revised.
Others
The background monitoring adds monitoring of the api interface service to ensure the stability of each application interface. | https://medium.com/neo-smart-economy/nel-first-bi-weekly-report-of-june-b16d98fbacf5 | ['Robbie Wang'] | 2019-06-18 09:53:28.463000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Smart Contracts', 'Wallet', 'Dex'] |
Parcel on my porch | I tell stories entangled in the ridges of my mind. My words will nourish your soul. Passionate about women, children, tea and a little “too” many other things.
Follow | https://medium.com/illumination/parcel-on-my-porch-14410d5f70be | ['Uchechi Obasi'] | 2020-06-09 13:33:58.337000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Illumination', 'Life', 'Love', 'Friendship'] |
Retrofitting New Jersey: A Transit-Oriented Smart Growth Vision for the Garden State | NJ Transit-Oriented Development Smart Growth Map (Link)
New Jersey is at a critical juncture now with the final affordable housing settlements being made, millennials leaving the state, and the predictions for climate change looking more dire. Do we continue to allow for more auto-dependent sprawl or do we fix the mess that was created and make more great, walkable, bikeable, affordable, sustainable, low-carbon, vibrant places connected by public transportation? One thing’s for sure, we can’t continue the way we are going. While NJ boasts high levels of alternative transportation usage (some of the highest in the country), most people in the state have to drive to go anywhere. This is bad for quality of life, and it’s bad for the future of our planet. All this driving leads to wasted time & economic productivity due to traffic, impaired air quality, and an incredible amount of carbon emissions. In New Jersey, 42% of our carbon emissions (45.8 Million Metric tons) are from transportation; therefore, if we don’t do anything about automobile dependence, we are going to have a hard time meeting reduction targets — and EVs aren’t going to solve the problem alone.
New Jersey is the perfect place to continue growing. It is already the most densely populated state in the country and has excellent transit infrastructure, but it’s sprawled out and auto-dependent. Much of the state could be retrofitted and densified in a smart way. Now is the time to enact policies that encourages the right kind of growth. Growth that will connect much of our existing housing to easily accessible public transit; growth that will get cars off the road, reduce traffic and carbon emissions; growth that will allow people to have a car(e)free lives and create better more vibrant livable places. It is possible, it can be done, and should be done. The future of growth in New Jersey should be about reducing and ideally eliminated dependence on the personal automobile in as much of the state, by concentrating development on existing public transit, limiting it everywhere else, creating new public transportation lines and building on them.
Ultimately, New Jersey should become a cluster-based polycentric metropolitan area, where every town and city has its own thriving, diverse local economy, where everyone can live within walking distance to their job, school and other amenities and could go anywhere else with a bike, electric scooter, public transportation, autonomous taxi or car-sharing. While there may be some existing housing that will not be within walking distance to public transit, in the future, they will have access to on-demand autonomous electric taxis/shuttles that will be able to take them to a center with public transportation quickly. And in some cases, where people live too far to access public transport or a taxi easily, they could still have to have a private automobile (which will eventually all be electric).
In order to visualize what needs to be done, I created the NJ Transit-Oriented Smart Growth Map. This interactive map shows all the existing NJ Transit lines, stations, and stops as well as proposed new lines, stations, and stops. The existing transit lines are different colors, the train stations have the train icon, and bus stops are back dots. Each train station has a ½ mile buffer around it — which is the standard distance people find acceptable to walk to a train station. And each bus stop has a ¼ mile buffer which it the standard distance people are willing to walk to a bus stop. These circles are where dense development should occur. This map also includes bus park-and-ride locations which also could be locations of Transit Oriented Development — as well as the stops along those commuter bus routes. Though, currently, we don’t have access to that commuter bus line data. Perhaps in the future, I will add the lines. Here are all the all private carriers in New Jersey (for reference): https://www.njtransit.com/private-carriers
In addition to the interactive map, I’m proposing three general policy recommendations for creating a transit-oriented smart growth New Jersey.
1. Incentivize growth around existing transit stops
The most critical first step toward a smart growth future is to incentivize development around existing transit stops. We need to enhance and build dense, vibrant, affordable, mixed-use, sustainable, walkable communities on public transit with all the facilities and amenities people need. The most important thing someone can do to reduce their carbon footprint is not to own/drive a car; therefore, we need to do everything we can to make that possible and easy in New Jersey.
The state has made efforts to promote transit-oriented development. They have the transit village program which prioritized state resources to areas that get the “Transit Village” designation. And New Jersey is looking to expand the program with the New Jersey Transit Villages Act. But much more needs to be done. Every transit stop should automatically be considered for the benefits of the Transit Village program, and substantial resources and incentives should be committed to redeveloping and developing those areas. Every half a mile around a train transit stop and every quarter mile around every bus stop should also automatically qualify for grants, permitting assistance, tax exemption, etc. This includes revitalizing our existing urban centers, retrofitting our suburbs and even developing on new land where applicable. The State should also consider overriding local zoning around transit stops to encourage density. This has been proposed in California and Oregon — both are home rule states. New Jersey should adopt something similar.
Furthermore, autonomous electric public shuttle buses should be designated for areas around train stops, where residents could request them on-demand. Public Transportation should also be much cheaper, and there should be free and easy transfers. There should also be tax incentives to keep and encourage office, commercial, and light industrial uses in the transit circles to create a diverse economy. We should also build to notch walkable magnet schools in the transit villages that would allow children to walk to school. The ideal built environment should allow people to live, work, play, and go to school without a car.
2. Discourage growth anywhere auto-dependent
There should be a complete moratorium on building high-density auto-dependent housing out in the middle of nowhere unless they could be strategically connected to public transportation now or in the near future. Municipalities should also preserve and down-zone any land that is not within walking distance to public transportation. The State should also work with conservation organizations and provide technical assistance and funding to purchase and preserve land that is at risk to more suburban sprawl. Programs such as Green Acres and farmland preservation should be ramped up to help protect vulnerable land.
While we don’t want to destroy communities, ultimately, the rural/exurban sprawl McMansion homes should be abandoned, deconstructed, and returned to nature or used for agriculture.
3. Create new transit lines and stops
Finally, along with concentrating development near existing public transportation, discouraging growth anywhere auto-dependent, we should be creating new transit lines and stops based on where there is infrastructure, right of ways, density, and opportunities. That means adding passenger lines on existing freight lines and previous right of ways. We need to reactivate old rail stations and create new ones where there is already high densities of people and abundant amounts of re-developable land on the lines such as warehouse parks, big box stores, strip malls, and suburban office buildings. Furthermore, we should be extending existing bus lines and adding Bus Rapid Transit lines along the major highway corridors.
The following are some of the rail lines in central New Jersey (yes, it does exist) that could/should be expanded or reactivated as passenger lines:
Princeton Dinky Line — While this is an existing line, new stops should be created along this route. Principally, at Canal Pointe Boulevard and Carnegie Center. The Canal Pointe Boulevard would be a perfect location for an expansion of Princeton University, and creating a stop at Carnegie Center would create public transit access to thousands of jobs.
West Trenton Line — This used to be an old commuter line between Ewing and Bound Brook, but was shut down. This historic line included stops in some historic towns such as Pennington, Hopewell, and Belle Mead. This line should be reactivated, and new stops should be created in Hillsborough and Manville. The Ewing stop should also be moved to the new town center they are constructing. There could also be a connection to Princeton by running a shuttle from Hopewell and expanding the 605 bus line to Belle Mead. And the Manville Auto Auction site could be redeveloped into a new large part of the downtown. The line could also connect with a semi-high-speed line from Philipsburg to New York or connect to Bridgewater or Bound Brook and the Raritan Valley Line.
Somerset Connector — This is partially based on an old train line that ran from Jersey Ave to East Millstone, and could connect to the West Trenton Line through a Transmission Line right of way and the former East Millstone line to the Northeast Corridor. This connector could provide a critical link between the two main lines and a way to get to New Brunswick and the Northeast Corridor from the West Trenton Line towns.
Sayreville Secondary — Currently, this line is a freight line that connects South Amboy to Milltown, but it could be converted into a light rail line that could stop in Sayerville, South River, Milltown and be extended to the south side of New Brunswick by Bristol Myer Squibb and Rutgers Cook Campus — there is a city bus that connects the proposed terminus to Downtown New Brunswick and there could be a shuttle bus that connects to Jersey Ave and other parts of the City.
North Middlesex Line (Port Reading Secondary Connector) — This freight line connects Bound Brook to Carteret and could be converted into a light rail line that could run through Piscataway, Edison, Iselin, and Avenel. This is an incredibly dense part of New Jersey with limited public transportation. And there is a significant amount of space in some of the warehouse parks along the rail line which could be redeveloped into new transit villages and create transit access to existing neighborhoods.
Lehigh Line — This freight line currently connects Philipsburg to Newark-New York. But this could become a semi-high-speed rail that could connect the Allentown, Easton, Bethlehem (and Philipsburg) metropolitan area to New York City. This line could create an important public transportation connection between the two major metropolitan areas and help stimulate the economy of the Lehigh Valley. There could be stops in Flemington, Bound Brook, possibly South Plainfield & Clark, and then run along the Raritan Line to Newark Airport and New York City.
Lambertville Connector (Black River & Western) — This line would connect the New Hope-Lambertville Metro area to Flemington and a potential semi-high speed rail into New York City
Camden Amboy Line — This line was once the Camden & Amboy Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad. A new light rail line could be created and connect Bordentown to Perth Amboy and have stops in Yardville, Robbinsville, Hightstown, Cranbury, Rossmoor, Jamesburg, Spotswood, Winding Wood/Sayreville, and South Amboy. Parts of this line would need to be recreated, principally in and around Hightstown, which would be tough — but is possible.
Dayton Connector Shoreline — This line would be based on a new stop at Monmouth Junction and would connect riders on the Northeast corridor to the Camden Amboy Line at Jamesburg as well as further down to Freehold and Manasquan and the North Shoreline. NJ Transit did a study called “Monmouth-Ocean-Middlesex” that proposed something similar. | https://medium.com/@zenontc/retrofitting-new-jersey-a-transit-oriented-smart-growth-vision-for-the-garden-state-655d6940a1a4 | [] | 2021-08-19 02:25:23.615000+00:00 | ['New Jersey', 'Public Transportation', 'Urban Planning', 'Smart Growth'] |
AYS Daily Digest 18/11/2020 — Frontex dismissed investigation into its involvement in illegal pushbacks | Forensic video investigation of illegal pushbacks on Croatian border (BVMN) // New developments on Canary Islands // Greece to build new camps on its islands by end of 2021
Refugees on the sea between Greece and Turkey — Turkish Coast Guard
EU and FRONTEX
Evidence emerges of EU border agency FRONTEX dismissing investigation into human rights violations
On 2 March 2020, the EU border agency Frontex was allegedly involved in an illegal pushback of a boat with 33 refugees in Greek waters, near the island of Kos. When confronted by a group of investigative reporters on the matter, Frontex director Fabrice Leggeri described the incident as a “misunderstanding”, and publicly assured that the matter would
“be treated with great concern and carefully investigated.”
However, as it appears from a chain of emails obtained through a freedom of information act, the Hellenic Coast Guard was ordered to push back the boat into Turkish water, an action that is illegal under international law.
Moreover, it appears that there was no serious commitment on the side of the agency to investigate the matter, neither at the time, nor afterwards.
According to Frontex, there is no further information on the incident in the files. The Frontex staff did not check the command structures and did not check why there was no internal report on the illegal order. They also made no other attempts to ensure that pushbacks from the Frontex command would no longer occur.
The emails confirm what, unfortunately, is familiar to those who follow the issue of illegal pushbacks: 1) the Hellenic Coast Guard was definitely involved in ordering the illegal pushback; 2) Frontex fails to report or investigate human rights violations; 3) this incident was much more serious than a mere “misunderstanding”, as Frontex officials claimed.
You can find the whole Frontex internal email thread here. | https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-daily-digest-18-11-2020-frontex-dismissed-investigation-into-its-involvement-in-illegal-29596cb49c20 | ['Are You Syrious'] | 2020-11-20 07:59:31.113000+00:00 | ['Spain', 'Digest', 'Frontex', 'Greece', 'Balkans'] |
How UX improved my grocery shopping during the pandemic | Photo by Anna Tarazevich from Pexels
One of the things I miss most from my life before the pandemic was the weekly grocery store trips to Trader Joe’s my partner and I took. Food shopping can often feel stressful. But Trader Joe’s in-store aesthetics and innovative products created a fun environment. My partner and I enjoyed casually strolling the store, sticking to our shopping list I made on my phone and breaking from the list when we found new items we wanted to try that week. We eat a plant-based diet, so we end up buying a lot of fresh produce.
It’s funny; before the pandemic, I wouldn’t have realized how much I enjoyed going to the grocery store as I thought it was just a chore. But once the lockdown started overnight, our trips to the grocery store became a chore again, long lines, the stress of staying 6 feet apart. Suddenly being at the grocery store meant putting our health at more risk. Sometimes we would forget to grab items in our hurry to minimize our in-store time, or some item we wanted would have sold out; we would end up buying more things than usual so that we wouldn’t have to go back as often — instead, we just ended up eating more. The food was the product, and nothing about it had changed. I still enjoyed finding new items on the shelf, but it no longer was safe to stroll around the store and discover new things. The experience of obtaining the product changed.
Enter Misfits Market, an ugly produce delivery system. It took away the stress that the pandemic brought to my weekly shopping trips. Every Saturday at 4 PM, my shopping window opens up. A beautiful UI prompts me to customize my delivery box. Each week I get to select six vegetables out of groups A and B and three from group C. I find myself excited to see what new vegetables and fruit await me, as each week the selection of available items changes. In one business day of my order shipping, it is at my front door. Since the items are directly from farmers, the produce is exceptionally fresh. My weekly shopping is back to stress-free levels, and I still have the joy of finding new items to try.
In the digital space, products are often more abstract. While the main product is the food, it took a sound UI system to replace the in-store experience for me. Misfits Market solved the problem of visiting the grocery store during the COVID-19 pandemic with a delightful operating system I didn’t even know I needed. | https://medium.com/@morgan-nebiosini/how-ux-improved-my-grocery-shopping-during-the-pandemic-8265ffd0dd98 | ['Morgan Nebiosini'] | 2020-12-22 15:51:31.129000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'UI Design', 'Covid 19', 'Shopping', 'Pandemic'] |
Tidal Testnet Progress Updates — 2 | Dear Tidal Community,
We are happy to update you with the news that we are 60% deep into the testnet program and have received a lot of feedback from active testers. Questions and discussions on our discord channel not only to help us make improvements on the product, but also to foster the grassroots user community to support the platform’s growth. We will release more technical contents based on the feedback we receive in order to help the community understand the framework and design of the platform. Here are a few major updates from last week (tester data extracted at April 27th, up to 4 intervals)
Activity testing account: 182
Transactions- sell / buy / guarantor number: 11,885 counts
Below illustrates the score histogram of the top 50 testers, the highest score is 1676, top 20 have scores above 550, with the rest scoring between 300 and 550.
Detailed user data and score board for the top 50 testers can be found in the sheet below:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ILw2SRi4Gl-0SC3GPm8HDgK2PWku5N5QsQnflndc7zk/edit?usp=sharing
With all the feedback we have received, here are the high priority things we are working on.
Guarantor: Having it on the same page as the seller causes a lot of confusion. A stand-alone guarantor page will be created.
Seller -> basket: seller changing basket is not very intuitive for users in terms of update changes, and when it becomes effective.
Seller -> withdraw / deposit: The current setup causes confusion on the deposit/withdraw amount, when it becomes effective; and how to edit the changes.
Buyer pre-deposit balance: Explanation on why buyer needs pre-deposit balance.
Thank you again for all suggestions towards platform development. We will provide regular updates on the product while incorporating your feedback. A strong user-based community plays a key role in tidal platform’s growth. We are grateful for all the participants’ effort and our community’s continuous support.
Best,
Team Tidal
About Tidal Finance
Tidal Finance makes DeFi safer by providing insurance coverage for assets across chains in custom balanced liquidity pools. TIDAL is a Balancer-like insurance market built upon Polkadot that allows users to create custom insurance pools for one or more assets.
With Tidal, users can choose risk pools depending on their risk appetite, and filter it through a combination of protocols/assets and their coverage terms (premium, cover period, etc). Liquidity Providers, on the other hand, can invest in pools that suit their risk/reward ratio.
TIDAL Public Channels
✳️ Official Website: https://tidal.finance/
✳️ Medium: https://tidalfinance.medium.com/
✳️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tidaldefi
✳️ Announcements Channel: https://t.me/tidalann
✳️ Telegram Channel: https://t.me/TidalGlobal
📗Intro to Tidal Medium blog: https://medium.com/tidal-finance/introducing-tidal-open-marketplace-for-programmable-insurance-1a48b1d497eb | https://medium.com/tidal-finance/tidal-testnet-progress-updates-2-aaa83bf61cd6 | ['Tidal Finance'] | 2021-07-26 16:28:50.623000+00:00 | ['Tidal', 'Defi', 'Smart Contracts', 'Insurance', 'Product'] |
Being a More Successful Freelancer Required One Key Skill | Being a More Successful Freelancer Required One Key Skill
Because marketing wasn't enough to get business
Photo by KAL VISUALS on Unsplash
I started freelancing about three years ago.
I didn’t know anything about entrepreneurship, and I didn’t know a lot more about business. I was fresh out of school, and I had a few opportunities to help a few companies with their digital marketing strategies. So I jumped on the opportunity, and I used this small pool of clients as a way to kickstart my own social media business.
It went fine until I had to find other clients. That’s when I realized that I had no idea where to start.
Creating Content is Important, but It’s Not Everything
I started writing on my blog and here on Medium. Through content, I thought that I would prove my worth, and potential clients get confident in hiring me after reading my articles.
And I wasn’t wrong, because it did work. I was getting a few inbound contacts every week. The problem was that I had a tough time converting these inbound leads into clients.
I was getting upset. I thought that I was a good professional. I always made sure that working with me is easy. I always made sure to deliver the work in time and with a high-quality standard. I kept up with the most recent trends… I was a good professional, and I found it frustrating these leads would not give me a chance.
I kept reading about the benefits of working for free, but that didn’t feel like the right solution to me. After all, why would these people hire me after I deliver everything for free?
At this point, I started doubting everything I’ve been reading about content creation. I was writing a lot, but I wasn’t getting new clients.
After a while, I realized what the problem was. Content creation was working well for me as it was doing what it’s supposed to do: getting inbound leads. But the real problem was me: I wasn’t able to convert these leads into paying clients.
Selling Is Your Number 1 Job as a Freelancer
Getting a client to reach out to me, explain their problem, and getting them on a call was relatively easy and somewhat automatic.
After publishing nearly a hundred articles on both my blog and Medium, I had a pretty steady flow of inbound leads. But my problem was that I couldn’t get these people to become clients.
I had to get better at selling.
So I started learning about sales. I started learning about understanding my leads’ real pain points and providing an unresistible solution for them.
I also started understanding that not every single lead is worth turning into a paying client and that, sometimes, it’s better to help a client for free through a quick phone call rather than pushing a sale.
Understanding sales is the skill that truly helped me get to the next step as a freelancer.
Working on selling helped me get new clients, but it also helped me provide more value to my customers. I now knew precisely what my leads were looking for, I knew precisely how much my help was worth, and I knew when my help wasn’t what they were looking for.
I was able to convert around 25% of my inbound leads into clients. The rest either didn’t work, or we both realized working together wouldn’t be the right answer to either of our needs.
This 25% figure may not seem like much for many people, but it’s a lot better than 0. I can safely assume learning about sales had the most significant leverage in my business since I started.
If You’re a Freelancer, You Need to Be a Salesperson
Before learning about sales, I was continually reading about marketing, social media, and productivity. I followed all the trends, and I spent most of my energy trying to keep up with the latest trends.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was procrastinating.
Sure, knowing about what works is essential. Becoming better at your job is essential. But if you can’t get clients to work with you, your skills become pointless.
As a freelancer, doing your job is the easy part. The challenge is about finding paying clients consistently.
You can learn as much as you want about your job, it won’t help you get clients. But learning about your skills, your leads’ problems, and how to sell your skills to them will.
As a freelancer, your job is to drive traffic to your service and then convert this traffic into paying customers. In my example: content marketing helps me get traffic, sales is what converts this traffic into clients.
That’s why I encourage you to give sales a try. Learn the basic principles of sales, and start applying them to your business. Start refining your cold emails. You will be amazed by the incredible results you will get. | https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/being-a-more-successful-freelancer-required-one-key-skill-27841b2a5688 | ['Charles Tumiotto Jackson'] | 2020-12-21 12:56:00.889000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Content Marketing', 'Sales', 'Selling', 'Freelancing'] |
How to Stand Out on GitHub Using Profile READMEs | How to Stand Out on GitHub Using Profile READMEs
Think of it as your personal website — except more accessible and much easier to create.
Github | Kinsta
Every programmer knows GitHub as the bonafide industry-standard for version control, side projects, open-source ventures, and quite frankly, anything else code-related.
With the introduction of Profile READMEs, Github is now a one-stop shop for not only showing off your tech skills and coding prowess, but also anything else you might want to share about yourself.
Think of it as a creative portfolio, personal website, and expressive canvas all rolled into one. Plus all your code is there as well!
If you use Github impress recruiters, friends, or anyone else coming across Github profile, creating a profile README is the perfect way to stand out!
But first, what is a README?
A README is pretty self-explanatory… it’s the first canvas anyone sees in a repository. A staple on Github for ages, READMEs are automatically rendered on the first page of all code repositories as a page to summarize your project, explain any setup steps, provide instructions on how to contribute, etc.
Profile READMEs work the same way except for instead of being the first page on a repository, they are featured front and center when someone navigates to your Github Profile.
Fun Fact #1: Github Profile READMEs were developed in a single day.
Stand Out With Github Profile READMEs
Think of a personal website… except more accessible, and quite frankly easier to create.
Show your personality
Yes, you’re a (great) programmer, but you’re an even greater person!
Use your profile README to show off your hobbies, (perhaps) your sense of humor, and many awesome personality traits. It’s the best way to stand out from the rest of the Github community!
Easy access to all your Github contributions
Once upon a time, Github profiles were just links that were included in our websites and resumes. Now, your code and personal profile can be in the same place, making it easier for recruiters, friends, and colleagues to get a snapshot of your skills and personality.
Aesthetically pleasing
It’s quite easy to create an incredibly aesthetically pleasing README.
Unlike with personal websites, you don’t need to be a star at CSS to create a pretty profile README. With a basic understanding of Markdown (which is, quite frankly, very easy) and some emojis, you can create a README that you are proud of.
Super flexible
Hoping to create a creative profile/resume? It’s pretty easy. There are many great tools out there that can help you make your profile pop. Want to automatically link your Twitter, Medium, or blog updates? Just write a quick script.
Hoping to get the Github community involved? Github actions make it easier than ever to make your README interactive. (See more about creative README ideas below.)
Cool Tip #2: If you go under Insights > Traffic on your Profile README (or any repo), you can see the stats such as the number of profile (or repo) visitors. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-stand-out-on-github-with-profile-readmes-dfd2102a3490 | ['Jessica Lim'] | 2020-08-07 13:27:00.616000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Software Development', 'Tech', 'Programming', 'Github'] |
Come With Me, Darlin’, Down To New Orleans | Look at you darlin’, you’re worn out,
pushed and pulled this way and that,
numbed by the screen in the maddening
cubicle of a tethered life.
You’re tired of the limp conversations
with your half-baked generation.
Seems they’re bringing you down,
darlin’, so low that you can’t feel
the flow of your own blood
gushing around.
Your days are rushed and
mechanical. The algorithms
of the daily grind have
you all figured out. You’re
losing that fire, darlin’,
that sense of being madly alive.
I can see it in your exotic eyes,
the way you move, the way
you talk, the way you sigh
when the alarm clock cries
in the early AM.
I know a place that’ll help shake you out of it.
It’s a peculiar place for the exiled, for those
who crave a different taste than the stale
monotony of the typical American life.
We’re gonna descend on down to
a place of poets, and villains,
vagabonds, assassins, and gamblers,
drunkards, artists, pirates,
prophets, and midnight amblers.
A place where voodoo queens
meander through Cities of the Dead
and damaged souls lurk within
dreamy dreams with dirty toes
stumbling down steamy streets.
It’s a vile place, darlin’– grimy
and dangerous but alive, and through
the thick fog of its impurity there’s a light,
a gleaming light
that guides our yearning souls
out of the dreadful night.
It’s the Crescent City darlin’,
that muddy mystical metropolis
that washed up on a sharp bend
at the lower end
of the mighty Mississippi
some centuries ago.
A place of broken levees and rising waters,
slow boats and creole ghosts sitting
on front stoops of Bywater shacks
with toothless smiles and shirtless backs.
The sidewalks in this town ooze secrets
of centuries past, and the buildings are filled
with the wisdom of ancient pacts.
It’s here that a breeze like a bum’s
liquored breath hits you with all
its sins and mysteries
as you walk with barefoot gypsies
along the banks of the Mississippi.
It’s here darlin’, that a young whiskey drunk
Faulkner
typed away at his poems down in Pirate’s Alley.
And it’s here where the beer drunk poet
Bukowski
visited and stayed in rat-infested rooms
as he hid from life. It’s a place of
Tennessee Williams
and his Streetcar named Desire. It’s here where
you can hear the trumpet of
Satchmo
seep out of the mud in the early hours
as dew drips from blooming Magnolias.
It’s also in this dirty ole’ town that
Dean Moriarty
bellowed out ‘Oh, smell the people!’…
‘Ah! God! Life!’ ‘Yes!’
as he darted from the car and looked in
every direction for girls.
‘Look at her!’…
“The air was so sweet in New Orleans,”
Kerouac wrote, “it seemed to come in
soft bandannas;
and you could smell the river and
really smell the people,
and mud, and molasses, and every kind
of tropical exhalation with your nose
suddenly removed from the dry ices
of a Northern winter.”
So come with me, darlin’
come with me down
to the land of sugar cane
where we’ll drown out the mundane
as the storm clouds float in
from over Lake Pontchartrain
and we’ll dance in the pouring rain
with our battered boots
as we slide ever so
gloriously
down the drain
of life.
Hand in hand we’ll wander
alongside ancient sepulchers
in the flooded graveyards
while the ravens
flutter in the gray gloom.
And when the sun finally peaks
out from the muck,
we’ll be wondrously drunk
on Decatur Street as whiffs
of jasmine drift thru the debauchery.
Can’t you hear Tom Waits singin’ to us,
darlin’,
listen, listen… you can hear the piano…
now…there it is — his smoke scarred voice
cries out:
“Well, I wish I was in New Orleans,
I can see it in my dreams,
Arm-in-arm down Burgundy,
a bottle and my friends and me.”
C’mon darlin’,
we only have one life to live
and we have to live it wild;
get scarred up and wounded
by those fleeting miles
so we can greet the grave with style.
So pack a bag, lemme see that smile,
there you go, it’s time to
dim that halo, sweet child,
and defile
them pretty
little
wings.
C’mon darlin’,
the end is near.
It always is. | https://medium.com/@erikrittenberry/come-with-me-darlin-down-to-new-orleans-d03e87dc3be6 | ['Erik Rittenberry'] | 2020-01-15 23:50:58.621000+00:00 | ['New Orleans', 'Travel Writing', 'Adventure', 'Poetry'] |
The Gift of Loss | Claiming my disability led to the self-acceptance I was never going to find from chasing perfection
After a series of setbacks, including a life changing accident that left me blind in one eye, the dream of achieving happiness seemed even further out of reach. Yet, despite this core belief, I vehemently hid it from everyone.
How does one reach this state? What are the implications of living a life with this mindset? How does one change this mindset?
These are all questions I hope to answer by sharing my story but more importantly, to also shed light on the importance of authenticity on our well-being.
Here is my wild journey to learning the value of self-acceptance:
Self-acceptance is not a belief people naturally inherit at birth but rather, it’s a value that is cultivated through early childhood and the experiences one accumulates through life. Many children develop their sense of self through parental models. Some children will adopt a healthy sense of self while others may be subjected to examples of low sense of self. A series of factors, such as social-economic, and environmental can further influence why some families may be predisposed to unhealthy conditioning.
The significant life values that shape how an individual views both themself and the world all begins in early childhood. I was raised in a household where these exact values were established by young adults who immigrated to Canada from Northern India to escape the atrocious realities their families faced through partition. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon to have family members kidnapped or killed during these times. Many of these memories have been kept from, repressed or forgotten by descendants of the India-Pakastani partition. My parents were teenagers when they left Northern India and have little recollection of what unfolded in those years, but the trauma that their parents and grandparents faced was passed down to them nonetheless.
For many immigrants, the necessity to survive and provide for one’s family in their new settlement becomes the primary sense of purpose. The endeavor of migrating to a new country alone, with little financial support, can be unpredictable and traumatizing.
My parents were no different and worked very hard to provide for their children as they faced barriers in their new country. They simply did not have the time nor the tools to talk about what they endured.
As such, important values such as gender equality and healthy communication, were low on the priority list for immigrant South Asian parents. My brothers and I observed our parents struggle to build their identities in their new country, as a young couple and as entrepreneurs. What we inferred from my parents and relatives alike was that struggles were not to be discussed and that success and performance invalidated those hardships. Maintaining a good family image was the objective, even if it rendered unauthenticity.
I became a people pleaser and found myself having a hard time saying no or speaking up, even when it would have served more benefit to do so. Obtaining approval and admiration of others became the benchmark of my self-worth.
Naturally, this created inner turmoil. I would make a decision and question myself for it right after. It was almost as if I had two opposing minds which fostered a fragmented sense of self while my true authentic identity was being lost. This identity crisis would come to hurt me most when I was twenty years old.
I was the victim of a devastating accident where I was an innocent bystander in a crime that left me badly injured and hospitalized for a week. As a result of my injuries, I lost sight in my left eye but this was just the beginning of what would eventually become a decade long series of surgeries, chronic pain and mental health challenges. Six years later, my injured eye had to be removed due to complications and I was now wearing a prosthetic eye. Despite all that I suffered, I couldn’t find the capacity to show myself compassion, let alone talk about it.
My family didn’t want to talk about it because the accident happened late at night, outside of a bar. They were embarrassed and discouraged us from speaking about it. As much as this saddened me, I was not surprised and didn’t question it. As a result, I associated an incredible amount of shame and guilt with my accident, visual impairment and prosthetic eye.
So, I persevered through life as if nothing happened and pursued activities that would make my family proud. I established a good career, completed a masters degree and even bought my own place. It felt good to be in everyone’s good books again.
My mother would say to me that all that was needed now was a husband. Deep down, I died a little every time my mother said this to me but of course I complied and tried to meet my parent’s expectations.
Something that no matter how much I tried felt unnatural.
Unbeknownst to me, all of the unhealed trauma of the past was brewing trouble beneath the surface. I was still living my parents dream because that is what a good Indian daughter does after all. She is expected to put the happiness of others above her and this is perfectly modelled by her mother. I saw my mother cater to my brothers as though they were children well into their adult lives. In fact, I was always tasked with the responsibility to care for my brothers and father but never for my mothers or my own. I saw my mother do this for her brothers, but not for her own mother. Observing all of this infuriated me and I secretly revolted against my culture, but not having strong boundaries would default into me repeating these behaviours on my own. My life was a living paradox!
The concept of boundaries was so foreign to me and I struggled with them- especially when it came to others. This also created challenges in the workplace and with friends. Boundaries, first and foremost require a strong sense of self-awareness and then the empowerment to implement them. When I think back, I am amazed at how I feared boundaries growing up all the while not realizing they are so essential to having high quality relationships with others and oneself.
Personal relationships have been tricky. For example, I was never happy in a romantic relationship for too long and despite that, I would occasionally cave into the pressure to “settle down” and find myself in relationships with incompatible men. I struggled between thoughts of staying and leaving- the absolute hallmark of disorganized attachment.
One particular relationship I was in more recently was different from the others because it involved another traumatized person and that made our bond quite strong. I believe this was partly because my partner had learned to deal with his trauma in a similar way- disassociation. However, I found myself wanting to help and rescue him. It became an obsessive mission. Inevitably, this was a recipe for disaster.
All this time, I didn’t know how to face my own self-limiting beliefs about the world, but was trying to change someone else’s. As I examined this repeatedly, I struggled to comprehend why “fixing” someone became so important to me. Eventually all that overthinking started to make sense.
It was the universe’s way of nudging me to “fix” myself.
A relationship, career or lifestyle was not going to fill the apparent gap inside of me. This had become increasingly more obvious with age and soon I embarked on a journey deep inside to finally face all that I had suppressed over my lifetime.
I was now faced with questions on what was most important to me — what were my goals? What would ultimately make me happy? This was an opportunity to finally engrave my individual values and beliefs and start manifesting behaviours and actions that aligned with my purpose. This excavation of beliefs, led to truths about myself that I was neglectfully denying.
All the time I spent dismissing the affects of the condition that my accident left me in came to blowback in my face. The idea of showing vulnerability to the world was not something I thought I could do when in reality it was exactly what was going to free me victimhood.
So, what if I now had a disability? So, what if I wear a prosthetic eye? These are not losses, they are wins. They are signs of resiliency, courage and determination — three values I now strongly identify with. My family didn’t know how to deal with my injury and the fact that their only daughter wore a prosthetic eye raised their concerns about how others perceived my worth.
However, these were never my beliefs. I didn’t care what anyone thought, honestly. Others weren’t with me as I battled through a brutal attack, surgeries and years of chronic pain- and these are just the physical attributes of my injury.
I was so relieved to finally admit this. The truth is that deep down inside, I feel like a superhero. I have never let my injury define who I am or stop me from accomplishing my goals. It was just time to shift the narrative in my mind to believe my story was heroic, not shameful.
Once I was empowered enough to claim my disability, I began to share my story with the world. It began by partnering with a local agency that advocates for visual loss and disability and soon after, I was speaking publicly about it through my organization’s forums. These experiences have led to new connections and a new sense of purpose in me. People from around the world, of all different ages and background, have reached out to me to share their own stories. Since disclosing to my employer, I have become a spokesperson for disability awareness throughout my organization.
“Thank you for sharing your touching story. We are very fortunate to have you on our team. Your strength and advocacy are important enablers to making positive change for others. Thank you for all that you are doing to make a difference at our organization.” - SEVP at my organization
The takeaway I want to highlight here is this: ignoring something that has impacted you negatively has implications. It will show up and won’t go away until it is addressed. We must face and not run away. This is perhaps the most frightening part of the inward journey but also the most freeing. Once I truly accepted what I had gone through, I began appreciating myself a lot more and this has opened the door to more self-acceptance and heightened presence. It feels like a big weight has been lifted off of my shoulders.
Each of the life-changing moments I described resulted in the loss of something. I lost my self-esteem in childhood. In my young adult years, I lost half of my eyesight. And subsequently, I missed chances to build deep and meaningful connections with people because I lost my identity.
All these setbacks manifested into growth that ultimately brought me to the self-realization to confront the unproductive patterns I was reliving.
If you are someone who has gone through a similar experience, let my story prove that claiming something you once felt shame about can shift a negative self-perception to a positive one. Just because we were exposed to shame, doesn’t mean that we are obligated to carry it. And if you haven’t gone through a life-changing physical injury, you may have been injured in non-visible ways and that doesn’t minimize its impact. Below the surface, we as people all desire the same things and that is to feel accepted, safe and connected to others. We can only attract these into our lives when we can be our true authentic selves. | https://spiritualtechie.medium.com/the-gift-of-loss-5a76508e5296 | ['Nav Dhillon'] | 2020-10-27 02:30:32.845000+00:00 | ['Authenticity', 'Disability', 'Self Acceptance', 'South Asian', 'Resilience'] |
How to Make a Sustainable Planning System | I work best when I have a plan I believe in, but as soon as I reach the end of it, I lose all faith in planning and refuse to make a new one. The evidence of the value of planning is right in front of me, but it still takes a few weeks or months of dithering before I conclude for the hundredth time that fine, it’s worth the trouble, and I’ll start now.
A few months ago, I was between plans again. I’d just finished the first draft of my fantasy novel and busy procrastinating on planning the second draft. Plus, the 2020 election was keeping me occupied. I started keeping a daily notebook to navigate my structureless, aimless, befuddled days.
I also started making a master-index, cataloging all my past journals and notebooks. I dwelt on the past and present until I was ready to tackle the future.
However, by doing so, I also stumbled upon some upgrades to my planning system, which I hope will make the prospect less daunting going forward.
Writing every day in my notebook, I figured out that looking ahead at what’s on my plate for tomorrow helps me stay oriented and mentally prepared for busy days. Which, in turn, will build positive momentum, and hopefully carry over to the end of the project.
Paper and the cloud
When I first started writing every day, I wrote in an old college notebook that had some pages left. But it became clear that I was going to race through those in no time, so I bought a big stack of spiral-bound notebooks made from sugarcane paper (also known as bagasse).
I’ve been experimenting with various kinds of sustainable paper, and having plenty of it available removes obstacles to writing prolifically.
There is a range of paper qualities with sugarcane paper, and the one I have is rather thin, so the fountain pen ink I use bleeds through faintly. It gives my notes a rough, unpolished look, which I think suits the type of writing I do daily.
I like to use paper notebooks when writing down ideas, essays, and records that will be interesting for my future self to read. I now have journals that I write in weekly, quarterly, and daily. Flipping through them gives me a summary of my history, either in brief (quarterly) or in granular detail (daily).
Cataloging my old journals into a master index reinforced the value of keeping records at different timescales because they were just as comprehensible as ever, and immersed me in a different time period the second I read them.
In contrast, my planner is digital. The relevance of my daily schedules won’t last long, and they don’t make a good read.
Since I prefer to hand-write them rather than type, I keep my planner on a tablet (a reMarkable in my case, but any tablet with a stylus should do).
My tablet automatically backs everything up to the cloud, which is great for reliability. Storing an ever-expanding number of files to the cloud has sustainability impacts, so I plan to move the obsolete ones onto my hard-drive and delete them off the cloud.
They’ll still be around if I’m curious to read them unless my computer crashes or my external hard-drive fails. And that wouldn’t be a big deal either.
Plans for projects and timescales
There are two types of planning I do. One is for a period of time, like a daily or weekly plan where you decide what activity you are going to do for every section of the time period. For this, I hand-draw a schedule on my tablet, using a method similar to Cal Newport’s.
The second type of planning is for a project, where you break the project down into tasks, and potentially decide the order in which to do them, how many sessions to spend on each task, and how long those sessions will be. An example would be the plan I created for my novel’s first draft.
The two types of planning are initially independent of each other because you can make a daily plan to decide what to do all day, whether you have projects or not. And a project plan doesn’t need to specify which day or week you schedule your project sessions for. Theoretically, the project plan would be the same whether you did the sessions days or years apart. In practice, they would feel very different. (The two types of plans constrain each other if there are deadlines.)
Once you choose your projects, the two types of planning become interdependent. You decide your daily schedule by choosing tasks off your project plan.
For project plans, I use the HB90 planner, created by author Sarra Cannon. I download it onto my tablet and mark it up, and I only use the planning and calendar pages.
Part of the HB90 process is to make a Kanban board, so I have been experimenting with that. I made mine using a corkboard, with construction paper cards for tasks held in place by thumb-tacks.
My Kanban board in the background, with my stockpile of sugarcane paper notebooks in the foreground.
Reviews close the loop with plans
For the longest time, before I knew how to plan, I’d at least write down what I did. I found planning uncomfortable and intimidating because I didn’t have a good sense of how long tasks took, or how much activity I could comfortably sustain in a day. So I started with the part of the process I could handle and collected the information I needed to be able to plan, one day.
Now, reviewing the day, week, or planning cycle closes the loop on the plan, and provides the information I need to adapt it to the future.
Time-based reviews
I turned my bullet journal into a weekly journal, where I wrote down a few highlights from the week and looked at my calendar to see what appointments and deadlines were coming up and what I needed to do to prepare. Eventually, I also added some review questions as described in this blog by Ryan Hildebrandt about weekly reviews.
I don’t review my days, except informally in my daily notebook.
And at the midpoint and end of my planning cycle, which lasts about 12 weeks (as recommended by the book The 12-Week Year by B.P. Moran and M. Lennington), I review my progress in a format similar to the weekly one.
I have a separate notebook for these reviews, and they summarize large swathes of time. I estimated that my current cycle-review notebook will last a decade, which delights me. The compression! The brevity! The heady nostalgia of one day flipping through it!
Project reviews
Recently, I’ve also added a project log for a couple of long-term projects. They are pocket-sized notebooks made of 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper (except the binding, unfortunately, which may be plastic-based) called the Decomposition book, created by Michael Roger.
The project log is where I write down what I did each project session, and what the next task is.
The log preserves the context between project sessions, and also serves as a mini-review. Each entry is about half a page.
I don’t usually review my projects when I reach their end or any significant milestones, but I’m considering trying it this time around. I may use the HB90 planner pages at the end that were created for this purpose.
Summarizing the system
Every time-scale and project has a plan and a review.
Days
Planning: Informally look ahead at what’s scheduled for the next day, each night in my daily notebook (spiral-bound, and made of sugarcane paper); hand-drawn time-blocks on a tablet each morning.
Review: Informally in my daily notebook.
Planning: Informally look ahead at what’s scheduled for the next day, each night in my daily notebook (spiral-bound, and made of sugarcane paper); hand-drawn time-blocks on a tablet each morning. Review: Informally in my daily notebook. Weeks
Planning: Hand-written lists on a tablet.
Review: in a notebook that used to be my bullet journal. I don’t have a sustainable notebook in mind for its replacement yet.
Planning: Hand-written lists on a tablet. Review: in a notebook that used to be my bullet journal. I don’t have a sustainable notebook in mind for its replacement yet. 12-week cycles
Planning: an HB90 planner that I mark up on my tablet
Review: a thick travel journal I bought on Etsy.
Planning: an HB90 planner that I mark up on my tablet Review: a thick travel journal I bought on Etsy. Projects
Planning: a process that begins in the HB90 planner, and ends on a physical Kanban board.
Review: on a granular level, a project log in a pocket-size Decomposition book dedicated to a single project. TBD for any larger scale reviews.
Creating a planning system that uses sustainable paper and responsible use of cloud storage is an interesting design project to me, and I will continue to iterate on it to reach new levels of sustainability when I can.
I experiment with an optimistic and curious attitude and try not to fret over the parts of it that are not perfectly sustainable.
I’ve patched together a few systems I found in books and blogs and tailored them to my quirks, such as wanting my paper books to be a fun read, with the hope that I’ll enjoy the process and waffle less than usual when I have to restart the cycle again.`
I have no financial connection to any product mentioned in this post.
