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Hope you like this review , always DYOR
@cLEarnProject #cLEarn | https://medium.com/@claudiu20042002/https-pyro-network-telegram-contest-58206ab10325 | ['Macovei Claudiu'] | 2020-01-14 00:00:40.302000+00:00 | ['Deflationary', 'Ethereum', 'Staking', 'Contests', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Words of Paradise | The unique program is the brainchild of Associate Adjunct Professor Tod Goldberg, its director and an accomplished crime novelist, and Agam Patel, associate director of both the MFA program and the UCR Palm Desert Center.
The academic year includes two rousing residencies where students work hand in hand with some of the top authors, poets, and screenwriters in the country. Think of it as a literary fantasy camp.
“The low-residency model has existed for years, but what I wanted to do was have it take into consideration the 21st-century writer,” Goldberg said. “That’s not someone who wants to work in solitude. It’s not someone who wants to avoid talking about publication and production. It’s someone who is as business savvy as they are creatively savvy. I wanted to integrate a robust online platform, allow all genres, and provide easier access to professors and professionals. I imagined a low-residency that was not low interaction.”
The program celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2018, and dozens of alumni returned — as they are encouraged to do every year — to join in the process and celebrate the newest batch of graduates.
The residencies consist of classes with published authors, working screenwriters, and esteemed guest lecturers. There are also daily workshops in which students share what they’re working on with peers and instructors to get thoughtful critiques and ensure their writing is as polished as possible.
“It’s a great program, because it’s about fostering content for the students in whatever writing industry they want to work in,” said playwright Michael “Mickey” Birnbaum, an assistant adjunct professor and program graduate. “And whatever kind of work you’re doing — poetry, screenwriting, plays, fiction, nonfiction — they are capable of supporting you in that specific field.”
The success of the MFA program, which takes seven quarters and five residencies to complete, comes through clearly in the numbers.
Agam Patel (left) and Tod Goldberg
According to Patel, the first class in 2008 had 22 students. Today, the total student body consists of about 80 students spread across four majors, making it one of the largest MFA programs in the nation. The program has produced more than 300 graduates in its 10-year run, and 75 percent of them have published or sold their work within two years of graduating, not including self-publishing.
The list of success stories includes Suzy Fincham- Gray ’15, whose book “My Patients and Other Animals: A Veterinarian’s Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope” was published by Spiegel & Grau in 2018; Natashia Deón ’12, whose novel “Grace” was published by Counterpoint in 2016 and was a New York Times Best Book of the Year; Jalysa Conway ’13, who became a staff writer for the ABC drama “Grey’s Anatomy” shortly after graduation; and Liska Jacobs ’16, whose novel “Catalina” was a direct result of her work at the residency and published by MCD x FSG in 2017.
“I was timid about letting anybody read what I thought was a bad novella, but everybody just said keep going and really championed it.” — Liska Jacobs ’16
The 35-year-old Jacobs, who lives in Los Angeles, said when she started the MFA program, her version of “Catalina” was a 40- or 50-page novella. When she left, she had an agent, a finished book, and five published essays. She has now turned in her second novel, “The Worst Kind of Want,” with an expected publication date in November.
“I was timid about letting anybody read what I thought was a bad novella, but everybody just said keep going and really championed it,” Jacobs said. “I was trying to flesh these characters out, and that’s what I did in every single workshop I had. Every single time I worked with someone on it, the story just grew bigger and richer, and I got to know the characters more.”
Each of the five residencies helped Jacobs mold “Catalina,” her thesis project, into the novel it became, she said, noting she loved the interaction of the students during the workshopping process, but it was the professors who really gave her confidence.
“Every time a new person would work with me on it, they just kept … asking me questions I hadn’t thought about,” she said. “They were almost like weird fairy godmothers, where each one I learned something different from.”
The distinguished list of instructors — literary heavyhitters across the board — is one of the program’s major selling points. They bring with them writing expertise, of course, but their goal is to teach students how to think about the craft in a more elevated way.
“‘Write this way’ — to paraphrase Aerosmith — I would never encourage that,” said author and Assistant Adjunct Professor Deanne Stillman. “I just want to make sure students are in touch with their own voices, and that they’re staying true to that and not catering to what other people tell them they should be doing or how they should be sounding.”
Maria Duarte
The student cohort is as eclectic as the stories over which they are slaving. You’ll find 20-somethings fresh out of college, retired professionals in their 70s who finally have time to pursue their passion, and hardworking servers or midcareer engineers in their 30s and 40s still trying to scratch their writing itch while juggling real-life responsibilities. Even published authors sign up to stretch their writing muscles in a new genre or to stay sharp. In this year’s class, there’s even a mother-son combo and a mother-daughter duo.
“I’m a waitress, and a baby sitter, and a writer,” said 33-year-old poet and nonfiction writer Maria Duarte of Long Beach, who adds an excited lilt to her voice on the word “writer.”
“I’ve been writing since I can remember, and I am the first person in my very big family to have a graduate degree, so that’s important to me,” she added. “I joined this program to get better as a writer and make important connections, and it’s happened. It’s changed my life completely.”
Daphne Nikolopoulos
Daphne Nikolopoulos, a 53-year-old magazine editor from West Palm Beach, Florida, has already published four books, but said she gets just as much out of the program as a beginner.
“You never know everything. There are several other published writers in the program, but we all come here to learn because you can always learn,” said Nikolopoulos, who is working on a contemporary family drama, branching out from her previously published works, which are historical fiction or historical thrillers. “That’s the exciting part of it. As a writer, you’re never finished. The world evolves, language evolves, and you have to evolve with it. This is a great safe place to do that and to form connections that will last a lifetime.”
Goldberg and Patel’s dedication to getting their students published is evident. In addition to the authors and screenwriters who give lectures and work with students during residencies, book publishers and film and TV producers are also brought in to unravel the mysteries of the industry.
That’s an important aspect that either doesn’t exist at other literary low-residency programs or, in some cases, is actively frowned upon.
“This program teaches the business of writing, and a lot of programs think that sullies the creativity, like it annoys the muse to learn about business,” said Jill Essbaum, a published poet and novelist, and an assistant adjunct professor. “But it’s really nice when a writer can feed herself.”
Mark Johnson
That concept appealed to Mark Johnson, a 60-year-old superior court judge in Riverside County and retired Army Reserve colonel, who graduated from the program in December. He’s working on a novel about a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder who can’t make sense of the world and kidnaps a cougar from a bar in Rosarito Beach, Mexico.
“My writing has improved, of course, but the thing I really like is the emphasis on the practical,” Johnson said. “They don’t just help you write a flowery piece and then send you out and say, ‘good luck.’”
Students are also required to select a cross-genre to work on, which serves as a sort of minor. For example, a poet would also learn about screenwriting, and a fiction writer would also study nonfiction, etc.
“The cross-genre element is really, really huge,” said author David Ulin, an assistant adjunct professor. “I think we live in a culture that likes to specialize, but I think that a writing genre is a blurry concept anyway, and genres inform each other. I think having a comfort or an experience with a different genre than your main genre is really useful creatively and professionally.” | https://medium.com/ucr-magazine/words-of-paradise-d327d27b4dba | ['Uc Riverside'] | 2019-02-28 21:50:07.090000+00:00 | ['Uc Riverside', 'Creative Writing', 'Palm Springs', 'Writing', 'MFA'] |
How I Trained Myself to Eat Only Until I’m 80% Full | How I Trained Myself to Eat Only Until I’m 80% Full
Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
The first half of 2020 gave me a big tummy. In the second half, I wanted to lose it. There are a million articles out there with complicated advice on how to do this so I kept it simple: I decided to exercise more and eat less.
Surprise! It worked really well, and that’s because I made two simple changes to my eating habits. I stopped eating from plates and I limited all drinks other than water to small glasses. I ran a lot too, but I attribute most of my success to the portion control methods.
First, let me tell you what it’s like to eat in a Filipino household. There are three big meals a day, and they consist of amazing food (a lot of them with high cholesterol) being piled on platters in the middle of the table. Then, you take what you want and put them on your own big plates. Seconds and thirds are common as well.
My family loves to eat until we’re bursting. We stop when we simply can’t move anymore. It’s not something I look down on; it’s always a great bonding experience and a lot of cultural importance is tied to eating together, being thankful for what you have, and sharing food with loved ones.
My inspiration to start implementing portion control actually came from Japanese culture. I visited the country for the first time in 2019, and I was impressed with all the walking they do every day. Also, one significant feeling I would always have after each meal would be that I was satisfied, but not full. Apparently, this is called harahachi-bunme, when you seek moderation by aiming to be 80% full.
Here’s how I aimed for that 80% every day. | https://medium.com/@christianalexpow/how-i-trained-myself-to-eat-only-until-im-80-full-2e7375685098 | ['Christian Pow'] | 2020-12-25 18:32:35.860000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Diet', 'Self-awareness', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Self Improvement'] |
How to Ship Multiple Paintings Overseas? | If you are new to shipping fine art overseas, most likely you will start with learning some tips on how to transport artwork safely and securely. There are many guidelines and much useful information on this matter online, so it won’t be a big problem to get the answers to all your questions. What you will find out is that proper packaging is the most important thing to pay attention to. Another obvious truth is that it is always better to ship multiple paintings separately in different boxes. Unfortunately, the latter is not always possible. Due to the cost of such shipment, not every artist or collector can afford this method of art transportation even if it is the safest one. So what is the way out? We have a solution for you!
How to Ship Multiple Paintings Overseas?
At Fine Art Shippers, we have been serving artists and collectors for many years, and over this time, we have developed a whole range of different packing techniques to satisfy any need and budget. If you need to ship multiple paintings overseas but have a limited budget, the best way to do it right is to ship them together in a custom wooden crate. Such a crate should be built in full accordance with the shipping requirements of the artworks being transported and reinforced with foam inside. Besides, it should be built using special wood that is allowed for air transportation.
Another important thing here is that every single painting should be properly packed first and only then placed in a crate. Keep in mind that this method will work only if you are shipping paintings of the same size. Also, it is not suitable for shipping large artworks. Oversized paintings require individual crates, as they are more susceptible to damage.
If you are looking for the safest and yet cost-effective way to ship multiple paintings overseas, do not hesitate to contact Fine Art Shippers. We will find the right solution to suit both your needs and your budget! | https://medium.com/@fineartshippers/how-to-ship-multiple-paintings-overseas-77306c13e347 | ['Ilya Kushnirskiy', 'Fine Art Shippers'] | 2020-12-12 00:18:05.097000+00:00 | ['Logistics', 'Shipping', 'Packers And Movers', 'Art', 'Painting'] |
CLARITY — Masks Reduce Your Chance Of Getting And Giving Coronavirus | CLARITY — Masks Reduce Your Chance Of Getting And Giving Coronavirus
The facts are unambiguous, and you can make your own mask
Image Credit: NHK World video screenshot.
The WHO does not recommend the mass use of face masks.
recommend the mass use of face masks. The Austrian Government has just required all shoppers to wear them.
to wear them. The US CDC does not recommend the mass use of face masks.
recommend the mass use of face masks. China experts say that the “big mistake” in the US and Europe is that people aren’t wearing masks.
Confused?
Let me help you:
Medical staff wear masks because they reduce the chance of airborne transmission of infection from the patients to the carer.
Let’s unpack that sentence together:
Medical staff wear masks because they reduce the chance of airborne infection. Masks reduce the chance of infection.
If it was not as crystal clear as that then medical staff would not be wearing them.
UPDATE April 4th: News study just out — the culmination of 5 years work. Nature just published new research showing face masks are effective against coronavirus, even reducing virus detection in aerosols in patients with coronavirus infections. Read on
The issue is about community spread
OK, so you may have an objection about the present moment — that there are not enough masks. Sure, and that’s nothing to do with what masks are for, that is simply logistics.
It is also not the reasoning behind the position taken by the WHO. Don’t confuse the two issues.
Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme — noted the global shortage of masks and said they must be a priority for frontline health workers. But he said this is not the primary reason for the WHO’s position on the use of masks. March 31, 2020.
Clearly, where there is a shortage then masks must be distributed in priority order. That’s not the issue about the mass use of masks.
The issue is one about one thing — community spread.
WHO and the US CDC believe that mass use of masks will not reduce community spread. Austria thinks they will, and China says that this is a fundamental requirement to limit community spread.
Cultural cringe is partly to blame
Most people in the West view “community spread” as managing the risk of them getting the virus. People in the East regard community spread as them managing their obligation not to give the virus to their family, friends and the community.
In China, not wearing masks in the current health crisis is seen as unhygienic, irresponsible, and even transgressive. Punitive measures are taken by authorities, with non-mask-wearers publicly shamed and humiliated on Chinese social media.
In the West, masks have been widely viewed with suspicion. The official advice from Australian health authorities is if you are not sick, don’t wear masks.
Masks limit community spread better than the current non-mask guidelines
Medical personnel don’t want to inhale an airborne virus from a patient. This is managing the risk of getting the infection. It works. That’s why they do it.
Surgical face masks were originally introduced to protect patients from wound infection and contamination from surgeons (the wearer) during surgical procedures, and were later adopted to protect healthcare workers against acquiring infection from their patients.
The big myth of the community spread guidelines is that standing 1.5m from another person is as effective risk management as wearing a mask.
The behaviour of microdroplets makes 1.5m ineffective
When we speak there are masses of water droplets spraying from our mouth in a vapour. That 1.5m distance is based on early observations that the droplets in the vapour fall to the ground quickly — within 1m.
The big droplets do fall to the ground quickly.
Image Credit: NHK World video screenshot.
But researchers in Japan have recently discovered that there are two types of droplets — macrodroplets and microdroplets.
The microdroplets float for a long distance and stay active for up to three hours — and each one carries a heavy load of the virus.
If someone talks loudly and you are standing 1.5m away you will be showered in microdroplets. The Japanese scientists mapped the microdroplets with lasers, and this phenomenon is very clear to see.
If the air is moving just very slightly towards you, you will be showered in microdroplets. When you breathe in, you will breathe the microdroplets and their viral passengers down into your mouth and throat.
Social distancing guidelines are a 2nd best option
Current social distancing guidelines are a second-best option which — at 1.5m — do not account for the unpredictable trajectory and lifetime of microdroplets.
It’s conclusive. If you wish to protect yourself from a second-party carrier, then wearing a mask improves your odds.
And, if you are inclined to do the right thing by your family, friends and the community in which you live, a mask will reduce your chance of infecting them.
Is that obvious, or does anyone not believe that having a mask over your mouth will greatly reduce, if not prevent, the ejection of sprays of an airborne virus as you speak?
This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role — you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others,” — George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
China very successfully controlled the spread of the coronavirus by a decisive range of measures which include the compulsory wearing of masks. Wearing masks is not a magic solution, but it adds to the overall effectiveness of a coordinated range of interventions.