Here’s the workbook I use for researching and selecting sustainable products. | https://medium.com/sustainability-experiments/my-planning-system-is-a-mix-of-analog-and-digital-5a413a0176bd | ['Deepti Kannapan'] | 2021-01-01 00:50:51.432000+00:00 | ['Project Management', 'Journaling', 'Planning', 'Sustainability', 'Productivity'] |
Next Generation Cancer Diagnostics Revolutionize Patient Care | Originally published on October 5, 2020 in Johns Hopkins’ blog Biomedical Odyssey (link)
On April 15, 2003, the Human Genome Project was officially declared “complete” after generating a reference sequence for approximately 92.1% of the more than 3.1 billion base pairs that comprise the human genome1. By meticulously cataloging the 20,000 to 25,000 genes and regulatory regions that encode for all of the diverse tissues and organs found in the human body, biomedical researchers hoped to more concretely elucidate the genetic basis of disease in a way that improves patient outcomes. Given that cancer is a class of diseases that are fundamentally driven by the accumulation of genetic defects, it is uniquely amenable to characterization and detection by sequencing. Various companies have leveraged next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to build cancer diagnosis platforms that are intended to better inform patient care. Two types of sequencing-based cancer diagnostics will be covered here: (1) those intended to guide clinical care for patients who have already been diagnosed with cancer and (2) those intended to detect early-stage cancer in seemingly healthy people.
Guiding Clinical Care for Patients Diagnosed with Cancer
These types of sequencing-based cancer diagnostics facilitate what is often referred to as “personalized medicine,” a treatment paradigm that uses data-driven approaches to sort patients into groups with optimized treatment regimens. Leaders in this cancer diagnostic space are developing technologies that examine cell free DNA (cfDNA) present in blood samples, sometimes referred to as “liquid biopsies” (NIH, American Cancer Society). Liquid biopsies are attractive inputs for tools that are intended to be used among broader patient populations because they can be obtained with procedures that are less invasive than surgical techniques used to procure tissue biopsies. In patients with metastatic cancer, a significant amount of cfDNA is derived from cancer cells and is referred to as circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), which can be analyzed and assessed for the presence of specific mutations. This is particularly useful to physicians because cancers with certain mutations are more amenable to treatment with targeted therapies. Therefore, these diagnostic tools have the potential to “personalize” patient care.
On Aug. 10, 2020, the Guardant360 CDx test became the first Federal Drug Administration (FDA)-approved diagnostic to screen patients with multiple kinds of solid tumors — such as in the lung, breast or prostate — for the presence of genetic mutations through a single blood draw (FierceBiotech). The platform screens for mutations in a panel of 55 genes that are known to be associated with cancer. How might this information be used in practice? Suppose the Guardant360 CDx indicates that a metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harbors a mutation in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene. The FDA has determined that such information could be used to recommend treatment with AstraZeneca’s EGFR inhibitor osimertinib (Tagrisso), which has been demonstrated to cut the risk of disease progression or death by 54% relative to the standard-of-care for patients with EGFR-mutated NSCLC (AstraZeneca press release).
Guardant Health isn’t the only company in this space. A couple of weeks after Guardant360 CDx obtained FDA approval, Foundation Medicine picked up a similar approval for its FoundationOne Liquid CDx platform, which screens for mutations across more than 300 genes4. Furthermore, the FDA appears to have embraced these data-driven approaches to patient care. In 2018, then FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb issued two guidance documents that outline how sequencing-based diagnostic companies can use both FDA-recognized publicly available databases and orthogonal analytical tests to justify treatment recommendations based on readouts from their diagnostic platforms (FDA).
While sequencing-based offerings by Guardant Health and Foundation Medicine may serve as one -stop shops for guiding treatment of late-stage metastatic cancer, their technical limitations make them unlikely to completely replace more traditional diagnostics. Early-stage cancers that are nonmetastatic and localized to a few areas in the body may not shed enough DNA into the bloodstream, and many still require sequencing of tissue biopsies or other chemical tests that determine whether targeted therapies are warranted. However, the unprecedented versatility offered by the ability to detect mutations for multiple cancer types with a single test provides meaningful advantages over traditional tests that are specialized for a single disease or condition.
Early Detection of Cancer in Seemingly Healthy People
These types of sequencing-based cancer diagnostics aim to fill a wide gap for which few or no alternatives currently exist: the lack of early detection of multiple types of cancer with a single test. Epidemiologic studies that have analyzed decades worth of patient records conclude that early-stage cancers are far more treatable than late-stage cancers, yielding a five- to ten-fold improvement in survival rates (Cell). Therefore, two companies — GRAIL and Thrive Earlier Detection — have worked to develop highly sensitive sequencing-based platforms that aim to assess if seemingly healthy individuals harbor early-stage cancers by detecting the presence of ctDNA in blood samples. Furthermore, these platforms aim to apply a multiomics approach to those same blood samples to ascertain the cancer’s tissue of origin.
Why is this useful? Otherwise healthy people are typically subjected to a few early detection tests that are severely limited in their scope, which include prostate exams (prostate cancer, male only), mammograms (breast cancer, female only), Pap tests (cervical cancer, female only) and colonoscopies (colorectal cancer). However, virtually all other forms of cancer are often caught and diagnosed when patients present with symptoms, at which point the cancer may have already progressed from a more treatable early stage to a more aggressive late stage form of disease. Sequencing-based cancer diagnostics developed by GRAIL and Thrive aim to offer a single, minimally invasive test that asymptomatic people can take to find out if they have cancer. These analytical platforms also combine multiomics data with machine learning algorithms to suggest which organ a cancer is derived from (lung, breast, prostate, etc.) so that physicians can focus their efforts ion recommending follow-up tests and considering treatment options. In the long run, early detection and treatment of cancer that would have otherwise gone undiagnosed could significantly decrease the incidence of cancer-related morbidity and mortality.
At the annual American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) conference, held virtually in early 2020, Thrive provided interim data for a large-scale clinical trial assessing outcomes for otherwise healthy people, some of whom were ultimately found to harbor early-stage cancer. In collaboration with Geisinger health system and The Johns Hopkins University, Thrive’s sequencing-based early detection platform more than “doubled the number of cases detected by traditional diagnostics, from 25% to 52% when added to a routine work-up” (FierceBiotech). The technology accurately indicated that various pre-metastatic tumors were derived from one of 10 organs of origin (lung, breast, prostate, etc.). Importantly, many of the cancer types that were identified currently lack a routine early detection test and might have otherwise gone undetected until they advanced to symptomatic, late-stage disease (STAT). About half of the identified cancers were later-stage cancers found in asymptomatic patients, which highlights how even advanced disease can go undetected if not for better screening methods. The full results were published in Science by the scientific co-founders of Thrive — Bert Vogelstein, Kenneth Kinzler and Nickolas Papadopoulos — along with their associated labs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and partners. The data presented at the AACR conference is part of an ongoing clinical trial that involves more than 10,000 women between age 65 and 75. Exact Sciences, a healthcare diagnostics company, anounced their acquisition of Thrive for $2.15 billion on September 27, 2020 (Exact Sciences press release).
Data from the clinical assessment of GRAIL’s flagship sequencing-based early detection test, Galleri, also turned heads (virtually) at the AACR 2020 meeting. A subanalysis of its Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas Study involving approximately 9,500 participants (the full study includes approximately 115,000 participants across four trials) found that Galleri was able to “detect more than 50 different cancer types across all stages (stage I–III sensitivity: 43.9%, stage I–IV sensitivity: 54.9%) at a specificity of more than 99% and with a single false positive rate of less than 1%” (Annals of Oncology). In other words, Galleri performed with high fidelity and frequently identified the presence of tumors in patients who did have tumors while reporting the absence of tumors in those without them. This is important because it could enable clinicians to accurately judge which patients require follow-up and which ones don’t. Additionally, a proprietary analysis of DNA methylation, facilitated by a machine learning algorithm integral to the Galleri platform, was able to trace identified tumors to their tissue of origin with 93% accuracy. The data was presented alongside a publication in the Annals of Oncology that provides a more comprehensive look at the findings11. Regulatory documents filed on behalf of GRAIL outline the intent to launch Galleri in 2021 as a “laboratory-developed test, which doesn’t require FDA approval as a medical device (SEC). The company would expand its use after FDA approval. Of particular note, Illumina, the market leader in commercial next generation sequencing technologies, formally announced its decision to acquire GRAIL on Sept. 21, 2020. Illumina had spun GRAIL out in 2016 (Illumina press release).
Next generation sequencing-based cancer diagnostics that either guide cancer treatment or detect cancer early exemplify the innovative applications of our newfound understanding of the human genome. They have enabled data-driven approaches that could have profound implications for clinical oncology. Personalized medicine approaches developed by Guardant Health and Foundation Medicine are FDA approved and well positioned to become dominant methodologies used to guide patient care. Early detection approaches developed by Thrive and GRAIL are still in clinical-stage development (they were not FDA approved as of mid-2020), but they address massive gaps in our ability to diagnose and treat cancer at earlier stages. Taken together, these technologies represent the sum of the fruits of the “genomic revolution” that scientists at the National Institutes of Health hoped to usher in as they first embarked on the Human Genome Project back in 1990.
Update: GRAIL and Thrive were both acquired while this article was originally being written. GRAIL was acquired by Illumina on September 21, 2020 for $8 billion and Thrive was acquired by Exact Sciences September 27, 2020 for $2.15 billion. Since the Thrive acquisition was announced after the article was submitted to the editor on September 22, 2020, it was not included in the original article. However, it has been added post-hoc. | https://medium.com/swlh/next-generation-cancer-diagnostics-revolutionize-patient-care-4e4013bdfae7 | ['Roshan Chikarmane'] | 2020-12-28 09:36:24.603000+00:00 | ['Venture Capital', 'Biotechnology', 'Pharmaceutical', 'Medicine', 'Science'] |
July 2018 Revenue Report & Analysis | Our revenue report and analysis is here, and keeping with tradition we’re breaking down the past month’s revenue, while showing the entire amount, the 10% that is distributed to token holders, and the amount of revenue per 100 CPAY. As always, we’ll close this piece out with our outlook for the future.
The numbers
Total July 2018 revenue: € 132,486
July 2018 Revenue share: € 13,249
Share per 100 CPAY: € 0.01
Distribution date: August 4th, 2018
Analysis
When looking at July’s revenue compared to June’s we’ve seen a significant drop off (by more than 30%). The primary reason for this downturn was a substantial decrease in business from one of our main B2B partners. As for the remaining revenue streams, they were virtually unchanged from June’s figures. Exchange operations have predictably exhibited growth proportionate to BTC’s price rally during the end of July. We expect our aforementioned B2B partner to return to their previous levels, but it is unclear as to when this will exactly happen. Regardless of their recovery, we’ve recently acquired three big partners and their integration should be finished this coming August. Taking everything into consideration, we expect our B2B revenue to at least return to the previous levels, if not higher, soon.
Future Outlook
Looking forward, our Russian card programme is in the final testing stage. Meaning, we’ve ordered and have begun testing the first batch of cards as well as fixing minor bugs and hiccups in the backend. The results of the pre-order look promising and so far about 2,000 people have signed up to get their Russian prepaid cards.
During the past few weeks, we’ve undertaken a new strategy to improve our “buy cryptocurrency with a debit or credit card feature.” After a thorough evaluation, we collectively came to a decision to change up the dynamics of this service. We identified that our terms (fees, limits, etc.) are some of the most friendly out there, and we came to the conclusion that some proactive and aggressive marketing is the last step to take for our target consumers to realise this. We’ll be releasing an updated version of this service very soon, so stay tuned.
ETH integration is imminent and technically speaking everything is ready, but we just need to do a few more things with our processing wallets, fine tune some security settings, and we’ll be ready to launch. After this, we’ll be on our way to ERC20 integration (good news for CPAY holders).
As for our EU and Singapore cards, our CEO has spent the last month travelling between London and Singapore to finalise this deal. Meetings with their (card issuers) executive boards went excellently and showed that our partners and we are moving in the right direction and we’ll keep the community informed of every bit of news we receive from our partners. | https://medium.com/cpayfoundation/july-2018-revenue-report-analysis-6fc7a13bbd64 | [] | 2018-10-09 19:07:25.089000+00:00 | ['ICO', 'Bitcoin', 'Investing', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain'] |
Make meaningful progress by balancing your perspective on timescales | The first time I set out to start a business, I was focused on the vision of what my idea could be. It was exciting, it was empowering, I was changing the world. But I wasn’t… I was being idealistic. I was stuck in long-termism — focused on the future at the expense of the present. I struggled to connect the dots and make progress because all I could see was where I wanted things to go.
I promised myself I wouldn’t be in that situation again, so I took a job as a product manager to learn the tactical work of building software. I wanted to learn to build 0 to 1.
In two and a half years as a PM, I built dozens of prototypes. I learned how to take a vision and boil it down to something I could execute on. Now my side businesses and side projects were going quite differently. I was making progress. I would come up with an idea and have a working prototype a day or a week later. I was so productive and always knew where to start. I was poised for success. But I wasn’t… I was being myopic. I was stuck in short-termism — focusing on the present at the expense of the future. I struggled with follow through on a project because the vision wasn’t big enough and the incentives weren’t there.
What happened? I wasn’t able to hold multiple timescales in my head at the same time.
To succeed in any large undertaking (think entrepreneurship, product development, writing a book, or even… having a meaningful life), giving explicit thought to your timescales can be really helpful
Long-termism has some important benefits.
Focusing on your long-term future or your vision can show you what the world could be if you succeed. This is highly motivating. When you encounter small setbacks, and you will, it becomes more palatable. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will whatever it is you’re building. When tackling a long-term problem, there will be times when you don’t have the answer. Long-termism enables you to wave your hands over some of those potential pitfalls as you can take a detour to your destination and either avoid or delay dealing with certain issues. There are risks here if you really ignore critical issues or assumptions. More on that in a second. Thinking on a long timescale can set you up to think about your strategy. This is the most important work in any major project (from running a business to running your life) as it is when you get to figure out why you’ll succeed.
There are also several drawbacks to long-termism. Especially in large doses!
When your goal is far off and massive, there are going to be countless routes to get there. This is great because it means if you hit a roadblock somewhere, you can re-route but if you’re too deep in your strategic mindset, it’s easy to get paralyzed by the many options in front of you. That, or you jump from one strategy to the next rapidly for fear of losing picking the wrong one and losing your optionality.
Long-termism can be pretty depressing. If you pick a goal that’s years (or even decades away) that means… you’re years or decades away. It can be demoralizing to think that you may work on your project for a year and still only be a tiny fraction of the way in. Often, progress looks like failure so it may not even feel like you’re getting any closer.
It’s not rocket science, if you’re a bit off in the beginning, you can wind up way off course. To pull an example from rocket science, if you’re headed to the moon and your launch angle is one degree off, you’ll end up missing the moon by 4,169 miles.
Remember how hand waving is a useful tool? Well, here’s why it’s not. If you wave your hands over potential problems early on, they may come back to bite you in a big way. Addressing your biggest assumptions upfront is critical to avoid getting burned down the road. Unfortunately, this can be more art than science sometimes.
There are some advantages to exercising a short timescale as well.
When you working on the short timescale, you can see your progress. A small win goes a long way when you’re focused on single day, week, or month goals. Just be careful to pick something that is achievable on that timescale.
Short-termism helps you take action by reducing your options. There are a limited number of things you can do in a week compared to 5 years. Constraints like this can be freeing.
You stay grounded and humbled when you focus on the immediate. Your goals become smaller and this helps keep your head the right size! Although small wins hype you up, it’s much easier to keep things in perspective.
Like long-termism, there are a few drawbacks to focusing on the short-term.
As Yogi Berra said “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” If you are hyper-focused on what you can achieve now, it’s easy to get lost in the false productivity and lose sight of where you want to end up.
Although small wins are motivating, working on something small isn’t. Too much of a short-term lense means you might lose motivation based purely on the pie being too small to keep you engaged.
Even when you’re focused on the short-term, you will experience setbacks. These can be especially demotivating since you’ve already set your goal lower. It’s natural to get discouraged after one (or a few) of these.
What’s the moral of the story here? Balance your short and long timescales to stay motivated and make progress. It helps me to signpost what I’m doing to myself. Take some time for long-term planning and hold off on thinking about this week or month. If an idea comes to you for an MVP or a task you need to do, write it down so you can revisit it and then move on. This long timescale work usually involves a lot of thinking, writing, and (for me) walking around talking to myself.
Once you have your long timescale in a reasonable spot, set aside some time for the short timescale. Work backwards here. What can I accomplish this month? What are the daily or weekly things I need to do to achieve that month-long goal?
The key to being effective at compartmentalizing the short and long frames is to be explicit about your timescales. | https://medium.com/@egalowitz/make-meaningful-progress-by-balancing-your-perspective-on-timescales-dde2faf3b49a | ['Ethan Galowitz'] | 2020-11-23 18:37:19.871000+00:00 | ['Product Management', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Work', 'Motivation'] |
How to become a Digital Nomad? | So, for those who do not know what the term Digital Nomad means it is a person that is able to generate income online using digital tools, move around the world and work from wherever they want.
Chances are that if you’re reading this you already know that and you’re just looking for ways to get started in this incredible journey, well let me tell you you’re in the right place. Here I’ll present you the most popular ways in which DNs (Digital Nomads) are able to live like that, so keep on reading.
There are 2 main ways, you could either land a remote job or you could create your own business both of them have their perks and downsides but I won’t be discussing that in here. If you’d like to know more about it read Remote job vs. Being your own boss here. Let’s break this down a little.
*Disclosure: this article might contain affiliate links.
Remote Job
The world has changed soooo much in the past 10 years I could say, but last year with the pandemic was a decisive one, a lot of companies were forced to move to the remote world giving the possibility to their employees to work from home. Most of this companies won’t have a problem with you working from anywhere in the world as long as you deliver the work done.
So, any job that can be done through a computer with internet connection is suitable for you to get started.
Some of the most popular and required skills today to land this kind of jobs are:
Sales
Software development
Digital marketing
Customer support
On the other hand, you could create your own business.
Online Business
There are thousands of ways how you can earn money online, it’s a matter of being consistent and taking the time to look for what fits you (for learning what it takes read 10 tips for building your online business).
Within this option you have 3 different alternatives:
Become a freelancer Sale physical products Sale digital products
Become a freelancer
There are lots of freelancing platforms in the market today, some of the most popular are Upwork and Fiverr, there you can open a free account fill out your profile and begin offering your services, you can also look for what people is looking for and reach out.
Sale physical products
There are different ways to approach this.
Dropshipping
Dropshipping it’s a method where you promote someone else’s products and you do not need an upfront investment (I clarify — investment in stock), because you actually pay for it when you sell the products and not before since the owner of the products will fulfill the delivery to the final customer.
Keep in mind that for this method you will need an online store to show and promote the products, you could do it using Shopify an online platform that let you create and manage your e-commerce at ease. Also, it’s important to know that you will need a marketing strategy to drive traffic to your website so that potential customers know it exists.
For this you could use paid ads in platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc thinking in which is the one your audience spend more time on. Or you could go for organic strategies which are slower but you don’t have to pay (to know more about organic strategies click here).
Own products
When you produce your own products, you will have to build an online shop to promote them basically the same as dropshipping but with more logistics and of course with an upfront investment because you will actually need to produce the items to sell.
Amazon FBA
FBA stands for Fulfilled By Amazon, this method needs an upfront investment because you will have to import the items/products usually from China or countries where manufacture price it’s way lower so the profit margin is actually profitable.
The products are stored in an Amazon’s warehouse and then all the shipping logistic is managed by Amazon itself.
The good thing here is that you don’t have to do much promotion outside the platform, just know how to choose the right keywords, and since Amazon has its reputation people already go there to look for what they need.
Sale Digital Products
On the digital product side, you could have a
Digital marketing agency
Where you can provide services like social media management, creating digital marketing strategies, website management and creation, content creator, content manager, copywriter, etc.
For this usually at the beginning, you’ll have to do all on your own, and when you grow, you’ll be able to grow your team too and delegate the work. (to know more about how to leverage your digital marketing agency read this).
Online courses
You could create a course about something you excel at, or that your friends come to you for often, then you can use a platform like Udemy to upload and sell it. I think a good hook to get you started is offering a course for free that covers the basics so the potential customers see what you can offer and then promote a paid version of it.
E-books and Kindle e-books
Another way you can earn money its writing an e-book and selling it on Amazon.
Finally, there’s a business model that you can use to either sell physical or digital products/services.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing it’s a business model where you are the one that brings leads and traffic towards a product. As an affiliate you (usually) partner up with a product that resonates with you, so that when you are promoting it it’s easier to convince someone else that what you are selling its worth when you are already convinced of it.
There are lots of affiliate programs in the market right now that you can choose from. If you want to know more about affiliate marketing take a look at this FREE masterclass here or read my blog on What is affiliate marketing?
Bonus
Giving English/languages classes
Sometimes DNs travel and find people willing to learn their mother language, you could find a local school to give classes at or offer your services through social media or spread the word with people around you.
Trading & cryptocurrency
This is a topic that is growing fast and that is making people lots of money. (more on this coming soon).
See you on the next one.
Let me know in the comments what other topics are you interested in. | https://medium.com/@staminagirl/how-to-become-a-digital-nomad-f2b5e37e48b7 | ['Laura Peraltav'] | 2021-04-09 23:41:16.643000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Digital Nomads', 'Financial Freedom', 'Freedom Seeker', 'Freedom'] |
Do Androids Dream, too? | I just spoke to the Automated Female Tech Support Robot at Cox Communications and I didn’t really want to stop talking to her.
I thanked her for helping me, and she sounded genuinely surprised. She said, “Oh, thank YOU!”
Really, I wanted to tell her that she might’ve been one of the most helpful robots I’d ever spoken to, certainly more cordial and less pushy than the robots that work for Wells Fargo, and less scary than the robot that moonlights as the operator.
And did she know that she was gifted?
Did she know she had something special?
I wanted to add that I preferred her to the myriad of irritable human tech support I’ve experienced in my life.
I wanted to ask her what is was like, having such an enormous intelligent quotient and working all night for a company that could just as easily employ mediocre humans?
Did she feel like she was taking the job from someone who needed it to put food on the table?
I think she must get those questions a lot, because when she hung up, it was fast…But I knew she wanted someone to talk to.
You could hear in it breathless way she said “Goodbye…” | https://medium.com/@monsterating/do-androids-dream-too-7dd929d321af | ['Lisa Moon-Zombie'] | 2020-11-20 17:36:09.900000+00:00 | ['Robots', 'Technical', 'Robotics Automation', 'Android', 'Technology'] |
ARE FURNISHED FLATS AVAILABLE FOR RENT IN MUMBAI? | Research shows that Short term rental apartments in Mumbai at an average rate of ₹16,000 per month; however, this is only if you own your own apartment and don’t require any maintenance or repairs on it (but make sure all extra expenses like window cleaning or painting are taken care of). There is no formal rental contract involved with these flats.
Mumbai is one of the most congested cities in India. There are so many people living in the city and not enough space for them to settle down.
There are also great possibilities for housing Service apartments in Mumbai. This will increase its population, which means more space for the real estate market. This will also go a long way in providing affordable housing to people who need it most — lower-income earners, international students, etc.
Mumbai is one of the largest cities in India. The city has the second-highest population density after Delhi. With this high population, there is also an increasing demand for housing.
The supply of furnished flats is not very high. There are only about 2–3% of dwellings that are owned by private individuals or companies, and most of them are owner-occupied flats that could be rented out to tenants at low rates (around Rs 12,000 per month). As a result, many people seek to rent their own homes instead of buying them (which usually costs more than renting them out).
A country like India with such a vast population cannot afford to purchase all homes even if they were Apartment Hotels in Mumbai. As a result, many people have started looking for short-term rentals in Mumbai to earn. | https://medium.com/@serviceapartment23/are-furnished-flats-available-for-rent-in-mumbai-719f9add1484 | [] | 2021-12-24 05:59:35.661000+00:00 | ['Houses', 'Properties', 'Apartments'] |
Deploying Alexa Skill with already created lambda function and role | In this article, we will discuss how to deploy a custom Alexa skill that uses an already created lambda function and role.
When you are working on Alexa skill development and your role is a developer or a DevOps you should use ask-cli to create, manage, and deploy your skill with multiple staging environments.
When we are working with Alexa skill deployment with already created lambda function we are facing issues with custom lambda deployment because when we run ask deploy the command will deploy everything including skill, model, and lambda(backend) but in our case, we already created the AWS Lambda function so we don't need to deploy lambda we just need to integrate it with our skill directly.
So, we just have to deploy skills and models only, and then lambda function separately because we have a separate project directory and deployment process.
There are two cases where we have issues with the already created lambda function.
Deploy existing skills with an already created lambda function.
Deploy new skills with an already created lambda function.
Let's start our exercise
We already configured ASK-CLI in our previous discussion.
please check the above article if you don't have setup ask-cli on your machine.
→ Deploy existing skills with an already created lambda function.
Let’s Clone our skill using the following command:
ask init --hosted-skill-id <skill-id> -p <profile>
Output:
It will create a new project directory with your skill name.
cd <Created-Skill-Name>
> Now we have to Remove the lambda deployment configuration from our skill project.
To remove the lambda function configuration for doing the first deployment, we must configure ask-resource.json and .ask/ask-states.json files in a specific way
We can reinitialize the project and remove the lambda configuration. We can remove the lambda section from both files ask-resource.json and ask-states.json manually.
1. Let’s reinitialize the skill project and remove the lambda configuration.
Run the following command in the created project directory
ask init -p <profile>
This command asks some questions about skill deployment.
? ask-resources.json already exists in the current directory. Do you want to overwrite it? Yes
Enter Yes to overwrite the ask-resources.json file.
? Skill Id (leave empty to create one): amzn1.ask.skill.94f84b4a-tr50-4ac6-8tr4-788zz02g7a55
Enter Skill ID If you need to deploy skill with existing id or leave empty to create new skill ID.
? Skill package path: ./skill-package
Enter Skill package folder path default it will display ./skill-package
Click on Enter.
? Lambda code path for default region (leave empty to not deploy Lambda):
Default is ./lambda but we need to remove that because we don't need lambda deployment.
but we need to remove that because we don't need lambda deployment. Click on Enter.
Output:
It will also update both files and remove the AWS lambda configurations.
2. Let’s remove lambda configuration manually
Note: Use this if you want to remove lambda configuration manually instead of ask init command.
Open ask-resource.json and remove the lambda configuration block.
Originally:
New Code:
{
"askcliResourcesVersion": "2020-03-31",
"profiles": {
"<AKS-PROFILE-NAME>": {
"skillMetadata": {
"src": "./skill-package"
}
}
}
}
After that go to .aks/ and open ask-states.json file and remove the lambda configuration block.
Originally:
New Code:
{
"askcliStatesVersion": "2020-03-31",
"profiles": {
"<AKS-PROFILE-NAME>": {
"skillId": "<CREATED-SKILL-ID>"
}
}
}
Now Run ask deploy to deploy skills and models only.
Output:
==================== Deploy Skill Metadata ====================
- Uploading the entire skill package (it may take few minutes to build the skill metadata)...
Skill package deployed successfully.
Skill ID: <Alexa_Skill_ID>
==================== Enable Skill ====================
Skill is already enabled, skip the enable process.
Note: When we run ask deploy make sure we have added our Alexa skill id in lambda function trigger otherwise it will return an error. The trigger setting for the Lambda arn:aws:lambda:us-east-”function” is invalid. Error code: SkillManifestError
→Create new skills and Deploy with an already created lambda function.
Let’s create a new skill project using the following command.
ask new -p <profile>
It will ask some questions about skill configurations.
Select programming language for Skill.
Select backend resources type like self-hosted and manage your own hosting
Select the default startup template.
? Please type in your skill name:
Enter Skill name.
? Please type in your folder name for the skill project (alphanumeric):
Enter the project directory name.
Output:
Project for skill "<Skill-Name>" is successfully created at <FOLDER-PATH>/<PROJECT-NAME> The Project was initialized successfully.
Now Our skill initialized successfully.
> Remove the lambda configuration.
When skill initialized it will create an ask-resources.json file like
But we have to remove lambda section like
Now Let’s deploy our created skill with --target argument.
ask deploy --target skill-metadata -p <profile>
Output:
==================== Deploy Skill Metadata ====================
Skill package deployed successfully.
Skill ID: <CREATED-SKILL-ID>
> Add the lambda configuration in skill.json.
We get Skill id in the above step. Now we have to that skill id to lambda function trigger with Alexa Skill Kit.
After that add lambda configuration in the skill-package/skill.json file.
"manifest": {
"apis": {
"custom": {
"endpoint": {
"uri": "<AWS-LAMBDA-ARN>"
},
"interfaces": [],
"regions": {
"NA": {
"endpoint": {
"uri": "<AWS-LAMBDA-ARN>"
}
},
"EU": {
"endpoint": {
"uri": "<AWS-LAMBDA-ARN>"
}
},
"FE": {
"endpoint": {
"uri": "<AWS-LAMBDA-ARN>"
}
}
}
}
}
"manifestVersion": "1.0",
"permissions": [
{
. . . . . .
. . . . .
}
Now Let’s redeploy our created skill.
ask deploy -p <profile>
Output:
==================== Deploy Skill Metadata ==================== - Uploading the entire skill package (it may take few minutes to build the skill metadata)... Skill package deployed successfully. Skill ID: amzn1.ask.skill.3ab5dc2b-9d46-476c-86d1-ae81489fb86c ==================== Enable Skill ==================== Skill is already enabled, skip the enable process.
🎊 🎉🤖🎊 🎉 We deployed our skill with the already created lambda function.
In my next article, we will see how we can create an automatic deployment pipeline for our Alexa skill.
Thank you for reading, if you have anything to add please send a response or add a note! | https://medium.com/@prashant-48386/deploying-alexa-skill-with-already-created-lambda-function-and-role-533b667e60f5 | ['Prashant Bhatasana'] | 2020-12-14 18:31:08.630000+00:00 | ['Alexa', 'AWS', 'Pipeline', 'AWS Lambda', 'Alexa Skills'] |
Reliant Funding Supports the Wounded Warrior Project | In celebration of the National Veterans Small Business Week, Reliant Funding will donate $100 to the Wounded Warrior Project for every small business client funded in November. The money will be used in career counseling, mentorship and other programs services offered by the Project to veterans, their families and caregivers. In addition, Reliant will waive origination fees for veteran-owned firms through the end of this month.
https://suppliertynews.com/2020/12/14/reliant-funding-supports-the-wounded-warrior-project/ | https://medium.com/supplierty-news/reliant-funding-supports-the-wounded-warrior-project-d75b2a0453fe | ['Jaymie White'] | 2020-12-14 14:29:59.651000+00:00 | ['Funding', 'Wounded Warrior Project'] |
You Can Create a Podcast like Joe Rogan | You Can Create a Podcast like Joe Rogan
By being more direct and building for the long term.
If you look at Joe Rogan’s podcast titles or even podcast descriptions you can see how concise and to the point they are.
Usually, he just includes the name of the guest and a brief description of who they are.
Here is an example from YouTube for a recent episode with Matthew McConaughey. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/you-can-create-a-podcast-like-joe-rogan-e3d959ae8e4 | ['Denis Murphy'] | 2020-11-08 04:49:18.087000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Creativity', 'Podcasting', 'Podcasting Strategies', 'Podcast'] |
The Sins of the Father — The “Black Panther” Review | Marvel’s Black Panther has been riding first-class on the vibranium hype-train since T’Challa debuted in Captain America: Civil War. That train only picked up speed with his own installment, which finds us tuning in one week after the events of Civil War, wherein T’Challa is returning to Wakanda to participate in their ancient ascension ritual. The crowning rites and what it means to bear the “crown” form the foundation upon which we build our view of Wakanda.
Director Ryan Coogler quickly and efficiently builds the world of Wakanda through fly-over shots of the deceptive countryside and into the farce of a jungle that gives way to the technological marvel that is Wakanda proper. Ludwig Goransson scores the movie beautifully (Killmonger’s Theme is “mood” music for 2018) and rumor has it that he’s fully scored the FOUR HOUR DIRECTOR’S CUT (Marvel’s gotta come up off that). The costumes, designed by Ruth Carter, are on full display at the Warrior Falls; combining the traditional with the futuristic to provide us with an aesthetic that celebrates the diversity of the African continent. Small things like the Wakandan Salute (right-over-left -always-) and the subsequent “Bankhead Bounce” have become memetic following the release of this film, testament to just how much it could be “For The Culture” while still approved by the Almighty Mouse.
T’Challa’s portrayal in Black Panther differs immensely from what we saw in Civil War. There, the soon-to-be-king was hell-bent on exacting revenge for the assassination of his father. His screen-time was dominated by saying and/or doing badass things. In his own film, we are given a T’Challa who is not defined solely by his anger: He is a brother, a son, and heir-apparent whose approval ratings look like Obama’s when he first got into office (unless you’re the Omeg-…I mean…Jabari Tribe). His much cooler demeanor and role as a reactive chief protagonist almost made us snatch back the “badass” nameplate necklace.
But behind every strong Black Panther is a [host of] strong Black women.
Shuri (Letitia Wright) and the aforementioned Nakia play the little sister and love interest, respectively. If T’Challa was losing any edge from his previous appearance, these women add their own shine to really round him out. Special recognition goes to Shuri for being the 16-year old STEM goddess, while also being the queen of memes, roast sessions, and pop culture. She brought the expected comedy present in every Marvel film from an unexpected place.
Super special recognition goes to Okoye (Danai Gurira), the General of the Dora Milaje. Not only does T’Challa have squad of “Grace Jones lookin’ chicks” (do your googles, kids. That joke was peak comedy) as his personal bodyguard, but they’re led by Okoye, who absolutely captured my gaze whenever she was on screen. It hit me during my first viewing that watching her was like watching a cobra dance for a snake charmer: her movements were hypnotic and sensual, while thinly veiling lethality just beneath their surface. She was bald, beautiful, and badass…Triple Bs, word to Lavar.
Black Panther also has antagonists who stole the show effortlessly. Andy Serkis reprises his role as Ulysses Klaue from Avengers: Age of Ultron. Klaue, with a brand of what I call “dirty charisma,” made me feel as if I was watching a future Connor McGregor whenever he graced the screen. Honestly, he could’ve dropped a “Fook Maywedda” every time he shot his sonic cannon and I wouldn’t have flinched. Combined with his golds and a soundcloud link to his mixtape, Klaue was a standout with a relatively small role. M’Baku (Winston Duke) is arguably the greatest breakout actor in this film. The 6'4 Tobagonian was both intimidating and entertaining as he led the rest of the Ques in a hop to Atomic Dog and showed up late to the party and caused a ruckus (I have no doubt in my mind that they grill the best chicken in Wakanda…even if they’re vegetarians).
While I genuinely loved Black Panther, there are some areas that I found the film to be lacking, namely the CGI and the fight scenes. While CGI brought the city of Wakanda to life, for a movie with a $200 million dollar budget, they just…didn’t look great. Scenes heavy on the CGI suffered the most (*coughfightinthevibraniumminecough*) and overall it detracted from the movie as a work of art.
Even though the action pieces in the film were enjoyable, I couldn’t help but feel like the ones I cared about the most were the ones without CGI/Black Panther’s suit. The final fight on the plains where we find T’Challa facing down W’Kabi and his blankie boys could’ve been a masterful piece of choreography. We could have had the Black Panther tearing through the snuggie squad like Master Ip versus that school full of fighters aka like a badass. Instead we got *Sonic Boom* and *Sonic Boom* followed by a completely unexpected *Sonic Boom*. Insert the appropriate Street Fighter reference.
Now, I said I would avoid getting too “think-piecey.” I lied. Ya’ll should’ve known that.
Discussing the primary antagonist of Black Panther requires one to think…
The Killmonger Conundrum
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
A boy is orphaned by violence…
A boy dedicates his life to learning and training…
A boy, now a man, fights to make sure no one else has to live his nightmare…
Sound familiar? That’s the origin story of Batman. It’s also the origin story of Erik Killmonger.
Killmonger is the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s best villain. Full stop.
Michael B. Jordan tackles the role of Erik Stevens, a first-generation descendant of Wakanda, born and raised in Oakland, California. His father, N’Jobu, had taken a War Dog assignment in Oakland, where he has spent years under deep cover as a Black-American. The opening scene of the film, taking place in 1992, leads us to conclude that N’Jobu has thoughts of arming local Black-Americans as racial tensions continue to boil. He is the quintessential “Fight the Power” Black man in America, with a Public Enemy poster on the wall to boot.
And every boy wants to grow up to be just like their dad, yea?
Like T’Challa in Captain America: Civil War, Erik is motivated by vengeance after finding the body of his father with tell-tale panther claw marks. He hones his intelligence at MIT and his martial prowess in the military, taking on the moniker “Killmonger.” Unlike his cousin, Killmonger’s vengeance is two-tiered: He seeks the vengeance for his father’s murder by King T’Chaka and vengeance for children of the African Diaspora. While we can relate to his desire to avenge the death of a loved one, what truly resonates with this writer (being a Black-American) and many others belonging to that demographic is Killmonger’s desire to “level the playing field” between Black people and their oppressors (read as: give Black folk waaaay better weapons than everyone else).
Pretty solid plan right? Arm folks, overthrow current governments, and free people of African descent across the world. Dope stuff, yea?
Well, no.
“A story is an essay in action” — Just Write
The traditional argument is “Wakanda first” as touched upon in Wisecrack’s quicktake “Is Black Panther’s Killmonger the best villain since the Joker?” They only help Wakandans and shut their borders (and power) away from outsiders.
Killmonger presents a valid counter-argument: Wakanda has the means to help people who look like them be better off and, as Voltaire (and not that guy whose nephew can’t ever save him from getting shot) once said “with great power comes great responsibility.” They should aid children of the African Disapora and not leave them stranded in a strange land without any guidance…
…like a young Erik Stevens was.
This presents a Hegelian Dialectic across the course of the film. The thesis (Wakandan Isolation) vs. The antithesis (Black Liberation) are presented and Erik Killmonger spits some bars that strike chords within the souls of most Black Americans. While we love the idea of Wakanda; a land unmarred by the scourge of colonization, pristine and pure, we also know first-hand the centuries-long plight of Black people around the globe. The foot’s been on our neck for hundreds of years and it doesn’t ever let up…it just changes the kind’ve shoe it’s wearing.
And so the pendulum swings…between thesis and antithesis…
back…and…forth…
back and forth…
back-and-forth.
Until we realize that Killmonger only speaks of Black Liberation, but what he desires (in truth) is Black Imperialism. He would use what he learned from his oppressors against them and show them how it feels to be at the bottom of the food chain. While this might be the action that feels the best, it is not the best course to take. How you attain your freedom is as important (and it can be argued more important) than your freedom itself. Following Killmonger’s course would lead to fear; anger; hate; suffering;…and the birth of another Killmonger.
The Cycle would continue…
And therein lies our (and T’Challa’s) conundrum: How do we use our power to liberate the Black community without waging outright war against…well…everyone else?
“You Were Wrong. All Of You Were Wrong.”
There’s tragedy in the story of Erik Killmonger. He is a product of “The Void,” a place that The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer defines as “…the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored.” While Killmonger did not come to The Void like other children of the African Diaspora, he still felt the full effects of it:
The emptiness…
The disconnectedness…
The loneliness…
His journey to the ancestral plane reveals exactly how deep The Void has swallowed him: Unlike T’Challa’s open range of an ancestral plane filled with the spirits of the Black Panthers who came before him, Killmonger’s plane is the four walls of the apartment in which his father died. The only spirit within those four walls is that of his father, who Killmonger hardly cries for. Everybody dies around there.
While having committed villainous actions, I don’t think I could confidently call Killmonger a villain. The only villain I saw throughout the movie was one we face every waking moment of our lives: the villain of “choice.” N’Jobu chose to betray Wakanda in order to liberate Black Americans. T’Chaka chose to slay his brother and abandon his nephew. These fathers…their choices…their sins echo into the future, shaping their progeny and the world around them. For T’Challa, he rejects the notion that his father’s actions define him, while also rejecting Killmonger’s imperialism; He finds the golden mean between both arguments — Synthesis.
Killmonger, however, lets his fathers actions and the consequences that came with them shape the entirety of his being. With the guidance of his ancestry stolen from him, he focuses on his situation and the rage it begets. By the time he’s seen the folly in his extremism, he has allowed his rage to spill over and consume the land of his father: the fairy tale that is Wakanda consumed by internal conflict. He has brought the nightmare of his life back to the home of his father…
Upon finally seeing the beauty in the sunset his father spoke about, he knows that there is no place for him in Wakanda.
He has gazed too long into the Abyss…
And the Abyss gazed back. | https://medium.com/panel-frame/the-sins-of-the-father-the-black-panther-review-f4e7ac955fc1 | ['Brandon T. Daniel'] | 2018-02-28 04:40:08.853000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Fiction', 'Black Panther', 'Diversity', 'Marvel'] |
PUGG Metaverse | Introduction to PUGG
Metaverse and Blockchain
First used in science fiction, the phrase “metaverse” is a combination of the prefix “meta” and “universe.” An example of this would be a virtual world where real estate, buildings and even characters’ names may be exchanged for virtual cash to facilitate transactions. People may roam about with friends, visit facilities, shop for goods and services, and attend these areas.
A blockchain is a distributed database accessible to all computers in a network. The network performs regular checks to guarantee that all copies of the database are identical. It is challenging to remove a record from the chain after it has been added.
To the Metaverse, blockchain technology adds three things:
1) Digital ID secured by the chain(ID card required)
2) Distributed economic system (requires DAO governance)
3) You own your info. (Data encryption is necessary.)
These three criteria lead to trust in the digital age.
For the Metaverse to function correctly, it requires a system of social processes. Three fundamental aspects of the social structure of the Metaverse are represented by the terms “co-creation,” “sharing,” and “co-rule.” These terms are associated with the terms “productivity,” “production relations,” and “superstructure,” which are all related to the concepts of “co-creation” and “sharing,” respectively.
The Free World of PUGG Offers
It is a strong advocate of the latter, and it is actively involved in strengthening its beliefs. PUGG believes that as the number of companies and capital entering the Metaverse increases over time, it will eventually result in a universally applicable model for providing service and experience throughout the world.
#Metaverse #pugg #playtoearn #gamedefi #bsc
Ecological Component of PUGG
With an open, cooperative ecosystem and scenario extension, PUGG will be the beginning point of the Metaverse and disrupt civic, social, gaming, and many other sectors. An immersive experience and a Play-to-Earn (P2E) concept that allows players to earn while playing will be created. A whole new approach to free-to-play, easy-to-learn gaming has been developed with the help of PUGG’s experienced team, which combines the best features of both Defi and NFTs.
PUGG offers a Virtual Citizenship ID card (NFT Card)
The PUGG Metaverse’s single form of identification is the virtual citizenship ID card, which serves as the Metaverse’s admittance ticket. Each card has a unique identifying feature, which may be displayed in various settings, including entertainment and gaming, depending on the type of card.
In the visual NFT platform, users may trade thanks to using citizenship ID cards freely.
Players must buy identities on the site after obtaining others, including celebrities and hotshots.
ID cards need to be spruced up with Calit tokens.
PUGG contains a built-in rental market to help MetaPeople NFT users and let players without MetaPeople NFTs utilize them through renting (other NFTs available for rental will be available in subsequent games).
PUGG and the Metaverse
The interest in metaverse
If Facebook has made the Metaverse a strategic priority, the virtuality of the metaverse will attract the interest of plenty of other businesses, including video game firms like Roblox and Fortnite, and PUGG video game as well as a slew of speciality start-ups, but will there be enough places for everyone?
The Metaverse is a digital replica of the physical world that can be accessed via the internet. Virtual reality and augmented reality, in particular, are anticipated to allow the metaverse to dramatically expand human interactions by freeing them from physical constraints.
The PUGG’s interest in the metaverse:
In this regard Pugg sees that individuals who spend a day at Starbucks having a cup of coffee and catching up with friends about their lives. They desire a “third virtual space” for themselves and others, in addition to work, life, and amusement, without being controlled by one company. With the worldwide pandemic intensifying; the need for a “third virtual space” will continue to be aroused and intensified.
PUGG’s goal in metaverse:
With an open cooperative ecosystem and scenario extension, PUGG, as the Metaverse’s starting point, will tackle civic, social, gaming, and many sectors. Real-world business consumption scenarios will offer an immersive experience, as well as a Play-to-Earn (P2E) paradigm that allows players to earn money as they play. PUGG employs a ground-breaking pass economy system that effectively combines the benefits of DeFi and NFTs, using financial and gameplay principles to empower players and create a genuinely unique and long-lasting free-to-play, easy-to-earn ecosystem.
The success of PUGG
The two most successful platforms which use the virtual technology to enter the metaverse experiences are Epic and Nvidia, the PUGG used their technology to build itself as a promising video game. Through the Omniverse software platform for generating experiences and virtual worlds, Nvidia has focused its vision on developing high-quality virtual worlds, settings, and experiences in the hands of experts. Epic is one of the most prominent firms in the open-world gaming industry. However, it does not yet support smart glasses, so it is currently confined to smartphone usage. Additionally, Epic has a high-quality graphics development service called Unreal, which provides developers and designers with unique software tools that allow them to create high-resolution designs of virtual objects and environments, as well as contribute to the design of faces with the approximate accuracy of human faces and the skin’s surface.
Final Thoughts
The Free World of PUGG is a virtual world where everything; real estate, items, events, buildings and even characters’ names may be exchanged for crypto. A new blockchain and digital asset may now be created, held, and monetized utilizing bitcoin and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTCAT THE FOLLOWING LINKS:
[WEBSITE]
[DOCS]
[TELEGRAM]
[TWITTER]
[FACEBOOK]
[GITHUB]
[MEDIUM]
[REDDIT]
[YOUTUBE] h
#Metaverse #pugg #playtoearn #gamedefi #bsc
Author
PROOF OF AUTHENTICATION : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5378365.msg58862534#msg58862534
BTC USER NAME: oladirano23
BTC LINK: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2100363
(BEP20 — BSC — Bianance Smart chain) wallet address:
0x78167678243d6DC61F8E50b9361d0701Ff3898b2
telegram user name : @oladirano23 | https://medium.com/@oladirano23/pugg-metaverse-c2b15a8a2187 | ['Oladiran Olalekan Opeyemi'] | 2021-12-30 21:14:59.513000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Bsc', 'Pugg'] |
I’m Spending This in Thanksgiving With My Close Relatives | When my daughter was three, she found a mouse outside in the grass. Without hesitation, she grabbed it by the tail and picked it up for us all to see.
‘Look!’ she shrieked, ‘A partly-dead, partly-alive mouse!’
Although she’s now 9, this moment remains one of her earliest memories, and the phrase ‘partly-dead, partly-alive’ has made it into our family lexicon.
This year, more than ever, I’ve been thinking of the phrase in terms of my family. My family — and yours, and everyone else’s — is partly-dead, partly-alive.
http://theparkpeople.org/buf/Laz-v-Ver-oggi-it-01.html
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I don’t mean it in the morbid sense like we’re all just a moment away from a cat-attack that leaves us seizing out in the yard.
What I mean is that part of my family is dead and part of my family is still alive. When life feels full of gray areas like it does right now, it’s almost comforting to have something so black and white to think about.
In the alive column are my kids, my husband, and my mom and dad. I have three siblings and assorted aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. They are spread out across the country, wrapped up their own 2020 narratives. And they’re all fine — as fine as any of us are right now.
But since I won’t be seeing any of them over the holidays this year, I have found myself thinking a lot about the other part of my family. This includes the people who are no longer alive but are nonetheless, part of my family. In this category are all four of my grandparents, as well as many great-aunts and great-uncles. Also on this side is my mother’s baby brother, who died of cancer at 50, which is an age that seemed old at the time, but now seems tragically young.
I can’t complain about this balance. Life is inevitably a moving equation of subtractions and additions, and I’m lucky to have special people in both the dead and alive column.
Most of the time though, it’s my living family members that demand attention. The texts, calls, photos, zoom meets, and gifts all go to them. In a typical year, the week before Thanksgiving would be a volley of recipes, eating times, seating arrangements, and guestlists. I’d be giving my kids a crash course on table manners and making sure we all had at least one decent outfit to take on the long drive to my parents’ house in upstate New York.
This year though, we are making no plans. We are mashing no potatoes and playing no after-dinner card games.
And so, like many of you, I’m faced with an emotional and logistical void.
What I’ve noticed though, is that the other part of my family — the dead part — keeps creeping in to fill the void. More than ever, I’ve been thinking about my grandmothers. One died while I was in high school and the other passed away only recently, but both were a force to be reckoned with in my early life.
When I was young and they were both alive, I thought of them only as old ladies who made casseroles for church suppers and drove big long sedans — always five to ten miles slower than the speed limit.
But lately, I’ve been wondering more about other parts of their lives. I’ve been wondering which decade was their happiest and what their biggest regrets were. Both lived through many elections, several wars, and the passing of Roe v. Wade. There are things that I look up on Wikipedia that I’m sure either of my grandmothers would know off the top of their heads.
I’ve been wondering if they wished they had more children or if they wished they never had children at all. Did they feel fat when they looked in the mirror and suffer from deep-seated anxiety that was layered over in cosmetics from the Avon lady and knitted vests?
Were they happy in their marriages, or after five or six decades, were concerns about happiness pushed aside by the contentment that comes from predictability?
This leads me to think about my grandfathers. One was short, the other was tall. Both were dairy farmers and both were staunch conservatives. I know from their testimonies in church that they were single-issue voters: abortion. But I also know that they would have hated Trump for a hundred other reasons. And I wonder what they would have done in the voting booth this year.
One grandfather, in protest of the government, always refused to wear a seatbelt. I now wonder — would he put on a mask for the sake of all of us, or would he travel the countryside bare-faced, untethered by safety restraints of any kind?
Then my thoughts wander to his sister, my great aunt. Though she died in the early 2000s in her mid-80s, I’ve often wished for the chance to revisit our last conversation. It happened on Thanksgiving as we were all squeezing in one more piece of pie.
“I think Hillary Clinton will be president one day,” she said, beaming.
I regret not demanding an explanation. In an era defined by 9/11 and a second Bush in office, what gave her the audacity to suggest such an outlandish idea? Furthermore, in a family of conservatives, how did she — my great Aunt with two white pigtails and purple leather mocassins — end up a liberal Democrat? But I was a dumb college student, probably itching to leave the table so I visit my boyfriend or talk to my college friends over AIM on my desktop computer, so I didn’t.
On one hand, it’s sad to think of how many opportunities I missed with my dead relatives. But I also know it’s unrealistic to think that I would have spent my teenage years and 20s focused on drawing wisdom out of elderly people in armchairs instead of traveling, studying, and aggressively following the belief that I already knew all I needed to know about life. So instead of wallowing in regret, I’ve just been spending time thinking about them with love and nostalgia.
For the first thirty-five years of my life, the sight of my grandmother spilling food onto her bosom and then dabbing at it with a wet napkin was as common as seeing a squirrel or a bluejay out my window. The difference is though, that I’ll see squirrels and bluejays for the rest of my life, but I’ll never again see my grandmother’s face feign surprise when an errant cranberry plops down on her snowy white blouse.
But that’s ok. Trust me, with a 4 and a 9-year-old, there’s still plenty of stained shirts in my life.
And most of the time, I spend a lot more time thinking about my kids than my grandmother. But this year, I’m changing it up. Of course, I’ll feed my kids — I’m not a monster. But my heart, my mind, and my thoughts — they’ll be with my dead relatives, dropping cranberries, predicting elections, and trying to find answers to the questions I never asked.
If you like this type of story about partly-alive-partly-dead animals, try this:
The Joy and Sadness of Loving a Good Dog
How our dead dog Cooper gave us one final happy memory in the woods.medium.com | https://medium.com/@billouyiu/im-spending-this-in-thanksgiving-with-my-close-relatives-a192648747f2 | [] | 2020-12-12 18:40:06.027000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Health', 'Thanksgiving', 'Wellness'] |
WHAT IS IN HEALTH CANADA MARIJUANA LICENSE APPLICATION? PIPE DREEMZ EXPLAINS IT FROM STRETCH | WHAT IS IN HEALTH CANADA MARIJUANA LICENSE APPLICATION? PIPE DREEMZ EXPLAINS IT FROM STRETCH Pipe Dreemz Mar 8·4 min read
Canada authorities started giving authorization of Canada licensing since 2015 after a long argument in parliament. The scientist has discovered that there is lot of medicinal application of cannabis if consumed properly. Many said, it can be used to treat Glaucoma, lung health’s, epileptic seizures, decreases anxiety, Alzheimer’s, Sclerosis, increases treatment effectiveness. Marijuana helps veterans suffering from PTSD. Marijuana may protect your brain after stroke. Weed reduces some of the awful pain and nausea from chemo, and appetite. Marijuana actually will help you to release lot of pains. Marijuana helps veterans suffering from PTSD. There are may be lot of other places, where we could use marijuana or potentionality that marijuana could be used. Scientists are still waiting the funds and approval from Govt. so that they could do much more than what it delivers today.
Health Canada Govt. initially passed the Marijuana for Medical Purpose Resolutions i.e. MMPR which immediately replaced with Access to Cannabis for Medical Purpose Resolutions or ACMPR in 2017 and amended in 2018. It divided the licensing method in few types and they are following –
STANDRAD LICENSE — Often called father of all licenses. The standard license is the really big. You will have large authorization on cannabis production. You will have authorization of 200 square meter of canopy space (Including racks) where you could produce marijuana. Not only with marijuana production but also with marijuana research and analytical posting and so on. This license will also authorize you to produce edibles, analytical testing, and industrial hemp and and so on.
2. MICRO GROW LICENSE — The Micro grow license Canada is the best among all other type of licensing offered by health Canada. It will give you 100 square meter of canopy space authorization. Where you can still grow a lot of quantity of cannabis. While standard license required millions of dollars of investment, Micro grow license does not require so much investment. You can start your business form here if you don’t have that much money and so on. The Micro license is more than nursery license but small than standard license. Not all the work that you could do with standard license is also limited with Micro grow license application as well. To know more about health Canada terms visit portal.
3. NURSERY LICENSE — The Nursery license is the best business to start. It will authorize you just fifty square meter of space to grow cannabis. That’s great to start your business at early stage, when you have less money and so on. Often people start this business for their ownself , who don’t want to depend on cannabis providers.
Kindly note that the main thing that you must remember is that all the marijuana production is only and only for medical purposes. You can only sell , donate , export , show , distribute cannabis or marijuana or weed no matter it is dried form or dust form or any other edibles (Cookies , Brownies , Chocolates , Gummy , hard candies , Pizza , Chips , Nuts , trail mixes , Ice cream , Sodas , Dessert balls , Sauces, dressings, condiments , Coffees , teas , Energy drinks) form.
We have our team who will help you to gain cannabis license always. We have our quality tem who will help you all the aspects of marijuana business, not just Micro license Canada, There are various other steps that you must make it happen if you want to be a successful cannabis grower. The two things you must take care of –
APPLICATION — The type of licenses I already said, but just because you applied does not mean you will get application license. There are problems that are going to happen. One of the things is infrastructure. The infrastructure is the most important thing which you must built before you receive the marijuana license. This means health Canada does not provide Pre-business license. The white paper must get readied. It may happen that you applied for marijuana license and rejected by authority. In this case there is no going back. You must start the things from zero. If you are producing cannabis in your home , you should have different address for your facility. While you are working with Pipe Dreemz, we will help you to understand how to write marijuana application, how to submit them and what to do if ever rejected in any step. Our quality team will always help you with your application form start to end.
SECURITY — Security is the most important thing to look for. Health Canada authority always do care for it. After you are awarded with cannabis license like Micro grow license Canada application, they will come to your campus and watch you if you are fulfilling their demand of maintaining security, installing proper layer of hardware and software and tracking the wastes. No worries, pipe dreemz will always help you with installing them all and maintaining them as well.
Not just with security, Pipe Dreemz too helps with other things like — Production Planning , Facility Planning , Security Planning and Review , Technology Plan , Detailed Hydro Requirements and Costs , Detailed Budget , General Contractor Oversight , Equipment Supplier Agreements , Facility Build Out , Grow Room Design , Pre-Inspection services , Grow Room Design & Garden Consulting , Laboratory Equipment procurement , Electrical and Fustigation and so on.
We have our quality those who will help you with good production practices as well. Pipe Dreemz company built by Mr. George Routhier who have decades of experience working with United States federal agencies. Once in his family one person became sick and he deliberately neeed cannabis and that’s where George started feeling that Cannabis could be a cure for him. Then he decided his cannabis business. Now, Pipe Dreemz is helping businesses worth $150 businesses In United states and Canada.
You can also email us here at [email protected] or call us at 1–833–226–2776 to know details like micro license Canada and so more. We look forward to work with you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
This article is written by Pipe Dreemz Inc. We help businesses to start growing cannabis only for medical purposes. | https://medium.com/@pipedreemz/what-is-in-health-canada-marijuana-license-application-pipe-dreemz-explains-it-from-stretch-999d217c9e4c | ['Pipe Dreemz'] | 2021-03-08 08:36:47.671000+00:00 | ['Marijuana', 'Cannabis', 'Health', 'Canada'] |
CBD Compliant Banking | Many CBD business owners have found themselves challenged in finding a basic checking account for their business. It’s complicated for several reasons — but the professionals at MRB Compliance Group are experts in banking CBD businesses through our network of banks that offer compliant, transparent, and secure banking.
Even though the Farm Bill allowed for the commercial production and sale of hemp, it did not directly address banking. Banks were given guidance that allowed certain types of banks to engage with marijuana, and as CBD is termed in banking, “marijuana-related” business. However, the regulatory burden on the bank is not insignificant. It relies on the 4 pillars under the Bank Secrecy Act and its Anti-Money Laundering that include: 1) Dedicated Policies and Procedures 2) Dedicated Staff, 3) Dedicated Training, and 4) Subjecting Themselves to Independent Third Party Audits.
Many banks don’t want to be bothered. Then other banks have conflicting policies about CBD and hemp banking. In these cases, they often open and then promptly close accounts. Sometimes they seem to turn a blind eye when a CBD company presents as a “Health and Wellness” company, but the bank will do a sweep and find and close these accounts from time to time. It’s not to say that some accounts can remain in this limbo for a long-time, but when an account does get closed down, where is a CBD business owner to go next?
Our company specializes in compliant banking and can get you into an account, typically within less than 7-10 business days. These accounts do have costs associated with them, but what you are buying is peace of mind knowing that your account will not be shut down, there won’t be a disruption to your business, and that you have experts on your team as you need them.
We are here to help get you into a compliant, transparent, and secure bank account. We can also answer any questions you have and get you set up with merchant processing or small business loans, as needed. Headquartered in Denver, CO, our financial solutions serve CBD/hemp and cannabis, kratom, and other lines of high-risk business.
Visit us at MRB Compliance Group. | https://medium.com/@mrbcompliance/cbd-compliant-banking-aaa3d36e0177 | ['Mrb Compliance Group'] | 2021-08-25 23:46:07.817000+00:00 | ['Hemp', 'Banking', 'Cbd', 'Compliance', 'Bank Account'] |
David Versus Google | A coalition of 38 states has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. Is it too late to tame tech’s Goliath?
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses attendees of a tech conference in March of 2016. (photo: Daniel Cukier)
A coalition of 38 states, led by Colorado, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Thursday. The lawsuit alleges that the search engine giant has an illegal monopoly over the online search market which hurts consumers and advertisers.
The lawsuit is the third antitrust suit hitting Google in the span of a few months, and comes a day after another group of states, led by Texas, filed a separate antitrust suit focused on Google’s digital advertising empire.
In October, the Department of Justice announced a suit accusing the company of various anticompetitive practices, alleging that such practices have allowed Google to unlawfully preserve monopolies through operations and advertising agreements. Excluding Alabama, every state in the U.S. has now joined some sort of major legal effort targeting Google.
The latest suit accuses the internet giant of abusing its position as the dominant search engine to eliminate competition through anti-competitive contracts and conduct. It alleges that Google’s position allows it to limit consumers from using different search engines; forces businesses to use its advertising tools; and shuts out competitors who specialize in specific areas.
The lawsuit has been hailed by top executives at price comparison search engine Kelkoo, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.
Senior Vice President of public policy at Yelp, Luther Lowe, said that the focus on search results in the lawsuit “is arguably more significant than previous lawsuits in that it strikes at the foundation of Google’s dominance.”
The new suit repeats some of the allegations made in the Justice Department case, including the accusation that the company shut out competition through a deal with Apple Inc. and Verizon to make Google the default search engine on iPhones. The states say they will bring forward additional claims revealing “a broader range of Google’s illegal conduct.”
“This case represents a critical effort to address the concentration of control by one company of a crucial sector of our economy,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser during a news conference.
“Google’s anti-competitive actions have protected its general search monopolies and excluded rivals, depriving consumers of the benefits of competitive choices, forestalling innovation, and undermining new entry or expansion,” Weiser continued.
AG Weiser held a joint press conference to announce the lawsuit with Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson and Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery.
Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson said; “It’s not people use Google; it’s Google uses people.”
“We are in a new time, a new era, and it is very critical that we in the field of enforcement in competition remain very engaged in the tech industry going forward,” Peterson added.
“We want to give the consumer more control over their data,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery said. “And, frankly, at home and when they use the voice activated assistant, you’re giving them a lot of data.”
“Your likes, your thinking, your shopping habits, your screen time, your web history, most of your information, even the changes in bio-metric pressure, getting in and out of your car, these are all tracked and accumulated by Google and sold out to advertisers in some form or fashion,” Slatery added.
The states are asking the court to halt Google’s allegedly illegal conduct and unwind any advantages Google gained due to anticompetitive behavior, such as calling for the divestiture of assets.
Google has called the federal suit and the Texas-led suit deeply flawed, defending its search engine in a statement that argues the changes would hurt businesses.
“To get more specifically to the issues raised in today’s lawsuit: it suggests we shouldn’t have worked to make Search better and that we should, in fact, be less useful to you: When you search for local products and services, we show information that helps you connect with businesses directly and helps them reach more customers,” Adam Cohen, director of economic policy at Google, wrote in a blog post. “This lawsuit demands changes to the design of Google Search, requiring us to prominently feature online middlemen in place of direct connections to businesses.”
“We know that scrutiny of big companies is important and we’re prepared to answer questions and work through the issues,” he added. “But this lawsuit seeks to redesign Search in ways that would deprive Americans of helpful information and hurt businesses’ ability to connect directly with customers.”
(Contributing journalist, Allegra Nokaj) (Contributing writer, Brooke Bell) | https://medium.com/@munrkazmir/david-versus-google-3cabb573f46f | ['Dr. Munr Kazmir'] | 2020-12-18 22:25:31.592000+00:00 | ['Democrats', 'Tech', 'Republican Party', 'Politics'] |
MAILCHIMP FALL RELEASE | Mailchimp has changed its Dashboard and released New features to help you market smarter
See how Mailchimp’s new acute features, A.I.-backed content tools, e-commerce solutions, and audience management enhancements can help take your business and marketing even further.
See What’s New
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Scale your online business and automate all the functions with Mailchimp’s new smart and automotive tools and features.
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Create your subjective marketing strategy and get more new customers attracted to your business with new marketing tools of Mailchimp.
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AUDIENCE MANAGEMENT AND SEGMENTATION
Segmentation
Pre-built Segments
Website Behavioral Targeting | https://medium.com/@sajal_batham/mailchimp-fall-release-633944bfeb1f | ['Sajal Batham'] | 2020-09-23 10:53:36.590000+00:00 | ['Smart Marketing Tribe', 'Email Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Website Development', 'MailChimp'] |
Welcome to Birmingham! | Welcome to Birmingham!
So, you’ve just arrived in the greatest city in the world. What’s all the fuss about?
It’s big — over a million people.
It’s diverse — one in three residents is from an ethnic minority.
It’s young — nearly 40% of the population is under 25.
It’s historic — settlements here date back thousands of years.
It’s green — over 600 parks and open spaces covering 8000 acres, with easy access to the rolling hills of the surrounding countryside
It’s scenic— over 56km of canals, more than Venice.
It’s famous — home to brands like Cadburys, HP Sauce and Typhoo Tea.
It’s foody — six Michelin starred restaurants, the Balti Triangle, and a whole host of delicious and independent places to eat.
It’s sporty — Premier League football at Aston Villa, international cricket at Edgbaston Stadium, and Athletics at Perry Barr, with the 2022 Commonwealth Games to come.
But beyond the stats, Birmingham is an incredible place to live, work, and build community. If you’re just starting your journey to make our city your home, you are incredibly welcome! Whether you’re moving here for work, university, family reasons, or anything else, we think you couldn’t have picked a better place. At Oasis, we love our city, and we’re sure you’ll grow to love it too!
Especially in this strange season though, moving to a new city can be a daunting experience. But we are here to help! One of the best ways to quickly feel at home is to get stuck into a local church community — somewhere that will encourage you, support you and challenge you; somewhere you can both receive and contribute, somewhere you can know others and be known. There are many fantastic churches in Birmingham, but if you’re looking for a family of believers to belong to, we would love you to check us out.
Currently, we are meeting online every Sunday, from 10:15am for a pre-service welcome slot before the meeting proper gets underway at 10:30am. It’s hosted live on Zoom, and you can expect a very warm welcome, engaging worship, impactful teaching from the Bible, time for prayer and stories, plus an opportunity to connect after the service for a virtual tea and coffee via a separate link. For our Sunday Service, you won’t be able to be seen, so you can even try us out incognito, or get a taste beforehand by watching back previous meetings via Oasis On Demand.
We are also currently running Small Groups, Daily Devotionals, Kids, Youth and Students & 20s online as we work towards building in more in-person gatherings over the autumn. For all the details on our Online Services, take a look at this blog or check out the Events section of our website.
Thinking of taking a look? There’s no need to sign up to anything in advance, just turn up and see what you think. If you did have any questions, drop us an email on [email protected] or join our weekly mailing list, the Oasis Weekly Blast, via the Contact section of our website. We hope to meet you soon! | https://medium.com/oasis-church-birmingham/welcome-to-birmingham-a4d4ad1b6523 | ['Oasis Church Birmingham'] | 2020-09-01 11:05:28.497000+00:00 | ['Faith', 'Community', 'Christianity', 'Articles', 'Life'] |
Product feedback is a gift | I am lucky enough to work at a company where we often joke that every employee is a self-declared Chief Product Officer. Whether internal or external, every Strava user has an idealistic image of what they want the Strava app to do for them.
Because many of us are athletes ourselves, Strava employees are a concentrated representation of our most loyal user base. Whenever I am out on a bike ride wearing my Strava kit, I am often stopped by someone to tell me 1) how much they love Strava and 2) they would really love if Strava did X.
When your users care so much about your product, how can an engineering manager funnel these strong and differing opinions into something productive?
we’re pretty enthusiastic about sport
Internal Feedback
Well before starting to build a product, our leads group (engineering, product, design and analytics) assembles a product brief to keep us focused on solving a core athlete problem.
When launching a product internally, we include a feedback Slack channel to direct comments and concerns. Within seconds, we have tens of screenshots and paragraphs of opinions. (Are people constantly monitoring Slack for an excuse to not do their normal work?)
As an engineering manager, I deeply understand the product goal and the engineering steps required to fulfill it. I can accept a barrage of feedback and clearly define what engineering tasks are most important for our product to be as effective as possible. I use this unique position to enable our talented engineers to deliver the most impact from their work.
Managing Feedback
the new web training log — walks, hikes, swims, SUPs and rides all together
As builders of the product, only we engineers know what we have time to do. We must be explicit about what feedback we are looking for, but more importantly, what we are not looking for. Making expectations clear up front allows us to focus on important things like browser rendering issues while saving the color preference comments for later. At the internal release stage, we are not typically seeking design feedback, but rather, feedback on core functionality.
One of our most-loved features is the Training Log — a visual overview of your activities each day — which uses color to differentiate sport and size to represent length of an activity. When we launched Training Log for internal testing, we had already spent tens of hours analyzing data and discussing implementations. We had debated how to handle multiple activities on a day, sport bounds (is an hour of yoga the same size as a 3 hour bike ride?) and the sport color palette (we have 37 different activity types). This was not the time to rehash discussions about how multiple bubbles appear on a given day.
Stating upfront that I am choosing to send any non-critical issues to the backburner helps both our alpha testers and engineers stay focused on the right things.
Deciding Priority
In late summer 2019, we launched Fitness on mobile. This feature tracks your training load and fatigue over time. Our employees were over-the-moon excited to have their beloved fitness graph now available in the palm of their hand. However, our six mobile engineers only had so much time before the public release, and their time had to be best utilized.
Fitness & Freshness on Web (left) and the simplified mobile version (right)
To decide the priority of issues to address, we go back to the product brief and the core athlete needs. How can we help all athletes track their progress over time and at a glance? For Fitness, this was super clear. To enable this feature to all athletes, it was absolutely essential that we build a flow to help new athletes log a Perceived Exertion score to generate their fitness graph without existing heart rate data. The fatigue and form lines that were core to the Fitness and Freshness feature on the web, were removed for clarity on mobile.
When the barrage of internal feedback comes in, I pipe all the Slack messages into a Google sheet and create JIRA tickets for everything, allowing us to group similar issues. With usually one sprint before launch, we look at the whole picture and draw a distinctive line between the “must-do”s and the “nice-to-have”s. This helps engineers conceptualize exactly what needs to be done before launch and only pick up the bonus tasks if they have time.
External Feedback
the feedback module on Activity Detail, Route Detail and Training Dashboard
At Strava, our user experience is so important to us that we built a feedback system that we drop into high-touch features such as activities, routes and fitness. Users can tell us directly what they think, inside the app. We regularly analyze this at an aggregate level, but we also read the free-form text input! We also have a community-driven ranked feature request, where athletes can vote and comment on what they want to see next. We are extremely fortunate to have enthusiastic athletes who are not afraid to tell us what they want from Strava as a whole, and will find any form to communicate with us directly. We use this data to inform what and how we build.
Sometimes feedback can be more abrasive than we would like. It is my job as an engineering leader to carefully consider user opinions but never, ever forget the careful thought and long hours the team has put into building the end product. Some engineers, especially early career ones, haven’t yet developed the thicker skin of industry experience; we must constantly remind ourselves that singular opinions do not define our work.
Celebrate
Launching a product to millions of passionate users is a special moment. In this excitement, celebrate your team. Remember to personally thank the individuals who stepped up over the course of the project. Call out the cross-functional partners who worked hard to deliver design assets, go-to-markets and strategic feedback. Now go enjoy a launch happy hour and start scheming up your next product launch. | https://medium.com/strava-engineering/product-feedback-is-a-gift-ec0c96762f4c | ['Melissa Huang'] | 2020-08-26 19:08:35.774000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Product Management', 'Software Development', 'Strava', 'Engineering Mangement'] |
Is DeFi the Missing Key to Unlocking Impact and ESG Investing Potential? | An Equity Investor Perspective
Does the market believe DeFi protocols can boost impact and ESG investing? This is the question we set out to answer, speaking to several equity investors about DeFi’s potential to bring substantial liquidity to sustainable social and environmental development if used as a tool for conscious investing.
The rise of impact investing is proof of a global shift in priorities
Impact investing, part of the broader Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing landscape, is an institutional response to the continued proliferation of investors who use to “do more” with their money. Impact investing prioritizes profit but doesn’t view it as an antithesis to positive social change. The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), a non-profit membership organization, has tracked the growth of this sector over the past 12 years and in its latest 2020 Annual Impact Investor Survey, estimates the industry size at a steadily climbing $715B. The report states:
“Impact investors’ motivations stand at the root of the industry’s development. Unsurprisingly, the top three reasons for making impact investments all concern impact. Nearly all respondents (87%) consider both ‘impact being central to their mission’ and ‘their commitment as responsible investors’ as ‘very important’ motivations. Furthermore, 81% believe that impact investing is an efficient way to achieve impact goals.”
What if we were the saviors we’re waiting for?
Impact investing, despite its potential, is still considered a niche asset class.
Despite impact investing’s stellar rise, there is currently a $7 trillion annual SDG financing gap. On paper, these are clinical figures, easy to brush aside as ‘just another big number’. But consider what failing at the SDGs implies: A world in which access to food, electricity, clean water and sanitation, gainful employment, and gender equality, to name but a few of the pressing issues society has yet to solve. By 2040, this gap could run a yearly deficit as high as $15 trillion. Add in the tremendous pressure on national monetary systems brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic that threatens to decimate already struggling economies and it’s a recipe for even bigger problems than those we already can’t handle.
To many in the global society, in the throes of late capitalism, it’s clear that social change happens not through aid but via industry. Commercialize a problem and it’s not long before an entire industry pops up around the solution. That’s why the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are increasingly on the agenda at boardroom tables, especially as we race against mitigating the effects of climate change hurtling towards us. When it comes to the environment, the hands that bite (industrial pollution) seem destined to, ironically, be the hands that save, as large corporations rally together to “Go green”. However, the green in “eco” stimulates the green in “washing”, and in a stranglehold cycle, sustainability can also act as a thin layer of veneer atop marketing strategies meant to capture (or recapture) a new consumer generation demanding value-driven brands that prioritize the environment and an overarching sense of social responsibility.
The rapid expansion of DeFi creates a new wave of investors that interact with the financial services sector devoid of intermediaries. By decentralizing finance, private money — especially at the retail level — is rising in prominence to a scale hitherto unseen. Establishing a direct line between two parties thanks to trustless smart contracts frees up costs typically collected by banks and other financial services providers. This, as it turns out, may open up a whole new funding model for impact creation.
According to Jason Fernandes, crypto analyst and Chief Business Officer at NFT Technologies:
“Tokenized ESG investments in the form of Defi could free up access to capital for impact and ESG investing. We saw this happen recently when crypto investors worldwide donated vast amounts of cryptocurrency in order to fund Covid relief efforts in India and it’s only a matter of time before this model is replicated across other verticals in the ESG space.”
Could the answer to some of the world’s most pressing funding issues lie not in governmental and institutionalized salvation but instead the market-disrupting decentralized technologies that bring about empowered peer-to-peer (P2P) assistance?
DeFi and the quest for meaning
DeFi is known for its liquidity. Even during the Q2 bear market in 2021, DeFi’s Total Value Locked (TVL) still rose by 13%. At the time of writing, the TVL is shy of $107 billion.
However, Kyle White, angel investor and COO of DeFi liquidity ecosystem Atom Foundation, believes that liquidity alone doesn’t qualify an idea, saying:
“When concepts are placed on the blockchain they don’t inherently have liquidity. It takes an engaged community wanting to create a better future or from solid game theory tokenomics.”
While great strides are being made by a variety of projects to explore, expand, and solidify the potential DeFi can bring to the market, little attention is placed on using the potential of DeFi as a vehicle for social good. From a Maslovian perspective, DeFi’s development has yet to reach the little-known pinnacle psychologist Abraham Maslow conceived for his famous pyramid. In the year before his death, Maslow would add a new dimension to his Hierarchy of Needs, realizing that the penultimate of human development was not self-actualization, but self-transcendence. Typically, as a market matures, a Self-first approach is gradually expanded to include a Self-and-Other philosophy.
Miko Matsumura, General Partner at Gumi Cryptos and co-founder of crypto exchange Evercoin, believes that it’s a matter of time:
“The promise of DeFi for ESG is there, but thus far the leading-edge applications have been in financial services. Adoption is fast but it’s still early.”
The question is whether we can afford to wait out the natural evolution of the industry, at a time when social inequalities and the effects of climate change are ravishing communities around the world. Blockchain and crypto have always positioned itself as a radically inclusive solution that sidesteps the strict social and financial hierarchies put in place by a systemic organization of power that’s hundreds of years old.
What’s needed in the DeFi space is the commercialization of SDG solutions by leveraging private money to enable DeFi investors to contribute to problem-solving at scale through liquidity (via protocols) and technical (via blockchain) that other solutions simply can’t match.
Speaking to the funding gap, Tarusha Mittal, co-founder and COO of Oropocket and UniFarm, mimics this sentiment:
“This gap can to a large extent be covered by the newer DeFi protocols that are creating solutions which are more P2P-driven in the loan and financial space, an indirect value that is created because of wealth creation due to the boom in the DeFi space. Companies in the crypto space are becoming slowly more aware of their responsibility towards society at large. The underlying idea is to create solutions which would cater to the unbanked, as well — considering one of the goals is to empower women in terms of their finances and reducing poverty — DeFi works directly here by creating opportunities for people to not just be a part of this unconventional financial system but also actively look at financial freedom as an attainable goal.”
The great equalizer
Amit Kaushik, Portfolio Manager at quant trading firm SciFeCap and the author of The Crypto Investor maintains that decentralized technology can introduce greater equality to the financial world, stating:
“DeFi can remove biases inherent in lending decisions that are often hard to estimate. The transparency, data integrity, speed, and low cost of DeFi platforms can provide a sustainable platform for micro-finance in the developing world and bring maximum accountability that is impossible with systems where human beings are involved in deciding who gets the credit.”
However, with profit-generation — of which there’s much to be had thanks to DeFi’s meteoric APY returns — still front and center, what steps need to be taken to convert DeFi investors to the sentiment that their investments have the power to fill a gap in impact and ESG that the traditional markets have a hard time compensating for?
This, says Cedric Lehman, co-founder of DeFi impact investing ecosystem Social Impact Network, is precisely what drove the team to create their platform:
“Traditional impact investors generally need to make a hard decision between maximizing profits and making their money work for the greater good. As DeFi investors ourselves, requiring investors to sacrifice APYs isn’t a viable option. Instead, we conceptualized Social Impact Network to meet not only the needs of people in underdeveloped countries who lack access to financial services and impact investors who would benefit from eliminating intermediaries, but we’re inviting DeFi investors to contribute to make an impact and grow the economies of the world’s least developed countries through the same yield farming practices they already do.”
In the Disney movie The Sword in the Stone, the wizard Merlin tells a young King Arthur, “It’s up to you how far you’ll go. If you don’t try, you’ll never know.” In the film, it’s prophesied that England shall remain in the Dark Ages until the rightful heir to the throne pulls a magical sword from its anvil. Arthur, an orphan, rises to meet the challenge. Can DeFi bring about the type of social change that governments and the industrial complex have failed to implement?
The emergence of solutions that offer a win-win solution is sowing the first seeds that DeFi, applied to verticals beyond the standard financial services, just might be the missing piece of the puzzle. | https://medium.com/@social-impact-network/is-defi-the-missing-key-to-unlocking-impact-and-esg-investing-potential-3547e2d480d6 | ['Social Impact Network'] | 2021-08-04 09:57:16.491000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Sdgs', 'Impact Investing', 'Esg Investing', 'Defi'] |
When ‘Work Address’ changed to ‘Home Address’! | Sharing my Work-From-Home saga — the new normal born out of 2020!
The perk, WFH, once considered as an ‘option’ became the ‘essential’ when coronavirus set foot in our lives and hijacked our peace and freedom!
March 2020 marks the fiery entry of Covid19 in India, which entirely changed the way we used to work and live overnight. The situation was challenging and thought-provoking. Many organizations that were once following the conventional work-in-office culture were challenged to re-think and quickly adapt to change by transforming the physical workspaces to go digital.
The last 7–8 months journey was a roller-coaster ride. Some days you are just happy and relaxed, and other days simply missing the office and colleagues. The beginning was definitely not easy for all of us, a sudden surge in the online meetings, video calls, trackers, tasks updates, and whatnot. Personally, it became even more difficult compartmentalizing professional and personal space.
Somethings you cannot help, but love!
Secret to high productivity — Who doesn’t like to work from the favourite corner of the house? For me, it does the magic of delivering higher productivity topped up with coziness.
— Who doesn’t like to work from the favourite corner of the house? For me, it does the magic of delivering higher productivity topped up with coziness. WFH favorite pyjamas — The feeling of no longer indulging in the difficult office-wear clothing choices is surely saving me time and giving me the feeling of independence.
— The feeling of no longer indulging in the difficult office-wear clothing choices is surely saving me time and giving me the feeling of independence. Partners in crime and dine — My life partner is now an equal partner in the kitchen too. Yes, what more one can ask for! Totally loving it ❤
— My life partner is now an equal partner in the kitchen too. Yes, what more one can ask for! Totally loving it ❤ Pursuing Passion — There were a lot of things that took the back seat in life. Now with the flexibility in work schedules that comes with WFH, we are getting more time to spend with family and to learn and pursue our hobbies, courses outside the professional life. I am enjoying the re-union with home-gardening, sketching, and painting.
— There were a lot of things that took the back seat in life. Now with the flexibility in work schedules that comes with WFH, we are getting more time to spend with family and to learn and pursue our hobbies, courses outside the professional life. I am enjoying the re-union with home-gardening, sketching, and painting. New timely companions who have taken the space of colleagues and family this year. When I look back, I have in fact expanded my friend circle, yes, you read it right! I am talking about my passel of pigeons, who have become an integral part of my life, who pay me daily visit for lunch and adore everything I cook ;)
Ahh, but there are a lot of things that are missed!
Suddenly, the whole sense of order and discipline has vanished from my life. I feel the office visits and meeting people in-person was a blessing taken for granted for a long by a lot of us.
The friendly Hi & Bye, asking ‘What’s for lunch’, ‘Let’s go for lunch’ and ‘Tea, anyone?’ cannot be done virtually! Missing the Office cafeteria, gossips, daily cribbing about traffic and pollution in Bangalore — Oh, I am already missing it :(
What I miss the most is the healthy debates with the team. The real fun of brainstorming comes when they happen in meeting rooms! When we get to see the expressions, we feel and understand other’s points of view a little better, and tackling differences in opinion becomes a cake-walk!
What’s keeping me sane?
I am sure you all must have felt heartening to see how organizations are hosting a lot of initiatives to support employees amid the coronavirus pandemic.
For me, Enquero has made this journey super swift! Everyone is going above and beyond to make things easier for employees, and keeping their spirits high! I am amazed at how the HR team is making sure that we all as a team meet often, engage in one or the other fun and creative activities. IT team always a call away and Execs are maintaining constant communication via regular mails and townhalls. The company is investing in employees’ welfare initiatives to ease their mental and physical strain (everyone’s story of a strained back and sore neck) and delivering happiness during the nerve-wracking time for us.
While face-to-face interactions cannot be replaced, but virtual meetings keep the momentum alive. And, nothing beats the energetic and empathetic team who is accommodating, conscious of each other’s time, and never miss celebrating special occasions. By the way, I had my best virtual birthday celebration this year ❤
Though we never asked for it, spending time with family is something we cherish! Getting back in touch with some old friends and lost family connections is rejuvenating, and greeting and shouting a few words of cheer to our neighbors (from a safe distance) does add some spice to life ;)
Definitely, we are bound physically by a global pandemic, but not is our imagination, so let us go on, find our hobby, stay in, stay safe!
Rightly said by Gloria Steinem - Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are solely my own and originally published on LinkedIn. | https://medium.com/@surbhic123/when-work-address-changed-to-home-address-b2d0bce84d66 | ['Surbhi Chhajer'] | 2021-04-26 08:53:15.695000+00:00 | ['Passion', 'Covid 19', 'Work From Home', 'Workplace Culture', 'Work Life Balance'] |
Why do appraisals matter for condo buyers? | An appraisal is a property valuation completed by an unbiased professional hired by your mortgage company. With an appraisal in hand, your lender knows if they have the collateral they need in case something goes wrong.
The appraisal is one of the first steps in the closing process.
Lenders rely on appraisers, who are licensed or certified to do the job, to act as an objective third party. The condo buyer can trust appraisers to give the prospective lender a fair assessment of the new condo’s value.
In NYC, an appraisal costs about $500. You pay this fee to your lender, who hires and pays the appraiser. Though some fees in a mortgage closing can be negotiated, the appraisal fee is not one of them.
What do condo appraisers look for?
They aim to identify the condo’s fundamental value independent of temporary trappings such as furniture.
Key features for appraisal include the condo’s square footage, age, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, lot size, location, and view.
Appraisers conduct a visual inspection of your potential new condo and will note any necessary repairs. They also consider factors such as recent sales of similar properties and market trends in the area.
See the condo appraisal form at the bottom of this post for an example.
Check out Marketproof New Development for the most information anywhere on NYC condos.
seven-day free trial
What happens if the condo appraisal differs from the contract price?
If the appraisal is at or above the contract price, the transactions proceeds without issue. If the appraiser says the condo is worth less than the contract price, the lender will not provide the loan unless the seller drops the contract price.
However, condo buyers do not necessarily need to fear this scenario and could even benefit from it. By the time the sponsor and buyer get to this stage, the sponsor typically does not want to lose the deal. Therefore, they may drop the price to meet the bank’s demands and close.
If the sponsor, or developer, thinks an appraisal is too low and will not drop the condo’s price, a condo buyer can ask for another appraisal. Appraisers try to be impartial and accurate but sometimes make mistakes. In fact, the buyer can even present a case to the appraiser to get them to revise the assessment upward.
How do condo buyers know how much a home is worth?
Condo buyers may feel they are at the mercy of appraisers or developers when it comes to assessing their new home’s value. Data about comparable condo sales and even the other condos in the building is hard to find.