The interventions implemented throughout China include complete lockdown of cities, active case surveillance, rapid investments in increased testing capacity, isolation of cases, treatment of severe cases, quarantine of cases and high-risk groups, and behavioural risk-reduction strategies, such as the compulsory use of masks in the general population — The Lancet, April 2, 2020.
Summary — we should all be wearing masks
To sum up the evidence, it is that:
Masks significantly reduce your risk of getting coronavirus from someone else — “greatly reduce” even applies if they are standing at 1.5m from you. Masks significantly reduce the risk that you will spread the coronavirus from you to other people.
Is there anything unclear about that?
We should all be wearing masks when outside. This especially applies when going shopping and to places where the breath of others is likely to float in the air.
The current guidelines from the WHO and CDC will inevitably be altered:
To recommend the mass use of face masks; or
To change the social distancing specifications e.g. more distance as a minimum; and
Include advice on where to stand, sit and otherwise minimise the infection risk from microdroplets;
Or, all of the above.
Not convinced yet, check the stats
If you are not yet convinced, then compare the coronavirus trajectories between countries that enforce the mass wearing of masks with those that do not.
Get the picture? The stats don’t lie.
In the meantime, with masks facing critical supply shortages, this video from Japan [From “How to Craft Safety”] shows you how to make a relatively effective mask at home.
It’s a lot better than having no cover.
Let’s flatten this curve together and send it down. Wear masks when you can.
Good luck. | https://medium.com/body-age-buster/clarity-masks-reduce-your-chance-of-getting-and-giving-coronavirus-fdd3df613fd8 | ['Walter Adamson'] | 2020-05-31 10:49:33.293000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Masks', 'Community Spread', 'Infection', 'Covid 19'] |
Keanu Reeves’ Top 10 Performances | Keanu Reeves is a great actor. This isn’t a personal opinion, but a fact. One that has given quizzical eyebrow raises to questioning of my credibility, followed by sympathetic nods when I try my best to explain. Granted it doesn’t help when you compare Keanu to some of his more successful contemporaries along with mentions of some his most cringey performances; however, if time (especially time during the COVID-19 pandemic) can teach us anything it’s that a little self-reflection is always for the better. So that’s what I’ve done with my time given unto me by the pandemic, is review my favorite and least favorite Keanu films to better understand what makes this enigma so enthralling to watch and if not that than at least give myself a serotonin boost while trapped in limbo.
10. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
This may not be Keanu’s best performance, but it is his most memorable. After all, it is what launched him into stardom and cemented his place into pop culture, not just because of the jokes and fun storyline, but because it’s so delightful to watch him and Alex Winters act together that you can’t imagine one without the other. While there isn’t any depth to his character, there is a great amount of shared charisma and chemistry with his co-star that pulls the audience into their camaraderie convincing us that he really is this wannabe rock n’ roll stoner. Pay attention to some of his later works, Keanu never eclipses his co-stars, he acts with them.
9. Destination Wedding
Imagine Four Weddings and a Funeral except Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell absolutely hate each other, have the worst personalities, and every time they talked you would hope murder-suicide occurred so the movie would finally end. That’s roughly the plot of Destination Wedding, where two bitter people must endure a wedding together since they can hardly tolerate anyone else. I’m only putting this one on the list, because I believe Keanu is an excellent comedic actor and not just when he’s playing a charming, lovable stoner. Just like with Bill & Ted, he shares his space with his co-star, never outperforming her. While his character is equally irritable as Winona Ryder’s is whiny and preachy, it’s his timing and subtle expressions of annoyance to her neurotic exclamations that make this otherwise drab comedy somewhat bearable to watch.
8. The Neon Demon
Keanu didn’t completely fade away from film once the Matrix trilogy ended. While most action stars try to hold onto relevancy by playing the same one note character until it becomes rote, Reeves chose the character actor route. This might be read as unorthodox given his fame, but it only proves he does have range. It’s a strange delight to watch him play Hank, the sleazy proprietor of the motel Elle Fanning’s Jesse occupies. He easily shifts from a louse to a threat that feels darkly hilarious and suddenly bone-chilling. Reeves is no longer the lovable man or the stoic hero, but the creep who has no moral qualms of taking advantage of others and it’s all the more intriguing knowing he can pull it off .
7. Point Break
Point Break is a classic example of good 90s action flicks, with it’s melodrama and swoon worthy stars. It is the jumping off point of Keanu’s career as an action star (quite literally almost feels like it since he does jump out of a helicopter). Arguably Speed is his first foray into action stardom, but I think Point Break offers something much more unique than the usual blockbuster fanfare. What most actors usually bring to such a role is usually a bit of cockiness paired with machismo (see a lot of action movies from the 80s). This is not the case for Point Break in which we see a dramatic change in a leading action star. Keep in mind this was the 90s, the era of the pretty boy with his floppy hero style haircut and slender build, a hybrid of masculine and feminine aesthetics that became the blueprint for androgyny today. We can point to actors like Leonardo Decaprio or Brad Pitt as classic examples, but what does it mean to embody androgyny? Keanu does this brilliantly with his physicality whether he’s throwing punches or sitting on the hood of his car in deep contemplation before he shoots his gun. His precarious relationship to Patrick Swayze’s zen-like surfer/bank robber also offers a rare form of vulnerability that is almost never shown between men and it only works because Reeves creates chemistry with his co-star. It’s a wonderful blend of a man unafraid of throwing down his defenses paired with a deep need of protectiveness for others.
6. Constantine
Probably the closest we’ll ever get to seeing Keanu in a superhero movie. It’s not the best of it’s genre since it’s bogged down by plot inconsistencies and awkward writing. Nonetheless, it’s still a cult favorite for a reason. Reeve plays the cynical occult detective John Constantine, who exorcises demons in hopes it will save him from eternal damnation. While most would struggle with cringey dialogue, Keanu easily breezes through it with a smirk and a glare. Just like with Point Break, Reeves relies on moderate expressions and movements to articulate a broken man who attempts to redeem himself by helping others. He slinks through dark corridors with a fearlessness and cockiness that does not come from being knowledgeable, but from the futility of knowing time is running out since he has terminal lung cancer. Even smoking a cigarette, alone in his apartment becomes poignantly somber with every exhale he takes.
5. My Own Private Idaho
Surprisingly Keanu Reeves loves Shakespeare and period dramas (evidently he gave a stellar performance as Hamlet in a 1995 onstage performance at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg). This may not be believable since his worst films to date are Dracula and Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing (his performances are so notoriously bad in these films that they are constantly propped up as examples as to why Keanu can’t act). Part of the problem lies in miscasting him, the other half is understanding theatricality does not always make for good dramatic acting. Keanu’s Scott Favor is a rebellious rich boy with a fatalistic attitude and a soft spot for River Phoenix’s Mike Waters. It’s a heartbreaking duality that longs to fight against it’s fate, but knows it’s futile so it rides out the journey to the inevitable conclusion. He could have played it over the top, but instead opts for subtly, never pushing the envelope. A gentle glance at Phoenix while he professes his love or a withdrawn back to his dying mentor tells more about who his character really is than any monologue given. Gus Van Saint’s cult hit doesn’t fall into the category of period drama (although it is heavily inspired by Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V) it is one of Keanu’s well-known dramatic roles and for a good reason since it proves he really can act when used right.
4. The Matrix
What’s there to say about the Matrix? A lot since it was groundbreaking for its time and is still influential. It’s the landmark of Keanu’s career and there couldn’t have been a more fitting actor for the role since it checks all the boxes: subtle transformative physicality (check), effortless charisma (check), and fearless vulnerability (triple check!). While Reeves understands the need for dramatics in such a role, he never completely plays into it nor does he let it go over the top since it would destroy the clever worldbuilding the Wachowski sisters have crafted. Through him we map the heroes’ journey as an everyman to revolutionary leader. It’s a culmination of his previous characters building upon one another to form the One. Unlike with Point Break, there’s no hesitation of jumping from great heights, he can only rise to the occasion.
3. John Wick
On paper John Wick sounds like a basic action flick that could have easily been lost in a market that is oversaturated with bland blockbusters. Thankfully and joyously this was not another bad movie, but a comeback that barreled in with a crash and kept pushing forward. Much of an actor’s life plays into how their on screen performance is interpreted, especially in the case of Keanu Reeves. Here is a great man who relatively disappeared from the public eye only to suddenly return, older, still just as strong, but something has changed. The fearlessness is still very present, but the naivete is gone and replaced with self-awareness of his public persona and the characters he’s played throughout his career. It helps knowing that most of his filmography consists mostly of playing loner characters. Men burdened with great power or a difficult past that isolates them from society. He carries all these perceptions of himself with a certain weight nonetheless he carries them no matter how heavy. This is so wonderfully demonstrated in his many fight scenes. The knowledge of fighting and defending is still there, but there’s a struggle after many years of being out of action.
2. Always Be My Maybe
2019 was an explosive year for Keanu. While still riding the high of completing John Wick 3, he still had the time to sneak in a brief performance for Ali Wong’s Always Be My Maybe. Quite a few movies will utilize well established actors for cameos only for the pay off to be an utter disappointment. For the collective twenty minutes of his appearance, not a second is wasted poking fun at his ethereal persona. He wears fake glasses to get into character for a movie role, he offers pseudo-aspirational advice of following one’s dreams; his slowed down intro to AWOLNATION’s Sail is ridiculous, but not too ridiculous because after all this is a man who has played the cool, slick hero so he plays it just right. Just like with John Wick, Reeves is very aware of how he’s perceived; however, instead of shying away he laughs with us (he knows he’s an internet meme and a man of intrigue). His performance is humbling, but not too degrading that it can be read as cheesy; it’s the highlight of what is just simply a pleasant rom-com.
John Wick 3
If his performance in Always Be My Maybe is a playful jab at Reeves as a celebrity, then John Wick 3 is the burden of persona. At this point in the story, it is known John Wick is back with a massive bounty on his head. He’s considered the best of his profession and everyone around him rises to the challenge to beat the unbeatable. Throughout the movie he struggles to return back to normalcy, but can he given his reputation? He has to now juggle two separate identities: the grieving widower and the merciless hitman. We the audience via Mark Dacascos’ Zero want the joys of watching him struggle and succeeding since it confirms how much of the myth is actually true. If the final fight scene is any indication, then the answer is no. Once you have reached such great heights you can only fight to keep your place or fall hard to the bottom and Keanu has earned his right to stay. | https://medium.com/@yourdadwatchesmovies/keanu-reeves-top-10-performances-6ebd76958685 | ['Your Dad Watches Movies'] | 2020-12-23 17:53:25.494000+00:00 | ['Movie Review', 'Film', 'Keanu Reeves'] |
There are worse viruses than COVID-19 out there. How do we avoid the next big one? | There are worse viruses than COVID-19 out there. How do we avoid the next big one?
Photo © iStockphoto.com | Charoenchai Tothaisong
By Debora MacKenzie for Ensia | @ensiamedia | @debmackenzie1
This feature, part of a collection of stories around reducing the threat of wildlife-transmitted disease, is supported by funding from the Solutions Journalism Network.
Irecently wrote a book about Covid-19 in six weeks. I could do that partly because I have, in a way, been covering this pandemic since the 1990s — when scientists started predicting this would happen.
It started with warnings that population growth, economic expansion and habitat destruction were rubbing humans up against wild animals with dangerous viruses, while mushrooming cities and global air travel meant any germ that jumped to us could readily travel long distances. HIV showed how. Several near misses since then further proved the point.
But more than that, scientists actually predicted precisely the kind of virus we are now fighting — a respiratory coronavirus from bats. In 2005, Zhengli Shi, now director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, found coronaviruses in bats that closely resembled the SARS virus that started in China and almost went pandemic in 2003.
Scientists agree that more viruses capable of causing a global pandemic will emerge.
In 2015, both Shi’s lab and another in North Carolina discovered some of these bat viruses could infect human airways and cause severe disease without having to undergo any changes. The research team put “potential for human emergence” in the title of their scientific article so no one could miss it.
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Yet we ignored the warning. There was no emergency program aimed at developing a coronavirus vaccine or antiviral drugs, no global alert to watch for new coronaviruses in humans, no blanket ban on bat-derived products — not even pandemic response plans for anything but pandemic flu.
I called my book Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One because we were warned and did very little to respond. Even without drug and vaccine research and development, governments could have prevented many deaths and lockdowns with a more rapid, focused response based on scientific advice. South Korea, New Zealand and China proved that by containing the virus with early, aggressive testing and quarantine. Most countries did not.
Scientists agree that more viruses capable of causing a global pandemic will emerge, says Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, who predicted respiratory RNA viruses were a particular threat a year before the emergence of Covid-19 — a respiratory RNA virus. Virologists are also worried about several flu viruses, and about the lethal Nipah virus of Asian fruit bats, which is evolving the ability to spread person-to-person. If nothing else, there are lots more coronaviruses — and probably infections we have no clue about yet. The million-dollar question is, what can we do now to prepare so that we can prevent any of them from causing another pandemic?
The good news is that Covid-19 has taught us the risk is real, and hideously expensive, making us more likely to finally act on the warnings. The question is whether we actually will.
Surveillance and Diagnosis
First, say experts in emerging diseases, we need surveillance of viruses circulating in humans, and perhaps in animals as well, to spot any new infection fast. The 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR), a treaty governing the management of outbreaks that could cross borders, requires rich countries to help improve surveillance in poor ones — but they largely have not, says David Heymann of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who helped lead the negotiations that led to the current version of the IHR in 2005.
“Rich countries have funded international efforts” such as the new emergency response capability at the World Health Organization (WHO), installed after the agency responded slowly to an Ebola outbreak in 2014, Heymann says. “But it would be better to help poor countries take charge of managing their own health situation themselves.”
China’s hospitals have a system that automatically alerts central health authorities of any unusual clusters of disease, a good way to spot when a new virus starts spreading in people. However, Wuhan officials trying to keep the Covid-19 outbreak quiet silenced it last January, allowing the novel coronavirus to spread for weeks before serious containment measures were taken, ultimately letting it get around the world. A more fail-safe version in more countries would help to better contain potential pandemic-causing disease organisms.
Second, we must diagnose infections. Most illness is diagnosed symptomatically, for example as a cough or fever or rash; the germs responsible for the symptoms are rarely identified, even in modern hospitals. China’s pneumonias started in November, but doctors reportedly didn’t do a diagnostic test to identify the germ responsible until late December. And that revealed a new coronavirus only because China has been watching for coronaviruses since the emergence of SARS in 2002. Not all countries could have spotted it.
Diagnostic tests like the ones currently being used to screen for Covid-19 could be used to systematically screen for novel infection. Photo courtesy of Raimond Spekking from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
New technologies can in theory identify germs we haven’t even seen before. The novel IRIDICA platform, based on a mass spectrometer, spotted the 2009 pandemic flu when it first hit the U.S. But the machine was taken off the market in 2017 by the medical technology company Abbott because of low demand: Not enough big hospitals saw the need for such capability to buy it, says Ranga Sampath, chief scientific officer of FIND, a nonprofit dedicated to developing diagnostics in Geneva, Switzerland, who was involved in developing IRIDICA.