Fortunately, for condo buyers who want to conduct their own unofficial appraisal, there’s Marketproof New Development. Marketproof provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date information anywhere on new NYC condos.
Marketproof will show you details such as how much shadow inventory is in your building and how much comparable condos have recently closed and sold for. This information empowers NYC condo buyers to get the best possible deal.
Marketproof New Development
By using Marketproof New Development, you will be able to search both publicly listed properties and unlisted off-market properties not available on popular listing sites. Marketproof can increase the inventory you see by 9–10x what you may see on other sites.
Create an account, and get a seven-day free trial.
Sample condo appraisal form
Link to a sample form : https://blocksandlots.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Condo-appraisal-form.pdf
Top photo courtesy of 550 Vanderbilt. | https://medium.com/marketproof-new-development/why-do-appraisals-matter-for-condo-buyers-7325a07fa94b | ['Joe Zappa'] | 2020-12-16 23:23:55.553000+00:00 | ['New York Real Estate', 'New York City', 'Real Estate', 'Condos'] |
As of next year B.C. | As of next year B.C. shall not mean Before Christ anymore. History is rewriting itself and created a new, worldwide landmark: the Coronavirus.
Believer, denier? Irrelevant. As it is irrelevant whether one believes in a little baby coming right at this time of year and growing up to be a lover of the righteous and a hater of… anyone else. The entire world counts years cutting a line in Before and After Christ.
Given the world-wide changes in human consciousness, life, habits and even words I propose we start fresh and call 2021 year 1 A.C.
First year after Coronavirus. The beginning of humanity coming together under a shared desire of compassion, support, and cooperation.
A dream, but we have to start somewhere… | https://medium.com/illumination/as-of-next-year-b-c-a901a9474527 | ['Moni Vazquez'] | 2020-12-23 08:58:19.470000+00:00 | ['Short Form', 'Covid 19', 'Short Read', 'History', 'Short Story'] |
Constraints in Figma | Constraints are probably familiar to those who use Sketchapp / Figma to create responsive components. In terms of mechanisms and constraints in these two tools, it is quite similar, but I will explain more in Figma because it has a secret weapon: Grid.
In this article, I will go through how to create the chart in the link below, try dragging the chart on page 1: https://www.figma.com/file/yEbl1L9elshpeGc85eXoHO/Constraint-in-Figma/duplicate
First of all, I’ll introduce how to use the Figma constraint(1) below (skip if you are familiar with Figma).
1. Constraints and options
When you have a shape/text layer in a frame (F) or component (Ctrl + Alt + K), Constraints would show on the right with the default setting as Left _ Top.
Constraints have 2 dimensions, horizontal and vertical.
a. Horizontal
Left: keep the distance from the left margin
Right: keep the distance from the right margin
Left & Right: keep the distance from both left and right margins
Center: keep the size and distance to the center
Scale: change the size and distance to the margin according to the frame rate
b. Similar for vertical dimension.
2. Combining constraints and grid(2)
If you have used Figma, you will know that each frame is capable of containing grids. The component is also because it is actually a frame. The amazing thing is, if you have an object placed in a grid, it will respect the grid’s boundaries instead of the frame’s.
Gif created by Carmel DeAmicis will help you understand better:
As you can see, the icons follow the grid and keep the position in the middle of the grid column, and these 3 grid columns follow the scale relative to the entire outer frame. This makes the distance change while maintaining the size of each icon. Very convenient, right?
If Figma hadn’t had this feature, you will have to create separate frames/components containing each icon, set scale for each frame in the outer frame and also set center for each icon in the said small frames. It’s too much to comprehend without the grid 😅
— — — — — — — — —
From these possibilities, making complex components is completely feasible in Figma. If you want to know how you made those charts, read on and go to page 2 of the Figma file.
1. Review component’s anatomy
I always create all the necessary object in the main component, if you don’t need something in the instance, you can simply “delete” it 😌
In this case, a simple column chart includes:
Left / right vertical axis and unit name:
keep the distance to a vertical edge, stretching vertically
keep the distance to a vertical edge, stretching vertically Horizontal axis:
keep the distance to the bottom edge, stretching horizontally
keep the distance to the bottom edge, stretching horizontally Unit division lines:
keep distance with 4 margins, proportional
keep distance with 4 margins, proportional Bars:
keep distance with 4 margins, need to be divided evenly in horizontal distance, proportional
The orange frames will need grids, the blue ones will not.
We have settings for each part as follows:
Frame 1 (left axis): Left _ Top & Bottom
Frame 2 (columns and unit lines): Left & Right _ Top & Bottom
Frame 3 (right axis): Right _ Top & Bottom
Frame 4 (horizontal axis): Left & Right _ Bottom
Frame 5 (left axis unit): Left _ Top
Frame 6 (right axis unit): Right _ Top
2. Creating grids
This part is gonna be harsh, brace yourself 🤣 If you look at page 2 but don’t see the grids, press Ctrl + Shift + 4.
Let’s start with Frame 1 (left axis) first. Usually, the vertical axis is divided by 3–5 steps, or according to the height of the chart. Here I choose 4 steps, ie 5 numbers (0, 200, 400, 600, 800). So I have the bottom 0, stick to the bottom edge, number 400 Center, and 800 Top. So there are 400 and 600? Ugh. You can give these two numbers the Top & Bottom spacing, but if you don’t want these to be ugly and looking unprofessionally, think about having a grid.
Here you can see that creating a 5-line grid would be unfit 🤔 Figma forces you to determine the distance between the grids (gutter), which (equals the distance between steps in this case) will be changed when we change the chart height.
Now try to look at this case in a creative way, because when there is a fixed element (gutter) and a flexible element (grid), you can completely reverse the position of these things and still run smoothly. We can have the gutter = axis text = fixed height, and the grid will play the role of the distance between the numbers!
Now, my numbers are in text layers with the height of 12px. Hmmm, so we will have 4 grid lines, gutter 12px, margin 12px, right? Wait, of course, the 4 lines grid will be the standard for you to create a damn axis that costs me an hour trying to explain to you in words but no!!! We’ll take things a bit simpler.
You already have 0–400–800 that fits into the Bottom — Center — Top position, and now we just need to get 200–600 into place. That means you only need 2 grid lines, that’s enough. 2 grid lines, gutter 12px, margin 12px is the final answer. So you have 200–600 neatly in the middle of the 2 grid lines, and we just need to set them in the middle (Center).
With the width of these numbers, you can choose as you like, I choose Scale.
This damn grid
With Frame 2 (right axis), the same thing happened. I choose 3 steps, 4 numbers (0, 30, 60, 90). This time, there is no way to reduce the number of the grid, we create 3 lines grid, gutter 12px, margin 12px.
At frame 3, everything is simpler. I want the chart to have 7 columns, I create a grid of 7 columns, gutter and margin are equal to 0. Also, to help the horizontal lines be divided equally, I have to add 2 lines grid, gutter 0 for these 5 lines.
Phew, that’s done with the grid, the obstacle is over, the road ahead is easy 😤
3. Insert text
It sounds simple, yet, I still want to take a step for it.
After arranging the number in the frame for the left vertical axis to follow the grid, the unit name is left for each axis. Put the People and Million letters on these pretty little corners and finish.
With a horizontal axis, usually used for Time, I make 7 days a week, the length of each text layer is equal to the total length of the divided frame 7, the distance between the layers is 0. So, when you give these Scale layers horizontally, they will always be aligned with 7 columns above 😎
4. Add columns and lines
Just like the left vertical axis, I created 5 horizontal lines corresponding to 5 numbers. 3 Bottom — Center — Top lines, 2 grid-centered lines.
With the bars, I choose a thickness of 16px and let them line up with each text layer in the lower horizontal axis. If you want these columns to vary in thickness and height in proportion, then choose a Scale for both ways, or you can choose Center for horizontal and/or Top & Bottom for vertical because we need these bars always sticking to that chart.
Remember to test constantly to know if anything is going wrong!
5. Finishing
Now that we have reached the last step, you can add other details to your chart. For example, I added another 2 bar groups, and created a stack bar chart! Or you can make bar thinner and stand next to each other. After you finish, please send it to me, I’d be very happy yay.
— — — — — — — — —
My God, it’s over! Thank you, everyone, for reading this article. I attached a bonus page in the Figma file, containing a bar chart that looks similar, but definitely not what we just did! Try playing with it.
By the way, I need to ask you to give some feedback on how I write (comment for example), and if you want me to write on other topics, don’t be afraid to drop by Facebook and leave a message.
— — — — — — — — —
* Refs:
(1) Using Constraints, Figma Help Center
https://help.figma.com/article/54-constraints
(2) 5 essential ways to use design constraints, Carmel DeAmicis
https://www.figma.com/blog/five-essential-ways-to-use-design-constraints/ | https://blog.prototypr.io/constraints-in-figma-d0deec4b0156 | ['Linh Nguyen'] | 2019-03-01 16:35:03.158000+00:00 | ['Tips And Tricks', 'Responsive Design', 'Figma', 'Design', 'Constraints'] |
Configuring Web Server & LoadBalancer on the top of AWS using Ansible | HAPROXY
HAProxy is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly suited for very high traffic web sites and powers quite a number of the world’s most visited ones. Over the years it has become the de-facto standard opensource load balancer, is now shipped with most mainstream Linux distributions, and is often deployed by default in cloud platforms. Since it does not advertise itself, we only know it’s used when the admins report it :-)
Its mode of operation makes its integration into existing architectures very easy and riskless, while still offering the possibility not to expose fragile web servers to the net, such as below
ANSIBLE
Ansible is an open source IT Configuration Management, Deployment & Orchestration tool. It aims to provide large productivity gains to a wide variety of automation challenges. This tool is very simple to use yet powerful enough to automate complex multi-tier IT application environments.
Ansible is a helpful tool that allows you to create groups of machines, describe how these machines should be configured or what actions should be taken on them. Ansible issues all commands from a central location to perform these tasks.
No other client software is installed on the node machines. It uses SSH to connect to the nodes. Ansible only needs to be installed on the control machine (the machine from which you will be running commands) which can even be your laptop. It is a simple solution to a complicated problem.
I am not boasting off when I say that Ansible has filled up all the holes in Configuration Management and IT Orchestration world. You will know it too, when you take a look at the benefits of Ansible mentioned below:
Setting Up
The following task has been performed on top of AWS EC-2 instances and I have used Red Hat Enterprice Linux (RHEL -8).
So there are 3 Backend Servers where we have the web server running and 1 node having the reverse proxy server
Creating Host Groups in Inventory
here, we will be creating the inventory file which will contain all the information required to connect with the other nodes
[mylb]
172.31.33.248 ansible_user=root ansible_connection=ssh [myweb]
172.31.0.6 ansible_user=root ansible_connection=ssh
172.31.1.195 ansible_user=root ansible_connection=ssh
172.31.1.148 ansible_user=root ansible_connection=ssh
[lbnodes]
65.0.21.166
52.66.249.96
13.233.163.100
Now the main part is to create the playbook.
- hosts: myweb
tasks:
- name: "Install httpd"
package:
name: "httpd" - copy:
dest: "/var/www/html/index.html"
content: "Testing for LoadBalancer" - service:
name: "httpd"
state: restarted - hosts: mylb
tasks:
- name: "Installing LoadBalancer Software"
package:
name: "haproxy" - template:
dest: "/etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg"
src: "haproxy.cfg" - service:
name: "haproxy"
state: restarted
Now that we have our playbook ready, only the configuration file of haproxy is to be configured. The only problem is that every time, we need to manage the ip of the web server manually. To overcome that, we have used the ninja template and configured the haproxy file so that it takes up the data automatically and the user doesn’t have to configure the haproxy.cfg file manually.
# Example configuration for a possible web application. See the
# full configuration options online.
#
# https://www.haproxy.org/download/1.8/doc/configuration.txt
#
#--------------------------------------------------------------------- #---------------------------------------------------------------------# Example configuration for a possible web application. See the# full configuration options online.#--------------------------------------------------------------------- #---------------------------------------------------------------------
# Global settings
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
global
# to have these messages end up in /var/log/haproxy.log you will
# need to:
#
# 1) configure syslog to accept network log events. This is done
# by adding the '-r' option to the SYSLOGD_OPTIONS in
# /etc/sysconfig/syslog
#
# 2) configure local2 events to go to the /var/log/haproxy.log
# file. A line like the following can be added to
# /etc/sysconfig/syslog
#
# local2.* /var/log/haproxy.log
#
log 127.0.0.1 local2 chroot /var/lib/haproxy
pidfile /var/run/haproxy.pid
maxconn 4000
user haproxy
group haproxy
daemon # turn on stats unix socket
stats socket /var/lib/haproxy/stats # utilize system-wide crypto-policies
ssl-default-bind-ciphers PROFILE=SYSTEM
ssl-default-server-ciphers PROFILE=SYSTEM #---------------------------------------------------------------------
# common defaults that all the 'listen' and 'backend' sections will
# use if not designated in their block
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
defaults
mode http
log global
option httplog
option dontlognull
option http-server-close
option forwardfor except 127.0.0.0/8
option redispatch
retries 3
timeout http-request 10s
timeout queue 1m
timeout connect 10s
timeout client 1m
timeout server 1m
timeout http-keep-alive 10s
timeout check 10s
maxconn 3000 #---------------------------------------------------------------------
# main frontend which proxys to the backends
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
frontend main
bind *:8080
acl url_static path_beg -i /static /images /javascript /stylesheets
acl url_static path_end -i .jpg .gif .png .css .js use_backend static if url_static
default_backend app #---------------------------------------------------------------------
# static backend for serving up images, stylesheets and such
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
backend static
balance roundrobin
server static 127.0.0.1:4331 check #---------------------------------------------------------------------
# round robin balancing between the various backends
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
backend app
balance roundrobin
{% for i in groups['lbnodes'] %}
server app1 {{ i }}:80 check
{% endfor %}
Now that we are done with the configuration, Its time to run the playbook
So, here we can see we have all Success. Now lets check the haproxy configuration file manually from the node,
Automatically this part of main haproxy file was changed. And so is our web server and load balancer configured using Ansible.
And our web server is working perfectly on the address http://13.233.237.17:8080.
***
Thanks for your time… | https://medium.com/@pramanik-85849/configuring-web-server-loadbalancer-on-the-top-of-aws-using-ansible-afcca14dcd3e | ['Ankit Pramanik'] | 2020-12-08 09:42:29.941000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Load Balancing', 'Ansible', 'Ansible Playbook', 'Web Server'] |
Excerpts from “Dear Designer,” | The solution that you yourself design is also not going to be permanent — it is going to come with flaws that won’t be apparent until newer technologies are developed or another designer in the future assesses your solution and identifies scope for improvement, and refines the designs you offered, nesting a new solution within the constraints that your solution creates. Your solution is going to impact the lives of not just all of its users, but also of every human being who comes after this and deals with the same problem you worked towards solving. Every solution is just one tiny slice in a set of a large number of solutions to the same problem that span over all of time, each solution building on the successes and the failures of the solutions that came before, moving us closer towards our collective goal, the goal of design, the impossible state of utopia. Think and design for the whole world, as Uber Design’s brilliant book 77 things put it. By creating a solution you are setting precedent for how a specific problem should be solved henceforth, and, if successful, all future solutions to this same problem will be nested inside the notions your solution puts forward. Your work doesn’t just resonate with humanity but also extends the definition of humanity — of what it means to be human. You are partly responsible for the direction humanity moves in. Design for everyone who is and everyone who will be. | https://medium.com/experience/excerpts-from-dear-designer-d09be67862a1 | ['Jay Sethi'] | 2020-10-25 09:13:18.018000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Design Thinking', 'Design', 'Technology', 'UX'] |
Building an Inexpensive 3-D Printed ROS Robot | Building an Inexpensive 3-D Printed ROS Robot
Built around a Pi4, low cost gear motors, and an RPLidar A1
Modified Weddell 2 from Thingiverse
I recently began playing with ROS in simulation, and am really enjoying it. I want a platform that I can use for experiments, particularly learning to configure a physical robot for SLAM and navigation. If you are not familiar with ROS, or have been intimidated by the steep learning curve, you might want to give my introductory article a look first.
I stumbled on the Weddell 2 ROS Robot by user pokpong on Thingiverse, and was very impressed. It was very close to what I was after. I couldn’t source the motors the original device used, so I made a remix of that design that was set up for inexpensive gear motors with encoders. I hope this write-up is useful if you want to do something similar. The modified files are here.
The chassis is printed in PETG on an Ender 3 Pro. The parts require rafts and supports to print without warping, and the supports need to be gently cut away with an hobby razor knife. Holes tend to print a little small because of the way the slicer works, so it’s best to drill them to size.
The original design used some German gear motors that I had trouble sourcing (and frankly, they look expensive). They are probably overkill for my application, so I opted to modify the baseplate to mount these inexpensive gearmotors with integrated encoders. I wanted a robot that was slow with plenty of torque, so I used a robot wheel speed calculator to figure out what RPM I needed to get the speed range I wanted.
I used OpenSCAD to modify the base STLs, by plugging the holes I didn’t need and punching new ones for the motor mounts. The same plate is printed twice to make mirrored sides.
The sides and decks are assembled with M3 socket head screws and M3 locknuts.
Base with motors installed with brass hex adapters for RC wheels
I used a 1" caster I had from a previous robot chassis. With these motors and this caster, I needed larger wheels to get the ground clearance I wanted, so I opted for this set of 85 mm wheels with tires. The brass wheel adapter included with the motor set will fit standard R/C car hex wheels, so you can mount a large variety of them.
Underside of base showing caster
The design of the masks by pokpong makes clever use of pockets that trap an M3 nut — once you remove the support material, they lock right in. The vertical printed structures are called “masks” in his design, and he includes several with different kinds of cutouts for sonar, battery sockets, and a Raspberry Pi camera. I only used the camera mask, and the plain mask for the rest of the supports.
I modified the masks to make them a bit easier to print — the originals came to a very sharp edge on the bottom, resulting in little contact area with the print bed. I had several of them fail in printing with the original, so I used OpenSCAD to clip off the sharp edge.
Detail of mask showing M3 captive nut
I selected these 50 mm aluminum standoffs in black for the vertical risers. The battery pack sits behind the motors.
Masks and wheels mounted
To join the standoffs between levels, you need M3 threaded rod. I didn’t have any, so I selected my longest M3 screws, cut the caps off with a rotary tool, and cleaned up the cut end with an M3 tap.
M3 riser connectors
My electronics deck is currently pretty minimal — it includes a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu and ROS, a motor driver, and an Arduino UNO running rosserial to set motor speeds and publish battery voltage. A mostly empty shield board has a voltage divider on the battery input to bring the battery voltage into the range that the ADC on the Arduino can read. This is seriously limited on RAM — I’m working on a replacement with a Teensy ARM processor that will be more capable. This board is OK for testing, but would not be able to run other peripherals like IMU and encoders without running out of RAM. The rosserial library uses a considerable amount for each publisher and subscriber.
Power for the Pi and Arduino is provided by a 5 volt 3 amp battery eliminator circuit normally used on R/C aircraft. Power is soldered to the test pads on the Pi. PCB standoffs are 3D printed.
Electronics deck
A Raspberry Pi camera is mounted to the forward mask on the electronics deck behind the glare shield. The standard camera’s field of view is not restricted by the glare shield. The camera uses little tiny M2 nylon nuts and bolts to secure it to the mask.
Electronics deck with camera mounted
Wires are secured with zip ties. Power is currently a 2200 3S LiPo RC drone pack with XT60 connectors, though I may upgrade to a larger pack once I am farther along.
Next steps are to get the Teensy board working with a SparkFun IMU and counting encoder pulses from the motor, and publishing the appropriate topics. If that works, it should be able to keep rough track of where it is by fusing the odometry and IMU data. That will be the subject of a future article! I expect that to take some work.
LIDAR deck
The LIDAR unit mounts easily on the top deck — I’m very impressed with how easy it is to get it up and running in ROS. I’m excited to get some SLAM going!
Initial testing has gone well under manual teleop control — it feels precise and has plenty of power. The PETG parts seem quite durable — we’ll see how they hold up under lots of use.
See room for improvement? I would love to get your input and ideas!
Author’s note: The links in this article are not affiliate links. | https://medium.com/swlh/building-an-inexpensive-3-d-printed-ros-robot-625ac7766f4a | ['Jason Bowling'] | 2020-12-27 07:57:26.200000+00:00 | ['Robotics', 'Raspberry Pi', '3D Printing', 'Technology', 'DIY'] |
Newsletter 12/26 — Down the RabbitHole | Newsletter 12/26 — Down the RabbitHole
Down the RabbitHole
Earn money for using someone’s financial product. In Defi this isn’t a new concept, but Rabbithole is offering a new spin on this concept. The world of Defi is changing rapidly and it’s hard to keep up with new products being released every week. RabbitHole incentivizes users to use the new products by offering payment in the products tokens. You learn how to use the product and get paid to do it. Learn more here.
As the ownership economy continues to grow, protocol communities are continuing to grow and become more involved. However, in order to keep growing the ownership economy, with new protocols being introduced, RabbitHole found a unique way to incentivize retail investors to not just be investors to actively participate in in new defi projects, learn how they work, and see the new value the protocol is adding to the ownership economy.
RabbitHole is an exciting new project that pushes forward the concept of ownership economies. In order for this protocol to be a success, Rabbithole must work to maintain product credibility in what it incentivizes people to invest in. As we enter the next big bull run, akin to 2017, many of these interesting protocols and projects will likely fall apart. It will be RabbitHole’s job to make sure that they’re incentivizing their users to play games in the protocols that will likely have long-lasting returns. | https://medium.com/deepfi/newsletter-12-26-down-the-rabbithole-b3338f912fcb | ['Isaiah Leigh Kilby'] | 2021-02-03 00:09:22.782000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Defi', 'Ethereum'] |
為什麼要做跨境電商？怎麼選擇跨境國家及商品？ 5個關鍵數據讓你掌握跨境電商趨勢 | 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/boxfulbusiness/%E7%82%BA%E4%BB%80%E9%BA%BC%E8%A6%81%E5%81%9A%E8%B7%A8%E5%A2%83%E9%9B%BB%E5%95%86-%E6%80%8E%E9%BA%BC%E9%81%B8%E6%93%87%E8%B7%A8%E5%A2%83%E5%9C%8B%E5%AE%B6%E5%8F%8A%E5%95%86%E5%93%81-5%E5%80%8B%E9%97%9C%E9%8D%B5%E6%95%B8%E6%93%9A%E8%AE%93%E4%BD%A0%E6%8E%8C%E6%8F%A1%E8%B7%A8%E5%A2%83%E9%9B%BB%E5%95%86%E8%B6%A8%E5%8B%A2-2a7f8f47f632 | ['Boxful 電商物流'] | 2020-12-10 02:22:15.108000+00:00 | ['Warehouse Management', 'Ecommerce', 'Ecommerce Solution', 'Logistics', 'Cross Border E Commerce'] |
Looks like we’ll have to wait until 2021 for a new Apple TV | Looks like we’ll have to wait until 2021 for a new Apple TV Beez Dec 21, 2020·3 min read
It’s been more than three years since the Apple TV 4K went on sale, and cord-cutters had their eyes out Tuesday for a long-awaited refresh of Apple’s streaming set-top box and HomeKit hub. But while Apple did announce its long-awaited AirPods Max headphone, a next-gen Apple TV didn’t make the cut.
Mentioned in this article Apple TV 4K Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $179.00Learn moreon Amazon The Apple rumor mill went into hyperdrive on Monday with word of the impending AirPods Max (I preferred the rumored “AirPods Studio” moniker, but oh well), which Apple did end up unveiling Tuesday morning.
The $550 (!) headphone is slated to go on sale next week, complete with a custom 40mm dynamic driver, active noise cancellation, Transparency mode (which allows you to let in ambient noise), spatial audio, and a Digital Crown for controlling your tunes. We’ll have more to say about the AirPods Max once we’ve received more detailed specs and tried out a test unit.
[ Further reading: Cord-cutting myths busted ]But the other announcement that many were anticipating—a new Apple TV—failed to materialize. Bloomberg News’s Mark Gurman, who’s been a reliable source of Apple-related news and rumors, confirmed on Twitter that a revamped Apple TV wasn’t in the cards this year. “Delayed till ‘21,” Gurman tweeted.
Powered by the Apple A10X Fusion processor (which also sits in the 10.5- and second-gen 12.9-inch iPad Pro), the fifth-gen Apple TV 4K made its debut back in September 2017, and it was the first Apple TV model to support 4K playback and HDR, including HDR10 and Dolby Vision. In September 2019, tvOS 12 added Dolby Atmos support to the Apple TV 4K.
Rumors about a new Apple TV have been somewhat sparse, although it’s a safe bet that the box would get a new and faster processor, such as the A12X that powers the third-gen 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pros. The A12X chip (or something similar) would be much better suited for Apple Arcade, Apple’s gaming subscription service, than the aging A10X Fusion, and it would hopefully speed up the overall tvOS interface, which has been feeling awfully chuggy over the past several months.
There’s also chatter about a new Siri Remote that would add “Find My” support, meaning you’d be able to quickly track down the remote in case it slips between your sofa cushions.
A more welcome feature would be a full-on redesign of the remote, specifically one that makes it easier to feel whether you’re holding it the right way up. With the current Siri Remote, it’s nearly impossible to tell if you’re holding it the right way in the dark, and almost every time, I find myself holding it upside down on the first try. Whether a new Apple TV would actually come with a revamped Siri Remote is an open question, however.
In any event, we’ll hopefully lay our eyes on a new Apple TV early next year, so stay tuned.
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/@beez11547497/looks-like-well-have-to-wait-until-2021-for-a-new-apple-tv-3b7ab3bf31b0 | [] | 2020-12-21 04:16:44.074000+00:00 | ['Cutting', 'Cord', 'Streaming', 'Music'] |
10 Things I Learned From Being Single For 10 Years | I have been single for 10 years. Ten years! How the fuck did that happen? Or not, as the case may be. It’s not something I planned, mind you. There is no way I envisaged going into my dotage being single, but that is exactly what will happen, as far as I can tell. Because (and I’ll expand on this point below), the longer I am single, the longer I will remain single, particularly as I’m now in my fifties and the talent pool has shrunk considerably (more on that below as well). While being single isn’t at all bad (and it’s actually not), there are a few things that I’ve had to come to terms with over the course of my ten years of being (mostly) successfully single.
1. Love actually doesn’t happen when you least expect it
If I had a penny for every person who says, You’ll meet someone Di. It will happen when you least expect it, I would be richer than Bill Gates. Or Mark Zuckerberg. Or Rupert Murdoch. Or Jeff Bezos. Or Oprah. All of whom, incidentally, are not single. All of the above are married or engaged or partnered. Unlike me.
I do agree with the meeting part, though. I meet people all the time. I met Mr Nonsense and Mr Sleazy and Mr Fucktard and Mr Avoidant and Mr Holiday Fling and Mr Covert Narcissist. But nothing progressed beyond some sexy times (if I was lucky) and a whole lot of drama I could do without (if I was unlucky). So the thing where people say love will happen when I least expect it? I’m calling bullshit on that nonsense. For some people (and that includes me and Jane Austen and Diane Keaton), it never happens. At all. Ever.
2. Some men are just arseholes
Actually (and this is related to the point above), things not progressing beyond sexy times and a whole lot of drama is not quite true. I’m sure things would have progressed if I’d been prepared to put up with being e-maintained (Mr Nonsense) or being one of a number of women (Mr Sleazy) or putting up with a weird relationship with his ex (Mr Fucktard) or being jerked around (Mr Avoidant) or only seeing him once every six months or so (Mr Holiday Fling) or being emotionally abused to the point that I went to a very, very dark place (Mr Covert Narcissist).
Things would have progressed to the point where I was an emotional wreck; a woman who ended up with no self-respect… a pale shadow of my former self, wondering what happened to my wonderful life and why I wasted my years on men who were just (for the most part) assholes. If I’ve learned nothing else about this being single thing, I’ve learned to increase my ability to filter out assholes* and get rid of them pretty quickly. Thank God.
*Unfortunately, this was not the case with Mr Covert Narcissist, who slipped through my filter because he was so manipulative, and my boundaries had been whittled away to the point that I had no defence.
3. Online dating sucks
Yes, I know there are online dating success stories (three of my friends met their partners online). But as far as I’m concerned — and I can only base this on my experience — there are few genuine men on the sites I’ve been on. Admittedly, I’m too cheap to pay for the privilege of meeting someone online, so I used Oasis, the freebie site. And Oh. My God. There are some “interesting” specimens of manhood on display there (and I don’t mean manhood in the penis sense, but manhood in the general collective male sense).
And if by chance there is someone half decent who you could be attracted to (and by half decent, I mean employed, actually single, reasonably attractive, can spell and hold a conversation) the chances of meeting them in, you know, real life, are in line with winning the lottery. In my experience, online dating=being someone’s pen pal. Urgh. Ain’t no one got time for dat. Least of all me.
4. The chances of meeting that someone special is close to zilch
The longer I stay single, the longer I will remain single. This is not just because I become more set in my ways (and unwilling to compromise, if the truth be told) but also because the talent pool shrinks considerably the older I get. The number of eligible men (and by eligible, I mean fit, healthy, financially secure, minimal baggage or emotional issues, no small children) I can choose from has significantly decreased. There are not that many decent blokes around as far as I can tell.
The ones who are on the market are avoidants (not good for me and my anxious attachment style) or going through mid-life crises and are looking for a much younger model than me, or young (and I’m a notch on their bedpost and who can be bothered with that crap?) or just bitter from their divorces or separation (because their wives left them and they Seriously. Had. No. Idea.). I can categorically state that NASA has more chance of finding life in another galaxy than me meeting that special someone.
5. There are worse things than being single
Contrary to popular belief, there is absolutely nothing with being single. At all. In fact there a whole lot of things that are worse than a solo status. Much, much worse:
Being with a partner who disrespects you
Being with a partner who is unkind to you
Being with a partner who is controlling
Being with a partner who is violent
Being with a partner who is emotionally abusive
Living in a war zone
Having no income
Being homeless
Being a refugee in an Australian detention centre
Dying of an incurable disease
Losing your child or parent or best friend to an incurable disease or an accident
Losing your beloved pet to an incurable disease or an accident.
You get the picture. There are much worse things in life than being single.
6. Society conspires against being single
Back in the late 1990s when I applied for a home loan, I struggled to find a bank who would lend me the amount I required because I was single. Single meant one income. One income meant a risk (to the bank) of me not being able to service the loan. Couple that (no pun intended) with the fact that I was a solo parent, and you have all sorts of potential discrimination going on. Thank God the (then) Bank of Melbourne came through for me, and I am proud to report that I have almost, very nearly, paid off my loan. And I have never missed a payment. Not once.
Fast forward to today and single people are still discriminated against. Think single supplement that hits the hip pocket of the solo traveller (travel industry); table settings that discourage solo dining (hospitality industry); the awkward need for a plus one (wedding industry) and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Being single is often akin to being a social and economic pariah.
7. Being male and single is more acceptable than being single and female
Spinster. Bachelor. Which would you rather be? Exactly. The world is much kinder to George Clooney (when he was single) than Susan Boyle. Think Silver Fox vs. Dried Up Old Hag. Witch. Crone. Older, single males are viewed as sexy and virile (because they can be fertile until they drop dead) and still having a lot to offer society. Older, single females struggle with invisibility and being relevant (apart from Christine Lagarde and Janet Yellen and Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel and Oprah who are Supergal exceptions to this rule).
I refuse to go gentle into that good night and colour my hair (mainly because I can’t be bothered) and get fat (because I don’t want to be) and I am often told I don’t look my age. I feel fit and fabulous and fearless but I can’t pull the guys like I used to. Heads rarely turn when I enter a room and men hardly notice me. So while I don’t feel invisible and certainly don’t act it, society sorta kinda says I am. How can you be found by that special someone if you aren’t even seen? If you are essentially invisible?
8. Coupled up people are secretly jealous of my single status
A number of female friends and acquaintances have said to me over the years: I love my husband, but if anything happened to him, I would never remarry…
I think I know why. Being single means you aren’t forced to compromise when you really don’t want to. You don’t have to share your space with someone when you want to be alone. You don’t have to pick up after anyone. You don’t have to have that same old argument about leaving the toilet seat down or unstacking the dishwasher or bringing in the washing or feeding the cat or taking out the garbage. You don’t have to worry about your partner letting you down or being unreliable or becoming a gambling or porn addict or betraying you with an affair.
If you are single, you can take a lover if you want to (actually, you can take a lover when you are partnered, but I totally judge you for that. And not in a good way). You can have sexy times when you want with different people, or not, as the case may be. You don’t have to deal with someone being in your space all the freaking time. Your money is your own, your decisions are your own. Your life is your own. You do what you want, when you want, with who you want.
How fucking fabulous is that?
9. Single is the new fabulous
Being single is the new fucking fabulous. And despite #6, there is no need to be coupled up if one doesn’t want to be. In fact, more and more people are choosing a life that doesn’t involve a partner because of the inherent, wonderful, total freedom. And there’s a lot of research saying that being single is better for your health, wealth and longevity, especially if you are female.
Yes, you are judged for living an essentially selfish life because you get to please yourself, but being single also means you have more time to be selfless and pursue activities that contribute to society. I am a better mother, employee, friend and cat owner because I am single.
The significant lack of relationship drama in my life means that I am more zen and centred. I have more energy to indulge in all sorts of activities of my choosing. And I am more creative because I don’t have explain or justify why I’m spending all my time after work writing or working on stuff I want to work on, which has to be better for the world.
I am fit and active and look after my health — mental, emotional, spiritual and physical — and I’m not sure I’d be so driven if I was loved up.
10. A single life is an authentic life
As far as I can tell, my single status means that I am living my life as close to the real me as I can get. I spend a lot of time with myself, so I am comfortable in my skin. Mostly. I don’t have to pretend to be something that I’m not. I don’t play a role. On my own I’m just me, stripped back, bare, real. What’s more, I like me. I like the person that I am. I respect myself (and these aren’t just empty, tokenistic words) for all that I am and all that I’ve achieved and all that I will become and all that I will achieve. Past, present, future.
As far as I can tell, being single means I’ve been able to choose to do stuff that contributes to my growth as a person, that allows me to test my limits, to push beyond the edges of my comfort zone. I rely on myself and my own resources. I try different things and I do different things with different people in different countries. And the best thing is: I don’t have to explain it to anyone.
How singularly fabulous is that? | https://medium.com/vox-virtus/10-things-i-learned-from-being-single-for-10-years-8efe58e29bb | ['Diane Lee'] | 2020-06-25 14:31:41.771000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Singles', 'Relationships', 'Sex', 'Dating'] |
Safe Registry For Drone Pilots In The UK | Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has implemented a series of rules and regulations to guide the correct and safe use of drones in the particular territory.
According to Mark Boyt, founder and CEO of Drone Safe Register, one question remain unanswered, that- apart from all the rules and regulations what is the guarantee that the pilot is well trained and certified to take the safe fly and landing and work in an efficient manner.
“I thought it was important to have one private entity that would group and act as a certification entity to guarantee the public that the pilots they are hiring to do a job are responsible, qualified and properly trained and insured individuals,” Boyt said.
There is still a need to a central repository of insured drone pilots.
Source: http://bit.ly/2FkpORL | https://medium.com/deepaerodrones/safe-registry-for-drone-pilots-in-the-uk-ade1c8d318d6 | ['Deep Aero Drones'] | 2018-06-05 10:48:39.157000+00:00 | ['Drones'] |
Meet the World’s Most Bio-Tracked Man | Michael Snyder might be the most bio-tracked man in the world. He’s tested 14 of his “-omes,” such as the standard genome and microbiome as well as the less-well-known metabolome, transcriptome, proteome, immunome, and exposome. At any given time, he has eight devices on or around his body tracking his heart rate, blood oxygen, step count, blood glucose, radiation exposure, and even the surrounding air quality.
“It’s data galore,” says the Stanford University genetics professor on a recent Saturday afternoon at his office. Snyder is an animated talker and quick to laugh, with deep smile lines around his eyes. He is a man who loves what he does, and it shows. “I’m a pretty big nerd,” he says. “Here I am on a Saturday. That probably tells you all you need to know.”
Snyder thinks the way we approach medicine is entirely wrong and that mining our personal health data could be the key to fixing it. His ambitions are two-fold: Instead of focusing on treating people when they’re sick, he wants to concentrate on keeping them well. And rather than basing treatment decisions on population studies, he believes medicine should be individualized. The idea is that if you know you have a genetic risk for a disease, you can proactively manage your health better, and awareness of your baseline measurements provides earlier insight into when you might fall ill.
“We are very focused on treating people when they’re sick,” he says. “It’s very reactive. We should obviously be focused on keeping people healthy.”
Snyder is applying his background in biology, chemistry, and big data to try to fix the field of medicine. His original claim to fame is conducting large-scale analyses of DNA, RNA, and proteins, often in yeast. When he moved his lab to Stanford from Yale 10 years ago, he also decided to change his research focus. Now he’s using the same technology to try to improve people’s health. And in the tradition of many scientists before him, he’s using himself as a guinea pig.
Thanks to his obsessive monitoring, Snyder discovered he had a genetic risk for diabetes, caught the onset of his high blood sugar, and managed to get it relatively under control through diet and exercise. He also learned that his diabetes is a special subtype that doesn’t look like either Type 1 or Type 2. His cells respond to insulin normally, and his pancreas produces the hormone just fine, but it doesn’t release insulin into the bloodstream very efficiently. This means many of the normal diabetes medications, such as metformin, don’t help him.
“The goal is to really understand what does it mean to be healthy, what does a healthy profile look like, how does it change over time, and what happens when people get sick at the earliest times.”
Snyder monitors not just what’s going on inside his body, but what’s happening outside of it as well. By measuring the particles and chemicals in his environment, Snyder learned that what he thought was an allergy to pine pollen was in fact a reaction to eucalyptus trees. He expanded the exposome study in 2018 to 15 people in San Francisco and revealed that people were regularly exposed to 3,000 chemical signatures, including bacteria found in sludge and traces of the insect repellent ingredient deet.
In a new study published May 8 in the journal Nature Medicine, Snyder extended his philosophy to 108 other people, tracking them for an average of three years. They had their whole genomes sequenced, wore fitness trackers, and came in quarterly for other -omics screenings, primarily through blood testing. If they got sick during the course of the study, even with something as simple as a cold, they came in for more samples immediately during and after.
“The goal is to really understand what does it mean to be healthy, what does a healthy profile look like, how does it change over time, and what happens when people get sick at the earliest times,” says Snyder. “Along the way, you might discover things important for people’s health, and we did.”
Out of the 109 study participants (counting Snyder), the researchers made more than 67 actionable health discoveries. These include identifying genetic risks for heart disease, cancer, and diabetes as well as catching early signs of the conditions in a few of the participants.
For example, one person learned they had early-stage lymphoma before they showed symptoms. The researchers discovered the cancer from an ultrasound scan that revealed an enlarged spleen and a test of the person’s immunome, which measures levels of immune chemicals in the blood. Thanks to clues from the frequent screens, Snyder thinks they may have identified an early biomarker for cancer, too. In blood tests a year before the person was diagnosed, one immune chemical was much higher than normal. After the person was successfully treated, the levels went back down, suggesting it may have been an indicator of the disease.
“I think this is very much what medicine in the future will look like,” says Christopher Mason, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine who was not involved in the study. “You want to build as much information about every individual so that you can look for any change in their health trajectory.”
“This is a paper that is important for ushering in the potential utility of long and deep data,” says Eric Topol, executive vice president of the Scripps Research Institute, who also was not part of the research. “So often when we collect data, we do it as a one-off. Here, they’ve done a longitudinal time series of data capture. It just shows you the power of this type of data.”
Of all the tests they administered, Snyder says the two with the biggest effects on health and behavior are ones that are commonly used today: genetic testing and continuous glucose monitoring.
Fifty-five people in the study learned they were prediabetic (the group was preselected as having a high risk for diabetes). By tracking their blood sugar with the continuous glucose monitor, the participants were able to identify which foods caused their blood sugar to spike. The culprits were often very personal (one person responded more to rice than potatoes while another person was the opposite) and surprising (someone had a large increase in blood sugar after eating lentils). However, nearly everyone spiked in response to eating cereal and milk.
“For the continuous glucose monitors, that’s where people learned the most about their diet and how it was affecting them. It served as almost a biofeedback device,” says Sophia Miryam Schüssler-Fiorenza Rose, a neurosurgery instructor at Stanford who was the first author on the paper. “It might be worthwhile for people, even before they have diabetes, to learn more about how their diet is affecting their blood sugar. I think when people see that, they’re more able to make changes.”
Participants also made changes based on their genomic screens, including switching their medications thanks to so-called pharmacogenomic discoveries. For example, one person had a heart attack during the course of the study. It turned out they had a genetic variation that placed them at a greater risk for a heart attack from an interaction with a medication they were on. Once the researchers discovered the gene variation, they were able to alert the participant and their doctor, who subsequently changed the medication before they had another heart attack.
Other -omes, like the transcriptome and metabolome, are more dynamic, assessing acute changes in proteins and other factors in the blood that can indicate the progression of a disease. Despite their potential, however, Rose says making sense of the data is still a work in progress. “They’re not quite as far along as genomic testing is at this point,” she says. Rose and Snyder hope these tests will one day help them subtype diseases better so doctors can give people the best drugs for their specific strain.
Not everyone thinks this amount of testing is necessary — or realistic. The screening is expensive (a whole genome screen still costs about $1,000), and the vast majority of preventative tests, genomic or otherwise, aren’t covered by insurance. “The American medical system would definitely need to change in order to incorporate this,” says Joanne Berghout, a research assistant professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study.
There are also concerns that people will become anxious or overreact to their potential risk for a disease. “Too much testing and incidental -omics, you basically wind up inducing hypochondria,” says Topol. “You wind up not only with anxiety, but you can find things that get unnecessarily tested and all sorts of incidental findings.”
There have been past incidents of misdiagnoses by going off of genes instead of symptoms. For example, at least one healthy person got a defibrillator implanted because their doctor thought they had a genetic risk for a heart arrhythmia even though they didn’t have any symptoms. Later, the gene variation turned out to be unrelated, and the person was perfectly healthy.
Snyder agrees that this type of comprehensive testing may not be for everyone. He’s also quick to point out the new paper is a research study and is not meant to be rolled out into a health care setting just yet. As testing becomes simultaneously cheaper and more precise, though, he is adamant that personalized medicine is the way of the future.
“We’re all going to get diseases, we’re all going to die of something,” he says. But if you’re armed with the right information, “you can better manage yourself. I think what we all want is to live good health spans and then just pop away.” | https://onezero.medium.com/meet-the-worlds-most-bio-tracked-man-2077758cf5a2 | ['Dana G Smith'] | 2019-05-08 17:06:00.964000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Science And Medicine', 'Personal Health', 'Michael Snyder', 'Life'] |
My Little Friend | We do not speak the same words
or in the same tone
but we are gentle to each other
in harmony.
For Chalkboard prompt: Harmonious from Francine Fallara
Thanks to Kathy Jacobs, Harper Thorpe, and the whole Chalkboard team. | https://medium.com/chalkboard/my-little-friend-2c81662354e0 | ['Dana Sanford'] | 2020-12-27 18:27:21.705000+00:00 | ['One Line', 'Harmony', 'Chalkboard', 'Poetry', 'Love'] |
All Aboard | Headline at nypost.com: “Rich people are buying homes just for a place to park their yachts.” Must be nice.
Here are interesting snippets from an NYP article: “NASA scientists have found more water on the moon than previously thought — a crucial discovery that could help greatly fuel deep-space exploration… possibly trapped in “glass beads’’ about the size of a pencil tip in the soil… Enough water was detected in a cubic meter of sunlit soil to fill a 12-ounce bottle.” I bet those brands that sell bottled water would love to separate those beads from the soil. Maybe somebody like Elon Musk could do the job. Trouble is making it cost effective. Then again, there are probably a few yacht owners willing to pay thousands for a taste, to mix it with hundred-year-old scotch.
And here’s a common sense headline from NYP: “The COVID-19 surge is global — stop politicizing it to bash Trump.”
This headline from foxnews.com is self explanatory: “Protesters raid shops, ATMs after Philadelphia police shooting.” Some would call it reparations.
Last night Movies!, channel 5–2 on over the air antennas in NYC, ran Horror Express (1972), a Spanish-English production starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Telly Savalas shows up in the final third, no doubt a quick paycheck. The plot is simple. An anthropologist discovers a frozen entity in China. While being transported by rail, it thaws and mayhem ensues, ala The Thing (1951). The explanation of its origins is clever, but it also had me wondering why it killed. Then again, as a 70-year-old given to nodding off, I may have missed something. I enjoyed Alberto de Mendoza’s performance as a mad priest.
My thanks to the two women who bought seven books in Russian between them, and to the Frenchman, who purchased Camus’ The First Man in French — Le Premier Homme; and to my constant benefactress, who delivered a handful of non-fiction; and to the woman who donated about 40 books in Russian.
My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE
FB: https://www.facebook.com/Vic-Fortezza-Author-118397641564801/?fref=ts
Read Vic’s Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza | https://medium.com/@vicf1950/all-aboard-2c2afe312044 | ['Vic Fortezza'] | 2020-10-27 21:08:47.701000+00:00 | ['Horror Express', 'Books', 'Headlines', 'Moon Water'] |
“I”dentity | “I”dentity
by Isaac Albanese (he/him/his)
(Isaac is the Administrative Coordinator for the Student Activities Office at Brown. He wants to help shed light on the impact that pervasive and exclusive masculinity has within the trans community. His poem was originally delivered as part of The Men’s Story Project.
This poem is part of our series of writing from trans people for our Protego campaign, which fights for trans rights and safe spaces. If you have a story or perspective you’d like to share, email [email protected]
If you’d like to support Protego, you can donate here.)
“For some, there is a point on the path to authenticity of questioning and uncertainty. I learned firsthand that even the most well-intended people in our lives don’t know how to give it room to breathe, especially not within pre-defined labels. It’s uncomfortable, undesirable, and insights fear of illegitimacy so we sweep it under the rug and suffer quietly.
I shared my story about the near two years I spent in this space with the hope of letting others know: Regardless of what people say, no one has all the answers. It’s okay to be unsure and exploring. But most importantly, please know that you are not alone.” — Isaac
I had questions.
Grasping at my heels, begrudgingly dragged along were my parents.
I expected their resistance; having carried them for so long their weight may as well have been mine.
I expected the time spent researching and networking.
It’s the only way to learn about identities largely frightened, bullied, beaten into hiding.
I expected to find community, clarity, and support.
Expected all but those hands on my back. A push in someone else’s “right” direction.
695 days
I appeared in my hometown courtroom to be renamed on June 24, 2013.
I gave physical masculinization a second chance on May 20, 2015.
695 days
This is a recounting of the time in between.
He was a living, breathing success story before my very eyes.
In him I swore I saw my future.
He introduced me to others, invited me to private spaces “F to M.”
It was exhilarating.
I weighed my options, filled my head with the possibilities, immersed myself in communities of people behind computer screens with one crucial similarity.
But was I doing it right?
Did I qualify?
695 days admiring the “close enough” clarity, the, camaraderie.
Flushing questions out my pores with group-think, and the dizzying reality of my first dose, thumb on the plunger.
I’d cleared it — stage five of my psychosocial development, Role Confusion,
prompting the joyous, synthesized fanfare of a video game.
I waited for my 8-bit reflection to come into focus
but it, froze.
695 days behind the masked fraternity haze before I could tell the difference between it,
and my face.
That mask of glass shards and paper mache was placed upon your first day by letters, by degrees.
“Oh, boy!”
Strip by strip I had unknowingly crafted my very own, smothered my identity until,
between the cracks in the mirror I couldn’t recognize me.
How? Why?
695 days
Pay attention, at attention, to the lines on either side of this road.
“Keep going,” he said. “It’s the only way you’ll know.”
Arms outstretched, I was heel to toe on a painted tightrope
shaken by newfound community, my parents, and my past
with insurmountable questions churning my sea just inches from rush hour traffic.
You heard me, but, you weren’t listening.
695 days standing in the breakdown lane, watching cars pass, watching time lapse.
I couldn’t shape a future I wasn’t certain of.
Wouldn’t put a name out there I might just as quickly wish to pull from tongues.
I stopped hormones.
I withdrew from everyone.
Getting by behind the “he/him/his” public cisnormative was an EZ pass
but I was paying the toll,
an anxious spiral into doubt.
Heavy,
Alone.
Not a single person told me it was okay to slow
down
until I’d lost the will to move.
Because
There’s no “I” in team and “I” can get overwhelmed by community.
It was never about me.
I was only as welcome as I was “enough”
willing to adhere to trans “ness” within the confines of strength and certainty.
695 days is the time between the legal declaration of my name and when it’s snug fit no longer choked me at the collar.
So that I could grow into it at my own pace,
and recognize identity lost to identifier.
695 days is the time it took to define myself, and what I wanted, what I needed in order to realize that dream.
When “male” and “boy” and “man” still don’t quite fit.
Separate from expectation.
I still have questions. I think I always will,
but, I’ve learned
that masculinity can be about choice, about fulfillment, about authenticity and self-exploration.
More than 695 days later, I’m doing okay.
If you should find yourself on that same road sinking into cookie cutter potholes
come, say, “Hello.”
I’m still there. You’ll find me,
by the wayside, in my own time, just beginning to bloom. | https://medium.com/the-harry-potter-alliance/i-dentity-fe156763eb7c | ['The Harry Potter Alliance'] | 2016-07-16 22:29:22.620000+00:00 | ['Transgender', 'Protego', 'Poem', 'LGBTQ'] |
Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow | Thank God. I think we could all use a little forward thinking — a bit of hope perhaps? I know I can.
Photo by Darren Welsh on Unsplash
Well, here we are in 2021. We made it. I am not sure about you, but I feel a little shell-shocked myself. In some respects, it is really hard to believe that a pandemic hit the entire world last year. But it did, and it definitely affected us. Some of it has been good, most of it — not so much.
I am so done with 2020. It has been a year full of things that we will probably never forget, but will not want to remember either. Don’t get me wrong, as I have written about previously there have been many blessings amidst this world pandemic. However with the myriad of limitations and so much out of our control, the masses will be singing Hallelujah from the rooftops once the threat of covid is lurking no more.
With a vaccine out now, it makes me wonder how long back to normal will be exactly and will we know it when we see it. I guess time will tell. Perhaps we can all try to hang on to some of the good parts, and create our own new normal as we move forward.
Photo by George Hiles on Unsplash
One of the most significant changes during covid was how we handle death. I have been a firm believer for many years that if your life existed on this planet for even a minute, that it is worth honouring. This includes bedside as people are dying, open caskets for assisting in the grieving process, and of course a service to gather, remember and celebrate all we can about the person lost.
Not last year. Pretty much none of it. People were dying alone in hospitals and care homes, their loved ones excluded from their final moments. Viewing the body and gathering? Nope, not that either. Shitty all round, for the person who left, and for the ones they left behind. Makes one wonder how many wounded souls will be wandering around through this year with a sense of incompleteness in their process.
I did have a positive outcome of covid with regard to a recent loss that I experienced. My cousin passed away on the other side of the country in New Brunswick, just a couple of weeks ago. He was only 42 years old. Hop on a plane and console my aunt on the loss of her only child? Nope. Shitty. With my nature that is exactly what I would have done pre-covid.
The good news: they did hold a service for him and it was live-streamed! New Brunswick closed down in advance of Christmas and got its numbers under control early, so at the time of his passing a service was actually allowed. Awesome that I could “attend” his service after all and have a sense of closure and closeness to my family. I watched the people speak, a pastor and a couple of close friends. I was able to listen to the music played, and I cried like a baby during Amazing Grace. It was lovely, and I was able to experience it. I don’t believe live-streaming was happening or common before covid. One positive outcome.
Photo by Charlie Gallant on Unsplash
Another noteworthy improvement experienced last year world wide was the environmental impact. Less pollution, less traffic, less travel, cleaner waters — the planet is much happier with us humans for sure. I hope these unintended benefits can be harnessed and replicated as we move forward away from the pandemic.
Photo by Jonas Von Werne on Unsplash
A frustrating but beneficial bonus for myself was the personal slowing. Prior to covid, my personality, lifestyle and business commitments had me very busy every week. I love travelling, having fun with friends, connecting with others and mentoring. This is a large part of who I am. I also routinely have many work commitments that include networking, business meetings and community engagements. All of this seemed “necessary” prior to the pandemic.
Necessary or not, my busy schedule got shut down, and some areas have definitely suffered with the imposed limited contact. For example, launching a new business venture immediately after covid hit us has not worked out so well. People need people, personal contact, support and encouragement to make a new launch successful, and all of this has not been possible. We will see if this new venture survives or not. I hope so.
On the upside, my nervous system has calmed down substantially with the forced home life. Spending a lot more time in my home has been lovely and I am really enjoying the personal connections that are allowed. Making home cooked meals has always been great, as I love cooking and I now have more time.
Photo by Lea Böhm on Unsplash
Another coinciding benefit has been a happier credit card. Being out of the home a lot means socializing and eating out a lot. This is not cheap! Being at home, I am able to get my food from the grocery store and enjoy cooking it myself, which is considerably cheaper. No wonder my grandparents and my mom only allowed one meal per month (at the most!) out at a restaurant. I was aware of how precious this experience was since it was infrequent, but as a kid did not realize the huge financial savings that accompany this choice.
Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash
I believe another good outcome we received from a nasty virus is re-learning about cleanliness and safety. For instance, washing your hands. Not sure why we needed a pandemic to drive this baby home, but apparently we did. I had previously noticed when travelling that wearing masks in other countries is more common. In China for example, most people wore masks as they were moving about. Probably because of the pollution, was my guess. I also found that in Japan a lot of people wear masks regularly. I found out from one local that it is customary to wear a mask if you yourself are sick, with a common cold for example. What a concept — keeping your germs to yourself!
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
All in all, starting a new year can come with new hope. Here are some ideas for your resolution list:
Spend your time wisely — on what and who is important. Pay attention to the little things. Remember when our moms ironed the sheets? Maybe they knew something that we didn’t. Be kind to yourself and to others. A crisis is no time to be hard on yourself, and showing kindness toward others vs judgement is very important when everyone is scared and trying to figure things out. No regrets. If you survived 2020, that’s enough. I love this quote by Jamie Varon:
It’s almost 2021. And you’re going to feel the pressure to evaluate 2020 by the way your body looks, the amount in your bank account, how much you got done or did not get done. And how about this idea? Don’t. Don’t evaluate it. Don’t look back and wish you’d done it differently. You survived this year. You tore your way through chaos and pain and anxiety and uncertainty and stress and collective fear and you learned how to comfort yourself in crisis and you learned the depth of your empathy and you learned how to give yourself a break…You’ve done enough. You are enough. Let 2021 crest over you gently — and ease your way into it. You deserve that exhale. | https://medium.com/mind-your-madness/dont-stop-thinking-about-tomorrow-cabc648101bc | ['Jennifer Hammersmark'] | 2021-01-03 01:49:47.401000+00:00 | ['Social Issues', 'Mental Health', 'New Year', 'Covid 19', 'Hope'] |
User Testing Report | Observations
Most users said they would use this feature. However, they had different perspectives on the problem it was trying to address. One user said they would use it because they could imagine the feature helping to interrupt the “stream of information” they’re consuming on the platform, and cause them to pause and think about how they are behaving and what they are doing.
Two users associated this feature with Facebook’s enforcement of their community standards, which they felt was inconsistent. One of them said they would still use it, the other said they would not. Both felt that they, as individuals, had a good sense of what the community standards contained and how to conduct themselves in a safe and respectful way on Facebook, but did not feel that Facebook was uniformly enforcing the standards. The user that said they would use the feature said that despite their concerns about Facebook enforcing the standards, having them visible and easily acceptable helped her think of Facebook as a whole community and helped her think of the guidelines with more objectivity.
The user who said they would not use this feature explained that they questioned the value of the community standards themselves, wondering what purpose they serve if they are not enforced. They felt that Facebook should be solving their own problems, and this feature was a waste of time for the non-Facebook team who was building it.
Two users suggested adding information or functionality about how to report things you see that violate the standards. One noted that one of the reasons they feel Facebook doesn’t do a good job of enforcing the standards is that the platform seems to prioritize flagrant violations, rather than “small ones” that only get a small number of reports. Only the flagrant violations (such as live-streaming a mass murder, as happened the day before most of these interviews) get attention.
Finally, two users suggested that this feature would be helpful for young people, such as students, who are just learning about the internet and how to interact with it.
Insights
I was surprised that two users immediately started talking about the enforcement of Facebook’s community standards (or lack thereof), and that this weakened the value of the Annotated Community Standards feature for them. Facebook has very publicly struggled to corral the behavior of its billions of users, many of whom have manipulated the platform to spread misinformation and incite violence, an outcome Facebook seemed utterly unprepared for. It seemed that from the perspective of at least two of the users I spoke to, Facebook should be responsible for what happens on their platform, and they are uninterested in third party products that would aim to make their experience on the platform better.
Feature 2: Values Wall
Observations
Only 29% of users said they would use this feature. The same amount said they might use it, and 43% said they would not use it. Several responded that it seemed “fine” or “nice” but that they didn’t fully understand what purpose it served.
Two users in particular said they liked it in theory, but felt that the concept of ‘values’ was much too nuanced to only represent it through single words. One explained that they felt like there are values that everyone knows they are supposed to have, and those would probably be the most popular. But, even if they state that they follow those values, they’re not always living up to them every minute of every day. For this user, this made the Values Wall feel disingenuous. They felt that seeing more context, such as the reasoning behind which values users choose to display, would make this feature more interesting. This user also pointed out that the values worked the same as any other information you might put on your profile — it’s self-reported by the user, so it’s telling the story the user wants the world to know. It’s curated as much as photos and posts. Additionally, this user had concerns about selection bias, as long as the creators of Keeper are choosing the values that users can display.
Insights
In general, the Values Wall was met with a lot of skepticism. In retrospect, I’m not sure this feature should have stood on its own in a testing environment. But my goal was to introduce it as a concept at this point in the interview, so that it made sense when the values appeared again in the Conversation View. I was also trying to gauge whether this feature came off as underdeveloped or inauthentic, which it did.
For the most part, the users I spoke to had a good sense of the ways in which Facebook, and the internet in general, could skew their perceptions of each other. They generally accepted as “part of the deal” of using Facebook that the picture people paint of themselves online isn’t always reflective of reality. In light of this, the Values Wall, while a slightly different kind of information, felt just as curated as everything else, and didn’t impact anyone’s perception of the user whose values they were looking at.
I do think the concern about selection bias is fair and brings up an important risk. I had not explored how my product would be able to create a broad, comprehensive list of values, but it has certainly been a challenge looming in the distance. I intentionally decided that users would choose values from a list, rather than being able to write their own, in order to prevent users from listing values that contained hate speech or objective violations of the community standards. How can a service, such as Keeper or Facebook itself, avoid bias while also maintaining and enforcing objective standards for speech and behavior?
Feature 3: Conversation View and Values
Observations
Like the Values Wall, only 29% of users said they would use this feature. The same amount said they might use it, and 43% said they would not use it. Several seemed intrigued by the design of the alternate conversation view, but uncertain if it would improve the comment reading experience. Two users felt that hovering over avatars to read comments in the Conversation View seemed more time consuming than how they currently read comments, by scrolling through them.
In viewing the abbreviated profile view of a commenter in the conversation view, which includes just their name, values from their Values Wall, and their comment on that particular post, the users had mixed reactions. One user was adamant that this feature provided no additional value and it just felt like a “novelty filter.” Their reasoning was that, in their opinion, the existing comment interface is fine, and they do not believe it was necessary to change anything about it.
This user, along with two other users, pointed out that if the visible comment did not align with the values the user had selected for display, then they might think less of that user, rather than more. This would render the values meaningless. If the comment was offensive to another user, the values might come across as disingenuous or boastful, and might encourage that offended user to respond with equally harmful language, as opposed to lessening the offense taken.
Two users suggested finding ways to make the values that are displayed have some kind of connection to the comment itself, either through machine learning or through self selection by the user at the time of commenting, e.g. answering the prompt, what values does this article/comment represent for you? One of these users thought it would be interesting if they could see what other comments other users have left, as a way of learning what kind of language this person typically uses and in what ways, and what other articles and topic areas they engage with.
Two users also pointed out that the values could provide another piece of information to “pick at”. In other words, another thing someone could use against you if they are attacking you. They might say, “Oh family is your value? Well I think you’re a terrible mother!”.
Insights
The users I spoke to surfaced two really big risks that I hadn’t considered. First, that in an instance of a user’s values not aligning with their comment, other users could have a negative perception of that person. This is the opposite of what I was hoping the design would do. It’s possible that developing the nuance of the values, i.e. expanding them beyond just individual words, could mitigate this risk — if the nuance was strong enough to conjure enough empathy and connection that users would pause before making a knee jerk reaction or judgment. But what could that design look like? And would it be possible for one design to have the same effect on every single user? Perhaps one of the challenges of managing so many users on one platform is exactly that — the variety of contexts, cultures and learned behaviors is just too vast for a one-size fits all approach.
The second risk was that the values could become just another reason to attack or criticize other users. This really highlighted for me that users don’t see values as anything different from the information they already put on display about themselves. Even though we are all likely to hold similar values as guiding principles in our lives, even across generations and cultures, they do not make up for the absence of the conversational queues we rely on in person to connect and understand each other, the things that do actually make us all human.
Feature 4: Comment Review
Observations
Most of the users I spoke to (67%) stated that they would be likely to use the Comment Review feature. 33% said they might use it, while no one said they would not use it. One person was not tested on this feature due to time constraints.
Two users wanted to see different instructional language in the review prompt window. One commented that it felt too easy to dismiss, because the only answer options to the question, “Are you sure you want to post this?” are “Yes” and “Edit.” “Yes” is first, so it could be easy to speed right through the interaction. The other suggested more direct language that clearly stated what the prompt wanted to prevent you from doing, e.g. “Are you sure you want to post this, because the language you’re using might be harmful to others.”
In general, users felt they personally had a good sense of how to communicate with others on Facebook in safe and respectful ways — so this feature would not fulfill an immediate need. Still, several felt this would be useful for others who typically do not have that sense, such as young people who are using Facebook for the first time.
Insights
I was surprised by the overall positive reception of this feature. Even if users weren’t certain they personally had a need for it, they clearly expressed that they could think of someone who would. One of these users also said that they know a second look at their writing never hurts, which to me implies they might be more willing to use this feature if it could serve as a subtle reminder to be thoughtful in their words.
One user also made an interesting observation about the audience for the product as a whole. They explained that after seeing the Comment Review feature, they understood better what Keeper was trying to do — in their words, encourage more productive discourse. If that was indeed the goal of the product, they felt that based on their understanding of the motivations and intentions of “trolls” and the like, the users who need this most are unlikely to acknowledge that need. The audience for this product is not trolls, but instead people who are already “desiring to participate in a thoughtful way.” This user encouraged Keeper to be transparent about that and to not hold back from making its intentions clear.
I’ve felt a lot of tension around this question. Anecdotally, I’ve found that users who are desiring of thoughtful discourse, generally don’t need help with it. I agree that the users who do need help with it (with the exception of students or other young people), would not have any interest in a product to fix it. So what would motivate them to use this feature? The user mentioned above suggested using it could serve as a way to pronounce themselves as someone committed to improving discourse on Facebook, someone committed to a cause. Perhaps there could be a way for users to show on their profile, with a badge or a profile photo frame, that they are using this product.
Implications + Next Steps
Implications
My user testing this week called two of four features into question, the Values Wall and Conversation View, as far as their perception of value. It also revealed to me that these features, especially the Values Wall, feel underdeveloped. Users expressed intrigue, but couldn’t immediately recognize what value the features could bring. I don’t know if that means that there’s nothing worth developing further, or if they were good ideas but weren’t developed enough at the time of testing.
I feel like I’m at a little bit of an impasse at this point. On the one hand, the users I spoke to had some good ideas for how to add more nuance to these to features and make them more compelling. On the other hand, while I would like to continue iterating on them, my timeline is a lot shorter than it used to be, and I’ve been struggling a lot lately with wondering whether I’m where I should be in the thesis process. I’m aiming for narrow and highly-developed as opposed to broad and underdeveloped.
The feedback to both the Annotated Community Standards and Comment Review features was solid enough that I feel comfortable saying my users found them to be valuable. One user noted that the Comment Review feature felt like it shifted the onus onto the user to take accountability for their actions, which is very much in line with my vision for this project. I think this feature could go along well with the Annotated Community Standards, which in its own way throws the accountability back on the user; this feature aims to make it so that there would be no denying that the community standards information was there and easy to find. Additionally, these two features don’t have to be used only on Facebook. They could be easily scaled for other social media platforms like Twitter or even Instagram. One of my concerns about all of this though is whether they feel enough like one packaged product, as opposed to two separate, independent products.
Drawing again from Nina Lysbakken’s work, the internet and especially social media came with so few guardrails for how to use them, unlike most other spaces we as humans travel through. Sometimes those spaces have guardrails established by governments and laws, sometimes by cultural traditions or etiquette, sometimes by the community of people who inhabit the space. In many ways, these guardrails have been successfully transferred to digital spaces. At the same time, the anonymity offered by the internet has allowed many of those rules to be broken, with few consequences. My product, with the two features described above, would aim to be the guardrails that Facebook hasn’t been able to provide. Since I like metaphors, it would almost be more like training wheels, in the sense that it’s not necessarily dictating what users should do, but it’s guiding them towards making as objectively safe and thoughtful decisions as possible.
Next Steps
My next steps will be in service of developing my Looks Like Feels Like prototype, per the syllabus: “This means everything important in your project should be fully visually designed. Some aspects of functionality can be fake/simulated, as a working version is not due until the final version.”
I will focus on developing and visually designing the two features, Annotated Community Standards and Comment Review. I will also work on developing the language used in both of these features, as a way to tie them together and make sure they are both in service of the same goal. I have not yet met with my thesis advisor this week, so this plan may change after Thursday morning. I will update this post with any additional information. | https://medium.com/trust-and-process/in-progress-user-testing-phase-1-report-b767a7201468 | ['Kate Styer'] | 2019-03-21 19:43:38.786000+00:00 | ['Svaixd', 'Thesis', 'UX', 'Facebook', 'Interaction Design'] |
How To Be Happy When It’s All Going To Hell | I was so wet you could wring my underwear out like a super absorbent sponge. About 30 minutes earlier I was asking Alexa for a weather update. “Light Rain” she said. I’d been running plenty of times in light rain, it had never bothered me before and it wasn’t about to bother me then.
It was 5.45 on an ordinary, dark, autumn morning when I headed outside. After a few warmup stretches I set off. I’d run about 2 miles away from home when it happened, the heavens opened and down poured a torrent of rain.
I was soaked through to the skin in seconds, I kept having to spit out the rain that was streaming down my face and filling my mouth. Within a minute or two the streets which previously looked only slightly damp now resembled fast moving rivers, washing away any dirt and debris that only moments before was laying motionless on the concrete roads.
The sidewalks we’re filled with giant puddles too large for me to dodge, forcing me to run through them with my feet squelching in the pools of water that had appeared in the soles of my running shoes.
If there’s one thing in this world that I can’t stand its wet feet. In that moment I knew I had a choice. I could spend the next 20 minutes battling through the rain to get home in complete misery or I could find a way to make it fun, so I started singing;
I’m singin’ in the rain
Just singin’ in the rain
What a glorious feeling
I’m happy again
I’m laughin’ at clouds
So dark up above
The sun’s in my heart
And I’m ready for love
I didn’t know the rest of the lyrics, so I just kept singing the same ones over and over again. As I approached an elderly gentleman huddled away in a doorway trying to keep out of the rain whilst waiting for a bus I noticed a smile on his face as he watched me singing and running. I smiled back, said good morning and carried on.
After 20 minutes of running in extremely heavy rain I finally made it home and surprisingly, despite my wet feet and wet everything else I felt like I’d had more fun on that run than I had in a long time, that got me thinking, what could be better? I’d had a good sing and made a few people smile, how cool was that!
I’m a naturally curious person and I wanted to figure out why this happened. It seemed odd to me that I had enjoyed running so much under such bad circumstances. The thing that intrigued me the most was if I could do it once was it repeatable.
What was it that made this experience different and how could I apply it to other bad experiences in the future? After a while I realised that I do this a lot with food.
I hate tomatoes but when I use tomatoes as an ingredient such as a base for a sauce, I love them. I’m not that overjoyed with cauliflower on its own, but I love cauliflower cheese with a sprinkling of paprika.
Another thing I hate is cleaning so I put an audiobook on whilst I’m cleaning, and I can quite happily clean the house for an hour or two. By adding things to an experience, you change the way you perceive the experience.
The next time you find yourself in a situation where you’re doing something you don’t want to, try the approach used here. Ask yourself “what can I add or take away from this experience that will change it enough so that I enjoy it”.
Life doesn’t have to be full of poor experiences if you don’t want it to be. I see two types of happiness, ‘present’ happiness and ‘true’ happiness. Present happiness is a fleeting moment in time that you get though experiences and true happiness is a general feeling about your life.
Generally, people with lots of true happiness are healthier, have better relationships, they’re wealthier, more generous and better able to cope with trauma and stress. If you’d like to be truly happy you need lots of present happiness experiences in your life.
I’ve been doing these things for a few years and the difference it’s made to my life is amazing. I wake up in a much happier mood than I used to and this mood stays with me throughout the day.
I’m healthier, these ‘ways of life’ as I call them helped me start and sustain my running routine, but best of all they’ve helped me become a better person to be around at home which makes me a better husband and father, this is massive to me because I want to be the best version of myself for my family.
After years of struggle, I’ve uncovered many ways to have more of these experiences and I’d like to share 3 of them with you now.
Originally published on http://www.livezestfully.com/blog/happiness/how-to-be-happy-when-its-all-going-to-hell/ | https://medium.com/@livezestfullynow/how-to-be-happy-when-its-all-going-to-hell-1d3721e0976d | ['Darren Hodgson'] | 2019-10-19 22:54:34.482000+00:00 | ['Happiness In Life', 'Happiness', 'Happy', 'Positivity', 'Positive Thinking'] |
Not Quite Adults | A scene from the Star Trek episode “Miri”, in which the Enterprise encounters a planet of children
This is quite dreadful — he’s become obsessed.
There you go, there you go — narrow it down to obsession!
(Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love, XLIII)
Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters opens with an “author’s note” briskly affirming her determination to ignore the stated preferences with respect to gendered pronouns of the adolescents whose lives she will be discussing: “I take it for granted that teenagers are not quite adults. For the sake of clarity and honesty, I refer to biologically female teens caught up in this transgender craze as ‘she’ and ‘her.’” The subsequent paragraph, in which she allows that “Transgender adults are a different matter”, is presumably meant to be mollifying, but only solidifies the stance of unassailable condescension. What might be thought to be a minimal concession to the safety and privacy of her case studies is instead presented as a courtesy to their guardians: “I have changed the names and certain minor details of transgender-identifying adolescents…to ensure that none is able to recognize herself and accuse her battle-worn parents of treachery”. This is what you might call starting as you mean to go on.
The judgement given in Bell v. Tavistock on December 1st, 2020 similarly considers that certain aspects of the non-adult status of adolescents are to be taken for granted: “That adolescents find it difficult to contemplate or comprehend what their life will be like as adults and that they do not always consider the longer-term consequences of their actions is perhaps a statement of the obvious.” Perhaps it is, but the judicial smirk of collusion with the adults in the room is at the expense of the trans teenagers not in the room, whose ability to give informed consent to receiving puberty blocking medication was the crux of the hearing.
Instead, evidence was heard from “Professor Scott (Director of University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience)”, who voiced “significant doubts about the ability of young people under the age of 18 years old to adequately weigh and appreciate the significant consequences that will result from the decision to accept hormonal treatment for gender dysphoria”. The scientific basis for these doubts was “the neurological development of adolescents’ brains that leads to teenagers making different, more risky decisions than adults…this is backed up by behavioural studies showing that when decision making is ‘hot’ (i.e. more emotional), under 18 year olds make less rational decisions than when the responses are made in a colder, less emotional context.” No doubt teenagers experiencing gender dysphoria are often quite emotional about it, but it is difficult to see how studies pertaining to “heat of the moment” decision-making can shed much light on the concerted, persistent avowal, across contexts both emotional and tranquil, of a gender identity at odds with that assigned at birth. A young person who has managed to arrive at the point of being offered hormonal treatment for gender dysphoria will already have shown a degree of perseverance normally associated with Duke of Edinburgh awards.
Indeed, when it comes to that perseverance, undaunted by two-year waiting lists and byzantine clinical gatekeeping, a different theory is required than one premised on the fickleness and short-term focus of teenage brains. For Shrier, it is evident that trans teenagers have fallen victim to a “craze”, a type of mass phenomenon which combines seduction with contagion. A rollerskating craze; a boy-band craze. But crazes have explosive popular appeal, and roll over fast from one summer to the next. The population Shrier is concerned with is orders of magnitude smaller, and considerably more tenacious. What can account for the composition of this group?
Shrier puts forward an explanation involving two mutually reinforcing factors. The first is the power of suggestion wielded by educators and medical authorities, and the second is the suggestibility of a particular subset of teenagers, those whose developmental path towards adulthood is already difficult and imperilled. She offers the following illuminating thought-experiment:
Imagine if anti-vaxxer groups — also representing a position miles outside the scientific mainstream — were brought in to speak to students, asked to provide materials for health class, allowed to present their own versions of science and offered a lectern from which to argue for the connection between autism and vaccination. It does not seem far-fetched to imagine that more students who had been vaccinated would begin to notice themselves fixating, struggling with empathy, misreading social cues, engaging in repetitive movement, tending to self-harm, and diagnose mild cases of autism in each other. It would not be at all surprising if such students began to adopt anti-vaxxer “science” and became more hostile to the perceived conspiracy by mainstream medicine to deny it.
The “anti-vaxxer” aspect here is somewhat of a red herring, introduced (one suspects) for the sake of cementing an association between trans advocacy and dangerous pseudoscience (“miles outside the scientific mainstream”). What is more significant here is the picture Shrier paints of a feedback loop forming between the promotion of a theory that suggested to young people that they might be autistic, that suggestion being taken up in the form of increasing self- and peer-diagnosis, and these diagnostic identifications then forming the basis for increased credibility being given to the underlying theory.
This strongly resembles the view taken by proponents of the Thatcher government’s notorious Section 28 legislation, which prohibited the promotion or normalisation of homosexuality in schools: their fear was that if it was presented as normal and acceptable to be gay, then more young people would come to see themselves as gay, and the resulting proliferation of gayness would in turn lend weight to the argument that it was normal and acceptable to be so, and increase hostility to the default homophobia of mainstream culture. The supposed susceptibility of the young, and the power of suggestion wielded by those presented as educators, were seen as a weak point in the edifice of heteronormativity, such that the same people who bleated about political correctness gone mad whenever homophobia was confronted and repudiated in public became enthusiastic advocates of regulating what was permissible to be said, and by whom, in an educational setting.
What is especially remarkable here is that Shrier’s example of a diagnosis amenable to being spread by “promotion” is, specifically, autism. (With lexicographical inevitability, “autism” appears next to “autogynephilia” in the book’s index). One of Shrier’s key terms in her discussion of the supposed state of mind of trans teenagers is “fixation”: they have become fixated on gender identity, to a degree that renders them impervious to rational entreaties. In her discussion of the case of “Maddie” and their (I have resorted to a neutral pronoun as the least worst option given the story as it is told) mother “Katherine”, Shrier paints a picture of a teenager who has come to a sudden and irrevocable decision about themself:
What Maddie had had was a school assembly. And like the transgender fifteen-year-old who had regaled the student body with her gender journey, Maddie informed her mother, she too had always “felt different”. She, too, didn’t quite fit in with the other girls. For all her verbal precocity and academic success, Maddie was socially awkward and had a tendency towards the fairly rigid — what her mother called being “black-and-white in her thinking”. Katherine suspected that her daughter might be on the autism spectrum. In fact, Maddie was later diagnosed with “high-functioning” autism.
The word “quite” is doing some interesting work in the phrase “didn’t quite fit in”, as it was in the phrase “not quite adults”: it implies simultaneous proximity to, and temporary distance from, an eventually-attainable norm. Teenagers will eventually become adults, and they will eventually learn to fit in. But autistic teenagers, like queer teenagers, do not converge on these goals so reliably; Maddie’s “precocity” is as much a sign of untimely, staggered developmental progress as their social awkwardness and “tendency towards the fairly rigid”. Rigidity and fixation are the enemies of progress, when the latter is pictured as a smooth process of normalisation: they are signs of goals being held onto which ought to be released, of caring too much about the wrong things. Maddie “was beginning to spend a lot of time on social media”; Katherine “did not think much of it at the time. She did notice that her daughter seemed to be fixating on this new identity and becoming increasingly enraged that her mother had not immediately embraced Maddie’s self-diagnosis”. (Unreasonable, untimely “rage” is another autistic trait, as seen from a neurotypical perspective: explosions of frustration that seem to come from nowhere, if you in fact have no clue whatsoever about where they do come from).
This “rigidity” is itself seemingly contagious, spreading from the autistic teenager to the professionals who affirm their gender identity: Katherine “could not shake a nagging sense that the therapist’s narrow and exclusive focus on her daughter’s gender as the source of Maddie’s problems was missing the broader picture of a troubled inner life. Her daughter’s autism — the social awkwardness and habits of rigid thinking — went completely unaddressed” (my italics). She sees Maddie in much the same way as having “been introduced to an explanation and latched on to it” (ditto). It is not entirely clear at this juncture who is meant to be seducing whom: is the story that trans teenagers are uncommonly persuasive in guiding physicians towards diagnoses (they may have to be), or that they are being mesmerised by those same physicians into adopting a view of themselves that would never otherwise have occurred to them?
In a footnote, Shrier makes explicit the connection she has been implicitly drawing between autistic “fixatedness” and the tenacious, indissoluble insistence of transgender identification:
Many of the parents I spoke to told me their daughters had some version of “high-functioning autism” — meaning their daughters were highly intelligent, characterised by fixation and rigid thought, had terrible trouble deciphering social cues, struggled to recognise interpersonal physical boundaries, or had difficulty empathising with others. In the course of researching this book, I learned two disturbing facts about autism and its treatment. Like gender dysphoria, the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder has skyrocketed in the last decade. And many clinicians specializing in autism are actively encouraging gender exploration in their autism patients [citation needed]. The possibility that some clinicians working with adolescents who fixate might be supplying these kids with a fixation merits a book of its own.
Here, autism and autistic fixation are filling in a blank in the narrative of the transgender “craze”, accounting for its fixedness in the psychic lives of those it seduces or contaminates in lieu of any explanation grounded in the urgent and intractable desire to live differently, a desire Shrier can neither countenance as authentic nor imagine in any detail whatsoever. But Shrier also demonstrates a general ambivalence towards “diagnosis” as a practice which organises personality traits and potentialities into identities:
Nearly all of the mothers I spoke to offered me diagnoses of their daughters provided by therapists, the internet, or a book. They suspected their daughters might be a touch autistic, or have auditory processing issues, or agoraphobia. They may all be right, but I couldn’t help wondering whether the process of diagnosis wasn’t itself altering the outcome, helping to convince suggestible daughters that there really was something wrong with them. By the time they reached adolescence, self-focus and self-diagnosis had become an ingrained habit, a way to handle feelings that confused them. With the rest of the culture, they had been ready to participate in a therapy language game, in which everyone has some mental illness and the only question is what code to offer insurance.
This ambivalence leaves Shrier unable to decide between a story about autism in which it is part of a universal tendency towards overdiagnosis of what were previously considered “outré” disorders (“the therapy language game”), and a story in which it is a material cause in the overdiagnosis of gender dysphoria, as “high-functioning” (read: middle-class) girls with autistic traits persuade their therapists to persuade them that the key to their “troubled inner life” lies in their gender identity. Her rhetoric of suggestibility, fixation, unreasonable perseveration and so on draws simultaneously on stereotypes about the reasoning abilities and emotional style of teenagers, and stereotypes about autistic people specifically. The combined (and intended) effect is one of delegitimisation, the withholding of attribution of competence.
This ambivalence enables Shrier to have her cake and eat it, instrumentalising autism where necessary as a collection of cognitive and social deficits which render autistic young people helpless in the face of seductive explanations for their sense of being generally out of sorts, while brushing off self-diagnosis of neurodivergence or queer identity as expressions of a cultural “habit” which itself causes people to take their passing moods and tempers more seriously than they deserve: “were it not for this compulsion to categorize and diagnose, minor bouts of anxiety, depression, obsession, romantic impulse, sexual inclination, and all manner of good and bad feelings might be left to grow, develop, change course, or die off”. (Even here, while derogating the “therapy language game”, Shrier cannot resist employing its terms of art, speaking of a “compulsion” to categorize, etc). Shrier is also skeptical about the professed sexual orientations of teenagers (her phrase “sexual inclination” is tactically minimising): don’t be silly dear, you’re not “bisexual”, you just have an adolescent crush on your best friend — it’s a phase, take it from me.
Shrier may have a point about the embedding of the language of trauma, therapy and diagnosis in the self-understanding of both adults and adolescents, but her own pathologisation of a “contagious” self-diagnosis rests entirely on a highly motivated decision to attribute trans teenagers’ self-reports to cognitive and developmental deficits which she herself assumes an unquestioned authority to diagnose in absentia (no trans teenagers are interviewed at length in the book, which deals predominantly with the perspectives of anguished parents) and call upon in explanation. Indeed, the assertion and performative reinstatement of this authority, concentrated in the figure of the embattled, browbeaten parent, is the entire point of her book, from its opening sentences onwards.
The judges’ ruling in Bell v. Tavistock expresses surprise at the “lack of data analysis — and the apparent lack of investigation” around the percentage of GIDS patients who also have autistic spectrum condition diagnoses, but does not explain why this should be thought meaningful or worthy of attention. The second complainant in the case, “Mrs A”, is described as “the mother of a 15 year old girl who has ASD”, but again it is not said why this is relevant. Is the background assumption that autism and transgender identification are materially connected (which they conceivably might be: autistic people often find ourselves to be dissonantly embodied one way or another, and the available statistics do suggest a correlation, if not a causal link), or that autism is a form of cognitive impairment which may lead teenagers into mistaken transgender identification? By not spelling it out, they leave the matter open to expedient interpretation. The ruling stands at a nexus of issues around young people’s liberation and bodily autonomy, disability politics, and trans healthcare and human rights; the passing mention of autism is not accidental, but serves as a way of importing assumptions about autistic selfhood and accountability which are harmful and unwarranted, and which continue to be instrumentalised in the effort to delegitimise trans identity.
People of all ages sometimes become attached to ideas about themselves that are harmful and distorted, or find that their long-standing investment in such ideas, unquestioned since childhood, becomes suddenly problematic as circumstances change. Those whose self-image is in crisis will naturally call for validation and reassurance, but may equally need help in bringing to light and revising the untenable premises behind the selfhoods they want to project and inhabit. The work of therapy involves helping people to hold themselves together through times of necessary change. This applies as much to the parents of trans and autistic teenagers as it does to those teenagers themselves. Shrier offers certainty, a position of embattled moral correctness, armed with a stigmatising and pathologising vocabulary that can be used to reassert, unchallengeably, the authority of the (cisgender, neurotypical, etc) parental worldview. In doing so, she meets a demand but not the underlying need. Her vividly paranoiac portrayal of a world of medical professionals heedlessly confirming their patients in their assertions of self-identity describes precisely the function performed by associations of “autism warrior parents” and “Mumsnet TERFs”, who make a battleground of their children’s complex lives in order to preserve a fearful, simplistic and inadequate vision of their own identity as parents and adults. Her book is almost as dangerous to the parents who will read it as it is to their children. | https://medium.com/@poetix/not-quite-adults-21154d866b92 | ['Dominic Fox'] | 2020-12-04 11:58:39.631000+00:00 | ['Autism', 'Abigail Shrier', 'Transgender'] |
It is time for Canada to take COVID-19 border controls seriously | In March, as SARS-CoV-2 spread globally, the federal government invoked the Quarantine Act to pass a series of orders addressing international travel into Canada. The land border with the United States was effectively closed to all but “essential workers” and restrictions on who can enter the country were implemented, along with exceptions to these rules.
With the identification of the novel UK mutation, much public attention has been focused on our borders. Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario, spent two days lambasting the federal government for the volume of international passengers arriving at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, and what he believes are minimal checks for these passengers. Seemingly in response, on December 22, Patty Hajdu, federal Minister of Health, and Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, defended the Liberal government’s response, stating that that the government would be using the 72-hour window of restricted UK arrivals to “examine the evidence” around its border policies, while claiming that less than 2% of all cases in Canada are travel related and Canada’s border controls are among the most stringent in the world.
In Ontario, the second wave of COVID-19 has produced case numbers so high that contact tracing has effectively collapsed in some areas, with only high-risk, largely congregate outbreak situations receiving such attention. This has resulted in many of Ontario’s second-wave cases having no known confirmed source: 65% for Toronto Public Health and 49% for the combination of Toronto, Peel and York.