Other diagnostic technologies, like the rapid tests now being used to screen people for Covid-19 infection, could also be used to screen for novel infections more systematically. But there is no way to sell technologies aimed at viruses that may never go pandemic, and that hampers progress, says Sampath.
A third line of defense would be to proactively develop vaccines and therapeutics. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was set up in 2017 to fund the development of vaccines for potentially pandemic viruses. But progress has been slow; the only coronavirus vaccine being funded before Covid-19 was for MERS, an existing disease with a potential market. Efforts to set up a similar coalition for antiviral drugs have never gotten off the ground. Covid-19 could inspire more urgent efforts.
Which Viruses?
But what viruses should we invest in?
A logical focus might be on the new infections already attacking humans, which would be discovered through improved surveillance. But some virologists argue we should learn about viruses before they find us, not after. The Global Virome Project (GVP), a nonprofit organization, is trying to raise US$3.7 billion over the next 10 years to genetically sequence and geographically map the half-million viruses in animals that belong to virus families that can infect humans.
But Adalja and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security argue that such a survey won’t tell us which of the thousands of new viruses discovered are dangerous or likely to emerge: Only tracking disease in humans will do that.
The answer might be a bit of both. Starting in 2013, Peter Daszak, head of the U.S.-based research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, and among the scientists backing the GVP, worked with Shi to discover SARS-like coronaviruses in bats, as the GVP advocates. But the team also found which of those viruses could infect people — plus evidence that, near bat caves in China, they already were. One of those viruses eventually caused Covid-19.
The problem is that neither discovery led to an urgent program of anti-coronavirus research and development.
David Morens, senior scientific advisor to Anthony Fauci at the U.S. National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease, suspects we need dedicated institutions whose job it is to survey worrying viral discoveries, decide which require a response, and see it gets done. No one is now charged with connecting all those dots.
“We all have a stake in preventing pandemics, and the problems can’t be solved by any one country. So we should solve them together, as we have nuclear weapons.” — David Morens
“We all have a stake in preventing pandemics, and the problems can’t be solved by any one country,” he says. “So we should solve them together, as we have nuclear weapons,” where a U.N. agency monitors nuclear industries. But, he says, the WHO doesn’t have the resources to monitor global disease. “No one’s in charge.”
For example, Wuhan doctors knew last December that the virus spread person-to-person, but Chinese officials claimed to the WHO that it didn’t, possibly to avoid panicking people. Earlier transparency might have led to earlier controls and a smaller epidemic.
But the WHO had no right to go into China and verify whether China’s reports were true. Treaties for chemical and nuclear weapons permit international inspectors to verify countries’ declarations about those things. Diseases pose arguably a worse risk, but under the IHR, they are the sole concern of the country they happen to strike first. If the WHO could inspect and verify countries’ declarations about disease — and help countries build their surveillance capability while they’re at it — we might be less at the mercy of countries’ inclination or ability to report disease.
Preventing the Leap
Ultimately, to prevent pandemics we need to prevent wildlife viruses from leaping from nonhuman animals to people.
Much attention has focused on the wildlife trade, as some early cases of Covid-19 had links to a wet market in Wuhan. Certainly markets pose a risk, says Daszak. But genetic and epidemiological evidence that Covid-19 started on that market is weak. Other dangerous activities have gotten less investigation — for example, the widespread use in China of dried feces from the very bats that carry Covid-like viruses as a traditional eye medicine.
One way to reduce the threat of pandemics is to factor the cost into land use decisions, since activities such as deforestation can enhance the chance that disease organisms will move from wildlife to humans. Photo courtesy of Axel Fassio/CIFOR from Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
One way to keep humans and bats apart may be to factor the potential costs of pandemics into how we manage land use. The destruction of wildlife habitat, which brings people and wild species into new kinds of contact that can spread viruses, and makes stressed, hungry wildlife more likely to spread infection.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) brings together scientists and policy experts to advance conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. In October IPBES estimated that spending US$40 billion to US$58 billion per year on disease surveillance, and reducing wildlife trade and risky land use changes, would significantly reduce pandemic risk — a bargain compared with the estimated US$8 trillion to US$16 trillion cost of just this pandemic — and that was only until July. Timber companies and the like might be eager to cooperate, says Daszak, a lead scientist on the IPBES report, if they were liable for damages from infections unleashed by their activities.
Replacing Complacency
Meanwhile, the Covid-19 crisis will end. A vaccine might be ready soon. It won’t immediately stop all Covid-19 circulating. However, it could be coupled with rapid, frequent, inexpensive tests to see who is carrying the virus, coupled with strict quarantine of infected people and their contacts, to safely re-open businesses, schools and restaurants, says Michael Mina of Harvard University, a leading expert on immune reactions to viruses. The air travel industry is already introducing rapid tests for the virus at some airports in a bid to replace the quarantines some countries now require of new arrivals, which have vastly reduced travel.
Covid-19 has revealed the true cost of our destruction of biodiversity.
But while normal life might one day return, the complacency that led to this pandemic must not, or, disease experts agree, we will certainly have more, and potentially worse pandemics. Covid-19 has revealed the true cost of our destruction of biodiversity. As we have seen, to control outbreaks, countries must start watching more closely for novel infections, sharing that information, and making far better pandemic plans. But they must also start trying to stop novel outbreaks from happening at all, by vastly reducing the destruction of nature that allows animal viruses to jump to us in the first place.
Not only that, but people who do not see our natural planet as worth conserving in its own right may now see another point: Destroying nature leads to deadly, destabilizing, very expensive pandemics. If campaigns using cute pandas can’t end the destruction, maybe mounting death tolls — and economic devastation — will. | https://medium.com/@ensiamedias/there-are-worse-viruses-than-covid-19-out-there-how-do-we-avoid-the-next-big-one-897f4af15555 | ['Safea Me'] | 2020-12-14 18:19:21.509000+00:00 | ['Disease', 'Pandemic', 'Wildlife', 'Health', 'Virus'] |
Interview — Acetmesis — Community Leader of Stratis | Hey Acetmesis, could you please introduce yourself?
I go as Acetmesis in and around the crypto space, a mashup of my initials (ACE) and tmesis, which is a linguistic construct whereby you stick a word inside another, compounded, word, e.g. crypto-bloody-currency. Don’t ask me why I chose this name: I don’t have a good answer to that question.
Besides my passion for the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, I have worked with a small film production company making low-budget horror movies and spend all my spare time on another passion of mine, woodworking.
How did you first learn about Bitcoin and the crypto space?
I don’t remember the exact first time heard about Bitcoin, but it was quite some time ago. I do remember the first proper conversation I had about it: with my dad after he had watched a Max Keiser bit on Bitcoin in 2012/13. He asked my opinion and I’m sure I had nothing valuable to say at the time.
My first real foray into the Bitcoin world was while I was at university, studying Physics and Philosophy. Bitcoin came up in one of the Phil tutorials, not as part of the curriculum, just in a general discussion about money. This was 2014. I fell for crypto pretty hard after that; not quite a victim of the FOMO of 2013, but certainly a victim of its fallout in the year that followed.
I invested some money, subsequently lost all of it and retired from the crypto game for a year, picking it back up again at the tail end of 2015. This time, I sat down and made the effort to gain a better understanding of the technology and the value proposition: the interplay between the mechanics of a cryptocurrency and the markets it trades in. I haven’t looked back since.
Which aspects of Bitcoin and the crypto space made you choose to explore it more?
The first reason I was driven to learn more is probably shared by most cryptocurrency investors: money. I believe that the “killer app” for Bitcoin and the world of cryptocurrencies was (and possibly still is) speculation. This won’t be true forever. However, it was certainly true back then. People were making money and I wanted in on the action.
Volatility (hence, speculation) are an excellent way of bootstrapping an asset. Cryptocurrencies derive efficacy from participation. What better way to get people participating than to give them the idea that they might make some money?
This interest borne of greed developed into a passion, nurtured not by the promise of money, but by a deeper understanding of the technology. I’m very much the autodidact, so my first port of call was the Bitcoin Core repository (https://github.com/bitcoin), reading through the docs, opening code at random and trying to work out how it all fitted together using the comments.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t go anywhere using this method. So, not to be discouraged, I moved to the Princeton Bitcoin Book (https://lopp.net/pdf/princeton_bitcoin_book.pdf). It looked pretty daunting at first but it’s a really accessible primer on cryptocurrencies. I came away from it feeling like I could tackle the cryptocurrency space with a little more direction than I had first entered it with.
How did you learn about Stratis?
Pretty unpoetically, I’m afraid: on one of the various “Upcoming ICOs” websites. I’d browse them from time to time looking for promising new projects. The ICO craze was kicking in again and I am not immune to FOMO. I hopped onto the Bitcointalk topic and kept an eye on what was going on.
Chris and Krushang talked the talk (and, of course, have since been walking the walk). At the time, I was very into the exciting new idea of sidechains (exciting and new to me, anyway) and I felt that Stratis’ enterprise-facing concept had really good prospects, even in those early days. The more time I spent within the burgeoning community, the more confident I was in the project.
By the end of the ICO I had convinced my Dad and a friend of mine to participate as well. The first and only time I’ve gone out of my way to get people to invest in something.
What made you decide to join the Stratis Community?
I am an unapologetic fan of Bitcoin. Stratis’ relationship with its big brother kept me coming back for more, in the early days. What made me stay long term was the people who made up the community. Within the Stratis community, I have met some of the smartest, funniest, kindest and most generous (in spirit, time and more tangible terms) people I’ve ever had the fortune to know in my life.
At some point, I realised that I was spending more time with these people online than I did with the people in my day-to-day life. Having great conversations, learning so much from them or just generally talking rubbish. I am happy to count members of this community amongst the best friends I have.
The Stratis community is supportive, patient and passionate. The community’s culture is a joy to me and it is made healthy by each and every person who donates their time, their energy and their positivity.
Could you tell us a little bit more about your Stratis journey so far and what it is that you do and have done in the past?
My first goal was to learn. Learn about Stratis, suss out the architecture of the platform and understand the value proposition of Strat. The Stratis community is well populated with individuals who know their stuff. Fortunately for me, they are happy to give their time to people who want to learn. Bit by bit, the Stratis picture was painted for me. There’s still so much I don’t understand. Learning is the fun bit anyway.
I think that you can’t help but help other people to learn when you are learning yourself. I found that I was writing longer and longer posts about Stratis, just as a way of getting my own ideas or my own new understandings down. Fortunately, rather than be annoyed by my piecing things together publicly, people would join in, or even thank me for helping them to understand.
My own journey to understand these things became useful to other people. I realised that this was how I could start to give back to the community which had given me so much: write content to help people gain a better understanding of Stratis and be active on the various forums to talk one on one with people — answer their questions when I could or point them to the someone who could when I couldn’t and give them the resources they needed.
What would you consider as the greatest joys in running and being part of the Stratis Community?
Definitely the personal interactions with Stratis community members. What can I say, I’m a softie. I love getting to know the people who spend time in the community. So many different backgrounds, so many different walks of life. Each and every one has a story to tell and I am genuinely interested to hear it.
On a level with this is when someone says thank you for something I’ve done. Be it help them with some basic support, an article or some other piece of content. I couldn’t be happier to give my time to Stratis in whatever way I can. Having someone say thank you for doing so is a wonderful feeling. I’m only human, after all.
What’s the moment that made you most proud so far at being one of the community leaders of Stratis?
Tough question. Once upon a time I would have said the Stratis FAQ (https://stratisfaq.com/). However, it is now out of date. I hope to revamp it and give it a new lease of life. I will do so in such a way that it can accept contributions from anyone within the community. This way, I hope it can become a valuable resource once again.
I get a big sense of pride when I see the Stratis community talked of with praise elsewhere in the cryptocurrency space. I’ve seen it used as an example of a solid crypto community. I’ve seen people say things like “you should check out the Stratis Discord/Slack/Telegram, that’s how a community should be set up”. That makes me feel pride, not for myself, but for the community.
In your own words how would you describe Stratis?
Distributed/Decentralised/Peer-to-Peer Network Lego. Stratis is the underlying cryptocurrency to a suite of services that allow a user to create applications which require the participation of mutually untrusting parties. It is a familiar, flexible and comprehensive blockchain development kit. Familiar given its positioning within the Microsoft tech stack (C#/.NET), flexible given the modular nature of the platform (plug in only those components such as you see fit for your application) and comprehensive given its modular nature: new innovations can be incorporated readily.
In your own words how would you describe the Stratis Community?
Stratis.
Stratis is not the company, it is not even the code: it is the network of computers participating in the cryptocurrency. Stratis is every person who holds Strat, sends Strat, trades Strat, runs nodes etc. There is no Stratis without the Stratis community.
Perhaps it’s a little maladroit to give “Stratis” as an answer to this question. Nonetheless, I believe that the above point is very important. A cryptocurrency neglects its community at its peril. Cryptos live and die by the health of their community.
Do you see any room for improvements in Bitcoin and crypto?
Yes and yes. I believe that there is huge room for improvement for bitcoin, on all fronts: at the protocol level, scalability (not of throughput or latency or any of that rubbish, but of the future accessibility to operating your own fully validating node — i.e. keeping the blockchain size and initial download time to minimum), non-first layer technologies, user experience, adoption, social scalability and so the list continues. Development on all of these fronts is progressing at a huge speed and the improvements on Bitcoin are coming thick and fast.
As for crypto more generally, I think that it is harder to pinpoint specific areas for improvement, yet I am loathe to simply say “everything”. Bitcoin is the best truly peer-to-peer shot we have at hard money. Every altcoin chooses to accept some level of compromise, hopefully in the name of some improvement. For example, PoS accepts a compromise in true peer-to-peer consensus compared with PoW. However, the trade off is deemed worthwhile for cryptocurrencies which are geared more towards the development of decentralised applications (such as Stratis, with Ethereum also jumping on the bandwagon once they achieve the switch to PoS). I think that the crypto space needs to determine which compromises work best. This will happen naturally. Survival of the fittest. The process favours those which are best equipped to adapt and Stratis is very well equipped to adapt…
Do you see any room for improvements for Stratis?
Yes, definitely. It would be a worry if I couldn’t see room for improvement. Engaging a broader community of developers is the key area, in my mind. People talk about the network effect like some kind of crypto panacea. Determining its value for cryptocurrencies is hard enough, but identifying how best to achieve it is even harder. For me, the next step is broadening the number of developers working on top of the platform. I don’t know off hand how many teams are working with the code, 10? 12? More? Whatever the number is, it can can always be bigger.
There’s nothing worse than someone who points out areas in need of improvement but who offers up no thoughts on how to bring it about. So, off the top of my head, I would suggest Stratis host hackathons, continue to provide excellent documentation (delving now into lower-level detail) and entertain the possibility of incubator funds. There will be other ways of cultivating a developer community and we need to find the best ones.
Do you see any room for improvements for the Stratis Community?
The community is already perfect! Perhaps the only improvement would be to have more people and form an even bigger community.
I do think that the community can be better served and better utilised. It is full of smart and talented people. There are writers, designers, traders, construction workers, students, producers, musicians, fishermen, teachers — you name it. We, as a community, need to find more ways of unlocking the potential that is there.
I think that we need to take the ideas which are put forward by the community and follow them up. If someone suggests we go onto Twitter and start conversations about Stratis? Don’t wait for someone else to do it, do it yourself, if you have the time. Think we need some graphics to help explain some aspect of the platform? See if someone in the community is willing to work with you to get your ideas out there.
A lot of people would call you crazy for helping out Stratis voluntarily for such a long and consequent time, what makes you do this anyways?
I receive more in value from my time and energy given to helping Stratis than is incurred as a cost of giving time and energy. I really enjoy helping out where I can. I believe that Stratis has the potential to be at the top of this game. I want Stratis to achieve the greatest success that it can and I will give what I can to help make this happen. I see no reason for this to change and I will continue to spend as much of my time within the community as I can.
What is the thing that drives and motivates you to voluntarily help out Stratis every single day?
The individuals who make up the Stratis team and the individuals who make up the Stratis community. I do also enjoy writing and communicating ideas, but it is the people who are involved which keep me going. I don’t need any more motivation than that.
What’s your future vision for Stratis, what is the thing you hope to achieve in the long-term for Stratis and what is your role to play in all of this?
I envision Stratis as first being a blockchain playground, with multiple sidechains forming a broad ecosystem for developers to play around in. Then I believe it will solidify into a number of established applications built in fewer, best-established sidechains, with new applications being built to be a part of the larger ecosystem. The Stratis mainchain itself will become a foundation for the sidechains, used only for larger, high value transactions: the central nervous system of the Stratis ecosystem.
I am happy to do whatever I can to help bring this vision to a reality. I don’t see myself changing up where I fit in all that much. I don’t have any ambitions besides continue to help people understand and continue to grow my own understanding in turn.
When will Stratis have succeeded in your opinion?
The easy answer of course is “never”. The landscape will continue to change and there will never be a static definition of success. For me, personally, there are steps in the staircase to success which Stratis can take, which I will view as going in the right direction. As I mentioned above, building a developer community is one of those steps. A major milestone would be when the number of contributions by outside developers to the Stratis codebase outnumbers the number of contributions by the internal Stratis team.
And I would like to end with giving an opportunity to say anything you still want to say to the community or in general
There’s nothing I can say here that I wouldn’t be able to say in person to each and every individual, but: thank you for being such a great group of people to spend time with. Thank you for every conversation, every minute given to helping out myself and one another and every show of support for what Stratis is doing.
We’re just getting started.
Thanks a lot, Acetmesis for taking the time to answer all of the questions and sharing all of this information. Follow Acetmesis on Twitter here.
You can find all of my interviews here: https://medium.com/khilone/interviews/home
Khilone
Follow me on Twitter to get all the news right away: https://twitter.com/Khil0ne
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Other things to keep your eyes on: | https://medium.com/khilone/interview-acetmesis-community-leader-of-stratis-a7dbb6c1b8af | [] | 2019-04-17 15:30:04.516000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Stratis', 'Bitcoin', 'Interview'] |
Notion iOS App Redesign — Zero Cost UX Case Study for the app for taking notes | Notion iOS App Redesign — Zero Cost UX Case Study for the app for taking notes Helen Gorbachenko Feb 6, 2020·10 min read
Perfecting the Text Editing
Introduction
The Notion is an app for managing plans, records, and to-do’s in one place. I used to have weekly notes in it.
By the time I am using the app, I noticed UX issues in the text editing and adding pages. I thought, what if such problems have not only me but other users.
The purpose of this case study is to showcase the possibility of Zero Cost UX Research and to present an improved UX according to users’ feedback.
UX Activities: User Interviews, Secondary Research, Competitive Analysis, User Persona, Sketches, Wireframes, Paper Prototypes, User Interface Design, Usability Testing.
User Interviews, Secondary Research, Competitive Analysis, User Persona, Sketches, Wireframes, Paper Prototypes, User Interface Design, Usability Testing. Used Tools: Sketchbook, Notes app, UserBit, Twitter, Sketch app, Principle.
Sketchbook, Notes app, UserBit, Twitter, Sketch app, Principle. Scope: The whole process took me one month of work for evenings and weekends.
Problem Space
Judging from my own experience, I assume that the Notion app has the following area for improvements: ‘Page Lock’ feature for selecting the text, the ‘Undo’ action — especially in its behavior in adding pages, lack of duplicating rows in the mobile app.
The ‘Page Lock’ feature makes me as a user to do several actions to achieve the selection of several text rows. ‘Undo’ does not work with the accidental adding of a page, though it could save me a couple of munites. The biggest struggle I have with the duplication of checkboxes from the mobile — for this, I need to create a new row and convert it manually every time.
To validate my hypothesis, I have conducted several research activities. | https://medium.com/@helen.go.ux/notion-ios-app-redesign-zero-cost-ux-case-study-for-the-app-for-taking-notes-98e6b0f43437 | ['Helen Gorbachenko'] | 2020-02-06 17:52:19.844000+00:00 | ['Ux Case Study', 'User Experience Research', 'User Experience Design', 'Ux Design Process', 'UX Design'] |
Choice‑making and choose‑ables: Making decision agents more choosy | Dr Lorraine Dodd, from Cranfield University, examines the Artificial Intelligence approach to modelling a decision agent’s choice-making. She explores the factors affecting an adaptive agent’s freedom of decision-making and investigates factors that can shape, extend, limit or re-focus an agent’s potential in terms of their ways forward. Dr Dodd also discusses the higher-order concept of choice-making that she refers to as “choose-able” in order to distinguish between it and the more typical decision-making concepts of choice and option.
Every day we are faced with decision-making. Before we get out of bed, we may already have decided whether or not to hit the snooze button. Then there are the decisions of what to wear and what to have for breakfast. While these decisions may appear trivial, they all involve identifying a range of alternative options and choosing between them to arrive at a final choice. Each choice reflects the values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker, which are also often influenced by others’ views.
In addition to everyday life, decision-making is integral to all forms of commerce and business. Without it, management functions such as planning, organising, directing, controlling and staffing would be impossible. With choices, however, come consequences; so how can we be mindful of our alternative options so that we can make advantageous choices in an uncertain environment? Dr Lorraine Dodd, Research Director in Applied Systems Studies at Cranfield University, is addressing this conundrum. Much of Dr Dodd’s research has involved studying choice, decision and action in conflict. This has established her as a highly respected international contributor to military Command, Control, Intelligence and Information analysis.
The study of any decision-making process involves a combination of mathematics, statistics, psychology and philosophy. Dr Dodd’s current research examines how artificial intelligence (AI) and mathematical algorithms model choice-making. She also explores the factors affecting an agent’s freedom of decision-making, with particular interest in agents that have the ability to adapt. The mathematical basis that underlies these adaptive agents is fundamental to choice and as such can span from agent-based algorithms, cells and organisms through to people, organisations and socio-political institutions.
Higher-order choice-making
Dr Dodd explains that fundamental to this research is the question: “what might shape, extend, limit or re-focus an agent’s potential in terms of their ways forward and felt degrees of freedom of choice?” She refers to this higher-order concept of choice-making in terms of what is “choose-able” so as to establish the distinction between a choose-able, which is subjective, and the more typical decision-making concepts of choice and option, which tend to be objective.
What might shape, extend, limit or re-focus an agent’s potential in terms of their ways forward?
Choose-ables
Before they can choose, an agent has to assemble a list of things to choose from. This forms the agent’s potential in terms of their scope of choose-ables and comprises all the possible ways forward that they can imagine, deem acceptable (e.g., within their moral code), consider open to them, feel obliged to consider, think they are competent to consider and believe they are barred from considering (e.g., social taboos). Choose-ables tend to be influenced by the decision agent’s circumstances and their relational conditioning. Consequently, choose-ables are subjective and personal to the agent.
Sometimes only one choose-able is available to an agent. ValentinaKru/Shutterstock.com
Dr Dodd examines what can intrinsically or extrinsically affect an agent’s degree of decision freedom in order to understand the conditions that shape the choose-ables that can lead to decisive consequences.
Funnelling construct
This shaping of choose-ables, going from the imagined to those deemed possible, is depicted using a triangular funnelling construct. It shows the choose-ables in relation to the agent’s capabilities and structured by both their motivation (i.e., highly motivated agents tending to modify and increase their scope of choose-ables) and the degree to which they accord with any associated policy, rules and laws and feel that they have to abide by them. The funnel narrows as the agent hones in on the choose-ables that they believe to be possible in their quest to find the ‘best’ solution.
Theory of choice
Previously, Dr Dodd’s research explored how choose-ables were likely to sculpt how an agent might sense, feel, interpret, discern, assess, adapt and act. She highlights how these actions are moulded by the nature and scope of the paths that appear to be open to the agent when they are faced with choice-making. If the agent has only one possible course of action, then they may have to frame the situation according to that particular way forward to provide the reassurance of having a solution. Dr Dodd uses the example of western governments with their constraint of accountability and legal scrutiny, limiting them to just one choose-able, such as imposing sanctions. Focussing on sanctions can restrict how they see and comprehend the situation. This suggests that the influences can flow both ways between understanding the situation and the choose-ables that are on offer.
Social influences
Dr Dodd describes how an agent who is open to working with others and taking their perspectives into consideration will have choose-ables that include the others’ options. This agent will also be disposed to finding compromises that are acceptable for everyone concerned, rather than finding the ‘best’ solution in terms of their own preference.
So, this research brings together Culture Theory and the mathematics of Catastrophe Theory to propose novel ways to analyse the effects of relational contexts on an agent’s choose-ables.
The range of options available to an agent is determined by several factors.
Culture Theory
Culture Theory provides a relational interpretation of agents in context. Each of the four relational states of Culture Theory: hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian and fatalist suggest a choice function that could be employed to characterise an agent’s choice-making in different relational contexts. For example, if the agent is in a hierarchist state, they will tend to advocate group norms and a defined structure, such as military command and control culture. They will aim for a balanced resolution that takes other agents’ perspectives into account. Conversely, if the agent is in an individualist state, they will tend towards their personal preference with little restriction from formal structures such as rules or ethics. Their choice will be steered by what they accept as normal, for example, making profit.
The complex relational field that helps to distinguish between the four states also influences where an agent’s socio-cultural relationships might be either helping them to stay (i.e., attraction) or causing them to move away (i.e., negative e-motion). The circumstances in which agents happen to find themselves can impact on the degree of autonomy and heteronomy that they will be able to accept.
The influences can flow both ways between understanding the situation and the choose-ables that are on offer.
Catastrophe Theory
The application of Catastrophe Theory facilitates mathematical rigour in the modelling. Four shaping coefficients, a, b, c and d, are associated with different relational conditions and the ensuing choose-ables.
The four shaping coefficients are:
The combination of ‘normal’ factors used to monitor and maintain an agent’s sense of what is OK. This sense of ‘OK-ness’ can then focus choose-ables down to adaptive thresholds that are known to provide success, stability and survival. Separating ‘confusion’ factors that represent the degree of uncertainty experienced due to a situation having two or more conflicting perspectives. Belief ‘bias’ factors used to comprehend biases and differences in projected outcomes as well as beliefs in their own and other agents’ notions of possible outcomes. Assessment ‘value’ factors to evaluate and resolve the agent’s own and other agents’ preferences and perspectives.
Dr Dodd notes that these four coefficients can change over time as the relational circumstances change. Their relevance can also increase or decrease when functional needs or living conditions change.
Agents’ choice-making, e.g., whether to prioritise profit or collaboration, is influenced by context.
Four catastrophe equations can be formed using one or more of these coefficients: the fold catastrophe containing just coefficient a, the cusp catastrophe with coefficients a and b, the swallowtail catastrophe comprising coefficients a, b and c and the butterfly catastrophe, which has all four coefficients and provides the most rounded and socially open accommodation of choose-ables.
Powerful concepts
Bringing together Catastrophe Theory and Culture Theory facilitates new techniques to analyse how relational contexts shape an agent’s potential for choice in terms of the scope of their choose-ables. Dr Dodd explains that “the strength of the combination of the theories lies in their descriptive power of subjective, relational concepts that hitherto have tended to remain hidden and tacit”. This descriptive power provides a rich language that can be used to understand where an adaptive agent might be in terms of their choose-ables, as well as offering possible explanations as to why.
The notion of a choose-able is very powerful. Often, we can only make inferences regarding the nature of choose-ables after a choice has been made and the ensuing actions observed. Dr Dodd’s research provides insights into how the subjective concepts of subordination, rules, norms, taboos, beliefs, myths, biases, preferences and focus of attention can affect and shape an agent’s choose-ables. These constructs can uncover the underlying assumptions concerning an agent’s rationale and show how they arrived at a dilemma or chose to carry out a particular action and are valuable assets to Decision Theory and Game Theory.
Personal Response
What initially prompted your research into choice‑making and choose‑ables?
Being with people and also observing people as they are coming to critical decisions, when analysis along the traditional lines of decision theory did not help to explain why certain choices had been made. I was introduced to two important areas of work: Drama Theory by Prof Jim Bryant and Peter Bennett (developed by Nigel Howard for military commanders as Confrontation Analysis); George L. S. Shackle’s Subjective Choice Theory (i.e., the concept of a choose-able) by Prof Gillian Stamp. My previous studies in Pure Mathematics at Warwick with Prof Christopher Zeeman had left an indelible fascination with Catastrophe Theory. Combining all of these with the Douglas and Thomson work on Culture Theory provided the way forward to develop a formal structural logic for understanding choice-making.
Article References
Dodd, L. (2019), Choice-making and choose-ables: making decision agents more human and choosy. Euro Journal on Decision Processes, 7 (1–2), 101–115 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40070-018-0092-5 | https://medium.com/@researchoutreach/choice-making-and-choose-ables-making-decision-agents-more-choosy-c928fa259027 | ['Research Outreach'] | 2020-12-25 20:03:04.946000+00:00 | ['Dr Lorraine Dodd', 'Choice Making', 'Decision Making', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Algorithms'] |
How to Make Hybrid Work a Success | What does the future ideal workplace look like? Will we stay forever in our home office or can we someday finally meet our beloved colleagues again in person? All these are questions probably everybody is asking at the moment. In this story, we explore the perks and downsides of working from home, an office or remotely from wherever you are atm. Additionally, we want to introduce you to the concept of flexible offices and show the benefits it can have.