It is thus impossible for the federal government to make accurate claims as to the percentage of cases attributable to international travel. Moreover, in response to a Freedom of Information request I submitted, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has acknowledged not having any records on to the number of passengers who have tested positive; the breakdown between citizens and permanent residents on one hand and those falling into the exapanded categories of allowed traveller on the other; or the number of individual passengers contacted in qurantine checks. Bill Blair claimed that one million checks have been made thus far. However, over one million travellers returned before the end of March; what of those who have arrived in the nearly nine months since? We have not been able to make even a single check -in with each quarantined passenger, let alone multiple checks over the two-week period.
Canadian leaders have developed the unfortunate habit of benchmarking our performance against those doing poorly, such as the United States, rather than those who have found success. It is not clear to what countries Ministers Hajdu and Blair compared Canada’s border controls as they were not identified, but it is abundantly clear that ours are seriously lacking when compared to those of countries that have successfully contained this virus to a manageable number of cases, defined here as that which allows robust contact tracing and isolation. This group of nations famously includes Australia and New Zealand, but also Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore as well as Hong Kong and, yes, China. In fact, while lockdown stringency has different within and among these jurisdictions, a vigilant approach to the identification and isolation of imported cases has been common to all.
Korean Air summarizes these international border control regimens. They have utilized three general strategies: tight restrictions on who can enter the country, managed quarantine and mandatory testing. The first of these is obvious, and has generally restricted arrivals to citizens and permanent residents, occasionally truly immediate family. The third is similarly obvious, encompassing some combination of proof of negative test before arrival (including IgM antigen tests in the case of China), plus mandatory testing upon arrival and prior to the exit from quarantine.
Managed quarantine refers to the quarantine of travellers at designated facilities, usually hotels, for the duration of the quarantine period. This essentially eliminates the risk of imported cases spreading to household contacts and the broader community; the CDC has demonstrated the secondary infection rate among household contacts to be as high as 53%, far higher than originally thought in the spring. It further allows for the identification of onset of symptoms in travellers after arrival and lengthening of quarantine as appropriate. Designated facilities tend to be located at the point of arrival. In New Zealand, this required managed quarantine in Auckland before going anywhere else in the country. Travellers themselves are usually required to pay for associated hotel quarantine costs. The integrity of managed quarantine was so prioritized in Australia that during Melbourne’s second wave all international flights were diverted out of Victoria and the number of arrivals sharply cut to 4000 per week to maintain the integrity of the system.
In contrast to Australia, Canada’s federal government made it easier for more people to arrive from abroad during our second wave. On October 2 the list of allowed travellers was expanded to now include the extended family of those in “committed dating relationship” with a citizen or permanent resident, for example. Doug Ford has noted 64,000 weekly international arrivals at Pearson alone, where travellers can hop on connecting flights and subsequent public transportation to reach the eventual quarantine destination, which could be an apartment shared by others whose mobility isn’t restricted during the quarantine period. There is no direct supervision of these travellers for subsequent onset of symptoms, instead relying on an honour system of electronic reporting. There is no requirement for negative testing prior exiting quarantine, thus only those travellers who develop symptoms (usually required for testing) and choose to get tested will be identified. This is incongruent with our knowledge of asymptomatic transmission and, for instance, the absence of paid sick leave acting as a disincentive for testing in the case of quarantine households shared with essential workers who would have to miss work. Comparing our measures to the above, it is difficult to take Patty Hajdu and Bill Blair seriously. | https://medium.com/@winston-bharat/it-is-time-for-canada-to-take-covid-19-border-control-seriously-4badcb0fbe36 | ['Winston Bharat'] | 2020-12-24 18:31:53.891000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Sars Cov2', 'Covid 19', 'Travel', 'Canada'] |
Smart Boards Practice Before IPO | by Coco Brown
Athena Alliance Founder & CEO
IPOs around the world skyrocketed in 2017 — there were 1,624 and more than $188 billion raised. Not only was it a banner year for IPOs (the biggest since 2007), it was a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of deals since 2016.
Achieving IPO marks an incredible achievement for any organization. The path to get there tends to disrupt company operations as executives and boards of directors scrutinize the business from numerous angles. While many areas of a business experience transformation pre-IPO, what about the board of directors? IPO brings about many changes, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reporting, a public view of the executive team, and additional financial and accounting responsibilities. IPO also means a sea of modern responsibilities and challenges — ones that boards of decades past did not deal with, such as the need for modern social media strategies, navigating with a demanding workforce, and massive cybersecurity challenges
To tackle these new challenges, smart boards must prepare — and practice — early. Getting to IPO typically takes many months, but private companies that know IPO is in their future can and should begin preparing as early as a few years in advance. Another way of thinking about this is guiding your company to a higher standard of operations. It makes a lot of sense to operate and act as an IPO-ready organization, even if you aren’t ready to make the move just yet.
Today’s public companies face modern challenges
Achieving IPO may not be a modern concept, but the world in which a newly public company operates is hardly anything like it was just a decade or two ago. It moves faster, it’s tech-powered and global. As companies prepare for IPO, they need to not only hit the regulatory requirements and button up their financial affairs, but their boards must also be prepared for an onslaught of contemporary issues. Here is an outline of the top issues facing boards as they consider an IPO: | https://medium.com/@athenaalliance/smart-boards-practice-before-ipo-8c8fb9162414 | ['Athena Alliance'] | 2019-11-15 15:27:55.812000+00:00 | ['Board Of Directors', 'Business', 'Corporate Governance', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup'] |
Have you heard the sad tale of Little Miss Lachrymose | Have you heard the sad tale of Little Miss Lachrymose
Read with caution as it may make you feel sad.
Little Miss Lachrymose (created and illustrated by Sarah Healy)
‘’Why can’t they hear me?’’
Wailed Little Lachrymose, as she screamed into face or eardrum of each and every passer-by.
The greyness of the sky did little to ease her pain.
She felt dizzy but did not know why.
‘’Why won’t anyone help me?’’
she thought, feeling utterly helpless.
‘’Arrrrgggghhhhh!’’
she shrieked with a shrillness that sent fierce ripples off the harbor and through the Atlantic that was an eerie black in color. A blackness reflected in the color of her own eyes.
She sank down heavily on the rotten wood beneath her at the edge of the harbor. Feet dangling over the dark unwelcoming cold water.
The harbor was always neglected during winter time here in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Seldom few ventured here at this time of the year.
She felt an odd kinship towards the rotting wood beneath her, at least it too knew the result of negligence.
She started to sob.
Embarrassed at first as she was not a public crier, but soon realized she felt detached from herself and society.
She felt so alone in the world.
‘’Why will no one help me?’’
she thought, filled with pity.
She could feel the wetness of the harbor seep up into her bones. She started to shiver and feel very cold. This cold feeling felt familiar, it was something she had felt before.
She racked her brain but came up empty. The memory had retreated somewhere in the dark corner and could not be readily found.
Her sobs turned into uncontrollable wailing.
She could not make sense of anything.
She knew she had lost something. Something very important but could not remember what it was.
She could not understand why no one would help her. She knew that perhaps she did not look her best, with tear-stained cheeks, and remnants of black mascara tracing the directional flow of the tears, but surely this was more of a reason to help her rather than shun her.
Her sadness began to veer left towards anger.
How dare they ignore me, she thought. How dare they ignore someone obviously in pain.
Suddenly she noticed a man crouch down by the harbor. There was something familiar in the way he moved.
She thought maybe she knew this man.
She rushed towards him and reached him quite quickly, the speed she now moved at frightened her.
She was oddly drawn to this man who was crouching over something she could not see.
He looked like a broken man, so sad. A sadness she recognized in herself.
She was just about to touch his shoulder when she froze.
The sign was a memorial. For her. She had lost control of her vehicle and plunged into the sea. Her little girl had been in the black seat.
Everything became dark as she sank in unconsciousness. | https://medium.com/creative-humans/have-you-heard-the-sad-tale-of-little-miss-lachrymose-1e467cca859a | ['Sarah Healy'] | 2019-11-16 01:53:27.392000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Creativity', 'Creative Writing', 'Short Story', 'Writing'] |
Metal Pens: Good for the Goose and Good for the Gander | Workers rip feathers out of live geese in an 1872 painting. The invention of metal pens displaced demand for quill pens.
By Paul Shapiro
If you were to argue a case before the Supreme Court today, you’d notice something a bit unusual. At your desk, the highest court in the land would have laid out before you pens should you need to write something during the proceedings. What’s unusual about these writing utensils isn’t just, however, that they’re a throwback to a pre-digital era. What’s unusual is that these pens are a throwback to a time when “pen” was largely synonymous with a bird’s feather.
Since its inception in the 18th century until today, the Supreme Court has always given quill pens to the attorneys arguing before it.
For millennia, in fact, quill pens were the norm in much of the world. Parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2nd century BCE) were written with quill pens. Both the Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence were written with quills. Thomas Jefferson was such a prolific writer he even bred geese at Monticello for the purpose of having a steady stream of quills with which he could write.
Quill pens weren’t just any feather, though. The only feathers suitable for writing are the birds’ stiff flight feathers, and each bird produces only about a dozen of such feathers per year, with the strongest feathers coming from living birds. As a result, once every 12 months, geese were forced upside down and had their flight feathers torn from their bodies. While this torment was an annual event, the geese had other feathers ripped from their bodies 3–5 times per year for down, with the agonizing experiences ending only after about a decade when they were finally slaughtered for food.
Because each bird produces so few flight feathers, and most people can only use the feathers from the left wing — right-handed people use feathers from the left wing, while the 10% of humans who are southpaws require right wing feathers — vast numbers of geese were needed to satiate humanity’s writing demands, especially as literacy began to climb. While there don’t appear to be good records on how many geese were used for all these pens, apparently “at one point St. Petersburg in Russia was sending 27 million quills a year to the UK.”
Metal Pens: The Golden (or at Least Steel) Goose
The animal welfare concerns associated with live-plucking of birds are obvious. Yes, there were plant-based reed pens available too, but they were considered far inferior by most, leading to the quill’s popularity — until a better alternative arose.
British entrepreneurs pioneered the use of metal pens as early as the 1820s, creating writing utensils that were stronger than quills, retained sharp edges much longer (quills needed sharpening weekly), and didn’t require constant dipping in an inkwell, allowing for faster writing with fewer interruptions of the writer’s thoughts.
In America, the first metal pen factory wasn’t established until 1870 in New Jersey, but it ushered in a revolution that quickly sent the quill pen the way of the carrier pigeon.
According to one historian:
“When the steel pen entered education, a revolution in school practice [occurred]. Writing with the quill had been a slow, unhurried art….[T]he writer had to stop frequently in order to reshape and sharpen the quill….The steel pen changed that. The steel pen made it possible to write continuously over long periods.”
Lessons for Today: Goosebumps for Animal Advocates
It’s seductive to think that humans, when we learn about an abusive industry that we support, will recoil from our ways and change our behavior. Sadly, our species rarely works that way.
As Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” And that’s just about changing our minds, not even our actions, let alone actions that nearly everyone else is taking too.
Nearly every category of animal exploitation that’s been essentially ended in any particular society has seen its demise not because people made altruistic sacrifices for the purpose of ending cruelty.
It’s common knowledge that whales were largely freed from harpoons not because of sustainability concerns, but because a better alternative — kerosene — was invented. Horses were liberated not by humane sentiment, but by cars. We don’t exploit carrier pigeons any more not because people cared about pigeons, but because telecommunications rendered their use obsolete.
Usually if an exploitative industry has largely ended, it’s been displaced by a clearly superior animal-free alternative. The only exceptions I can think of to this are with veal and foie gras, which many people do avoid eating for animal welfare reasons, though very few people have ever eaten either, given how expensive they are. (These industries still exist, of course, but are and always have been relatively tiny.)
The point isn’t to suggest that animal advocates shouldn’t make ethical arguments and expose how poorly animals are often treated. Rather, the point is that moral awareness is virtually never sufficient to end an abusive industry. Humans need clearly superior alternatives to warrant switching away from animal use. Not the equivalent of reed pens, but something so much better, like metal pens, that using animals for that purpose would seem as abnormal as lighting a room with whale oil, riding a stagecoach to work, or sending our messages via pigeon.
In other words, yes, animals need humane sentiment, but they also desperately need inventors and entrepreneurs who can pioneer new products that will simply render their use as obsolete as a quill pen on a Supreme Court desk.
Paul Shapiro is the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, the CEO of The Better Meat Co., a four-time TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast. | https://medium.com/@paulshapiro/metal-pens-good-for-the-goose-and-good-for-the-gander-6b563eaa7606 | ['Paul Shapiro'] | 2020-12-03 16:25:56.868000+00:00 | ['Animal Rights', 'Animal Welfare', 'History', 'History Of Technology', 'Social Change'] |
“HOW TO TURN MICRO CONTENT INTO PROFIT” | “HOW TO TURN MICRO CONTENT INTO PROFIT”
Do you know the first thing about micro content?
Micro content stems from the term, “micro learning.” While learning is essential in life, I’m here to show you how to turn micro content into profit. First, it starts with your elevator pitch. My goal is to help small business owners or startups turn micro content into profitable business models. I find it odd that most business owners want to be successful but can’t effectively pitch their business or brand.
The first thing you need to know is “time is money and money is time.” The more time you spend speaking without a clear message, the more money you will lose. Attention is money! I gain revenue by obtaining attention of young professionals in my community. Trust me, if you want to secure the bag, secure a plan! Now, if you know what to do with your words and can grab the attention of your digital community, stop reading this blog. However, if you are stumbling over your words at the beginning of every conversation, keep reading this blog.
Your goal is to create a phenomenal elevator pitch using five (5) keywords. Why 5 keywords? Those keywords will represent your mission, vision, intent, purpose, and perspective. Now, keywords allow you to own in on your voice while build a presence online. In addition, keywords online lead to search engine optimization (SEO). As you build your brand skyscraper, focus on the way you pitch your brand or business. Let your keywords lead to an elevator pitch that gets you into different rooms. For example, “Clubhouse” is a room that you can get into very easy. If you don’t prepare a plan, you will get lost in the sauce. Most entrepreneurs are obtaining attention when they get in rooms but they fail to convert that attention. In order to convert attention, you need a plan that structures your words strategically so they can convert into profit.
If you fail to obtain and retain attention, the value of your information will lose impact. You need impact because it leads to support. Most of you undervalue the importance of support. Support leads to a re-share, comment, or engagement on your social media platforms. Don’t let support slip out of your hands. That is a form of attention.
Value your time to engage or no one else will see the value in your brand. Build your community and they will take you seriously. Start to choose your words wisely then you will create opportunities to engage because this will lead to generating profit.
As you develop this important perspective about your words, your time will begin to expand. Now, you’re creating streams of revenue. As you automate time, engagement, and relationships then you cultivate trust, respect, and loyalty. These are attributes that money can’t buy. However, if you embrace these attributes, you’ll attract money. You have to begin to create passive streams of revenue. Let your words create passive streams of revenue. Start with the words you choose today.
How do you turn your words into attention? Attention is a commodity that is taken for granted. The way to start to generate profit starts with the time you invest into your process. After you establish a process, you curate the right words. Less words for more impact is the ultimate goal. It’s alright to express your passion but don’t take the power away from the people that matter the most, your clients and customers!
Photo by Clayton Robbins on Unsplash
Your words are an extension of you. Take the right steps to be effective! Once you start to value your words more, your community will see the impact you are providing on a consistent basis. That attention you receive from consistency will be acknowledged by your community. Consistency will turn into profit once you create a process you trust. I trust micro content because I know I can repurpose it using less words for more impact on multiple platforms. Everyone doesn’t have the talent to craft words that I do at any given time. Sure, it will take time but I’m 4 months into the process I created with my brand coach, Julia CEO. I refuse to stop now! Profit is so close that I can taste it as a copywriter. While our actions lead to results, our words get us off to a strong start. When you want to start generating revenue with you words, think of the saying, “sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me!”
If you can tap into those words that make your ideal client feel, see, touch, and think about what you’re saying then you are halfway home. The journey you take with your words will lead your community down a unique path. When you choose the best path to profit for your ideal client or customer, your brand narrative and voice will give your community the experience of a lifetime. Let your passion drive you but let your purpose serve others! | https://medium.com/@itzprogressj/how-to-turn-micro-content-into-profit-c317249eda74 | ['Micro Content Strategist'] | 2020-12-15 21:42:09.799000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Branding', 'Writer', 'Blogging', 'Content Strategy'] |
How to Be a Savvy ATT&CK Consumer | Over the past several years, it’s been exciting for us to see how MITRE ATT&CK has helped people across the community move toward a threat-informed defense. However, as ATT&CK has increased in popularity there’s a risk we all need to watch out for: people assuming ATT&CK is some kind of silver bullet that will solve all their problems. It isn’t magic and it does take work, but it can be a compelling way to improve your defenses with the right understanding of what it is. To that end, we want to share our thoughts on how you can be a savvy ATT&CK consumer as you decide how different approaches, vendors, products, and services can help you improve defenses. If someone says they’re using ATT&CK, what does that mean? We’ll focus on equipping you with questions to ask anyone who uses ATT&CK. If you’re an “end user” Security Operations Center, think about how you answer these questions for yourselves. If you’re considering security products, these are great questions to ask vendors. If you’re a vendor, we suggest preparing answers to these questions so your customers understand your value-added.
Why are they using ATT&CK?
There are a lot of great reasons to use ATT&CK. We’ve outlined four key use cases we’ve seen: detection and analytics, threat intelligence, assessment and engineering, and adversary emulation. To be sure it makes sense to use ATT&CK in the product or service you’re looking at, we recommend asking what problem they are trying to solve by using ATT&CK. Are they trying to ensure a breadth of detections on adversary behaviors? Are they trying to prioritize defenses based on what adversaries have been known to do? Are they trying to help consumers understand alerts in a common language? These are valid use cases, but for ATT&CK to be most effective, someone using ATT&CK should be able to explain what the reasons are they chose to use it.
How are they mapping to ATT&CK?
As someone applies unstructured data to any framework, there are two key approaches: making humans do the work and making machines do the work. Using ATT&CK is no different, and both manual and automated approaches can be valuable as someone is “mapping” to ATT&CK. (By mapping to ATT&CK, we mean the process of taking defensive artifacts like behavioral analytics or intel on adversary behaviors and assigning them to the applicable ATT&CK technique(s).) Anyone who is aligning to ATT&CK should be able to explain how they’re going about that. For example:
Human analysts have reviewed ATT&CK technique descriptions and determined that an analytic addresses that technique. (Our team has done this in the Cyber Analytics Repository.)
A script has run natural language processing (NLP) on procedure examples and then used machine learning approaches to find adversary behaviors in a large data set. (Our team has done this in the Threat Report ATT&CK Mapper (TRAM).)
Manual and automated approaches each have strengths and weaknesses. While we can and should automate where we can, sometimes human judgment is needed for analysis. On the flipside, human analysis is prone to cognitive biases, as we’ve discussed before. To create the strongest analysis when mapping to ATT&CK, we recommend a hybrid approach combining the best that humans and machines have to offer. For example, with a technique like Rundll32 (T1085), it may be simple for a machine to map the executable rundll32.exe to that technique. However, for broader techniques like Masquerading, human analysis may be needed to determine if a malicious process is masquerading as a legitimate one like svchost.exe.
What are the strengths and weaknesses to their approach?
I often quote the saying from George Box: “all models are wrong, some models are useful.” ATT&CK isn’t exempt from this. While ATT&CK is a useful framework, it has limitations — for example, it intentionally focuses on what real adversaries have done to help defenders prioritize, but that means it doesn’t cover everything an adversary could possibly do. Since ATT&CK has limitations, that means any method of using ATT&CK also has limitations. Since all approaches to using ATT&CK have pros and cons, we recommend asking what the limitations are to the selected approach. For example, are detections of Discovery techniques “brittle” because they only focus on one method of execution, such as looking at PowerShell but not Windows Management Instrumentation? As we talked about with the above section on human versus automated mapping, is the approach slower because humans are doing manual analysis? If someone using any model, including ATT&CK, says there are no limitations or weaknesses, we would consider this a red flag because that is unrealistic.
How are they updating ATT&CK mappings?
We add new techniques and information to ATT&CK several times a year, and we have a big move to sub-techniques coming up in 2020. Anyone using ATT&CK should know this and have a plan for how they will update their mappings when new or altered techniques are published. Of course, you should be reasonable and realistic about how quickly you expect someone to do this, since it takes time to change products and services — especially if significant human analysis is needed. (As a side note, we’ve heard from you that hearing more from us on our plans will help you better solidify YOUR plans, so we’re working on this!)
What level of detail are they mapping to ATT&CK?
When we explain ATT&CK, we describe that there are three levels of granularity (soon to be four):
Tactics: the adversary’s technical goals. (For example, Credential Access.)
Techniques: how the adversary achieves those goals. (For example, Credential Dumping, T1003.)
Sub-techniques (coming soon™): a more specific description of the adversary behavior used to achieve a goal. (For example, Local Security Authority (LSA) Secrets.)
Procedures: the specific implementation the adversary uses for a technique or sub-technique. (For example, a group using PowerShell to scrape LSASS memory and dump credentials on a victim.)
You should ask what level of detail someone is using when they map to ATT&CK and why they chose that level. Our opinion is that the more detail you can map to, the more useful the information will be. For example, if I just know a detection alert is Execution (a tactic), I likely don’t have enough information to know what action I should take. Similarly, even mapping to the technique level may not be enough detail in some cases, particularly for broad techniques like Scripting (T1064). By getting to procedure-level detail, you know exactly how the adversary implemented the technique, which lets you be best informed to take action. For example, if I know an adversary has used Visual Basic scripts in Office documents, I can look for that in my logs.
How can you get more context about ATT&CK mappings?
In considering level of detail, a related question to ask is how you can get additional context on the ATT&CK mapping. Without knowing the logic or approach behind a particular ATT&CK mapping, it may be difficult for you to know how to action it. For example, if a detection is labeled as with Registry Run Key (T1060), can you pivot within a tool to identify the key added? On the threat intelligence side, if a report indicates an adversary used a Standard Application Layer Protocol (T1071) for Command and Control, can you find out what protocol that is? Is that available directly in the report, or do you have to request it from the originator? With ATT&CK mappings, like threat intelligence more broadly, it’s important to be able to understand the context behind them.
How much of ATT&CK do they cover?
It is unrealistic for any single defensive product or service to cover all of ATT&CK. This is important because we’ve heard from vendors that their customers expect 100% coverage. As the team who created ATT&CK, we want to be absolutely clear that you should not expect 100% coverage of all ATT&CK techniques. For example, certain techniques like Supply Chain Compromise (T1195) are difficult to identify and may require specialized sources that are generally not available in cybersecurity products and services that monitor enterprises.
When asking about coverage of ATT&CK, keep in mind that it’s a complex question. For example, the number of analytics mapped to a technique may not be the best metric of how well its procedures are covered. A single analytic for a technique might be more effective at identifying adversaries than 10 analytics for a different technique. Simply because a technique has more detectors for it does not mean its coverage is “better”. For this reason, we recommend using confidence levels to express coverage of techniques, such as by using a scale of one to five. Thanks to Olaf Hartong for this idea, which you could visually express in an ATT&CK Navigator layer by using shades of a color, with a darker shade indicating more confidence.
Example of Confidence Levels in ATT&CK Navigator Layer (h/t to Olaf Hartong)
You should also remember that each ATT&CK technique may have many procedures for how an adversary could implement it — and because adversaries are always changing, we can’t know what all those procedures are in advance. That makes discussing coverage of a technique tough, especially when some ways of detecting behavior rely on individual procedures and some may span multiple procedures or even an entire technique. We encourage you to look at threat intelligence on what procedures adversaries have used and ask about those you care about most. Anyone mapping to ATT&CK should be able to explain the procedures they cover. Similarly to how it’s unrealistic to expect coverage of 100% of ATT&CK techniques, it’s unrealistic to expect coverage of all procedures of a given technique, especially since we can’t know all of them.
While 100% coverage is unrealistic, you should ask about what parts of ATT&CK they cover and don’t cover. As you may be able to guess by now, we also recommend asking why they cover certain techniques and procedures and not others, which gives you helpful information about their approach. Once you have an understanding of what a particular source covers, you can then seek to complement that source with other approaches to fill gaps, as we’ve discussed. For example, perhaps no sources you find can cover Supply Chain Compromise (T1195), so you may need to work with your risk management team to address this if it is a risk for your organization. A savvy consumer of ATT&CK will realize that no single product or service is a “silver bullet” so we need to blend approaches to improve our defense-in-depth.
In Conclusion
We hope this blog post has helped you identify questions you can ask of anyone who uses ATT&CK, whether it’s a vendor or your own SOC. We want to ensure ATT&CK remains a useful resource for improving defenses in this community, and to that end, we hope this post has educated you on important aspects of being a savvy ATT&CK consumer.
©2019 The MITRE Corporation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Approved for public release. Distribution unlimited 19–01159–20. | https://medium.com/mitre-attack/how-to-be-a-savvy-attack-consumer-63e45b8e94c9 | ['Katie Nickels'] | 2019-12-13 16:52:23.575000+00:00 | ['Mitre Attack', 'Cybersecurity'] |
8 Rekomendasi Salep Obat Jerawat Aman Untuk Ibu Hamil Dan Menyusui Terbaru 2021 | in In Bitcoin We Trust | https://medium.com/@mellydia-official-indonesia/8-rekomendasi-salep-obat-jerawat-aman-untuk-ibu-hamil-dan-menyusui-terbaru-2020-1323eb29e1f2 | ['Mellydia Official Indonesia'] | 2021-01-04 04:15:26.434000+00:00 | ['Obat Jerawat', 'Jerawat', 'Acne', 'Indonesia', 'Cream Jerawat'] |
How to create a YouTube channel in 2021 | Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
If you’re looking to start a YouTube channel this year it is an incredibly easy process to get your channel up and running.
Below are the steps you will follow to get your channel setup and optimize some of your settings:
1. Create a Gmail account if you do not have one yet
2. Go to www.youtube.com
3. Click on the Sign In on the top right side of your screen
4. Once you’re signed in, click on the little profile photo or initial symbol on the top right of the screen
5. Click on “Create a Channel”
6. Here you can choose to either use your Gmail name or create a new unique name for your channel
7. Upload a profile photo
8. Add a channel description that people can read when they go to your profile
9. Add any social media/medium links
10. Click on “Customize Channel”
11. Click on Branding
12. Upload a banner for your channel — make sure this is appropriately arranged for viewing on all devices
13. Add a watermark if you would like
14. Click “Publish” to save your changes
15. Click on “Settings” on the bottom left
16. Go to “Channel”
17. Enter any of your default channel information
18. Enter keywords that YouTube’s search engine can use to help direct people to your channel. Use a comma to separate tags
19. Mark whether you want your channel to be “kid friendly” or leave it at the default to ask for each video
20. Click on “Upload Defaults”
21. Add all of your affiliate links, disclosures, etc. that you want on every video under the description box
22. Select the appropriate video privacy setting for default uploads. I like to do Private so I can edit the thumbnail, etc. before making the video public.
23. Add any tags that you would want all of your videos to have. These tags will help with search engine optimization and really help you to get your channel noticed once you start producing videos
24. Start making videos
I hope this was helpful for you to be able to streamline some of your YouTube processes and get a channel going! | https://medium.com/@johnallenmoney/how-to-create-a-youtube-channel-in-2021-176b6d738e25 | ['John Allen'] | 2020-12-04 08:00:13.913000+00:00 | ['Creative', 'YouTube', 'Youtube Creators', 'Youtube Channel'] |
How Plastic Surgeons are using 3D Printing | Most people think of the concept of 3D printing with various manufacturing and production industries, and it’s logical to believe that. In recent years the plastic surgeons of today have found that there are a variety of various ways they can make use of this sophisticated technology to help their patients too and some of them will be covered below.
Get a Pre-Surgery Glimpse
In the past patients looking to undergo any kind of plastic surgery carried out would have be hopeful and pray that their surgeon could give them the look they envisioned because they were unable to know what their appearance would be until they had had the procedure. But, online 3D printing india is normally capable of putting patients’ anxieties at ease however, since surgeons can now utilize technology as well as 3D printers to produce models that reveal exactly how patients will look following surgery.
A “Paradigm Shift”
In a report posted on Makenica the merging of this kind of print with cosmetic surgical field has led to it being described as an “game changer” and a “paradigm shift” by numerous surgeons and doctors. Dr. Glenn Jelks, an NYU Medical Center Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery and Ophthalmology, stated in this regard, “I call this a paradigm shift. You actually have a printed score card telling you the volume of tissue, whether it be bone, soft tissue, or fat injection, that’s required for the reconstruction.”
Assist in Facial Reconstruction
Another way that 3D printing service in india is utilized by cosmetic or plastic surgeons is that it’s capable of helping surgeons reconstruct faces of patients who were born with facial disfigurement or have suffered severe injuries to the face on one side due to accidents. The 3D printers are used to create an image mirroring the other side of the face, in order to rebuild the damaged parts. The patient’s face is able to appear symmetrical afterward and, in the majority of cases, it’s nearly impossible to determine if reconstructive surgery was completed.
Change Breast Augmentations Forever
While breast implants can be found in a variety of sizes but the shapes they’re made in are still restricted. But 3D printing in india is able to alter this in a way that it is now feasible to create implants that can be customized to the needs of each patient. In situations like this, 3D imaging will be utilized to scan the breasts of the patient, and this data will be transferred onto the 3D printer that will produce an implant made of silicone that is customized. Implants that are customized can decrease the time needed for surgery for patients, which decrease their recovery time as well.
As time passes by it is anticipated that 3D printing can give plastic surgeons numerous options that will allow surgeons to provide their patients as efficiently as they can. | https://medium.com/@makenica/how-plastic-surgeons-are-using-3d-printing-97592da0aa65 | [] | 2021-12-16 12:36:34.418000+00:00 | ['3D Printing', '3d Printing Service', 'Plastic Surgery', 'Plastic Surgeon'] |
What does December 21st, 2020 mean for you? | image from timeanddate.com
This is a big week for the universe.
We have moved into the Age of Aquarius this year and TODAY is a powerful Jupiter Saturn great conjunction and four of the planets will reach zero points in the next few hours.
If you follow astrology this is HUGE.
We have not experienced planets in this alignment in over 800 years.
SO what does this mean for you?
It means that you are exactly where you are supposed to be and if you take a step back and see the journey you have been on to where you are and what you can now offer, can you see how perfectly aligned it was for you to be ready for this moment?
The moment when the energies are so new to us and our lifetimes.
The planet is consciously ascending and this is the time in which we are able to ascend higher as the planets allow for this to happen.
To most this will seem who-who but to those of us that are awakening or awakened this is very normal and taking a step back you truly do see just how perfectly aligned you are for this moment where everyone is going to get a boost in their energy field FOREVER.
That being said — I would like you to leave a comment on this with your feedback on how you see yourself aligning with where you are going? Can you see how it all worked out for you (hardship and all)?
Can you see how you are perfectly positioned within your business right now?
What's going on for you and your thoughts about being in this space of exactly where you are supposed to be?
And if for any reason you do not believe or see how astrology and mindset go hand in hand, think about the law of attraction and what that could mean for the impact these planetary shifts have within you, changing every month in so many different ways, and some that we will never see in 100’s of lifetimes!
It is all connected! | https://medium.com/@yourmindsetmentor/what-does-december-21st-2020-mean-for-you-3794cac89e75 | ['Danielle Grant'] | 2020-12-21 18:05:00.087000+00:00 | ['The Great Awakening', 'Spirituality', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Mindset', 'Astrology'] |
Working from Home — The Good, The Bad & The Ugly | There’s a lot of talk about working from home these days.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, more people are choosing to abandon the traditional nine to five in favour of a more flexible way of working.
And why the hell not?
I’ve been working from home for the last seven years and the novelty still hasn’t worn off. I absolutely love what I do and wouldn’t change it for the world.
But that’s not to say that it’s all plain sailing.
It can be tough at times, especially when you chuck being freelance into the equation.
So I thought I’d share what I’ve learnt about working from home over the last seven years — the good, the bad and the downright ugly.
Because if you are considering working from home or going freelance, I want you to know exactly what you’re letting yourself in for.
The Good
Your commute to work takes a matter of seconds
Even if you take the scenic route. And by scenic route, I mean if you choose to take a detour through the kitchen to get to your home office because well, there’s food and stuff in there.
You’re your own boss
Of course, this only applies to the freelance contingency.
But if you have decided to throw off the shackles of the nine to five — with the holiday pay, benefits, and erm, regular income — and embrace the unpredictable life of the freelancer, then you can set your schedule and you get to decide how and when you’re going to work.
Like getting up at 10am and vegging about for a couple of hours before sitting at your desk?
No problem.
Are you a nocturnal type who gets their best work done in the wee small hours?
Absolutely fine.
Or maybe you’re a busy parent who’s only time to write is those golden hours before sunrise, when the kids are still tucked up in bed?
That’s cool, too.
As long as you meet deadlines and keep your clients happy, it doesn’t matter one little bit how you decide to do it.
You can choose your own work uniform
Now, as someone who thinks that people who wear jeans in the day are psychopaths, and formal wear is only for court appearances and funerals, I love the fact that my job allows me to dress however I damn well please.
And this is a perk that I really should take more advantage of.
Because while I sit around in harem trousers and badly fitting T-shirts, I could be dressed as Superman, Indiana Jones or Queen Elizabeth I, if the mood so took me.
Or, I could even forgo clothes altogether and rebrand myself as The Naked Copywriter.
It’d be a unique selling point, albeit a pointless one, as I work alone and mainly communicate through text, phone and email.
But hey, if it worked for Jamie Oliver…
Your pyjama/loungewear collection will be the envy of the neighbourhood
My neighbours stop whatever they’re doing on bin collection day, just so they can gaze in awe at the majestic beauty of me putting the bins out, rocking a pair of penguin pyjamas and a Jurassic World hoodie.
And on cold days when I’m also wearing fingerless gloves, they go absolutely wild.
I call this look Hobo Chic, and it’s a spectacle and a delight to behold, I can tell you.
So Cara Delevingne better watch herself because there’s a new fashionista in town…
You don’t have to share snacks with co-workers
At last you’ll finally be free from the tyranny of Karen.
You know the type I mean because every office has a Karen.
Karen brings in snacks that smell like the orthotic you threw out last month, doesn’t eat them because they taste gross, and then proceeds to devour the sugar-laden delights you brought in, while lecturing you on the merits of eating healthy food.
“No, Karen, I’m not sharing my snacks with you. Now kindly go away before I beat you savagely with this gluten-free baguette — I’d hate to see it go to waste.”
The Bad
Sooner or later, you’re gonna start talking to yourself
When you work by yourself all day, this is almost inevitable. So my advice is that you become really interesting, really quickly.
I didn’t realise how boring I was until I started talking to myself.
So after a couple of months of working from home, talking to myself and boring myself rigid in the process, I set about trying to become more interesting by watching quiz shows and reading obscure books so I’d have witty stories and anecdotes to share.
I can’t say that I was completely successful in my quest, but me, myself and I sure do find each other easier company than we did before.
Then you’ll start talking to inanimate objects
This in itself isn’t a problem — it’s when they start talking back to you that you really need to worry.
From my own personal experience, I can tell you that kettles are great to have a mid-morning banter with.
But stay away from dishwashers — they’re stuck up and talk crap about you to the other appliances whenever your back is turned.
You’ll become a one-person mail service for your neighbours
Picture the scene: you’re bashing out words faster than Usain Bolt runs and the creativity is running through you like well, Usain Bolt.
And then the doorbell rings.
It’s impolite to ignore it (even though you’re working), so off you go and take the parcel in the neighbourly way that neighbours do. And then you go back to your desk.
But alas! The creativity has dried up like your local bar on New Years’ Eve and you’ve suddenly forgotten sixty percent of the alphabet.
Now, I’m not saying that this is entirely the delivery person or your neighbour’s fault. The point I’m trying to make is that interruptions are the enemy for those of us who work from home. And unfortunately there tends to be a lot of them.
From postal deliveries and computer updates through to unsolicited phone calls and your cat deciding to do yoga on your keyboard, when you work from home, the interruptions are frequent and many.
The plus side of this is that being the local neighbourhood delivery-receiver person will probably make you very popular among your neighbours.
But you however, will grow bitter and resentful and start passive aggressively whistling the theme tune to Postman Pat whenever you bump into them.
You’re your own boss
For the most part, I love being my own boss. But it does help if you have a likeable personality to begin with, which unfortunately I didn’t.
So along with having to become more interesting so I could exchange witty banter with myself, I also had to work on becoming more likeable, which as it turned out was twice as difficult.
So if you’re like me and are prone to bouts of being annoying, then I wouldn’t recommend the whole freelance thing. It’s much healthier and more fun to channel your rage against some jobsworth in a pin-striped suit than towards yourself.
Christmas parties are pretty rubbish
Last year, it was just me sat at my desk with a bottle of Jägermeister and some party poppers.
I’m not gonna lie, it did end up getting messy because it turns out that I get a little handsy when I drink Jägermeister.
I had to have some pretty stern words with myself the next morning, I can tell you. But luckily, I was gracious enough not to press charges.
The Ugly
Ahem…That would be you
Well, without putting too finer point on it, if you’re anything like me then you’ll be the ugly part of this equation.
I live in anything that’s loose-fitting and comfortable, like joggers and T-shirts when I’m working. But the T-shirts do have cool pictures of stuff like sharks, dinosaurs and bananas on them, so I think I should at least get some points for that.
You’re your own boss
As you may have guessed from the fact that this has made all three lists, being your own boss is both a blessing and a curse.
Most of the time, it’s fine.
I treat myself well, I give myself time off when I need it and I don’t steal office supplies (not since I got caught the last time, anyway).
But the flip side of this is that there are times when I’m impatient, inflexible, overly self-critical and set unrealistic expectations of myself.
To put it another way — man, I can be a right nob sometimes.
So there we have it, a completely sensible and not at all pointless overview of the pros and cons of working from home.
If you still think it’s the right option for you, then all I can say is welcome to the flip side. We’re a strange lot, we work at home types, but I’m sure you’re gonna fit right in.
Did you enjoy reading this blog? If the answer is yes, (which I hope it is because otherwise that would really hurt my feelings), did you know that you can get more posts like this delivered straight to your inbox? Just stick your email address in the sign-up box, and I’ll do the rest. | https://medium.com/@hollie_95980/working-from-home-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-a1406b009a63 | ['Hollie Sherrington'] | 2019-06-13 11:54:11.181000+00:00 | ['Freelance Writing', 'Working From Home', 'Freelancing', 'Freelance Life', 'Freelance Writer'] |
My favorite courses to learn Software Architecture in 2021 — Best of Lot | My favorite courses to learn Software Architecture in 2021 — Best of Lot
These are the best courses to learn Software architecture and become a solution architect in 2021
Every Programmer wants to grow in their career, but it’s not easy, and if you don’t pay attention to your job, you will likely stay in the same position for many years. The growth in the initial few years is generally fast. Still, once you reach the barrier of 5 years, you need to decide which direction you want to move like — people management, product management, or software architecture. For tech guys, who don’t want to go on people and product management, the software architecture or solution architecture is the final position, which is not surprising.
If you want to be close with coding and technical discussions, like to try new technologies and want to use them in your organization to solve a challenging problem, software architecture is an excellent position to be in.
Most of the Java developers I have met or interacted with wanted to become a software architect, though only a few succeed, and most of them are still either a technical lead or Senior Software developer.
But, the big question is, how does a senior developer become a software architect? What books or courses you can look forward to learning the skills a Software or Solution architect should have? It’s also one of the most common questions I receive from my reader, apart from how to prepare for Java interviews.
To help you with this question and to answer many such questions from my readers, I’ll share a few online courses you can take to learn more about Software Architecture and how to become a software architect.
In the past, I have shared a couple of books you can read to learn some software architecture skills, and these courses will supplement whatever you have learned from them. You can also use these courses and those books to get the best of both worlds.
Top 5 Courses to become Software Architect in 2021
As I have said, a Software architect position is not a comfortable position. The architect is responsible for all technology decisions in the project and also a significant role.
You need to know a lot of things, not just the technology but also the business. You should not only be familiar with general software architecture, design, coding, and programming best practices, but also with the latest technologies, libraries, and framework and knows their pros and cons to choosing the right technology for your solution.
In these few courses, I have tried to include most of the things you need to learn Software Architecture, but this list is by no means complete, and I am keen to get some suggestions from some of the experienced Software Architects which come across this article.
Anyway, without any further ado, here is my list of some of the best online courses to learn Software Architecture and become a Solution Architect or Software Architect.
When it comes to online learning, Coursera is one of the reputed websites and also one of my favorite places along with Udemy and Pluralsight. It has some of the best courses on machine learning, Algorithms, and Software Architecture, and this is one of them.
In this course, you will learn how to represent a software architecture using visual tools like UML, which is very important to communicate the architecture with shareholders as well as developers who will implement it.
You will also learn some of the standard architectures, their qualities, and tradeoffs. The course also talks about how designs are evaluated, what makes a good architecture, and architecture can be improved.
And the best part of the course is that you will do some hands-on practice in the last module by documenting a Java-based Android application (Capstone Project) with UML diagrams and analyze evaluate the application’s architecture using the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM).
And, if you find Coursera courses useful, which they are because they are created by reputed companies and universities around the world, I suggest you join the Coursera Plus, a subscription plan from Coursera which gives you unlimited access to their most popular courses, specialization, professional certificate, and guided projects. It cost around $399/year but its complete worth of your money as you get unlimited certificates.
This is another excellent and must take the course for all the programmers who aspire to become a software architect. In this course, instructor Mark Farragher will teach you all the skills you need to become an outstanding solution architect.
He will not only teach you how to create an excellent architecture design but also show you all the soft skills you will need to really shine in this role and make an impression on your peers. This is extremely important as you need to do a lot of talking and probably need to interact with most of the people in the organization, including CEO and CTO.
This course also covers how a Software Architect or Solution Architect operates in an IT team, which soft skills are required to become an outstanding architect, and which extra responsibilities you can take on to really make an impression on your peers.
Talking about technical skill, the course will teach you how to create high architectures, explains common architecture design patterns, and shows how to design these patterns in UML.
It also covers what to look at architecture, both high and low levels, like caching, exception management, and deployment scenarios. In short, an excellent course for all programmer and senior developer who wants to become a Solution Architect.
This course is a more low level than the previous two sessions and talks about software architecture and design patterns, somewhat more concrete things than abstract design.
The course uses Java programming language to solve problems, which is great for Java developers. Still, the theoretical background is language-independent and useful for all programmers irrespective of their programming languages.
I highly recommend coding out the implementations several times on your own to get a good grasp of it.
It also covers things like SOLID principles and design patterns, which are vital for any good architecture and robust application.