Having said that — sit back, be inspired and have fun learning about how to best build a hybrid workplace model to join the current trend about the future of work!
When it comes to work locations, the recent pandemic (ugh — not again this topic!) has faced us with boundaries and opportunities at the same time. Home office has replaced the daily visit to our offices for many, our cats, dogs and hamsters are annoyed of our constant presence and we learned: it’s a delight for some, wormwood for others! But as time passed by, we (and probably our furry flat mates as well) realised that there are perks and downsides to both — going to the office on a daily basis and working from home. Thus, we strongly believe that the future of work is going to be hybrid, combining the benefits from both sides!
What is a hybrid work model?
But starting from the roots: What exactly is behind the modern, fancy term “hybrid work model”?
A hybrid work model (aka flexible work concepts) consists of a combination of working in the company office and remote. Btw, remote can be from home, from the café down the street or from one of the nicest coworking spaces ever (ckeck out our 9 favorite workspaces around the world here).
There are innumerable variations of combining these concepts, way too many to list here. Therefore, if you’re interested in this topic feel free to read our blog post about the most common hybrid work archetypes.
One of the most prevalent combination is working in the office for 3 days a week and spending the remaining two days a week at home with our pets (famous example is Amazon). However, this might totally depend on factors like the circumstances, your industry as well as company culture and everyone’s personal preferences, to name only a few.
Offices should be accordingly equipped
At its core, a hybrid workplace model tries to capture all the benefits different work locations may offer whilst reducing disadvantages to a minimum.
Offices, to begin with, are the most traditional work location for many of us. Meeting colleagues for some social interaction (and if it’s only for drinking a coffee together and talk about the upcoming vacation), team work, sharing creative ideas, learning from others, and also last but definitely not least, allowing us to clearly start and finish our work day. Multiple studies have proven the benefits of home office, such as increased productivity (no more in-person coffee dates!), less stress, better compatibility of job and family as well as the famous work-life balance, time gain due to the shorter way to one’s workplace. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, working from home makes it more difficult to distinct between job and private life hard, as one is literally living at the workplace (who doesn’t know the situation of “just checking one more mail”). In addition, employees report missing social interactions and the exchange with their colleagues.
Summarised: Neither the office nor one’s desk at home are ideal in the long-run.
deskbird: One of our favourite coworking spaces
Next to home office, working in coliving or coworking spaces is becoming more popular. It’s another possibility for everyone who is missing social interaction either while drinking a coffee together or simply being motivated by sitting next to somebody who seems to be productive as well. Further advantages of those options are huge flexibility and cost savings to benefitting from the coworking or -living community to increase one’s network and to collaborate with like-minded people.
As we can see, there are advantages and disadvantages to probably every location. Thus, hybrid workplace models can combine all the perks and try to reduce the downsides. More concretely, employers allow their employees to work from several locations for different periods of time.
Overview of the advantages of hybrid work models:
Meet the needs of each of your employees
One thing is for sure: each employee has different preferences and needs, which all should be tried to be met. Thus, no static workplace model, which might have worked for thousands of other companies, will make your workers equally happy. Hybrid workplace models are great, because they can provide you with the most important aspect: individual solutions, tailored to everyone’s needs and wishes whilst providing a framework and tool for supervision. A happier and satisfied workforce
Which is probably the most important advantage, since we all know: Having happy employees is fundamental for a company’s success. Given that every employee can choose a work location however she or he wants to is bound to increase the productivity for your company. Employer competitive advantage
Every employer knows how difficult it is to find motivated, passioned employees for new positions. Therefore, being an attractive employer and both retaining existing employees and attracting new talents is crucial. By implementing a hybrid workplace model, companies can improve their desirability as well as differentiate from other competitors. Lower office costs
By optimising your work location use, you can save on office costs and manage occupancy, work satisfaction and much more! Some tools even feature very easy ways to see how much you can save. Ever wondered how much money you could save by introducing a hybrid model to your company? Easily calculate it here, it takes only 1 minute. Added value for all parties
Both employees and employers can benefit from a hybrid workplace concept. Whilst employees get the opportunity to be more flexible and satisfied, employers enjoy increased productivity and efficiency.
Having talked now a lot about the hybrid workplace model: Do you need help to set up your own, individual, amazing hybrid workspace?
We are here for you. Book a demo to see, whether deskbird is the intuitive, people-centric workplace management solution your employees will love. | https://medium.com/@deskbird/hybrid-work-and-its-benefits-34f7090de0d7 | [] | 2021-10-13 08:11:25.333000+00:00 | ['Coworking', 'Future Of Work', 'Hybrid', 'Hybrid Work', 'Home Office'] |
St. Joseph: The Father No Longer “Hidden or in the Shadows” | St. Joseph: The Father No Longer “Hidden or in the Shadows”
The Dream of St. Joseph by Luca Giordano (1634–1705). Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s the Year of St. Joseph, a first in Church history. Pope Francis has dedicated now through December 8, 2021, to the protector of families, the Church, workers — and fathers.
“Each of us can discover in Joseph — the man who goes unnoticed, a daily, discreet and hidden presence — an intercessor, a support and a guide in times of trouble,’’ Pope said. “St. Joseph reminds us that those who appear hidden or in the shadows can play an incomparable role in the history of salvation.”
Millions felt “unnoticed’’ or “non-essential’’ during the pandemic:
A record 35 percent of U.S. children live in single-parent homes . The pope stressed: “Children today often seem like orphans, lacking fathers. The Church too needs fathers… ‘Though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers’ (1 Cor 4:15).”
. The pope stressed: “Children today often seem like orphans, lacking fathers. The Church too needs fathers… ‘Though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers’ (1 Cor 4:15).” Humanity’s first broken relationship? Between the Father and His children. The pope added, “Being a father entails introducing children to life and reality. Not holding them back, being overprotective or possessive.”
Between the Father and His children. The pope added, “Being a father entails introducing children to life and reality. Not holding them back, being overprotective or possessive.” Questioning authority? Your relationship with your earthly father completely shapes how you see your Heavenly Father and all authority figures: God, family, and country. Trust is at an all-time low. Too many “confuse authority with authoritarianism, service with servility, discussion with oppression, charity with a welfare mentality, power with destruction.”
Your relationship with your earthly father completely shapes how you see your Heavenly Father and all authority figures: God, family, and country. Trust is at an all-time low. Too many “confuse authority with authoritarianism, service with servility, discussion with oppression, charity with a welfare mentality, power with destruction.” The logic of love is always the logic of freedom. The Holy Father declared, “and Joseph knew how to love with extraordinary freedom. He never made himself the center of things.”
What difference does a Year of St. Joseph make? Just ask Fr. Donald Calloway, author of “Consecration to St. Joseph’’
Father Donald Calloway, 48, is a Marian priest and native of Dearborn, Michigan, now based in Steubenville, Ohio. The author of Consecration to St. Joseph wrote Pope Francis with the request in May 2019.
Father Calloway’s own conversion story is a powerful example of a prodigal son lost — and then found — after his family found Catholicism and then brought him home.
He grew up with three different fathers before he was 9 and little to no religion. When his mom married into a military family, they began moving, ultimately being stationed in Japan when he was a teenager who “really bit onto the culture.’’
Calloway wound up a runaway, deported, dropping out of school, doing “all kinds of crazy immoral things.’’ His worst behavior seemed to help drive the rest of his family to conversion to Catholicism. They prayed until the teenager experienced his own conversion, becoming a nationally known priest and Marian father.
“I’m in awe of what’s going on,’’ Calloway said in a Facebook live stream after the announcement. “The effects of this are going to be off the charts.’’
He said he “put the book together because of crazy times,’’ and then the book was released just in time for the pandemic, making the world need St. Joseph even more.
“This is one of the happiest days of my life,’’ Calloway said. “This is so unique. This isn’t something that happens every day. We’ve got the whole church on board now… We did it. Your prayers made it happen.’’
In his book on consecrating to St. Joseph, he called on readers to pray for a Year of Joseph, but he notes some dioceses have already had their own “Year of Joseph’’ before the pope’s decision and have already “borne great fruit.’’
Calloway noted the Birmingham, Alabama diocese began the first diocese-wide “Year of St. Joseph’’ in 2018. On the final day of that St. Joseph year, major pro-life legislation passed the Alabama Legislature.
Oldest and newest prayers: The laity have always called on Joseph
One of the oldest known prayers, going back to 50 AD or earlier, starts, “Oh, St. Joseph whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt before the throne of God, I place in you all my interests and desires. Oh, St. Joseph, do assist me by your powerful intercession and obtain for me from your Divine Son all spiritual blessings through Jesus Chris, our Lord.’’
The new year was announced on the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX proclaiming St. Joseph patron of the Universal Church. This special year lasts through December 8, 2021, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception honoring Joseph’s beloved wife, Mary.
Pope Francis grants a plenary indulgence to Catholics reciting approved prayers honoring St. Joseph. Besides the many existing prayers to Joseph, the pope wrote a new prayer:
“Hail, Guardian of the Redeemer, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary. To you God entrusted His only Son; in you Mary placed her trust; with you Christ became man. Blessed Joseph, to us too, show yourself a father and guide us in the path of life. Obtain for us grace, mercy and courage, and defend us from every evil. Amen.”
The three conditions for receiving a plenary indulgence are:
Sacramental confession.
Receiving Holy Communion.
Praying for the pope’s intentions.
The indulgences are available any day but are especially encouraged on days honoring St. Joseph, including the December 29 Feast of the Holy Family, his March 19 solemnity, the May 1 Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, the 19th of every month, and every Wednesday, a day dedicated to Joseph in the Latin tradition.
How to turn a problem into a possibility
The pope said St. Joseph, at the crossroads of the Old and New Testament, shows us how “to turn a problem into a possibility by trusting in Divine Providence.” Joseph also shows “the value, the dignity and the joy of what it means to eat bread that is the fruit of one’s own labor.’’
He added: “Our world today needs fathers. It has no use for tyrants who would domineer others as a means of compensating for their own needs.”
Pope Francis added: “If at times God seems not to help us, surely this does not mean that we have been abandoned, but instead are being trusted to plan, to be creative, and to find solutions ourselves.”
Noting Joseph’s patronage for people who work, Pope Francis said workers “are cooperating with God himself, and in some way become creators of the world around us.” Pope Francis encourages everyone “to rediscover the value, the importance and the necessity of work for bringing about a new ‘normal’ from which no one is excluded.”
Because everyone is called to some vocation, the pope said, “Every true vocation is born of the gift of oneself, which is the fruit of mature sacrifice.”
Like each of us, he said Jesus “came into our world in a state of great vulnerability. He needed to be defended, protected, cared for, and raised by Joseph.”
God and Mary trusted Joseph, and he continues protecting the Church family.
“Work is a means of participating in the work of salvation, an opportunity to hasten the coming of the Kingdom, to develop our talents and abilities, and to put them at the service of society and fraternal communion,’’ the Holy Father said.
“It becomes an opportunity for the fulfillment not only of oneself but also of that primary cell of society, which is the family. A family without work is particularly vulnerable to difficulties, tensions, estrangement, and even break-up. How can we speak of human dignity without working to ensure that everyone is able to earn a decent living?”
The Church has awakened the sleeping giant
In 2015, the pope said he keeps an image of the sleeping St. Joseph on his desk, adding, “I have a great love for St. Joseph because he is a man of silence and strength.”
Though Joseph is sleeping in the image on the pope’s desk, Francis said: “Even when he is asleep, he is taking care of the Church! Yes! We know that he can do that. So when I have a problem, a difficulty, I write a little note and I put it underneath St. Joseph, so that he can dream about it!’’
St. Joseph shows us all how to face difficulties; the pope stressed:
“If the first stage of all true interior healing is to accept our personal history and embrace even the things in life that we did not choose, we must now add another important element: creative courage.
“This emerges especially in the way we deal with difficulties. In the face of difficulty, we can either give up and walk away, or somehow engage with it. At times, difficulties bring out resources we did not even think we had.” | https://medium.com/catholic-way-home/st-joseph-the-father-no-longer-hidden-or-in-the-shadows-df0b313e3968 | ['Joseph Serwach'] | 2020-12-10 01:22:32.445000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Christianity', 'Religion', 'Pope Francis', 'Catholic'] |
This Is Not A Strong Jobs Recovery | The United States’ jobs recovery is extremely poor, especially if we consider the size of the monetary and fiscal stimulus and the spectacular upgrade to GDP estimates. After a massive consensus increase in GDP recovery estimates to 6.5% in 2021, no one should be cheering a 5.9% unemployment rate, 58% employment to population ratio, and, even worse, a 61.6% labor force participation rate that has remained stagnant for ten months. Furthermore, Bloomberg Economics shows that the United States unemployment rate would be 8.4% excluding the participation decline.
In the European Union, the employment situation is also a cause of concern. The United States’ jobs recovery is certainly strong only when compared with an extremely weak European jobs environment. In May 2021, the euro area’s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 7.9%, marginally down from 8.1% in April 2021. These figures, published by Eurostat, do not include the six million furloughed jobs that remain in the European Union. Eurostat estimates that 15.278 million men and women in the EU, of whom 12.792 million in the euro area, were unemployed in May 2021. Compared with May 2020, unemployment rose by 949 000 in the EU and by 803 000 million in the euro area. Despite a strong recovery in the purchasing managers’ index (PMI), the employment component remains poor. Euro area unemployment rate would be closer to 11% including furloughed jobs.
The disappointing jobs recovery should also be analyzed in the context of the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus in decades. No one can seriously consider these job figures as positive in the middle of trillions of dollars of deficit spending and monetary stimulus. The Keynesian so-called miracle of government spending and central bank intervention has failed again.
We must also remember that these figures are happening in the middle of a better-than-expected recovery in the services sector, which tells us that the risk of a jobless recovery that we mentioned a few months ago is even clearer now.
We estimate that the unemployment rate and labor participation rate of 2019 will not be recovered in the United States until 2025… If there is no financial or economic crisis in the process. Even worse, we believe that almost 30% of furloughed jobs in the European Union will not be absorbed even by 2025.
The slow jobs recovery is not something economists should simply ignore or underestimate. An artificial increase in GDP driven by debt and deficit spending where job creation is so weak is also a recipe for a debt crisis in a stagnant economy where job creation may slow even more.
When the mirage of monetary and fiscal stimulus evaporates, we will likely see a return to the failed low-productivity growth and indebted model that defined the 2010–2018 recovery, but with an alarming increase in government size and interventionism. More debt, less growth, and millions of people out of a job due to increased levels of intervention. The hilarious thing is that many will blame the poor recovery on capitalism and neoliberalism when all we are seeing is the result of massive government and public absorption of economic resources.