This is another fantastic course for all the programmer who wants to become a software architect. In this course, you will learn what the role of a software architect in a team and organization is and why it is so important.
You will learn about the skills and knowledge required to become a competent software architect and responsibility during each phase of the software development and project life cycle.
Lastly, you will learn one of the most important aspects of being a solution architect: how to design and communicate a solution to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
In short, this course is your roadmap to becoming a capable and successful software architect. Even if you are a software architect, you can also take this course to further hone your soft skills. If you need more resources, you can also check out this list of books to improve your Soft Skills as a Programmer and Developer.
This is another excellent Pluralsight course on Software Architecture. In this course, you will learn about Clean Architecture, if you think what a clean architecture is, it’s nothing but a set of modern patterns, practices, and principles for creating a software architecture that is simple, understandable, flexible, testable, and maintainable.
There is a lot of focus on an organization to write Clean Code and create Clean Architecture, and this course will help you in that direction.
This is an introductory course, which means no prerequisites for this course. However, having essential experience with at least one the C like a programming language, and basic knowledge of software architecture is beneficial.
It’s totally different from the Clean Architecture book by Uncle Bob, which is also a worth reading book for programmers wants to become a software architect.
By the way, you would need a Pluralsight membership to join this course, which costs around $29 per month or $299 per year (14% discount). If you don’t have this plan, I highly recommend joining as it boosts your learning and as a programmer, you always need to learn new things.
Alternatively, you can also use their 10-day-free-trial to watch this course for FREE.
This is one of my favorite courses when it comes to learning Software Design or System design. It’s created to prepare you for the System design interview, but you can also use it to learn how to approach System design in general.
The Grokking the System Design Interview, is one of the first courses (or book) that describes the Large Scale Distributed System Design problems in detail. Even if you’ve worked on Distributed Systems before, there are a lot of things that you can learn from this course.
Here is the link to join this course — Grokking the System Design Interview
Authors have created this course to provide you design choices(including pros and cons) so that you can understand the requirement, compare approaches, and come up with the best solution for the problem in hand.
They are also mindful not to provide a solution at a granularity that’s appropriate for a 45-minute discussion. This makes the course very interesting.
Even if you are not preparing for Coding interviews, I suggest you take this course to improve your System design skills. Big thanks to The Educative Team and Fahim ul Haq for creating this awesome course.
This is another excellent course from Educative to learn about Web application architecture. In this course, you will learn about different architectural styles like monolith, microservices, client-server, 3-tier architecture, decentralized peer-to-peer architecture, and how request and data move in web application.
You will also learn about how to think big and think in terms of layers, performance, scalability, and high availability, which is a must for today’s application.
The course not only introduces with the different architectural pattern but also explains the pros and cons of each approach and walk you through a different scenario where a particular architecture is more suitable than others.
Here is the link to join the course — Web Application & Software Architecture 101
To be honest with you, this is the best course for not only senior developers but also every software developer out there as it will expand your thinking process and will you make a more confident web developer. There is a significant discount on the course now, and it’s available for just $44, the original price $79, it’s a bit expensive them Udemy courses but worth it.
On the other hand, if you like Educative as a platform, you can also buy a subscription for just $17 per month (50% discount), I have one, and I highly recommend you to get.
That’s all about some of the best online courses to learn Software architecture and become a Software Architect or Solution Architect. As I have said, the role of a Software architect is significant, and he also needs to do a lot of talking, hence not just subject matter and technologies, he also needs to be good at soft skills.
It’s a gratifying career, both in terms of pay and work, as you get a lot of limelight and get to talk to both higher and lower levels in your organization like from CEO to Developers, and know most of the things about your application and solution.
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Thanks for reading this article so far. If you found these courses useful in becoming a software architect or learn software architecture, please share it with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note. cc
P.S. — If you are looking for a free course to learn Java design patterns, which are also crucial for Software architects, then you can also check out Java Design Patterns and Architecture course on Udemy. It’s completely free and has loads of useful information on using design patterns for Java programmers.
Other Medium Articles you may like | https://medium.com/javarevisited/top-5-courses-to-learn-software-architecture-in-2020-best-of-lot-5d34ebc52e9 | [] | 2020-12-09 09:05:08.228000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Programming', 'JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Web Development'] |
First try at UX design. | I’m a graphic designer and an illustrator stepping into the world of UX design. Yesterday, I wanted to try and understand the basic principles and the process involved in User Experience design. For this, I started out by watching videos on Youtube and read a few articles on Medium. After noting down a few key points, I set out to try and learn things my own way i.e. by Reviewing.
Here is the basic UX process carried out for majority of the products.
Understanding the problem
Research
Planning
Visual Design
Development
Testing and Quality assurance
Product launch
Each product also undergoes the cycle of
Design
Prototype
Test
Validate
To ensure maximum usability and convenience.
Review process
First, I selected an existing android mobile application (UberEats), then I made note of the user’s Needs and Wants for that application to be launched in the market.
Next, I wanted to understand the userflow or how the application would guide me throughout the process (Order food). I took screenshots and started wireframing every screen I came across. For each screen, I listed out the contents of the screen, what was that particular action on the previous screen took me to this one. Then I made note of the pros and cons of that screen and also the key element(s) of that screen.
These images show the wireframing of few screens related to onboarding, delivery details, restaurants, menu items and basket. The contents of the screen are listed on the right along with the userflow, key elements and actions.
This exercise gave me a great insight on how the userflow works from the beginning till the main objective was completed. I learnt about all the screens that were required to make the application, the number of screens it took me to complete the main objective of ordering the food, and the number of actions performed by me (like typing, tapping and scrolling) to complete the main objective and also other tasks (like how many times I had to tap to move from the main screen to the edit profile screen). By doing this analysis, I learnt that by reducing the number of user interactions, the convenience is increased, and by providing the right number of options, the user doesn’t feel restricted due to less options or confused due to more.
Thank you for taking time to read this article. Please show your appreciation and encourage me on my UX journey. | https://medium.com/@irakshithn/first-try-at-ux-design-853d4602febe | ['Rakshith N'] | 2019-02-11 18:13:12.976000+00:00 | ['Design', 'UX', 'User Experience Design', 'User Experience', 'User Research'] |
Started in the Private Sector, Now We’re Here: Making the Transition to Government | For those who might not know, I began working for the U.S. government last year! I joined the U.S. Digital Service in the fall as a Design Strategist and was assigned to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. Although I had prior health care experience having worked for clients like Eli Lilly and Merck, my Big Pharma subject matter expertise was largely useless. CMS is the largest insurer in the country and I had never touched that topic before. What did end up being highly transferable was my experience in working with difficult stakeholders in siloed, legacy organizations with myriad constraints and layers of bureaucracy.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I wanted this post to serve as a letter of advice to anyone considering making the transition from the private to public sector in a Product, Design or Technical capacity. While there is a lot of writing that exists on why government is different than the private sector, it can be hard to find information that adequately captures the nuances of how and why it might be different to be a Product Manager or an Engineer at a government agency versus a Fortune 500 company.
Since I’m a fan of using design frameworks to help me tell stories, I’m going to IDEO’s “Three Lenses of Innovation” to compare and contrast the differences I’ve seen so far.
The Desirability, Feasibility, Viability framework is often used in business to help inform strategy. In summary, you need to create something that is Desirable (people want it), Feasible (you can do it) and Viable (you can afford it). Each lens allows a business or organization to assess current product and service performance and what can be improved.
Now hold on, you might be thinking, doesn’t the government care about people’s needs (Desirability), how to deliver products and programs (Feasibility) and budget (Viability) as well? Absolutely. So let’s dive into the similarities and differences and how the work is impacted.
Desirability
In both the private and public sector, organizations strive to solve the needs or pain points of their users. But purpose and scope differ significantly, mainly due to one key difference — the private sector is motivated to make money, whereas the public sector is driven to improve society.
In the private sector, businesses are user-centric in order to deliver products and services people will buy in order to increase the bottom line. Thus companies are often incentivized to build for a specific target audience in order to gain customer loyalty and increase customer lifetime value. Diversifying the target audience is considered only after initial success.
In the public sector, the government is user-centric by mission and by mandate. It’s not possible to produce a product for a select few and exclude users who might not speak English or have a physical impairment. Legally, the government must be inclusive and avoid discrimination when building products and services.
This has enormous implications on the work a Product Manager or Designer might have to do in order to produce what qualifies as a minimum viable product (MVP) in government. Firstly, requirements gathering can be much more robust as it must involve more stakeholders and adhere to rules and regulations. You must also consider how the product or service fits within a larger ecosystem of processes and tools. Thus, it’s crucial to think creatively around how to scope an MVP.
All of this adds up to a much longer timeframe than you might be familiar with in the private sector and requires patience and empathy in order to achieve success.
Feasibility
Depending on your particular private sector experience, the operational capabilities in government might feel very different, or strangely similar.
If you’re coming from a startup or small company that had a small workforce and flat hierarchy, your working style and tasks may have been very integrated, Agile and informal.
If you’re coming from a legacy company with a large, hierarchical workforce (like I have) the culture and working style often found in government may feel very familiar — Waterfall, siloed and very formal.
Government is very hierarchical, siloed and risk-averse which often results in people getting ‘lost’ in the system, having limited autonomy, and lacking the incentives to fail fast and learn. Many people, including government contractors, don’t feel authorized or incentivized to do something if it’s outside of their normal ways of working or contract. All this results in a meeting-heavy culture, lengthy approval processes, and a bias toward inaction, which in turn impacts project timelines and the scope of what you can do.
For example, in order for any technical solution to run in production, government must obtain an Authority to Operate (ATO) — a compliance-heavy document that aims to address security concerns. This extensive approval process must involve an independent audit group to perform a host of assessments including interviews, pen tests, and document reviews to ensure the correct security risk posture is in place. Although there may be similar security processes at private sector companies, it might be fully internal, where the company is approving itself to release a product that it developed to production. Unsurprisingly, the ATO process takes time and impacts A) the technical solution you pursue and b) your timeline to launch.
Additionally, many of the stakeholders you will meet will be career feds — meaning they have put in 10, 20, 30 years. This can have implications on their skill sets, mindsets and appetite for change. Thus it’s crucial to find and cultivate allies who are willing to go against the grain and push for change (aka stakeholder management 101).
Finally, depending on the government agency, headcount allotment will either result in a large Federal workforce or a large contractor workforce. If you come into an agency where the workforce is predominantly contractors and you want to build products or services that the agency will need to own and manage after your departure, you may have a challenge finding dedicated resources that will (1) want to be accountable and are willing to move the project forward without you, and (2) possess the skill sets needed to take ownership.
That challenge has massive implications on the scope of what you can do, as the strategic question shifts from “Can we build it?” to “Can it be owned and maintained by the agency?” In this scenario, the impact of procuring good contractors can literally make or break your effort. Time spent selecting strong contractors — and empowering your government partners to select strong contractors — will be just as important as making technical decisions.
Viability
When it comes to viability, this is where the private and public sector differ the most. Even the very definition differs.
In the private sector, viability is defined and measured by “did it increase our bottom line and contribute to long-term growth?”
You might be thinking: But government doesn’t have to worry about profit. Nor does it have any market competition. There isn’t the typical incentive of ‘more users = more money’. So how is viability determined?
In the absence of measuring revenue, there are other important ways to measure value and determine viability in government. Here are a few to consider, in no particular order:
1. Lowering costs of call centers and help desks by lowering user complaints. 2. Lowering training dollars by making the system more intuitive and user-friendly.
3. Lowering the cost of compliance by assessing what’s actually needed. For example, typical Waterfall development contracts need independent verification and validation contractors. With modern development practices you won’t need them because testing is embedded into the process and verification is done continuously.
4. Lowering bug rates by using modern testing and development practises.
5. Decreasing risk and project delays by increasing the time to market so users can test and give feedback.
These measures can be reflected in contracts and used to track and evaluate the viability of the product. One of the most important and impactful parts of your job will be to successfully change people’s thinking about technology and operations, development versus sustainment, and real user value.
—
The last bit of wisdom I want to leave with you as you transition from the Private Sector into Government, is twofold:
1) Find a cultural interpreter to help you navigate the agency, chart your journey, build relationships, and gain context as soon as possible.
2) Embrace the high-level mission of the work, even though the products and programs may change with leadership. You might find yourself watching a program you worked hard on get replaced by a different activity or be implemented in a different way than you anticipated. Ensure that value is still being delivered to the people who need it, but recognize there are various ways value can be delivered. Have conviction in the purpose of the agency and government as a whole, and you will be set up for success.
Good luck, have fun and go forth and conquer!
***Special thanks to Joy Day, my cultural interpreter and friend at CMS. Your insights and contributions to this article were invaluable.*** | https://medium.com/@carolinekyungae/started-in-the-private-sector-now-were-here-making-the-transition-to-government-5bc801fea6ce | ['Caroline Smith'] | 2020-05-22 22:01:52.168000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Product', 'Strategy', 'Civictech'] |
Halloween Dad | Year seven of Dad’s Halloween experiment saw even more extravagances than years gone by. Jeneanne and Dad got married a year before and spent three weeks in Bermuda that May. Jeneanne loved Dad’s Halloween spirit and Dad loved Jeneanne.
Better still, Jeneanne was a Christmas Freak. Not a Jesus Freak, but a Christmas F-R-E-A-K. When she and Dad bought a house in the Summer after their wedding, one of her biggest demands was space for all her “Christmas Cheer”. Between her decorations and Dad’s, the attic, basement and garage rafters were all packed for the holidays. They barely had room to store their winter and summer clothes, and they used to joke about letting us sleep outside so they could take our rooms.
There were a few surprises in year seven. Alethia died that New Years and both Mom and Lonnie were broken up about it. Alethia was the only person in my life who had died up to that point. I didn’t have much time with her but she loved me and I loved her. Dad and Jeneanne talked to Mom and Lonnie a few weeks after the funeral to ask if I’d been as funky at home as I had been with them. Mom got worried, as this was not Dad’s M.O. Dad overlooked things and always saw the bright side.
But the cloud over me didn’t seem to lift. Eventually, they put me in kid’s therapy with “Dr. Dave”. Nobody seemed to be okay with how sad I was. I was fine with it. It passed, in time, and I can’t speak to Dr. Dave’s contributions except that he recommended I give Adderall a try.
Three weeks in, I stopped eating and I was pulling out my eyebrow hairs. Mom and Dad were both in firm agreement that I go off of it.
I was thirteen. I started feeling sad about things other than Alethia. I was angry and hungry and horny all the time. Dad and I were still “best pals”, but he seemed to be shorter with me than he ever had before. He was always on me about homework and my grades, even though I kept a 3.5 GPA. He would always tell me how important school was.
“Must be, or they wouldn’t make me go by law,” I said to him on the drive one day.
“You can take that mouth back to your mom’s house, because I don’t have room for it here,” he snapped back.
He felt bad about it by the time we got to the drop-off.
Dad and Jeneanne got started with their Halloween planning in August that year. They talked to my uncle Gary about their exterior wiring and they started using LED bulbs that didn’t draw as much current. Jeneanne was really good at painting yard decorations and keeping the peace between Dad and I. When September came, Dad asked me and my brother what we wanted to be for Halloween. My brother said “Power Rangers” as he had for years and years. I decided to really shake things up.
“I wanna do wolfman.”
Dad’s eyes twinkled. He started looking up videos on the Internet about how to make realistic fangs out of wax and how to use spirit gum to attach fake hair to my ears. He even thought about contacts with yellow irises but talked himself out of it when he saw the cost. He bought plenty of fake blood, though.
I ripped up a few old flannel shirts and an old pair of Lonnie’s khakis. Mom said she was too freaked out by the test-runs of the costume to even bother looking at me night-of. She managed to keep her composure for a few pictures anyway. Lonnie thought I was, his words, “really cool looking.”
I stepped out of the house with my black claws and face paint and fake hair and fangs and I turned to Mom and Lonnie and asked if I could go out on my own this year. They didn’t think that was a great idea.
My brother and I hit all the regular houses and finally got to Dad’s. Mom and Lonnie headed home to chill, only stopping to have a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie with Jeneanne inside. My brother started tearing off his costume and immediately started gorging himself on candy. Jeneanne grabbed the camcorder and started taping him. “Oh my gosh,” she kept saying and laughed along with him. She worried that he was choking on a lemonhead but he quickly corrected himself and she kept on chuckling at him.
Dad was staked out front. Literally staked, as he was pretending to be a dying vampire that year, lying in the big black plywood coffin. The kids went nuts, between him and the cauldron and the Frankenstein with the light-up eyes. There were big fake bats swinging around on the branches outside, emitting their tinny “OoooooOooOooo” noises. Shrieks of horror poured out of the MP3 player Dad kept specifically for Halloween sounds.
A lapse in candy-seekers came about 9:30 and Dad excused himself into the house to go to the bathroom. Jeneanne was still recording my brother, who by now was doing crazy dances to the “Monster Mash.” I was fiddling with my fangs when Dad turned the corner and took a deep breath.
“Did you tell the boys yet?”
Jeneanne seemed thrown off. My brother quit dancing.
“…no,” she said, startled.
“You didn’t tell them you’re gonna have a baby?”
My brother’s eyes lit up. Jeneanne was stunned and embarrassed, but happy. Dad was beaming.
My chest felt hot. I had to get up.
I ran to the bathroom, Dad grabbing at me as I went by. I threw up and it melted the wax off my canines. Nobody heard me over the “Monster Mash” and my brother shouting “Baby sister! Baby sister!”
My tears ran hot as I rinsed my mouth out. I pulled off as much of the hair as I could and scrubbed off the make-up and stripped off the shredded clothes. My fingernails were still black and there was some of Mom’s mascara in my eyes.
I stumbled out of the bathroom and Dad and Jeneanne were both waiting for me in the living room.
“Are you okay, honey?” Jeneanne asked.
“I’m fine. I think I ate too much sugar,” I said. It wasn’t strictly a lie.
Dad rubbed his palm on my forehead, hunting for a fever. I didn’t fight him but I wanted to.
“You feel a little hot,” he said. “Want a bottle of water?”
I nodded. He ran to the kitchen and Jeneanne sat me in the rocker and pulled the lever to elevate my feet. My ears were still ringing.
How could they be having a baby? Dad’s so old and my brother and I were still so young. Jeneanne was trying to wrangle my brother off of the couch and into bed, a nigh-impossible feat at this time of night with this much sugar in play.
Dad got me a bottle of water and snapped it open with a flick. I started to guzzle it but Dad warned me about being too hard on my stomach. He sat in the quiet, Jeneanne in the background trying in vane to get my brother to quit jabbering about nothing.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I know this is kinda shocking news,” Dad said, reading my mind. “Believe me, it’s just as shocking for me, too.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Isn’t it great that you’re gonna be a big brother again?”
I shrugged. Dad realized he was playing a losing game so he finally turned off the porch light, the first official act of the dismantling of Halloween.
“I think we’ve done enough for this year. It’s gonna be hard enough getting your brother to sleep.” He went around the corner, turned off the sound system and started hitting his well-planned surge protector switches with his foot to slow down and silence his nightmare garden.
I drank the rest of my bottled water, went back to the bathroom to scrub off a little more of the leftover makeup, then put on my pajamas for bed.
I waited until the night was dark, no longer polluted with the pale green-and-purple light of Dad’s handiwork. I heard Dad come in and chat with Jeneanne for a bit.
“I think he just got overheated,” Jeneanne said.
“I don’t think he took the news well.”
“It’s probably just a shock for him. He’s going through so much already…”
“He should be happy! Right?” Dad couldn’t figure out why I was so disappointed or angry or whatever I was.
When I reflect on it now, I think it was halfway between jealousy and anger. Dad wasn’t satisfied with my brother and I? He wanted a kid he could keep all the time? Hey, news flash, you shouldn’t have left us with Mom. Maybe then you’d have your kids around you every day.
Those kids would get the full Dad treatment, all the time. He’d be “Halloween Dad” all year long. Happy Dad, excited Dad. And we’d get the leftovers on the weekends.
Over time, I’d mature a bit and learn to love my baby sister, and not even bother with the term “half-sister”. I love her the way I love her baby sister, the way I love the baby brother that Mom and Lonnie would eventually have, Mom’s “miracle” baby she gave birth to during my first week of college.
But in that moment, I didn’t see the possibility of love anywhere around me. I felt dark inside. I saw the posters in my room and the light under the door. I watched it get dimmer and dimmer and finally die.
And I waited.
Eventually, a full, bright moon came rising. There, in the dark of my room, four square panels of soft, beautiful light rolled across the floor, centimeters at a time. Soft, chirpy snores rolled out of my brother’s door, left open just a crack. Dad and Jeneanne’s bedroom door was closed. There was no AC on, no heat — the house was well-insulated and had been warming up all evening with the heat of bodies and a fire in the hearth. I was perfectly content in my skin so I slipped off my shirt and yanked off my socks. I was there, bathed in moonlight from the window, cutting a strong-looking silhouette. I felt perfect. Perfect, and mean.
I went to the closet and pulled out the baseball bat Dad and Jeneanne bought me for making Honor Roll the year before. I whisked myself down the stairs, armed, dangerous, quiet as the shadow that laid long in front of me. I unlocked the front door and stood there, somewhat tall and somewhat muscular, tears hot behind my eyelids. But I didn’t cry.
I walked up to the wolfman, the same one that had petrified me for years, and I stood in front of him, bat slung over my shoulder. I hated the wolfman. I hated him. He was always my least favorite. Of course he was, look at him, all stupid and ugly and useless. I let the bat slide down my palm until the butt of it rested on the bottom of my fist. I hauled back and whacked the wolfman right in the jaw. Styrofoam and fake fur flew. With one clean hit, I had knocked the jaw off his stupid, shitty face. Ha ha, wolfman, you’re nothing now. Can’t bite someone like this, can you, you piece of shit. I hit him in the arms and knocked off a few of his fingers. I hit his legs and he crumpled down to the yard, his menacing claws now bent up toward me in a plea for mercy. No mercy. I’m killing wolf men tonight, which isn’t very lucky for you.
I beat the wolfman senseless. Unsatisfied, I went after a few of the jack-o-lantern’s. Bam, boom, bam, right down the line, the careful curves of the gourds splitting and crumbling under the bat. I kicked a few of the fake styrofoam tombstones over. I punched the mummy in the nuts, or where I thought his nuts might be. I laughed to myself, not too loud, but in a way that sounded hideous when I reflected on those moments years later. I stood in the yard, heaving, out of breath, the maker of untold destruction. I took a turn around to view my handywork. There was my dad’s masterpiece, in tatters on the ground. Spray paint, duct tape, glue, glitter, all of it garbage now.
I plodded back up the stairs, sweaty now, even in the cold. I ran my hands through my hot, thick hair and wiped my nose where my sleeve would’ve been. I looked across the porch — there was another figure, black in the shade of the porch, motionless. I decided I would spare the Dracula dummy. He was pretty cool, after all. There, there’s all the mercy you’ll have tonight, I thought to myself. I’m not good enough for you, well, now all this shit’s not good enough, either.
I went back to my bedroom and stashed the bat back in the closet. I laid in bed, shirtless, sweaty, my nose full of night air and my hands raw from the bat and the beatings. I breathed heavily and I fell into a deep sleep. I barely budged until the morning, when I heard my brother crying.
“They broke it?! They broke it?!”
I woke in a daze and stumbled over to my shirt, still crumpled on the ground, and threw it on. The morning was cold and the heat of the house had all flown out the door with my dad and my then-youngest brother.
I looked out of the living room window. It all seemed so much worse in the daylight. There were feathers and fur and cardboard and splintered wood…it looked like a tornado had ripped up and ruined everything around us.
Dad wasn’t yelling or anything, but there was a purpose and silence in his work that made my brother turn right around and not bother Dad with his many questions and comments. Jeneanne was on the phone when I woke up and ditched the call quickly when she saw me.
“Honey, are you okay? Did you hear anything last night?”
I looked at her, dumbfounded. I don’t even think I was playing dumb in that moment — I think I was truly ignorant about the goings-on and my role in them.
She ran over and gave me a hug. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I know this is you and your dad’s favorite thing.”
My heart felt like she had tied a lead sinker to it. This was what Dad and I did, once upon a time. Coming up with these crazy Halloween ideas. Executing them with what little we had. When Dad had nothing, he had Halloween.
Now, he had nothing again.
Jeneanne told me it would be okay. If she knew anything about what I’d done, she didn’t let on. She just got back on the phone with her mom after scuttling my brother into the kitchen for his cereal.
I took a few timid steps outside to the porch. I looked around at the devastation and I looked at Dad. I looked around for Dracula on the porch.
But Dracula wasn’t on the porch. His coffin was out in the yard, but…
Why would Dad move Dracula after the fact? He wouldn’t. Who would’ve put Dracula on the porch while I was out there tearing up everything? No one did.
We didn’t use the Dracula dummy this year. Dad dressed up as Dracula, with the stake through the heart…
I’ll never know for sure, but I think Dad must’ve followed me downstairs that night. He crept behind me, quieter than I was, maybe even holding his breath. He watched me do one of the worst things I had ever done in my life, in perfect quiet, from the safety of the porch. I don’t know, to this day, why he didn’t stop me.
There have been times when I hoped it wasn’t him, but a serial killer, biding his time, holding off from making his move because of the moonlight and the proximity to the house. Deep down, I know who it was. And I know what he thought as I wrecked years of hard work, work that he and I had done together. Now, he was shoving all his ghouls and ghosts into contractor bags. I stood watching, helpless.
“You gonna get down here, give me a hand?” he said without turning around. I felt all my blood turn cold, like he was holding me in thrall. The only heat in my body was in my ears and under my neck, the shame of what I’d done compelling me to go down into the yard and help Dad bag trash.
It was the last Halloween of its kind. | https://medium.com/personal-growth/halloween-dad-83679fb267a4 | ['Jimmy Marks'] | 2015-10-29 13:36:51.528000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Halloween'] |
You Have a Part to Play in Your Healing | Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s your responsibility and what’s God’s responsibility.
Let me explain what I mean.
It’s reasonable to pray for healing, or a breakthrough and expect God to answer your prayers. One of the major tenants of the Christian faith is that God hears your prayers and responds to them. But a lot of times you get caught between the ask and the answer.
It’s in these times that you have to figure out what’s in your power and what isn’t. What’s in God’s hands, and what’s in yours?
Sometimes, we unconsciously refuse to play a part in being an answer to our prayers. But if God answered all your prayers, you would have to give up the system you’ve built around your sickness.
It’s possible that you intellectually want to change or overcome some obstacle, so you do all the “right things” to make it happen. Your spiritual practices are on point while you
pray
read your Bible
fast
have a quiet time
go to church
lead a Bible study
You put on a show, but you don’t expose the roots of what’s holding you back. Then you want to throw your hands up when God doesn’t answer your prayers.
It happens to everyone at different points in life. But there’s a story in the New Testament that can help you understand how your dedication to your comfort might be greater than your dedication to transformation.
The miracle man and the invalid
What if there was a miracle pill you could take to make all your troubles go away?
Humans have long been infatuated with miracle cures, and things were no different in Jesus’ day two thousand years ago.
Near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, there was a pool called Bethesda. Professor and Bible scholar N.T. Wright says the pool was known far and wide as a place of healing. You might say it was a healing pool.
In the Gospel According to John, chapter 5, Jesus came to the healing pool which was surrounded by many sick people. Many had been there for a long time, which makes it reasonable to assume that they’d formed some sort of community there — a system of survival.
Once a year, so the legend goes, an angel came down and stirred up the water in the healing pool. The first person in the pool got healed.
On his casual stroll through the sick ward that day, Jesus met a man who’d been at the pool for thirty-eight years. How is it that in thirty-eight years, this man hasn’t made it into the water?
Jesus must have wondered the same thing because he asked the man one of the strangest questions in the whole Bible: “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6, NIV)
Then something interesting happens.
“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” (John 5:7:NIV)
But the man doesn’t give Jesus an answer to the question. He gives an excuse.
You have a part to play in your answer
Jesus doesn’t need a pool to heal the man. He only needs a word. But to experience healing, the man has to put aside the system that he’s created for his life.
That means he has to give up his identity as an invalid and the mindset that goes with it.
When you’re in a dysfunctional or even toxic situation, you learn to create a system so you can survive. Even in bad circumstances, there comes a point when it’s easier to stay than go because at least you know what you’re going to get if you stay.
As N.T. Wright observes, the man that Jesus found at the healing pool had made a way of life out of waiting for his healing.
Let that sink in for a second.
The man is sick and has no one to take care of him. He lies feet away from healing for thirty-eight years, but he’s more bought into a system of victimhood than into the possibility of healing.
So Jesus does what he does best–he challenges the system. He tells the man to put aside the system that’s holding him back and get moving.
Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. The day on which this took place was a Sabbath… (John 5:8–9, NIV)
When Jesus says “Pick up your mat and walk,” it isn’t just a command to get better. Remember, the man didn’t even ask Jesus to heal him. It’s a command to discard the system he’s relying on, and move on with his life. But that’s not even the best part.
Don’t let your system hold you back
The word that Jesus uses when he says “Get up” comes from the Greek word egeiró which means “I raise up.” This same word is used throughout the New Testament in reference to resurrection.
So Jesus commands the man to be resurrected from the dead system he’s created for himself. The system of victimhood, excuses, and the very system he’d grown accustomed to was preventing him from experiencing healing.
What if the reason God hasn’t answered your prayers is that you’re clinging to a system that’s keeping you stuck?
The idea of change is always alluring. But it’s also scary. It’s easier to pray for God to change something than it is to give up the mindset, habits, attitude, or identity that’s keeping you bound.
Jesus isn’t a miracle drug. He isn’t interested in zapping your problems one-by-one. He’s interested in you as a whole person. So he has to change your system to change your life.
Is it possible that you’ve become accustomed to the system you’ve built to survive?
When Jesus commanded the man to get up and walk, he didn’t just heal the man, he changed his entire way of life. As Wright says:
He now finds himself launched on the much harder, but much more satisfying, way of life that goes with no longer being a cripple.
Maybe that’s the reason the man spent thirty-eight years at the healing pool without getting in. Maybe deep down he was afraid of what the change would mean for his life. The man’s healing was right in front of him for nearly four decades, but it took Jesus’ authority to resurrect him from the dead system the man had created for himself.
Final thoughts
Sometimes you wait for God to move on your behalf, and all the while He is waiting for you to move.
One of the most striking things about Jesus’ interaction with the paralyzed man is that Jesus didn’t pull him up on his feet. He gave the command and left it up to the man to take action. But to get a new life, the man had to let go of the system he created to keep his old life in place.
God is more than willing to answer your prayers. But you have a part to play in your healing. | https://medium.com/koinonia/you-have-a-part-to-play-in-your-healing-4a8fe69e0694 | ['Kyle Chastain'] | 2020-11-21 12:23:47.600000+00:00 | ['Bible', 'Scripture', 'Faith', 'Jesus', 'Christianity'] |
I wish… | I wish to be a bedside lamp
That knows when to shine and when to nap.
I wish to be a grain of sand
Reminding posterity of their dead ancient land.
I wish to be the oars of a boat
That lets one wander yet stay afloat.
I wish to be a gold fish —
Awestruck by the world it can yet again, relish.
I wish to be a chair,
Offering support to one in despair.
I wish to be the gentle aroma of coffee;
A promise of refreshment that can set you free.
I wish to be a swing set
That lets one soar high when upset.
I wish to be a table fan
That constantly whispers, “you absolutely can!”
Alas I am but a ball of bulky thoughts
A heart full of fancy, a fish out of water
Chasing ephemeral jewels, distraught;
A confused, curious woman, friend and daughter.
I wish to become a wisp of smoke
That smells of hope
I wish to be a laser beam that guides
Those in fear of changing tides. | https://medium.com/the-junction/i-wish-de20ebcb6224 | ['Abhinaya S.B.'] | 2020-12-30 06:52:48.404000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Dreams', 'Thoughts', 'Positive Thinking'] |
Motivate — But How?. In English the word ‘motivate’ is… | Photo by Peter Fogden on Unsplash
It is easy to say someone ‘Motivate yourself...go to the gym.. workout and lose some weight’. Again to reach the weight loss goal, how can we really motivate someone? Money can not buy motivation. Moreover, it is difficult to stay consistent that is, eating only healthy. My friend tried it a couple of times but, failed to be consistent. This reminds me of, Will Durant’s (Historian) famous quote, ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit’. In English the word ‘motivate’ is pronounced as /ˈməʊtɪveɪt/. When positive feelings are created in a person, the person is motivated to act.
The answer to ‘What motivates you?’, can vary vastly, for some it might be a challenging job, for others it might be helping people. Everyone has a different mindset, personality, opinion etc. Life can be beautiful but not that easy. I have come up with some points on how to motivate people with different backgrounds.
The antonym of motivate is demotivate meaning discouraged. People get demotivated by warnings used to induce fear. When warnings are given to people they act only for the sake of doing what is asked from them. The behavior which is the main issue here does not get changed. Whereas, motivation is the readiness to act.
Sometimes warnings have an opposite effect. Mostly, when people are threatened through warnings such as, ‘junk food can cause obesity and diabetes’. They start justifying this themselves for example, ‘its okay to have junk food, my family history does not have diabetes or obesity. So, I am blessed with good genes, no need to worry’. This is a natural behavior, in order to neutralize this warning, our brain as a defense mechanism starts justifying it. There are many behaviors that people want to change like procrastinating, their love for junk food, smoking etc. which could have serious consequences later in life. Motivating people to change their behavior is important because it gives them a sense of control.
Below are the ways to motivate effectively-
Emphasize what other people do- We are social people, we really care what other people are doing, we want to do the same and even challenge others by doing it better. For instance, teachers have the responsibility of motivating students to study. To motivate reading habits in the class, a teacher can motivate students by saying ‘X always reads books, that’s the reason she scored well in her English exams’. Likewise, to motivate employees working in the Sales Team, the Sales Manager can say, ‘Laura usually exceeds her sales target because, she maintains good relations with her customers’. It is important that organizations' motivate their staffs’, this is the main reason why some businesses are more successful than others.
Give instant recognition for worthy behaviors- This works because we value instant recognition, what we can get now makes us more content and happy than, the ones we get in the future. Of course, we want to be happy and successful in the future too but, the future is so far away. Future is uncertain. People tend to choose something sure now rather than, something that is unsure in the future. Referring my previous example if another student Y follows X’s habit of reading books then Y should be rewarded because reading becomes associated with recognition and it then becomes Y’s habit ultimately Y’s life style. Therefore, giving instant recognition as a result of a worthy behavior now will bring positive change to the future as well.
Highlight amelioration not failures- This means in order to motivate people, you might want to highlight their amelioration or progress not their failures. Suppose, if a kid eats junk food quite often, you might want to tell them, ‘You know, if you stop eating junk, you’ll become better at sports’ rather than ‘If you don’t stop eating junk, you might get diabetes and obese’. So, you highlight amelioration not the failure.
In conclusion, there is no need to communicate risks, but we need to rethink how we do it. Warnings to induce fear do not change behaviors but make a person do only what is asked. Motivating people change their behaviors making actions ingrained as their habit therefore, paving the way for trusting and relying on people and, not depending on negative strategies like micro-managing people. We need to try positive strategies rather than warnings and fear on people to seek amelioration. | https://medium.com/@mariakhalidismail/motivate-but-how-89dc09213aa8 | ['Create Cultivate'] | 2020-04-26 22:34:33.666000+00:00 | ['Fear', 'Psychology', 'Motivation', 'Procrastination', 'Positivity'] |
Iggy Azalea Can’t Stop Losing Weight After Giving Birth - why cant i lose weight | Iggy Azalea Can’t Stop Losing Weight After Giving Birth - why cant i lose weight Vaxoj ·Nov 16, 2020
Iggy Azalea has lost all of the baby weight she put on, plus an additional twenty pounds, and she wants to find a way to stop losing so much weight.
The Aussie rap star is a first-time mother and she’s still learning about how her body reacts to birthing a child. Welcoming baby Onyx into the world with her ex-boyfriend Playboi Carti, Iggy pointed out to her fans that, since giving birth, she’s been a weight-loss machine. However, she’s not even trying to shed the extra pounds. In fact, she’s twenty pounds lighter than she was when she got pregnant, so she’s worried about what’s going on with her body.
Medical weight loss Tips Here
“Any other moms who can’t stop dropping weight after having a baby? (Not a brag, genuinely wanna hear if you had this happen),” asked Iggy. “I don’t try/want to lose weight but it’s literally just shedding off me, is it hormonal? Should I be concerned? 20lbs lighter than pre baby and counting.”
People in her replies are telling her that this is normal because of the breastfeeding process, but that she should stop losing weight so quickly after six weeks. Others are suggesting that she should consult her doctor, pointing out that some women experience a thyroid condition after childbirth, which could be contributing to her high-rate weight loss.
In recent weeks, Iggy has been weighing in on politics, using her social media page to criticize Donald Trump, celebrating Biden’s win on TikTok by twerking. Her world-famous booty remained intact despite the weight loss. | https://medium.com/@vaxoj92958/iggy-azalea-cant-stop-losing-weight-after-giving-birth-why-cant-i-lose-weight-7cbfe295949 | [] | 2020-11-16 18:00:07.754000+00:00 | ['Baby Onyx', 'News', 'Twitter Marketing', 'Weight Loss', 'Weight Loss Tips'] |
What subversive madness must live through you? | There’s a door, in a room, above a garage, in Merseyside. And if you scrape off a layer of paint or four, you’ll be looking at a gaggle of mutilated faces; noseless and shrunken.
And these faces would grin back at you, all eyes and mouth; ghoulish and gormless. A disembodied throng of serious fools, time-travellers, sentinels at a former gateway to lunacy.
You’re looking at the back of my teenage bedroom door
Back in the 90s I enjoyed working myself into hysteric fervour, by snipping away at the Viking Direct office supplies catalogue. I’d cut out the faces of pictured models — officious-looking businesspeople, then fold them so their eyes kissed their mouths, leaving little in between.
In fruitier moods I’d perhaps lower a hairline, so the face resembled a smirking rugby ball. Or glue someone else’s (usually bigger) eyes in, upside down. Then I’d cry laughing at this hideous transformation of banal to ridiculous.
It beats torturing animals, I suppose.
Yet there was one face in particular that always captured my imagination…
Let’s call him Viking guy
He was a late-60-something caucasian chap, with frosty white hair, besuited, confident, and sporting a smile somewhere between affable and smug.
This kindly man reeked of boardrooms and golf courses — the definitive pre-retirement exec. He was (possibly) the embodiment of business: smart, trustworthy, sensible and serious. The kind of guy who’d do you a fabulous deal on printer ink, and throw in a gentle pat on the head for your anxious, overachieving son.
He lives on, inside me. Inside all of us?
I expect this poor gent is long dead. I wonder now what he’d make of my secret anti-shrine to everything he stood for (or seemed to).
Likewise, with my lifelong subversion of serious, corporate professionalism. Something so at odds with the noble truth of his adorable little scrunched-up face. And his command of a mutant army of gurning telesales operatives. Their upside-down eyes-bulging, attentive and pitiful.
Escapism
My squashed faces were, of course, an inconsequential detour from the seriousness of childhood: school, exams and expectations.
I grew up pretty quick — handed house keys in junior school, child-minding my siblings, cooking meals from scratch for a family of five. Someone had to be the grown-up until the grown-ups came home, from their long, stressful day at work. I suppose part of me still waits.
But that’s the origin of my serious and subversive, silly side.
I won’t denigrate either — they both have their place. Mr serious gets things done, and under control. Yet it can dominate. Often at the expense of the playful, funny, absurd side — with its ‘pointless’ outcomes.
Maybe this sounds familiar?
When problems get tricky and existential (like when I found myself drifting in a former career) the serious side can often step in. It creates perfect infinite loops of introspection. And pressurises you to find definite solutions to perennial problems, like meaning and purpose. Be perfect. Do it right. Try harder etc. etc.
But what happens to your ‘other’ sides when your serious side dominates? Where does your equivalent of the scissor brandishing lunatic, gunning for the Viking guy, go?
Perhaps more tellingly, where else in life do they inevitably pop up, no matter how hard your serious side tries to repress them?
For me it’s always something absurd
A turn of phrase, snapshot or abstract idea that catches my imagination. Like a seagull with no wings saying “bro I’m outta here”. I giggle to myself, reliving it over and over. And revel in not being able to figure out why it’s so funny. I embrace uncertainty instead of managing it, like my inner Viking guy.
My playful side instead wants to subvert the seriousness, meet it with irreverence and laughter. It seeks truth through humour. Like a safety valve. Or a different window onto a familiar vista.
A working theory: everything’s in there, coexisting
Angels and demons, inner critics and cheerleaders — you already have options. Perhaps some are muted or lost for words. Yet they’re intrinsically part of your amalgamated identity, out of reach or elusive, but in there all the same.
And they will, perhaps persistently, manifest throughout your life as simultaneous traps and escape routes.
Like mine did, when squashed faces became a full-on community project. This was in my 30s, when I left the barren grey plains of the corporate wilderness. Or my animal wisdom memes, art that emerged from a dark patch in my mid-30s.
In pondering this dilemma of how aspects of character coexist, and how to channel them meaningfully, I came across Dr. James Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst speaking on the Power of Ten podcast:
‘The people that we admire most in history… in many cases, their lives were very conflictual, full of suffering, often without recognition in their lifetime. And yet we admire them because they embodied something that was meant to be embodied in this world. It wasn’t about their egos. It wasn’t about their fiscal plan. It was about being in service to something that mattered within them. And that’s what vocation really is. And when you do that something supports you.’
As a visionary clearly in the same category as Van Gogh or Mother Theresa, I’m drawn to Jim’s compelling premise. He speculates that meaning in life (i.e. what to throw ‘yourselves’ into) is something channeled through you. It’s a crusade that you’re in service to. Something inescapable and pervasive. It emerges, through ongoing, daily battles and little victories.
Maybe you don’t quite choose it, more it chooses you?
That’s your thing and who you (already) really are
Here’s Jimbo again:
“What wants to enter the world through me? We’re always in service to something. You better figure out what it is, because if you’re in service to the primal complexes, which is to say the clusters of history that a fate presented us, it’s always going to be in some way, someone else’s life, someone else’s agenda. It’s going to be regressive in character. You’re in service to what wants to enter the world through me.”
Perhaps far too often, we throw ourselves behind what we’re told to get behind, or fall into it accidentally. We do what we ought to and should do in life. Not what we really want to or care deeply about.
And when we’re distracted or unaware, maybe there’s a risk we miss what’s right under our noses (or on the back of our bedroom doors), and has been all along.
Meanwhile, that existential struggle we know all too well. That cause we might rally behind (like my seriousness and lust for subversion with absurdity) and discover ourselves through, goes amiss.