Original Source: https://www.dlacalle.com/en/this-is-not-a-strong-jobs-recovery/ | https://medium.com/@worksofdaniellacalle/this-is-not-a-strong-jobs-recovery-fba33d75662f | ['Works Of Daniel Lacalle'] | 2021-07-07 15:30:49.536000+00:00 | ['Jobs', 'Fiscal Policy', 'Employment', 'Monetary Policy', 'Recovery'] |
ADA Leadz, Marketing Gimmicks Are Problematic for Accessibility (and Compliance) | Is there room in the market to create an accessibility agency for small businesses?
Absolutely.
But the reason a gap exists isn’t because nobody has thought of offering accessibility services, it’s because legitimate web accessibility requires significant time, dedication, specialized knowledge, and the acceptance of very real legal risk.
All of those requirements come at a significant cost which is why many small businesses can’t afford them.
ADA Leadz provides none of what is actually required.
Rather, ADA Leadz goes the opposite route and tries to convince marketers and would-be marketers that ADA compliance is an easy value-add or something they can quickly build an agency around.
Not the case.
Beyond the legal implications, there is something that a lot of people overlook: We are in the midst of a great movement towards more accessibility for everyone in the world.
When you create a product that diverts or distracts from accessibility, you are slowing this movement.
This means you are directly and indirectly preventing access to millions of people.
Unless you are truly committed to making the digital world accessible, it’s best you don’t build a business around ADA compliance / web accessibility.
It comes at a real cost. | https://medium.com/@krisrivenburgh/ada-leadz-marketing-gimmicks-are-problematic-for-accessibility-and-compliance-2b107ea8babf | ['Kris Rivenburgh'] | 2020-12-13 22:01:08.100000+00:00 | ['Web Accessibility', 'Ada Compliance', 'Accessibility', 'Ada Leadz', 'Website Accessibility'] |
Clearing the Crime-Scene Cobwebs: Meditation for Skeptics, Old-Schoolers & Beginners | Contributing Authors: Kirsten Pabst, NDAA Well-being Task Force Chair
The bigs.
“I was born to do this,” I congratulated myself as I brushed my teeth, wondering how many hours until daylight.
I was out of law school only a few months, just into my role of prosecuting traffic citations in justice court, the lowest deputy county attorney handling the lowest priority cases in the court of least jurisdiction, when called-out to my first middle-of-the-night crime scene. It was my inaugural shift as an on-call prosecutor and the first time I’d ever carried a cell phone (I know I’m carbon-dating myself), so when it rang it took me a minute to wake up, figure out how to flip it open in the dark, and accept the call. It was my boss.
“Do you have a pen? Write down this address and meet me down there. It’ll take me about fifteen minutes.”
This is it. Finally! I’ve been called to handle some real crime.
I don’t recall what time it was when I pulled into the narrow, vacant area in the dirt between the gravel and the dilapidated mobile home. The stars seemed blotted out and a dim yellowish back-light coming from a distant power pole faintly illuminated the boxy shapes of the 70’s-era trailer park. Other than that, it was really dark and oddly quiet, given the density of people packed into the twenty or so aging trailers packed inside a single square block. Maybe a dog barked.
My boss, the County Attorney, met me at the door and offered a quick briefing. The suspect had slashed the victim’s neck and fled on foot, leaving the victim bleeding out on the dirty floor of the old trailer, amidst garbage, half-finished crosswords and animal waste. By the time I got there, the victim had been taken to the hospital and detectives were already processing the scene — taking photos, gathering evidence and swabbing for forensics.
As I stared at the coagulating pools, I was struck by two things that have stayed with me for the last 25 years: my awe of the human body’s capacity to hold and lose so much fluid; and that smell — the distinct mixture of blood, alcohol and squalor.
In the decades to follow, there were countless more crime scenes, gruesome photographs, horrific stories, broken kids and jury trials.
Career prosecutors who handle crimes of violence and human tragedy will often say that the most effective prosecutors are those who deeply connect with other people — their circumstances, their stories, their traumas — and then authentically convey the essence of human tragedy to jurors. It is no coincidence that prosecutors, especially the good ones, suffer the classic symptoms of long-term exposure to secondary trauma, which can mirror the symptoms of PTSD. Left to stagnate, the effects can be devastating.
What’s so great about meditation?
I was one of biggest skeptics of anything woo-woo or new-agey. I’m still not a fan of group activities, “getting to know you” games or “team building” exercises. I scoffed at things not detectable to the human eye and wore my grit like a badge. Until I discovered the benefits of meditation.
For the last 10 years, we’ve been bombarded with self-help-ish suggestions to do yoga, go vegan and meditate. We all know we could do better at maintaining our aging bodies, but with time-crunches and pressure from every direction, we need to invest in activities that get us the biggest bang for our precious time. Is meditation really the answer? What is meditation, actually? It is different for everyone.
What finally led me to meditation?
Photo credit: Marc Olivier Jodoin/Unsplash
Vanity. In the midst of a protracted, work-related whirlwind, shortly after I was first elected as the County Attorney, my metabolism went bonkers due to unmanaged stress and I packed on about 10 unwelcome pounds. My naturopath recommended the audio book Meditate Your Weight, A 21-Day Retreat to Optimize Your Metabolism and Feel Great, by Tiffany Cruikshank, LAC, MAOM where, according to the publisher’s summary, the author teaches “How to get started: advice for new meditators (no weird positions or chants required).” Really? It doesn’t have to be weird? I’ll try the first one and, if it gets to woo-woo, return the book.
I didn’t return the book. I finished it. More than once. I learned that meditation is not tricky, not necessarily spiritual or even time-consuming. And I felt better, so I kept at it.
It really does help.
New research published in Forbes offers evidence that yoga and meditation benefit our short and long-term physical and mental health.
Brian Pennie, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, explained, in 3 Things to Do If You Want a Brain That’s 10 Years Younger,
Research shows that a regular mindfulness practice weakens the amygdala’s ability to hijack your emotions. This happens in two ways. First, the amygdala decreases in physical size. Second, connections between the amygdala and the parts of the cortex associated with fear are weakened,” he writes. “I have literally shrunk the fear center of my brain, and as a result, I simply don’t feel anxiety like I used to.
It is kind of like a charging dock for humans. Yeah, there are other ways we recharge our batteries — for me, horseback riding, painting, running, beaches, cooking — but we all have a battery pack with various types of batteries that all need charging. And meditation charges something different, something bigger, deeper, and I wouldn’t trade those minutes every morning for a trip to the Big Island. OK, I would, but I’d still meditate on the beach.
How to meditate.
Andrea Parsons, M.S.W., L.C.S.W., a psychotherapist explains in Prevention, “Meditation is the practice of intentionally awakening to our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations in the mental space of observance and acceptance. Meditation asks us to be the observer of our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations rather than the critic of them.”
There are many kinds of meditation to suit various styles, schedules and goals, including mindfulness meditation, mantra meditation, movement meditation, and many others. There is no single right way to do it.
Try starting by just sitting for one minute. Pop in your earbuds with some soothing ambient music, waves or other white noise. Find a comfortable spot with fewer distractions, sit and close your eyes. Try to turn down your thoughts, just for one minute, and absorb the stillness and quiet.
But my mind wanders.
Everyone’s mind wanders. Meditation helps us work toward finding calm and observing our thoughts and emotions. If your mind wanders, and you notice a thought pop in, gently let it go and return back to the quiet. Remember, noticing your thoughts is an indicator that you are increasing your awareness, which is the point of meditation! Nice work.
Will meditation fix me?
Probably not in one minute. But as part of a repetitive, holistic practice that includes exercise, healthy diet and connection with others, it can greatly improve your quality of life. And it can help us metabolize years of secondary trauma and crime scene residue that often presents as cynicism, burnout and disease. It has for me.
Where to find more.
The zeitgeist of YouTube has more meditation videos than can be counted, with more being added every day, from ambient music to short, guided morning meditations, you are sure to find something that fits your comfort level.
Insight Timer is a free comprehensive app for anxiety, sleep and stress and has thousands of meditations, courses, lectures and inspirations. It is a great resource.
Here is a great BBC documentary on meditation
ABC Science and The Science of Meditation
10-minute morning meditation by Jason Stephenson
Helpful tips from a master, Deepak Chopra
Pictured: Kirsten Pabst
Kirsten Pabst chairs NDAA’s Well-being Task Force and serves at the County Attorney for Missoula County, Montana. | https://medium.com/@ndaajustice/clearing-the-crime-scene-cobwebs-meditation-for-skeptics-old-schoolers-beginners-9e998312ac59 | ['National District Attorneys Association'] | 2020-12-18 20:57:09.113000+00:00 | ['Attorney', 'Prosecutor', 'Crime Scene Investigation', 'Meditation', 'Wellbeing'] |
Integrating Open Access in your GLAM institution | In the second post of her second series (first post here), Anne Young shares some of the tools and programs GLAM professionals can utilize to integrate Open Access in their institution in the most automated way possible.
Roman, Funerary Monument of Flavius Agricola (detail), Antonine period (138–193 A.D.), marble, 26–1/2 x 70 x 27 in. Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Gift of Alan Hartman, 72.148. Public Domain.
It is important to remember that the ability to institute Open Access stems from having solid licensing practices already in place, having high-quality digital content (images, videos, etc.) and as complete as possible metadata to accompany the content.
The most direct means of getting Open Access content online is through the coordinated delivery between a GLAM’s collections management system (CMS) and digital asset management system (DAMS) to populate online collections.
What is a CMS? “It is computer program that facilitates the administrative responsibilities (cataloging, accessioning, loans, exhibition planning, digital image retrieval, copyright management, etc.) associated with the documentation and stewardship of a GLAM’s holdings.”¹
A DAMS is a “digital program used for storing, managing, and retrieving digital assets, such as images or videos of collection objects.”²
There are a host of CMS and DAMS a GLAM might utilize to deliver content online and make available via an API. I will not even try to explain the technology behind how these all work together, but can vouch that without these systems Open Access can be much more challenging.
View of coordinated CMS, DAMS, and API functioning on a collection page for the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. Artwork: J.M.W. Turner (English, 1775–1851), The Fifth Plague of Egypt, 1800, oil on canvas, 48 × 72 in. Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Gift in memory of Evan F. Lilly, 55.24.
Beyond the tech itself, GLAMs need to consider the terms and conditions of both Open Access and their website platform(s) overall to ensure no conflicting clauses (i.e., don’t claim copyright and restrict use to content in one place whilst trying to offer Open Access in another).
No matter how a GLAM makes Open Access content available (e.g., direct downloads from collection pages or a separate microsite), always integrate policy information and cross-reference how users can license content not in the Open Access program.
Beyond the mechanisms of content delivery, there are a host of other decisions to make to define what Open Access parameters you want to apply to your collection. These are the questions that you need to ask yourself:
Usage restrictions: will the GLAM look at different levels of uses: non-commercial uses only, unrestricted use, or somewhere in-between? Essentially, the question you want to answer for your GLAM is whether you’ll go full Open Access or “Semi-Open Access.”
will the GLAM look at different levels of uses: non-commercial uses only, unrestricted use, or somewhere in-between? Essentially, the question you want to answer for your GLAM is whether you’ll go full Open Access or “Semi-Open Access.” Object attribution and collection credit line: will the GLAM require or merely recommend the inclusion of this information to further assist in downstream identification of collection content? Or simply ask for: “Courtesy of [insert GLAM name]”?
will the GLAM require or merely recommend the inclusion of this information to further assist in downstream identification of collection content? Or simply ask for: “Courtesy of [insert GLAM name]”? Gratis copies: will the GLAM request users send a gratis copy to aid the institution in its institutional records of where collection content is reproduced?
will the GLAM request users send a gratis copy to aid the institution in its institutional records of where collection content is reproduced? Data collection: will the GLAM track downloads or types of uses of the content? If so, how does it intend to gather and record this information? Is this a hindrance to being fully open or does scholarly record of reproductions take precedence for the institution?
will the GLAM track downloads or types of uses of the content? If so, how does it intend to gather and record this information? Is this a hindrance to being fully open or does scholarly record of reproductions take precedence for the institution? File specifications: what size files will the GLAM provide? Single size, full size, multiple sizes optimized for different uses? Is the metadata embedded in files?
what size files will the GLAM provide? Single size, full size, multiple sizes optimized for different uses? Is the metadata embedded in files? FAQ: in addition to revising terms and conditions with existing online materials, the GLAM may wish to prepare FAQs (in advance) to address specific questions about its Open Access policy.
in addition to revising terms and conditions with existing online materials, the GLAM may wish to prepare FAQs (in advance) to address specific questions about its Open Access policy. Third-party copyright restrictions: GLAMs should ensure the collection content made available under Open Access is in the Public Domain or that the rights are held by the institution and free of any other copyrights or other legal restrictions.
GLAMs should ensure the collection content made available under Open Access is in the Public Domain or that the rights are held by the institution and free of any other copyrights or other legal restrictions. Privacy and/or publicity restrictions: GLAMs should ensure the collection content made available under Open Access is free of any Privacy or Publicity issues, if there are people depicted in the content.
GLAMs should ensure the collection content made available under Open Access is free of any Privacy or Publicity issues, if there are people depicted in the content. Contractual restrictions: GLAMs should ensure the collection content made available under Open Access is free of any contractual restrictions (i.e., donation or purchase restrictions to mandating credit lines with all reproductions).³
The coordinated consideration of these parameters in conjunction with the use of a CMS, DAMS, and API will enable a GLAM to implement the best version of automated Open Access downloads that their institution can facilitate.
In the next post, I’ll have a look to what you can do when you have limited resources and still want to get an Open Access policy running. | https://medium.com/open-glam/2-integrating-open-access-in-your-glam-institution-56789b1d8fb | ['Anne Young'] | 2020-02-24 17:12:12.548000+00:00 | ['English', 'Open Glam', 'Open Access', 'Rights And Reproductions', 'Copyright'] |
Exploratory Data Analysis — Retail using Python | We will Visualize a Superstore Dataset related to different categories of Office Supplies, Furniture & Technological products, by conducting EDA on the dataset through the use of scatter plots & heatmaps. After that, we will try to figure out the variables which are directly / indirectly related to Profit variable.
Read, Load & Understand the Data
#Load packages
# Read the file & display first 5 rows import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt6
import seaborn as sns
import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings(“ignore”, category=DeprecationWarning)
warnings.filterwarnings(“ignore”, category=FutureWarning) super_store = pd.read_csv(“D:/ANCHIT/Python/SampleSuperstore.csv”)
super_store.head()
# Rows containing duplicate data
duplicate_rows_super_store = super_store[super_store.duplicated()]
print("number of duplicate rows: ", duplicate_rows_super_store.shape) # Dropping the duplicates
super_store = super_store.drop_duplicates() # Check for any null values in the dataset
super_store.isnull().sum() # Rounding off the decimal values upto 2 decimal places for Sales & Profit
# Copying on new variable of Sales_r & Profit_r respectively super_store['Sales_r'] = round(super_store['Sales'], 2)
super_store['Profit_r'] = round(super_store['Profit'], 2)
cols = ['Sales', 'Profit']
super_store.drop(cols, axis=1, inplace=True) # Below variable doesn't yield much value, hence dropping them
super_store.drop(['Postal Code'], axis=1, inplace=True) #Renaming the column
super_store.rename(columns = {'Ship Mode':'Ship_Mode'}, inplace = True)
super_store.head()
We will also perform certain statistical inferences on the data (describe command), check the type of variables (info command), observe the shape & columns list (detailed code in my github account).
Outlier Detection
#Checking for outliers
plt.figure(figsize=[10,5])
sns.set(style=”whitegrid”)
ax = sns.boxplot(data=super_store)
plt.show()
There are number of Outliers in Sales & Profit. Hence we need to remove them
def remove_outlier(col):
sorted(col)
Q1, Q3 = col.quantile([.25, .75])
IQR = Q3-Q1
lower_range=Q1-(1.5+IQR)
upper_range=Q3+(1.5+IQR)
return lower_range, upper_range lowsales, uppsales=remove_outlier(super_store[‘Sales_r’])
super_store[‘Sales_r’] = np.where(super_store[‘Sales_r’] > uppsales, uppsales, super_store[‘Sales_r’])
super_store[‘Sales_r’] = np.where(super_store[‘Sales_r’] < lowsales, lowsales, super_store[‘Sales_r’]) lowsales, uppsales=remove_outlier(super_store[‘Profit_r’])
super_store[‘Profit_r’] = np.where(super_store[‘Profit_r’] > uppsales, uppsales, super_store[‘Profit_r’])
super_store[‘Profit_r’] = np.where(super_store[‘Profit_r’] < lowsales, lowsales, super_store[‘Profit_r’]) #Let's see if the outliers are removed or not
plt.figure(figsize=[10,5])
sns.set(style="whitegrid")
ax = sns.boxplot(data=super_store)
plt.show()
Exploratory Data Analysis
Analysing the categorical variables
super_store.Category.value_counts(ascending=False)
sns.countplot(x="Category", data=super_store) plt.show()
super_store.Segment.value_counts(ascending=False)
sns.catplot(x="Segment", y="Profit_r", kind='bar', hue='Category', data=super_store)
Though the Category of Office Supplies was more in number, Technology category brought the highest profit in all the 3 Segments
sns.countplot(x=”Segment”, data=super_store)
plt.show()
# CatPlot for State vs Profit
plt.figure(figsize=(15,8))
sns.catplot(x="State", y="Profit_r", data=super_store, kind='bar', height=5, aspect=2, palette="Set1")
plt.xticks(rotation=90, fontsize=13)
plt.yticks(fontsize=10)
plt.show()
We can see Wyoming & Vermont are among the highest Profit States alongwith others like Montana, Rhode Island, Indiana & Minnesota. However, states like Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania & Illinois are making losses.
super_store.Region.value_counts(ascending=False)
sns.countplot(x="Region", data=super_store)
plt.show()
# Using Lineplot
df = pd.DataFrame(dict(time=np.arange(500),
value=np.random.randn(500).cumsum()))
g = sns.relplot(x="Discount", y="Profit_r", hue = 'Category', kind="line", data=super_store)
g.fig.autofmt_xdate()
We can observe that by giving Discount of 10 %, we can increase our Profit for all the 3 categories. However, giving discount of more than 10% will make our Profit margin decrease and it keeps on decreasing as we increase the discount. Hence an ideal percant of 10% discount is feasible.
# Plotting all the variables
sns.pairplot(super_store)
sns.set(style="whitegrid")
As we can see above in the pairplot, there is not much a relation among the variables
#plot correlation matrix
plt.figure(figsize=[20,10])
corr_mat = super_store.corr()
sns.set(style=”whitegrid”)
sns.heatmap(corr_mat, cmap=’coolwarm’, annot=True)
As you can see there seems to be a positive correlation between Sales & Profit. Since it is positive, it means with increase in Sales, Profit increases. There is a negative correlation between Discount & Profit. However, the correlations are not strong enough for any conclusion to make.
# CatPlot for Sub-Category vs Profit
plt.figure(figsize=(15,8))
sns.catplot(x="Sub-Category", y="Profit_r", data=super_store, kind='bar', height=5, aspect=2, palette="Set1")
plt.xticks(rotation=90, fontsize=13)
plt.yticks(fontsize=10)
plt.show()
In the above plot, we can see that Copiers made the highest profit among all the Sub-Category products. Other categories are Phones, Accessories, Appliances, Machines & Envelopes which had made considerable amount of profit. However, Tables made a neglible contribution in terms of profit. Other products like Fasteners & Supplies didn’t made much of either.
View the entire code at my github account: https://github.com/Anchit13/AnchitBhagat/blob/main/Super%20Store.ipynb | https://medium.com/@anchitbhagat13/exploratory-data-analysis-retail-using-python-4dc241158cd7 | ['Anchit Bhagat'] | 2021-01-06 06:43:42.577000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Data Science', 'Exploratory Data Analysis', 'Analytics'] |
When Your Ideas Are Too Abstract | When Your Ideas Are Too Abstract
And your writing doesn’t give value
Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash
I recently had a friend give feedback on why a piece of my writing didn’t do well. The feedback was this:
Your ideas are too abstract, out of touch, and not grounded in reality.
There was no actionable examples or advice, just a wrestling of spiritual ideas. My abstract ideas didn’t add value to my reader. It was too theoretical. The writing was nice, but there was nothing new and no takeaways for the reader.
Needless to say, the feedback didn’t feel very good.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary does not define “abstract” in a positive light, with definitions like “insufficiently factual” and “difficult to understand”. One definition even defines abstract as having “little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content.”
For example, think about relationship advice. Too often isn’t actionable. Buzzwords like “trust’ and “communication” are thrown around like they’re the holy grail, and it’s not like they’re not important words of advice, but everyone’s heard them before. What do trust and communication look like in different contexts? What are actionable ways to build trust and communication?
I have come around to the idea that readers read for value, and I do as well. If a piece of writing doesn’t have any value, it’s less likely to be compelling — and I’m a very stream-of-consciousness, get everything off my chest kind of writer. I have a confessional style that doesn’t always translate to actionable takeaways.
I write a lot of abstract content. I write a lot about my faith — and when you’re writing about Bible verses and God, it’s really difficult for your writing not to be abstract until you start applying examples. I write a lot about spiritual beliefs and ideas — how is that not abstract?
I wrestle with the idea that every concept needs an application. Who am I, after all, to tell you how to apply your faith or spiritual beliefs to your life? I’m nobody and needing to make abstractions more practical is something I seriously struggle with because I believe every person should have the right to their own interpretation or decision-making.
However, it’s a middle ground. If your head is all in the clouds and you’re debating theory, well, who’s the person that needs to be actually doing? That’s how I make my peace with political arguments, for example. Sometimes, arguments are too much talking, debating, and yelling, but not enough doing. We wrestle with ideas, and yet in my personal observations, the difference between how someone thinks and believes versus how they behave and act towards others can be very different.
So it’s the interplay between theory versus practice.
You need both — but when is it too much theory, and not enough practice? For example, I, as a liberal, can debate a conservative for hours about whether it’s better to have small government or big government, or whether we should have a regressive versus a progressive tax system. At a certain point, however, you just have to take action.
To seriously help a community or people in need, I might work on a clean-up project like I did last week, help friends move, give to someone who is in need, or donate. I’m sure the same conservative I’m debating the size of government with might do the same. We might not donate to the same charities or nonprofit organizations, but in action, we agree on the same methodology to help.
When my ideas are too abstract, I have to ground myself more in the real world. Many people have different ideas than I do, and they believe abstract ideas are boring because there are no visuals. A big company rebranding with a new logo or different delivery vans has a very practical rebrand. If the idea of the rebrand stays in the abstract, it’s never going to happen.
John Spacey at Simplicable also says that abstract ideas fail because everyone is doing it. In the business world, Spacey says that “business buzzwords are overused abstractions.” Abstractions tend to just be noise because they are overused and can come off as generic.
If abstractions by themselves have no value to readers, how can I and other abstraction-minded people turn abstract ideas into valuable content? Well, for one, action— people want to know how to apply a novel idea even if I personally want to allow room for ambiguity and interpretation.
For example, the late John Lewis’s quote: “freedom is not a state; it is an act...[it] is the continuous action we all take” is an absolutely beautiful and galvanizing quote. But what can we do about it? How can we apply it for those energized by Lewis’s inspiration?
For one, we can vote. We can protest. We can write to our legislators about what we want to see happen, and we can donate to causes we believe in, and, if we’re willing to risk enough, we might be willing to leave a dissatisfying and meaningless job for one that makes a difference for the future of the country. I’d seen several people change careers from bartenders or business executives into a more fulfilling and altruistic career in teaching, being galvanized by Civil Rights era heroes like John Lewis.
At the end of the day, however, it’s a balance; the best and most valuable content is likely a mixture of abstract and concrete. In psychology, an abstract object might be the sport of basketball. A concrete object would be a basketball game. It is the game that excites us more than the concept. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one proposal for what makes an object abstract is if it lacks any causal powers, or the ability to make any tangible impact.
I, however, struggle as a writer with that balance between abstract and concrete. Relaxing is a very abstract concept. But you need, well, concrete things to relax. You might need a couch, bed, or water. Those are concrete matters.
What does that mean for faith? Is God concrete or abstract? I don’t know the answers to a lot of those questions and I might have just taken myself on an emotional whirlwind. But I know I’m not alone. I have seen politicians my entire life stress abstract concepts like justice, peace, unity, and love. However, I’ve rarely seen politicians explaining how they’re going to pursue these benevolent abstract concepts.
I’m no different in my personal life. I have spent this whole summer thinking and stressing about “becoming a better teacher than I was my first year.” Do you want to know a secret? I haven’t thought, for a second, of how I’m going to be a better teacher, but now that I think more about it, it starts with some mashup of setting boundaries between work and my personal life, documenting phone calls, supplementary aids, and services more consistently rather than at the last minute, and grading more consistently. Using a stopwatch while teaching will stop me from getting off track.
Abstract theory is inspiration. Abstract theory is motivation. And that means abstract theory is important — I wanted to teach because I wanted to make a difference in educational inequity and get kids to believe in themselves. If I didn't have those theoretical ideas, I wouldn’t have become a teacher.
Theory, however, is just the start. Next comes the implementation. I want to become a better writer — but to make that goal concrete, I should probably use less theory and more practical examples. | https://medium.com/inspired-writer/when-your-ideas-are-too-abstract-3bd08d030f11 | ['Ryan Fan'] | 2020-08-24 05:40:32.251000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Self', 'Philosophy', 'Ideas', 'Writing'] |
2021 Zero Draft Thirty September Challenge: Day 1 | One month. FADE IN to FADE OUT. Creativity meets Productivity.
Zero Draft Thirty: Day 1.
The 2021 Zero Draft Thirty September Challenge is for you!
September 1: You type FADE IN / “Once upon a time…”
September 30: You type FADE OUT / “…They all lived happily ever after.”
It’s free! It’s fun! It’s Fade In to Fade Out!
For everything you need to know to join, click here.
Many thanks to Stephen Dudley for putting together this calendar!!!
To download your copy, click here.
On Twitter, use this hashtag: #ZD30SCRIPT.
Zero Draft Thirty Facebook Group: Here. 4,200+ members strong.
Today’s Writing Quote
“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.” — Isabel Allende
Today’s Inspirational Video
It’s a Zero Draft Thirty tradition, beginning and ending each Challenge with a few words of wisdom from our Spirit Guide — actor turned screenwriter — Shia Labeouf. Here is a rough transcription of his message:
“JUST DO IT!!!”
Each day this month, I’ll post a Zero Draft Thirty Challenge post here at Go Into The Story. And as I’ve done with every past Challenge, I will hand out an award for a notable Tweet, Facebook post, or comment here on the blog. This cycle, the winner will receive the Anita Loos Award!
Today’s Anita Loos Award winner: Cate!
What better way to begin the Challenge than The Rock giving us some GIF encouragement! For that visual uplift, Cate (@supergayscripts) is today’s recipient of the Anita Loos Award!
For more information on Anita Loos, one of the earliest and most influential screenwriters in Hollywood, go here.
For background on how the Zero Draft Challenge came into being and what it is, go here, here, and here.
Hear Ye! Hear Ye! All you Zeronauts, Scampers, Word Warriors, and Outlaws!
The 2021 Zero Draft Thirty September Challenge is now officially underway!
GO WRITE! | https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2021-zero-draft-thirty-september-challenge-day-1-a4fdb0f22e85 | ['Scott Myers'] | 2021-09-01 11:32:44.920000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Creative Writing', 'Screenwriting', 'Writing Challenge', 'Writing'] |
How to Build xcframework With Xcode | In this article I’ll cover how you can build your framework and test it using xcode.
Create the Framework source code
This article is written and tested by xcode Version 11.4.1 (11E503a).
Open xcode and start with a framework project.
I’ll name mine FruitBasket , you can choose whatever you want, and I’ll save it to my desktop so I can easily access it later when I’m building the xcframework.
What is FruitBasket? It is a silly example I made for this article it is basically a basket of fruits and we should be able to add fruits to it and the basket should tell us how many fruits are in there and what are they. Quite fun, isn’t it?
I’ll start by adding a swift file to contain simple enum for a number of fruits to use, I’ll name that file fruit.
As you can see I’ve added public access modifier to be able to access that enum from outside the framework, (ie from our project when we import this framework).
I’ll add a simple class for fruit basket. Feel free to add only one function to print Hello, world , It doesn’t really matter in this example.
Now the framework code is ready, let us generate the framework. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-build-xcframework-with-xcode-b3d0b3c08f43 | ['Ahmed Fathi'] | 2020-09-06 20:18:51.408000+00:00 | ['Framework', 'Xcframework', 'Swift', 'iOS', 'Xcode'] |
Collaborating and Creating: Beauty Influencers’ Impact on Brands | For more information about Julius or our blog, please contact Russell Wilde Jr.
Digital influencers of all categories are on the rise. One genre, however, has dominated the space: beauty. Beauty influencers completely reshape how consumers choose what makeup to wear and what skincare products to buy. The digital age of beauty product advertising not only consists of reviewing brands in Youtube videos or giving a perfect smokey-eye tutorial, but now includes collaborating with brands to create makeup lines. Some even take it a step further and launch their own independent line of products.
Sponsored post by Zoella featuring TRESemme
The most popular example is UK beauty blogger Zoella, who has over 11 million followers on Youtube alone, 9 million on Instagram, and over 6 million on Twitter. She’s worked with brands such as TRESemme and Bombay. Millions of followers trust Zoella’s opinions on makeup and skincare — she shares thorough tutorials, monthly favorites, and features regular “New in Beauty” videos. Now the famous influencer has taken her love for beauty and skincare to a new level with her own line of products, Zoella Beauty. It features soaps, bath bombs, and various beauty products. The line is extremely well received in the UK and recently made its way to the US in American Eagle Outfitters and Tilly’s.