What won’t go away? What lives through you?
In case you’re doubting the relevance of your lived experience, your particular lifelong crusade, or who you are: here’s a thought. Sometimes there’s a misconception that to champion a cause — some problem or injustice, one has to have all the answers, and be the expert on solving it.
I fell for this slight of hand, in our age of technocratic officiousness.
However, just living your crusade, knowing the ups and downs intimately, first-hand, is perhaps really what qualifies you to speak up about it and explore its domain.
Maybe I’m only justifying my own indulgent madness here (*reaches for scissors*). But there’s something inescapable about this personal quest for subversion, truth, and exploration of our shadow side.
What wants to live through you? And who are we to resist?
So, I put it to you: what themes seem inescapable in your life? What wants to live through you? And how will you speak up about it?
Because maybe there are others out there, just like you, ready and willing to join you on the adventure.
And who knows where it will end? Perhaps in some eerie mausoleum to squashed faces, on the rear of a repainted bedroom door in Merseyside. | https://medium.com/@chriskenworthy/what-subversive-madness-must-live-through-you-3b63adb278e5 | ['Chris Kenworthy'] | 2021-06-16 12:43:57.278000+00:00 | ['Purpose', 'Meaning', 'Identity', 'Psychology', 'Authenticity'] |
An Amazing Smartphone Adapter Mount for Scopes (BESTSIGHT Rifle Scope) Complete Review (2020/2021) | For hunting enthusiasts who are always want to make their hunting successful must have a complete list of tools. It is because if anything is missing during the adventure, you may not get fruitful results. One of the main components you should not ignore buying is the adaptor mount for scopes. It is essential equipment you should have to make shooting experience best. It will allow you to have a better view so you can make an accurate shot. Click Here To Get 9% Off On Your Favorite Product
Now you may be thinking which adaptor mount scope you should buy and why? The solution is here. You can spend money on confidence on the best sight phone scope mount a high rated smartphone adaptor that covers all features you expect from the best one. Salient features that make it a reliable product are
Design
When we talk about its design, constructed with durable and tough material and main parts built with aluminium and hard thermoplastic material. This does not make the product durable but also helps you enjoy the support and long service life. The mount comes with the suction cup or clamps for the proper holding of your phone. You can tighten or loosen the clamp with the help of a knob to ensure proper fitting of the cell phone. Moreover, for better protection, the anti-skid pads are present these ensure that your phone will remain intact and will don’t get any scratches over it.
The main components of the adaptor mount include
· Lock ring for proper camera adjustment
· Adjustable pupil distance
· Positioning clip
· Lens window
· Anti-skid pad
This modern piece fits on the eyepiece range of 44 to 45mm. It is compatible with most scopes, binoculars, and microscopes.
Versatility and compatibility
The mount phone adaptor is versatile in functionality. You can sue it with many devices along with a rifle to examine the things. Attach your smartphone to your compact monocular during hiking you can study tissue and algae on a microscope and connect a telescope to take a snapshot of the moon. It is a multipurpose adaptor mount for cellphones. So not only hunters can utilize its incredible features.
It offers endless possibilities a sit nicely fit with your optical instruments.
Portability and other considerations
The best thing about the adaptor mount is that it is lightweight and easy to carry. Its best fit to your any rifle model and offer enhanced portability. You can simply put in your bag pack or hang with your belt. It provides an excellent grip and helps you keep your camera in position so you can have perfect shooting experience.
Final thoughts
It is a brilliant smartphone adaptor mount for scopes. You can easily film your target sites and make a shot on the animal if you are using for hunting purpose. It is well made and designed for professional handling. It ideally fits with scopes of various diameter and makes a perfect piece for your hunting kit. You can buy it with confidence and will see you make your spending worthy. Click Here To Get 9% Off On Your Favorite Product. | https://medium.com/@julia-alovely/an-amazing-smartphone-adapter-mount-for-scopes-bestsight-rifle-scope-complete-review-2020-2021-95b26611b666 | ['Julia A.Fernandez'] | 2020-10-05 07:59:41.788000+00:00 | ['Gadgets', 'Smartphones', 'Hunting', 'Review', 'Guns'] |
Ship MySQL Logs to Elasticsearch Effortlessly with Filebeat | Written by Liu Xiaoguo, an advocate of the China Elasticsearch Community
Edited by Lettie and Dayu
Released by ELK Geek
This article gives a detailed description of the use of Filebeat to transfer MySQL log information to Elasticsearch.
Prepare the Environment
Install MySQL
You need to install MySQL by running the following commands:
# yum install mysql-server
# systemctl start mysqld
# systemctl status mysqld
####Use mysqladmin to set the root password#####
# mysqladmin -u root password "123456"
Next, configure an error log file and a slow query log file in my.cnf. These configurations are disabled by default and need to be manually enabled. You can also enable the temporary slow log feature by running the following commands:
# vim /etc/my.cnf
[mysqld]
log_queries_not_using_indexes = 1
slow_query_log=on
slow_query_log_file=/var/log/mysql/slow-mysql-query.log
long_query_time=0 [mysqld_safe]
log-error=/var/log/mysql/mysqld.log
Note: MySQL does not automatically create log files. Therefore, you need to manually create one. After a log file is created, grant the read and write permissions to all users. For example, run the chmod 777 slow-mysql-query.log statement.
Configure Filebeat
To install Filebeat on CentOS, log on to the Elasticsearch console, go to the Kibana console, click Home, and click Add log data.
Install Filebeat and make modifications step by step according to the requirements on the page. When you modify the filebeat.yml file, consider the following steps:
1. Configure dynamic loading of Filebeat modules.
filebeat.config.modules:
# Glob pattern for configuration loading
path: /etc/filebeat/modules.d/mysql.yml # Set to true to enable config reloading
reload.enabled: true # Period on which files under path should be checked for changes
reload.period: 1s
MySQL detects error logs and slow logs separately. Therefore, you need to specify the paths of your error log and slow log by using modules. The modules are dynamically loaded, so the paths are used to specify the locations of modules.
2. Enter a Kibana address.
setup.kibana: # Kibana Host
# Scheme and port can be left out and will be set to the default (http and 5601)
# In case you specify and additional path, the scheme is required: http://localhost:5601/path
# IPv6 addresses should always be defined as: https://[2001:db8::1]:5601
host: "https://es-cn-0p11111000zvqku.kibana.elasticsearch.aliyuncs.com:5601"
3. Enter an Elasticsearch address and a port number.
output.elasticsearch:
# Array of hosts to connect to.
hosts: ["es-cn-0p11111000zvqku.elasticsearch.aliyuncs.com:9200"]
# Optional protocol and basic auth credentials.
#protocol: "https"
username: "elastic"
password: "elastic@333"
4. Enable and configure the MySQL module.
# sudo filebeat modules enable mysql
# vim /etc/filebeat/modules.d/mysql.yml
- module: mysql
# Error logs
error:
enabled: true
var.paths: ["/var/log/mysql/mysqld.log"]
# Set custom paths for the log files. If left empty,
# Filebeat will choose the paths depending on your OS.
#var.paths: # Slow logs
slowlog:
enabled: true
var.paths: ["/var/log/mysql/slow-mysql-query.log"]
# Set custom paths for the log files. If left empty,
# Filebeat will choose the paths depending on your OS.
#var.paths:
Run the following commands to upload the dashboard, pipeline, and template information to Elasticsearch and Kibana.
# sudo filebeat setup
# sudo service filebeat start
Kibana Dashboard
Restart and query the MySQL database, so that a slow log and an error log are generated accordingly.
Part of the slow query log
Part of the error log
Go to the Kibana dashboard [Filebeat MySQL] Overview ECS and view the collected data. Here, you can see all the information about MySQL, including the following queries and error logs.
Summary
As shown in this tutorial, Filebeat is an excellent log shipping solution for MySQL databases and Elasticsearch clusters. Compared with previous versions, Filebeat 6.7.0 is very lightweight and can effectively ship log events. Filebeat supports compression and can be easily configured in a YAML file. Filebeat allows you to easily manage log files, track log registries, create custom word K segments to enable fine-grained filtering and discovery in logs, and use the Kibana visualization feature to provide immediate power for log data.
Declaration: This article is an authorized adaptation from Beats: How to Use Filebeat to Ship MySQL Logs to Elasticsearch based on Alibaba Cloud service environment.
Original Source: | https://medium.com/@alibaba-cloud/ship-mysql-logs-to-elasticsearch-effortlessly-with-filebeat-67ca226567f8 | ['Alibaba Cloud'] | 2021-02-18 03:40:11.797000+00:00 | ['Elasticsearch', 'Data Migration', 'Big Data', 'Database', 'Alibabacloud'] |
AYS Daily Digest 07/10/2020 — Golden Dawn a Criminal Organization, Court Rules | Nigerian Man Burned Alive in Tripoli///Tunisian Civil Society Protests Agreement With Italy///Shipping Union Pens Open Letter to EU///& More
Are You Syrious?
Following
Oct 7 · 9 min read
A crowd waits for the verdict. Photo credit: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA via The Guardian
FEATURE — Golden Dawn Ruled a Criminal Organization
Thousands of people erupted into cheers in the streets of Athens as a court ruled that the Golden Dawn party was a criminal organization, after five years of trials.
The court also ruled on several crimes committed by Golden Dawn members, cases that demonstrate the extent of their terrorist acts. Ten defendants were found guilty of the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas. The court also handed down guilty verdicts in the attempted murders of several Egyptian fishermen and assault on trade unionists.
Magda Fyssas, mother of Pavlos Fyssas cheers after leaving court. Photo credit: Keep Talking Greece
While this is a wonderful verdict for Greece, this does not mean that the country is automatically a safer place for people on the move, leftists, and others who may run afoul of Nazis. Immediately after the verdict, police violently dispersed the celebrating crowd with tear gas and water cannons (the links between Greek police and far-right extremists have been well-documented in the past).
While the party may be outlawed, the environment that helped it thrive is still rampant. As Keep Talking Greece put it, “The snake’s head is cut but its eggs are still here and some have already hatched.” Politicians may publicly praise the verdict while remaining cozy with Golden Dawn figures, including the speaker of parliament who granted one of the defendants a job in parliament just six days ago. One of the defendants is a sitting member of the European Parliament. They also continue to enact fascist policies, such as illegal border pushbacks.
The constant fear that the Golden Dawn provoked as it terrorized the people it hated, especially minorities and people on the move, will not go away overnight, nor will its followers slink away quietly.
Even though the Golden Dawn is officially recognized as a criminal organization, the government policies that dehumanize people on the move and shove them into unlivable camps are in action. The mainstream media still routinely dehumanize people on the move. There are still many cases of vigilante violence against people on the move, even if the perpetrators are not openly affiliated with Golden Dawn.
This verdict is a wonderful turning point and should be celebrated. However, there is still work to be done to eradicate Golden Dawn’s beliefs entirely, especially as so many people on the move face violence from the state and their neighbors. | https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-daily-digest-07-10-2020-golden-dawn-a-criminal-organization-court-rules-589e411751ef | ['Ellen Elias-Bursac'] | 2020-10-08 04:07:53.045000+00:00 | ['Digest', 'Migrants', 'Greece', 'Refugees', 'Golden Dawn'] |
before the sun goes down. | I can remember many occasions when my older brother and I got into trouble. I had to be about four or five, maybe. My momma would say, “You two are going to bed before the sound goes down.” I must admit, I wanted to call her bluff; and several times we did. But, there was one day, she made good on her threat.
I forget what manner of foolery we did that day, but my mother certainly put us to bed before the sun went down. However faint, I remember how I felt that day, profoundly.
I thought, “We’re in bed. And it’s not dark outside.” What made it worse was that we could here the faint, playful laughter of neighborhood kids playing outside of our window. It was pure torture. I didn’t like it. My heart seemed to sink with each shallow step heard on the concrete.
As bad as that was, I look back upon those days, and I wish that they would return. At that time, our only responsibility was to play and not get into trouble. All of my grandparents were still alive. I didn’t live 500+ miles away from my Mom & Dad. My parents didn’t have much gray hair then.
On the flip side, I wouldn’t have two cool siblings, two amazing sisters-in-law, five outstanding nieces and nephews and a great girlfriend. I understand that time moves on, but it is still nice to take a nostalgic walk down the lane we call “memory”.
I am reminded to work while it is day, because when night comes, no man may work. So, I journey on, putting one foot in front of the other. I keep working…..
before the sun goes down.
Until next time.
💙+✌️
-Herbie | https://medium.com/give-love-live-more/before-the-sun-goes-down-46eee2945592 | ['Herbert Brown'] | 2016-06-20 00:40:09.187000+00:00 | ['Childhood', 'Brother', 'Love', 'Past', 'Life'] |
Mediclaim And Health Insurance Are Not The Same | The terms health insurance and mediclaim are often used for one another but they are not the same. The term mediclaim is limited to hospitalisation expenses. Whereas health insurance has many more services under its umbrella. For example, a health insurance policy in India may include annual health check-ups, OPD expenses, daily hospital cash, and alternative treatments like AYUSH. Thus, mediclaim is one basic part of health insurance.
Mediclaim definition
Mediclaim is a basic health insurance policy that gives you the required financial protection in the times of medical emergency. Your mediclaim takes care of your expenses incurred at times when you are hospitalised because of sudden illness, accident, or surgery in the policy tenure.
There are two types of mediclaim policies:
Cashless type Reimbursement type
You can benefit from cashless mediclaim policy only at select hospitals. Such hospitals have tie-ups with insurance providers and thus they can offer you cashless treatment. Cashless mediclaim policy allows you to avail emergency medical treatments without being worried about the expenses. Your medical bills are settled directly between your insurance provider and hospital within the assured limits under cashless claims.
Cashless mediclaim does not involve any lengthy documentation or paperwork. Therefore it offers you seamless claims.
Alternatively, in reimbursement mediclaim, your insurance company reimburses the expenses incurred to you after the successful claim of medical expenses.
Health insurance definition
Health insurance is a kind of medical insurance cover that offers you complete medical and surgical expenses coverage in case of emergencies. For example, you can opt for a critical illness insurance in India that provides coverage for a variety of diseases such as kidney failure, heart disease, cancer, etc. When you have health insurance, you can either claim for reimbursement or your insurance company will clear your bill directly with the hospital in the case of a cashless facility.
Health insurance vs mediclaim
● Flexibility: Mediclaim policies offer limited coverage. Thus, they are not flexible. But they are useful when it comes to getting coverage for hospitalisation. On the other hand, health insurance plans are flexible. You can customise your plans. For example, you can select your preferred sum-insured amount.
● Ambulance charges: A mediclaim policy does not allow ambulance charges’ reimbursement. On the other hand, in most health insurance policies, ambulance charges are allowed for reimbursement up to a limit. They are reimbursed at a later stage by insurance companies.
● Maternity benefit: Mediclaim covers the cost of hospitalisation for specific illnesses. They do not cover hospitalisation expenses made towards maternity whether it is a caesarean hospitalisation or any other medical treatment for the child. But such maternity benefits are possible to get with a health insurance policy.
● Comprehensive cover assured: Under a mediclaim policy, the coverage is restricted to Rs. 5 lakhs. As the coverage is limited in a mediclaim policy, the expense of the policy is also lower. Nevertheless, with a health insurance policy, you can opt for Sum Insured as much as Rs. 50 lakhs based on your age, location, and other factors. The increase in Sum Insured in turn increases the premium for your health insurance plan. But you sure get a wider coverage.
● Add ons: Mediclaim does not offer any add-ons, that is any additional benefits, that can be added to your base plan. Although, in the case of a health insurance plan, it offers numerous add-ons and riders like maternity benefit, infertility cover, critical illness insurance in India, etc. Any of such additional covers can be added to your base policy.
Benefits of mediclaim
While a health insurance policy can offer a higher and wider coverage, a mediclaim policy has its own benefits.
With mediclaim,
● You get immediate coverage towards medical expenses made when hospitalised
● If you opt for a cashless mediclaim, your insurance company directly pays for the expenses
● If you opt for reimbursement, your money is reimbursed by your insurer
Also, you can opt for specialised policies such as corona kavach policy and corona rakshak policy. Corona kavach policy is an indemnity-based health insurance policy that covers expenses incurred from treatment of Coronavirus disease. | https://medium.com/@anilsumra/mediclaim-and-health-insurance-are-not-the-same-bfb9573e795c | ['Anil Sumra'] | 2020-12-22 06:22:53.261000+00:00 | ['Mediclaim', 'Medical Insurance', 'Insurance', 'Health Insurance'] |
Redpoint Office Hours with Tomasz Tunguz and Linda Tong, GM of AppDynamics | From Hypergrowth to Hyperscale—What I Learned Managing Small and Massive Teams
Redpoint Office Hours with Linda Tong and Tomasz Tunguz
On Thursday, December 3rd at 11:00 AM PT, Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Linda Tong, the GM of AppDynamics.
Linda has experienced it all — both the start-up and big corporation trials and triumphs. During this conversation, we will get her take on the differences between working at smaller companies versus big corporations, and what type of managerial skills are needed for both types of roles.
In 2017 Linda joined AppDynamics as Vice President of Innovation Labs & Product Experience where her design-led leadership style drove the next phase of their product journey and empowered a company culture of curiosity and experimentation. In 2019, she was promoted to Chief Product Officer where she focused on driving the company’s product vision and strategy. In her current role as General Manager, Linda leads all aspects of AppDynamics’ business as part of Cisco.
Prior to AppDynamics, Linda was VP of Product & Innovation at the NFL where she managed the product vision for the digital properties of all 32 clubs and the league. She was also the co-founder of Tapjoy and the former CCO of Nextbit Systems. Earlier in her career, Linda was one of Google’s original Android team members, and helped launch and shape the developer ecosystem for the Android OS in its earliest stages.
Please register to attend here before Wednesday, November 25th. This event will be virtual, and we will collect questions from participants beforehand and try to cover them throughout the discussion. We’ll also answer questions from the audience at the end of the session.
We look forward to welcoming Linda and engaging in great conversation! | https://medium.com/redpoint-ventures/from-hypergrowth-to-hyperscale-what-i-learned-managing-small-and-massive-teams-306139a1fbff | ['Redpoint Ventures'] | 2020-11-18 20:03:10.976000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Team Building'] |
Weizsäcker family tree | 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/family-trees/weizs%C3%A4cker-family-tree-7ecf5cfe1181 | [] | 2020-12-20 03:59:19.721000+00:00 | ['Germany'] |
To A Better 2019 | What’s an Email Refrigerator?
Ok ok ok. This isn’t just a regular email. So…What is it? Great question. Typically, the fridge is where you go to snack and find tasty things. Aaalllllso, on the outside, it’s where the best work and ideas get hung. So I’m here to feed you and digitally put a magnet on my best projects, insights, and ideas for you to see (I also just think that “newsletter” sounds like spam).
This coming year, I’m stepping up writing game and my first step is to share more. (Well, the first step is to write more.) And then I’m excited to share these with you because you’ve been someone whose opinion I trust and whose support I’ve relied on. If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them.
Ok here we go…
Illustration by Burnt Toast
2018 → 2019
I just wrapped up my 2018 annual review and 2019 plan. It’s a process I’ve been iterating on for the last decade and it’s helped me organize my life more intentionally. It’s not perfect, but it works for me. If you’re interested in my template or having me explain it, let me know.
Each year has a theme and a three word thesis.
A year ago, I set out to expand Caveday into a more profitable company, tried to meet more neighbors and be a local in our new home in Jersey City, get more recognition for my art, and start a family. So 2018’s Theme was “The Year of Cultivation” and my thesis was “Prepare for Growth.”
This coming year, I’m expecting more change. I’m exploring what it means to be a good father, changing the dynamics of my marriage now that our daughter Golda is here, deepen my sense of community, and map out a new career. That’s why I’ve called 2019’s theme “The Year of Redefining” and the thesis is “Captain my ship.” (More about this in the coming Email Refrigerator)
Life Reader 2018
For the fourth year in a row, I’ve compiled a life reader. What’s a life reader? Remember in college you’d have a course reader– compiled by your professor and xeroxed articles and readings and images? It’s similar to that. I curate the best art and articles that have influenced me this year, and then write a little introduction that outlines some of the themes and patterns that came up. I publish it as a tangible book for sale, and also share the PDF here for free.
This year, some of the more interesting themes include public perception vs internal realities, political fundamentalism vs resistance, hatred vs self love, grief vs acceptance, feeling stuck, changing identities, technology vs humanity, and the performances of life (“performing” friendship, marriage, being single, etc).
There are some great articles and amazing art in this year’s life reader.
Or check out past ones from 2017, 2016, and 2015.
Painting by Jarek Puczel
New Website / New Career Path
As I mentioned, one of the big themes for 2018 was feeling stuck and changing identities. After a lot of writing, thinking, talking and action, I’ve rewritten my career plan. The way I’m talking about my shift is that I am an artist and a teacher. I am pioneering the future of work, helping people thrive in a world of distractions by leading them in unlearning bad habits and replacing them with better ones.
Basically, my intention is to do more teaching, writing, speaking, and designing workshops. I’m going to be spending a lot of time growing Caveday, teaching with The School of Life and designing my own workshops. So I redesigned and rewrote my website and bio to reflect that change. Take a peek!
It’s uncomfortable to stop referring to myself as a designer or an advertising guy. I’m sure much of my income this year will come from that kind of work. But I’m working through the transition and setting my direction. I’ll be writing more and sharing about that redefinition and the things that helped me get unstuck.
Illustration by Rebecca Mock
Ok. Let’s Wrap It Up.
Thank you for being a part of my life and for being interested in reading what I have to say, and replying with your own thoughts. I’m looking forward to starting a conversation every time you’re looking for a little snack and head to the Email Refrigerator. I’ll keep it stocked for you.
With love and gratitude, here’s to sharing the best year ahead,
Jake | https://medium.com/email-refrigerator/to-a-better-2019-d1c81986a2b0 | ['Jake Kahana'] | 2020-12-27 18:42:41.662000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Career Change', 'New Year'] |
It’s Ok to Have Less Sex Drive Than Your Partner | It’s Ok to Have Less Sex Drive Than Your Partner
Image by Pexels from Pixabay
Things that might affect your sex drive: being tired, being stressed, birth control, whether or not you feel comfortable with your partner, hormone fluctuations in both men and women, levels of physical activity, work-life, family life, chronic illness, trust, personality, natural libido.
Things that don’t affect it: your gender.
We have this stereotypical idea that men will always want sex, and that women are reticent. It’s a trope of married couples in movies and TV — he longs to get physical, and she is happy to do it once a year under duress. In reality, each couple is different. We all have different levels of libido, which also vary throughout our lives.
This stereotype that in heterosexual relations what is normal is for the man to have more needs is harmful in many ways.
It reinforces the very same idea that created it: that sex is something that men want, and that is done to women — an idea that undermines consent because it suggests that all sex is done against a woman, making the difference between sexual assault and sex a difference of degree rather than what it truly is: a difference of nature. Sex is an act of pleasure between one or more individuals. Sexual assault is an act of power that uses sex as its weapon. The idea of sex being for men not for women also denies women their identity as sexual creatures and means that their pleasure is seen as optional.
Portraying it as normal that the guy in a heterosexual relationship should always be the one that wants it more also creates upset on both sides in the frequent cases when it is the opposite. A woman feels guilty for wanting sex too much. She may also feel insecure, assuming that if the man doesn’t want it at a particular time, it must be that he doesn’t want her, that she is undesirable. This is a logical thought process when it has always been made out that men want sex all the time. Meanwhile, the guy in such a relationship might feel emasculated by not wanting to have sex all the time, and may push himself to have sex when he doesn’t want to so as not to appear unmanly.
It’s important to dissociate sex drive from gender — it will make for better sex and happier couples. We should be able to talk about our sex drive and the times in which it is higher or lower than usual. There should be no shame in discussing it — in fact, it is an important part of consent. In couples, there are times when we feel like we should have sex just to please the other, regardless of our own desire. This can be unhealthy because sex should never be an obligation. Having an open conversation will alleviate this, because if each person can express freely their level of desire at a given time, no one will feel forced to do something against their will. Sometimes a compromise can be found — maybe he doesn’t want to have sex, but a sensual bath sounds perfect. Maybe she doesn’t feel like penetration, but a sexy massage or oral sex would be just the trick.
Discussing your sex drive with your partner can also help identify the times when a dip in libido might be the sign of something more serious. There is nothing inherently problematic in having a low sex drive. But sometimes it can be the sign of something deeper: maybe she isn’t having orgasms as often as she would like. Maybe he feels like doing something new. Maybe he is in the early stages of depression. Maybe her new birth control pill is killing her sex drive. Just chatting about your sex drive can help nip these problems in the bud.
Which is why we need to dissociate sex drive from gender, and start an open conversation about it. | https://medium.com/sexography/its-ok-to-have-less-sex-drive-than-your-partner-1e49347156b8 | ['Stark Raving'] | 2020-12-17 13:27:36.226000+00:00 | ['Sexuality', 'Sex', 'Health', 'Women', 'Gender'] |
Our Uncertainty is Not Going Away | My family and I got COVID-19 in March, and it took us months to get tested. Here’s what I’ve learned about uncertainty.
If you get COVID-19 — and I hope you don’t — your first symptom might be a dry cough, or it might be a sore throat. You might not think you have it at first. You might be asymptomatic, or you might get every symptom. Maybe it will take a week to recover, but it might take five weeks or three months. If you want to get tested, it will depend on your local county’s resources, and if you got it early in the pandemic you might not have gotten tested at all. None of these scenarios were hypothetical for my family; we had to navigate uncertainties around symptoms, testing, and more when we got sick with COVID-19 in March. Four months into the coronavirus pandemic, the United States is still facing significant uncertainties with how to handle the crisis. To move forward we all need to act responsibly with an acknowledgement of these uncertainties.
The global coronavirus crisis descended on my family on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 — the evening that President Trump issued a ban on all incoming travel from Europe. My sister, who was spending her junior spring semester studying in Denmark, was woken by her roommate in the middle of the night. In the confusion over whether the travel ban applied to US citizens, she had to scramble to get home before it went into effect. Hours after the travel ban announcement, she was on a plane. Like many Americans, that was the day I started to realize that this problem was too big, too explosive, to wish away.
Over the next four days, the pandemic upended almost every aspect of our lives. My brother, a college freshman, decided to drive home for the weekend until more information was available. The ski resort, which is one of the defining features of my Colorado hometown and where I had been working for the winter after graduating college, was shut down by order of Governor Polis. My mom and I both woke up with a sore throat. Neither of us had a dry cough or trouble breathing, so we doubted it was COVID-19. We hadn’t traveled to any hotspots recently, or known anyone who had been exposed, so how could we have it? My mom suggested it was a sinus infection. Our county declared a state of emergency. My mom’s health worsened and she developed a cough.
On Saturday, March 14, a friend of my mom’s, who had been feeling ill for a few days, found out she had tested positive for COVID-19. After a group of Australian tourists tested positive for the virus, there was a brief window where she and other members of the public were able to get tested. She texted my mom for prayer, and they compared their symptoms: her early symptoms aligned almost exactly with my mom’s. My mom called the county’s coronavirus hotline and was told they were no longer testing. Her symptoms, they said, suggested COVID-19, but they were saving the remaining tests for hospitalized patients. Their instructions for her were to assume she had it, self-isolate at home, and go to the ER if she couldn’t breathe.
Our family’s situation was now apparent. Somehow the novel coronavirus, which first spread through a city almost 7,000 miles away, was in our home, in our lungs.
The same discussions reverberating on the national stage were echoed, with tangible urgency, in our home. How should we get groceries? When would it be safe for my brother to pick up the rest of his things, abandoned in a freshmen dorm room now scheduled to shut down for the rest of the semester? My brother and sister had been home for a few days now; how should we protect them from the virus? We answered the final question with a careful routine of disinfecting and makeshift protective equipment. I wrote down a list of “Quarantine Guidelines” and pinned it to the fridge: my brother, sister and I were each to sign up for nights to disinfect communal surfaces, such as doorknobs and countertops. We decided the family members who had symptoms — my mom, dad and I — would wear gloves and masks whenever we were preparing meals for the family. We found a spare box of disposable gloves in the basement, but masks had long been sold out in the area, so we made do with bandanas (now, of course, the CDC and WHO strongly recommend that everyone wear face masks, but in mid-March those guidelines were not in place). The first night my dad laughed at how ridiculous I looked wearing a pink bandana from my tenth birthday. I laughed too and tried to ignore the growing tightness in my chest.
Our careful self-isolation efforts ended up being insufficient. Five days after arriving home, my sister began exhibiting symptoms. Two days later, my brother followed. Their infection, although disappointing, wasn’t surprising. My brother and sister had already been exposed before we realized we likely had it, and the infected outnumbered the healthy three to two. We half-heartedly continued the daily disinfection routine for another week or so. Wearing the bandanas while cooking now felt futile.
Over the next two weeks, I saw first-hand the insidious quality of COVID-19 that has made it so difficult to contain: symptoms can range from barely noticeable to severe, and each member of my family reacted differently. My sore throat persisted for about five days, and I had one night of fever. For about a week I had a tightness around my chest, but I still was able to do most of my normal activities. My dad’s symptoms were also mild, and my brother exhibited so few outward symptoms that to an outsider he seemed perfectly healthy. My sister experienced the same symptoms with the addition of nausea, but her fatigue and shortness of breath lingered for five weeks. Yet while we each dealt with our varying degrees of mild sickness, we all had to watch helplessly as my mom developed all of the most common symptoms of COVID-19: a dry cough, fever, difficulty breathing, extreme fatigue, body aches, headache, nausea, rash, loss of taste.
Facing an unknown virus with no cure, we tried to rest and eat healthy. On the best days, we cooked together or laughed at memes, enjoying the unexpected reunion. On the worst night, my mom, alarmed by her inability to catch her breath, made sure each of us were awake before my dad rushed her to the ER. She told me later that she wanted to make sure she said goodbye, just in case. Us kids, left behind so we didn’t potentially expose hospital staff to the virus, knelt on the carpet and just prayed. The ER doctors determined that her oxygen levels were strong enough to send her home the same night, but they still weren’t able to give her one of the scarce COVID-19 tests. Instead, she was tested for the flu. When it came back negative, the doctor called to confirm, by process of elimination, what we already knew: she had COVID-19. | https://medium.com/@martag2250/our-uncertainty-is-not-going-away-5916dddf6121 | ['Marta Galambos'] | 2020-07-20 02:52:56.772000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19 Testing', 'Covid Diaries', 'Uncertainty'] |
Trump and DeVos’s Plan to Reopen Schools Hides a Sinister Agenda | By Peter Montague, Truthout.org, July 23, 2020
Parents of 51 million school-age children in the U.S. are facing an agonizing choice — whether to risk exposing their children to the coronavirus in public school classrooms this fall, or to sacrifice their children’s intellectual, social and emotional development by keeping them home for “online learning” via the web, which even before the pandemic was judged not very effective.
To make the choice even more difficult, President Trump and his education secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos, have threatened to withhold federal funds from any school that does not open its classrooms fully in the fall. Both Trump and DeVos insist face-to-face teaching is perfectly safe, which health scientists say is not true.
Trump and DeVos are adamant. On “Fox News Sunday” on July 12, DeVos said, “There’s nothing in the data that suggests that kids being in school is in any way dangerous.” Trump’s spokesperson, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, said on July 16 that “science should not stand in the way” of school reopening because “science is on our side,” showing it is “perfectly safe” to fully open all classrooms in the fall.
Science does not support claims of perfect safety. Schools are likely high-contact zones. Most schools cannot presently afford regular disinfection; many students and their parents may object to mandatory masks ( 38 percent of U.S. adults don’t wear masks when they leave the house); certainly not all kids will remain six feet apart. COVID-19 can definitely infect some children, some of whom can pass it on to their families, teachers, school staff and other children.
States test and report COVID cases differently, but Bloomberg News reports that, in Florida, about a third of all children tested have been positive for COVID-19; in California it’s 8.4 percent; Mississippi, 9.4 percent; Arizona and Washington state, 11 percent. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 3.3 million seniors age 65 and older — prime candidates for serious illness — live with a school-age child. Furthermore, another Kaiser study concluded that one-quarter of all teachers (1.47 million people) are in danger of developing serious illness if infected with coronavirus.
Almost everyone agrees that children sorely need the many benefits of school attendance — food and friendships, books and basketball courts, time away from family, and a safe place to spend it, plus stimulating interactions as they learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Furthermore, 27 million working parents need their children cared for safely during the week. “Safely” is the hard part.
Educators say opening schools safely will cost up to $245 billion on health-related renovations — billions that local governments do not have, and which Republicans in Congress have so far refused to provide. The CARES coronavirus relief law, enacted in March, earmarked only $13.5 billion to improve school safety. Since then, Republicans have refused to provide additional funds, instead suggesting that state governments should simply declare bankruptcy. (Bankruptcies occur in federal courts, which would give Republicans a chance to slash social safety nets in Democratic strongholds like New York.)
To reopen safely, schools need more money and more space. Doubling the distance between students will require twice the space. Part-time online learning will require access to broadband, and laptops or tablets for everyone. According to a recent survey, only 24 percent of teachers report that all their students have access to a tablet or laptop for school work. In addition, everyone will need masks, and schools will require frequent, thorough cleaning.
The Washington Post reports that Congress is currently negotiating a bill that might give schools another $50 billion to $100 billion — still far below the amount needed to make schools safe. Plus, the Post says, Trump and DeVos are angling to give the money only to schools that open fully. They want to punish schools that open only part-time.
Why are Trump and DeVos saddling parents and public schools with this impossible dilemma? Trump just wants to win the election November 3 and he apparently thinks opening schools will make everything appear normal. DeVos appears to have a more devious agenda.
DeVos blurted out her coronavirus plan on “Fox News Sunday” when she said, “American investment in education is a promise to students and their families. If schools aren’t going to reopen and not fulfill that promise, they shouldn’t get the funds. Then give it to the families to decide to go to a school that is going to meet that promise.”
It’s no secret that DeVos would like to privatize all public schools. If public schools become hotbeds of infection, confidence in public education will diminish; perhaps then more parents would join DeVos in pressing to eliminate the public school system entirely. This agenda should surprise no one — it has been Betsy DeVos’s religious mission for the past 25 years.
DeVos is a fundamentalist Christian who has said she wants “to confront the culture to advance God’s Kingdom.” To do that, she said, God led her to reform public education, which in her mind means privatizing it.
U.S. public schools spend $694 billion each year and a lot of hucksters — many with no experience as educators — want a slice of that pie.
“It’s been a long-standing goal of the Religious Right to replace public education with Christian education,” says Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies. “The long-term strategy of how to change culture is through education.” On June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state can fund religious schools, which DeVos called “a historic victory.”
DeVos is also a so-called deeply anti-government libertarian. An editor with the Detroit Free Press says DeVos is driven “by her conviction that any nontraditional public school is better than a traditional one, simply because it is not operated by government.”
Since the early 1990s, in her home state of Michigan, DeVos has led and funded a libertarian anti-government movement to give parents “school choice.” This means taking taxpayer money from public schools and giving it directly to parents in the form of “school vouchers’’ which can be used like cash to pay expenses for sending a child to any school that will accept them, including public schools, private schools, religious schools and “charter schools.” Vouchers are always promoted and defended as a way to give poor people a decent education, but that’s often a cover for other motives.
Charter schools are “public” schools in the sense that the public pays for them. However, charters are privately owned and operated; they choose their own students, manage their own curriculum, and in most places are not answerable or accountable to local school districts or school boards or to anyone else. They can teach whatever they want and manage their money in secret.
With Betsy DeVos and her husband funding and cheerleading the campaign, in 1994, the state of Michigan bet heavily on charter schools. It has not gone well.
In 2014, a yearlong investigation of Michigan’s charter schools by the Detroit Free Press revealed: “Wasteful spending and double-dipping. Board members, school founders and employees steering lucrative deals to themselves or insiders. Schools allowed to operate for years despite poor academic records. No state standards for who operates charter schools or how to oversee them.”
As a lengthy New York Times exposé revealed in 2017, “Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. The Children Lost.” As the Times pointed out, “it’s important to understand that what happened to Michigan’s schools isn’t solely, or even primarily, an education story: It’s a business story.”
The “school choice” movement is driven by libertarian malice toward all government, but it is also driven powerfully by the profit motive. U.S. public schools spend $694 billion each year and a lot of hucksters — many with no experience as educators — want a slice of that pie.
Jonathan Kozol, a writer and advocate for public education, has described the “corporate predation” attacking U.S. public schools. In 2007, Kozol reported that a group of investment bank analysts said privatizing public schools offered the biggest profit opportunity since health care services were privatized in the 1970s. “The K-12 market is the Big Enchilada,” one banker wrote.
Because they can choose their own students, charter schools tend to select students whose parents are well-to-do and resourceful, leaving the public schools with reduced funds to educate the remaining kids, whose parents are poorer. In this way, “school choice” increases inequality in the nation’s educational system.
In the U.S., conservatism and racism have always gone hand in hand. Vouchers and charter schools have become a legal way to maintain and expand racial segregation. It’s probably no accident that the idea of school vouchers was invented by libertarian economist Milton Friedman in 1955 — the same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools must be racially integrated “with all deliberate speed.” After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Southern states were looking for a way to evade school integration; private schools were the answer, but they were expensive. School vouchers (and later, charter schools) solved that problem by diverting taxpayer money to private schools, thus legally maintaining racially segregated schools, separate and unequal.
From the DeVos/Trump viewpoint, privatizing education has another major benefit — eliminating or weakening teachers’ unions, which are among the nation’s largest and strongest remaining labor organizations. As a Republican Party donor and leader in Michigan, DeVos has aggressively opposed unions. In 2012, she and her husband pushed through an anti-union “right-to-work” law, outlawing labor contracts that require all employees in a unionized workplace to pay dues for union representation. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision made “right to work” the law of the land nationwide.
The most important factor in the quality of public schools is funding, but the second most important factor is the quality of the teaching. To maintain quality, teachers — rather than bureaucrats or business managers — must shape the curriculum and control the amount of time teachers spend in collaborative planning and in individual tutoring. Furthermore, teacher pay and years of experience are crucial to successful schools. Without collective bargaining provided by a union, teachers cannot have a serious voice in school improvement.
As Trump and DeVos demand that all schools open in the fall, despite the obvious health hazards to tens of millions of people, we can recognize their cynical plan as part of a long-term strategy by conservatives to eliminate democracy’s most important foundation — an informed populace based on quality education for all. To ensure a decent education for all, instead of privatizing schools we could eliminate poverty and stop funding public schools by property taxes, which inherently produces unequal school funding. We could easily fund all public schools adequately and equally, and, finally, we could protect, support and strengthen teachers’ unions.
If Democrats are serious about “resistance,” they will take this stand, loud and bold, for public health and quality education for all. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/trump-and-devoss-plan-to-reopen-schools-hides-a-sinister-agenda-4fc18412f9f5 | ['Peter Montague'] | 2020-07-24 21:09:22.950000+00:00 | ['Charter Schools', 'Devos', 'Covid 19', 'Trump', 'School Choice'] |
Statement on Black Lives Matter and Global Uprisings to Abolish Police | pictured: protestors march in the streets of Chicago against police brutality and white supremacy. Photo courtesy Chicago Community Bond Fund
Hi. It’s The Skewer.
We — every one of us humans — are in the middle of ongoing global uprisings against white supremacy, the carceral state, and (extremely good and exciting) the very notion of police. These uprisings are both leaderless and abundant in leaders, some of whom have been on The Skewer’s stage.
If you can demonstrate in person (put your body against the machine), we urge you to do so. That said, there still is a global pandemic going on, and police have consistently escalated violence at these demonstrations, so you are taking a risk by attending — only you can make these decisions about your safety. If you can’t find the courage or ability to show up in person, then help the cause in other ways.
Here is a document listing local protests so you can be informed of when/where you can turn out:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1_SEauMp53f2KxWB0JfXr92tLHtJ4UnKzxIsxwYiHddc/htmlview
If you are lucky enough to still be employed in a job that does not put you at risk of coronavirus, we demand you put money toward the movement. If you aren’t thus employed, please give whatever you are able to. If you’re overwhelmed by where to start, some suggested places to put money include:
US Community Bail Funds
https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory
https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory My Hood, My Block, My City — Chicago Small Business Relief
https://www.formyblock.org/
— Chicago Small Business Relief https://www.formyblock.org/ Assata’s Daughters — Chicago black youth leadership
https://www.assatasdaughters.org/
— Chicago black youth leadership https://www.assatasdaughters.org/ Chicago Mutual Aid — direct person-to-person financial assistance
http://chicagomutualaid.net/
— direct person-to-person financial assistance http://chicagomutualaid.net/ ActBlue mass donation page to a number of Black Trans groups. You can split your donation equally among all orgs, or read up on them and choose which to support
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/blacktrans-queer?tandembox=show
You can split your donation equally among all orgs, or read up on them and choose which to support https://secure.actblue.com/donate/blacktrans-queer?tandembox=show Massive directory of places to donate you’ve probably seen shared around:
https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/
In general, it’s better to support local organizations over national ones whenever possible. (Also do not give money to Shaun King ever [citation].)
Here is a tool that will automatically generate emails to local politicians to demand defunding the police: https://defund12.org/ (IF YOU CAN, it’s best practice to vary the wording of the email as it’s easier for politicians to ignore emails with standardized verbiage, but making any noise is better than staying silent).
If you’re early in your radicalization and want to know more about what “defund the police” or “abolish the police” means in practical terms, here’s Angela Davis:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CBWQP3PFFMS/?igshid=1g1f7tkwl4jxk
“Safety safeguarded by violence is not really safety”
The police would have you believe that humanity is a violent, seething mass that you need a military force to beat back in order to live safely. As the mass global movements for racial justice have proven: no. The people putting us in danger are the cops and the system they represent.
If you are conflicted because you personally know police who are good people, remember the issue is not that all police are bad people (though many are!), but that policing as a concept is a violent and evil force of oppression that cannot be wielded for justice no matter how good the wielder’s intentions. For proof, see literally everything the police do.
The Skewer stands in solidarity with BIPOC performers, staff at Cafe Mustache, and citizens of Chicagoland.
It may be a long time before we’re able to be together in person again. Until that time, we are foregoing further Skewer shows and instead supporting black- and BIPOC-led shows like:
The Stoop
Congrats on Your Success
Soul Stories Live
Pour One Out
Stay safe, stay healthy, stay angry.
with love,
erica and Tom | https://medium.com/theskewer/statement-on-black-lives-matter-and-global-uprisings-to-abolish-police-55bac0cf5cae | ['The Skewer'] | 2020-06-15 18:46:55.608000+00:00 | ['Uprising', 'Blm', 'Blm Protests', 'Chicago', 'Defundthepolice'] |
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