Jeffree Star, one of the top digital influencers on Myspace, also started his own cosmetics line after several years of working as a musician & makeup artist and sharing tutorials. His brand, Jeffree Star Cosmetics, includes highlighters, liquid lipsticks and plumpers.
As one of the original beauty influencers, Star is a trusted name in the lipstick world with his product often selling out quickly online as he begins to bring his products in stores worldwide.
September launch announcement by Jeffree Star Cosmetics
Other influencers have collaborated with makeup brands to create something special and high quality for their loyal followers. Bunny Meyer, better known as grav3yardgirl, brings her own hilarious take on makeup reviews, hauls, and monthly favorites to over 7 million followers on Youtube. Recently, she partnered with Tarte Cosmetics to create the limited edition Swamp Queen eye and cheek palette and two lip paint colors. The palette repeatedly sold out and even caught the attention and recommendations of Jeffree Star and beloved beauty guru Tati Westbrook.
Carli Bybel collaborated with a lesser known, but highly reviewed brand, BH Cosmetics, to create her own highlighter and eyeshadow palette. Followers have praised her for the affordable price and wide availability, and the colors are inspired by warm, neutral makeup looks Carli is known for.
Jaclyn Hill, who has over 3 million followers on Youtube, partnered with Becca Cosmetics to create an exclusive line, Becca x Jaclyn Hill Champagne Collection, featuring highlighters, blushes, and primers, and once included an eyeshadow palette. Jaclyn and Becca Cosmetics decided to pull the palette from the line after customers expressed disappointment with the product due to a time crunch which caused it to be created in a different lab and not offer the same quality. Followers a respected Becca and Jaclyn’s sincere apology over the issue, choosing to confront it rather than ignore fans’ critiques.
These are only a handful of beauty experts out of millions of influencers who have collaborate with brands or worked independently to create their own cosmetics line so why are they so successful and how does it connect with followers?
Influencers, such as Zoella or Jeffree, create and grow and loyal following through skilled tutorials and extensive, honest opinions on a wide range of products. Followers know that these influencers appreciate quality and will trust a product that has their name. Even if they have a negative reaction, like Jaclyn Hill’s eyeshadow palette, they use social media to their advantage to sincerely apologize and keep their fans up to date on what is happening. It’s a reminder that they aren’t only a brand, but a person one can trust.
Some influencers may not always create their own line or collaborate to make a product, but will still partner with and swear by products. Tati Westbrook, also known as GlamLifeGuru, gained a heavily loyal following due to her honest critiques of high-end and drugstore beauty products. After all, who better than a highly trusted beauty guru to partner with Birchbox to share her faves?
Photo via Birchbox
Bottom line: beauty influencers are changing how products are researched, advertised, and bought. They’ve become trusted and popular enough to engage with a brand, make their own lines, while sharing powerful and organic messages to their followers. Julius includes thousands of beauty influencers, both well known and micro-influencers, ready to partner with beauty brands or even collaborate and create their own lines, and have a following ready to see what their favorite gurus do next.
Julius, a Thuzio solution, is a SaaS influencer marketing platform that provides marketers with rich social data, advanced search capabilities, and the campaign management tools required to organize a successful influencer marketing strategy.
For more information about Julius, our influencer marketing software, or our blog please contact Russell Wilde Jr. | https://medium.com/juliusworks/collaborating-and-creating-beauty-influencers-impact-on-beauty-brands-2ead9a6721f7 | [] | 2016-12-27 15:58:55.738000+00:00 | ['Influencer Marketing Tips', 'Influencer Campaigns', 'Fashion', 'Branding', 'Influencer Marketing'] |
Wading Through Death on the Mediterranean | Dr. Erna Rijnierse is a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) physician on board the search and rescue vessel the MV Aquarius, which is run in partnership between MSF and SOS MEDITERRANEE. She gave the following account of a rescue operation in the central Mediterranean on July 20, in which 209 people were rescued from two small boats in distress, and 22 people (21 women and one man) were found dead.
On Wednesday, we got a call from Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Center and were told that there was a helicopter doing a medical evacuation and we were needed to assist in a rescue. At that point we didn’t know that a navy vessel had disembarked about 48 people from a rubber boat. So a lot of things we only found out a bit later.
I and another of the team members had a bad feeling and it turned out that we were right.
So when we approached, the first thing we noticed was the silence. Normally, when you approach a boat the people wave and let you know that they are there, but this time, they were awfully silent. The other thing we noticed almost immediately was the very strong smell of fuel.
When we approached the boat, they told us there were dead bodies inside the boat. They didn’t tell us how many.
When we got close to the boat, we noticed that they didn’t have proper lifejackets, so we distributed them immediately. What we didn’t know at that point was how many bodies were on board.
I asked permission to get onto the boat. The water was up to my calves. The smell of fuel was incredible and there were strong smells of urine and other things. It was very hard not to step on a human body, but I wanted to make absolutely sure that the women — it was clear to me at that point that most of them were women — were really beyond the point of resuscitation.
I just did a quick assessment to make sure that the women were really dead. Some of them were already stiff, so rigor mortis had set in. It was clear that they didn’t die in the last few minutes and you could see in their eyes that the way they died, they were struggling.
From a medical point of view, it was clear that there was nothing we could do, so I went back onboard our rescue boat to focus on the ones who did survive this ordeal. There were a lot of people onboard the boat who did suffer from stinging eyes which was probably due to the gas or fuel.
It became apparent that there had been a struggle taking place on the boat. You can tell it from the nail scratches on peoples arms and legs, but also we had 10 people presenting with human bites on arms, a person’s back, but also on lower backs and ankles. To me that’s somebody who has lied down flat on the floor and has been stacked upon, without being able to do anything about it. It’s horrific to imagine that scenario. It must have been chaotic. People were just staring with empty eyes into nothingness.
“Different men were shooting guns and they gathered people together and they all run down towards the sea. They put too many people on our boat. The boat was very full. It was too full,” David, from Nigeria, describing the journey at sea. Photo: Donal Gorman/MSF
People on board are severely traumatized by events, but it’s not only their journeys in the Sahara or the horrific stay in Libya. What they’ve encountered here has been beyond most people’s imagination. Later on, we recovered the bodies, which was not easy. What we do is take pictures of each and every individual. We give their estimated age and other details, to be handed over to the Italian authorities, but what’s really sad is that there’s only one person who has been positively identified.
They have died an agonizing death. You can see that in those faces. Some of them have protruding tonsils because of the suffocation process. It’s also difficult for people to recognize their loved ones when they are in that state.
So we have one positive identification of a man who has lost his wife in this incident. There is also a person who has traveled with one of his relatives, but because of the state of the faces, he couldn’t even identify his family member and unfortunately doesn’t come from a country where his dental records or DNA or whatever could be used to identify the person. What we are hearing is that the girls were traveling from Nigeria. Some of them met while traveling along the way. We are hearing stories of them being at the bottom of the boat between the wooden floor and rubber bottom, gagging on swallowed dirty fuel and water.
Many of the girls were coming after having spent some time in detention, so were very weak to begin with. They didn’t eat or drink properly. How can you physically fight if you are weak? So it’s been horrible.
What we need to do is to focus on the ones who have survived and care for them. We’ve called in a psychosocial team from MSF in Italy who work on the shore who are prepared for these sorts of situations and will meet us tomorrow in Trappani, where we will hand over the dead bodies to the Italian authorities.
What is difficult and even disgusting to me is that these girls died a horrible death and only for the reason that they have no other way to get to Europe. I find that appalling and very difficult to deal with.
“What happened to these people? Was there panic on board? Crushing, drowning in a shallow pool of fuel and water? I had a feeling of anger towards the situation, and felt an overwhelming sadness about these unfortunate people, mostly women who had suffered so much,” Ferry Schippers, project coordinator on board the MV Aquarius. Photo:
Alva White/MSF
Of course it’s difficult to look face to face at a dead person but it’s even more difficult when you have to try give some sort of identification to a girl you will never talk to. You will never know [her] history or who will miss her. Because you will have no way of identifying her, that makes it even more personal to me.
I was furious yesterday. I was angry at the policies that keeps everything at arm’s length. These girls could have bought an airplane ticket and had a very safe comfortable journey and still have paid half the price for what they paid for this doomed crossing. They shouldn’t have to cross the desert or be in forced prostitution or whatever situation they find themselves in, then have to board in the middle of the night an unfit vessel to then drown in the sea because they can’t do it any other way, and that whole sequence makes me furious with anger.
And at the same time, I’m super sad because the people have committed no crime but to cross the sea. They were not sick. They were normal people with their whole lives ahead of them. | https://medium.com/msf-passport/wading-through-death-on-the-mediterranean-18668748f368 | ['Doctors Without Borders'] | 2016-07-26 18:08:23.120000+00:00 | ['Latest News', 'Doctors Without Borders', 'Libya', 'Refugees', 'Water'] |
Pandemic Positive | Let me elaborate.
My tools of choice during 2020 were Zoom, Mural and Miro (I use them both, interchangeably, and sometimes in the same workshop series). The shift to digital forced me to be more intentional in my workshop design. That meant I needed to timebox activities more carefully while making sure to take care not to ignore personal, non-digital needs. I’ve always strived to work very structured in my in-person work but once we moved online I saw a lot of tentativeness. This was mostly due to peoples’ unfamiliarity or even fear of the new tools.
On the other hand, that gave me more opportunity to create clear parameters in which to work. Let’s face it, a lot of what we say we miss with in-person meetings is the idle banter, the elongated transitions, and the slow starts. These are all personal interactions that many people claim is the relational glue that holds people together. I disagree. I think most of this is learned behavior to reduce performance and responsibility. Most of the longer lasting relational glue that builds culture through human conversation happens in between meetings or through producing good works. I’m not saying meetings or workshops shouldn’t be fun. I’m saying that I’m seeing stronger relationship being built through higher levels of work interactions and results in digital meetings than I see being built through idle chatter in in-person meetings. The clearer parameters that the online meetings demand make it easier, not harder, for people to meet.
One of the reasons that I’ve come to prefer the combination of Zoom and Mural/Miro over in-person meetings is the ease and flexibility of creating small groups and giving each of these groups a dedicated work room. The groups themselves have come to the conclusion that three (3) is the optimal number of people in a group. This small number forces people to be active throughout, enables better and more direct conversations, builds rapport quicker, and helps them produce in short periods of time.
In Zoom and Mural/Miro I never run out of workspace; I always have great rooms to design in with limitless whiteboards and creative materials; I can quickly check in on individual groups seamlessly; and I can call people in to the larger meetings and then send them back out with no transportation times or disruptions.
Most of this is impossible in real life. We have limited space in which to work. There are never enough good rooms to design in. We spend (waste) lots of time in transitions. We are then forced to increase group size and watch as a small subset does the work, while others have the ability to look on passively. This isn’t to say we don’t waste time online or that everyone is highly active. But it happens less in the newer meetings.
And so, we end almost all of these meetings with people declaring that they feel inspired, energized, ready to take on new things, have more confidence and feel more creative. My favorite quote was from a participant who, half-way through a workshop, grabbed her head and claimed “My head hurts from being so creative in a short time. I’m not used to participating in meetings like this!”
All of this happens because of more intense planning and rituals. One ritual is that we have to take at least a 10-minute break every hour. People can’t sit in front of computers for too long. The break, for coffee, bathroom, exercise etc. gives people a clear picture that they will work hard for a bit, and then have a breather. It works wonders. | https://medium.com/@rnadworny/pandemic-positive-51192a3d7991 | ['Rich Nadworny'] | 2020-12-18 08:52:06.210000+00:00 | ['Collaboration', 'Design Thinking', 'Online Meetings', 'Workshop', 'Innovation'] |
Trading Journal for 12/24 | 6:18AM: Today is a short day. SPX futures are at 3686 after Trump vetoed the spending bill. I don’t see any stocks that look good pre-market. | https://medium.com/finding-income/trading-journal-for-12-24-97f28e2561e3 | ['Vinson Chuong'] | 2020-12-24 18:02:37.079000+00:00 | ['Day Trading'] |
The Productivity Experiments | Digital Productivity
The Productivity Experiments
Photo by Bram Naus on Unsplash
Ah! that lovely idea of Digital Productivity — it will one way or the other make you adapt to the exploding digital world.
Everyone who has been using the digital form of reading and writing as much as I do, (which going by the contemporary standards is pretty much) would have at some point of time or other been smitten by the idea of productivity. One way or the other, productivity is a pretty inviting idea. If one emerges as someone who has benefited, it is good, else, well, there are folks who can be cynical.
So, when it comes to digital world, either one is sucked in the trap or one becomes a master of productivity, at least in the individual domain. There is possibly no other outcome, if one seriously attempts to improve productivity in these times of “too much screen-time”. My time to start seeking to improve my digital life began long time back. Day One was not born and masters like Steve Dotto were not accessible to me to make me learn how to use Getting Things Done® popularly known as GTD® when using the new tools of the digital world. The bells and whistles of the digital world were alluring and seemed to offer possibilities to make us supermen when it came to handling our data. The digital mode was an obvious option for an engineer steeped into Information Technology. That was the last decade of the last century. Many may recall those days of Y2K Bug.
Fast forward that by about a decade and the world all around us started exploding with digital data. The humans have been creating data like never before. To give an idea of how much data we create, The World Economic Forum put out an article in April 2019. It may seem mind-boggling to those who are still in the blissful era of pen and paper or who need not be concerned with what really are the Digital Nomads up to. Do read that report nevertheless, for one day sooner than you realise you will not be very different from an average digital nomad of today. Somewhere around that time, I had also started to leave a bigger digital footprint. The process wasn’t subtle but it was sudden and expotential, especially after I bought a smartphone driven by almost always available mobile connectivity. Things seemed to have become better than one could ever imagine in th 1990s. There were new apps like Endomondo to track my bike rides and Evernote to organise my documents. Even if we leave out the personal data that I created just by using the various apps, I was to amass colossal amount of data by the existing standards in the decade when digital explosion was taking place — just about a decade and a half back. My computer was flooded with bills, invoices, investment proposals, professional reports, presentations, white papers and almost everything that was thrown at me in a digital format. Soon the pleasures of organising your data became a challenge and one was forced to explore options to get a better methods for handling personal data. It was scary to be swamped in that manner. The need to be better organised was pertinent and had become a pressing one.
Thus, started my journey of Digital Productivity. I started reading productivity books. Learning methods like The Secret Weapon, using applications like OneNote and Evernote and trying to find the best tactics that suited my requirements. There was a great learning in my endeavours to understand and master different methodologies. I also discovered the new tools of productivity like Todoist, OmniFocus, Any.Do, Wunderlist to name just a few prominent ones. I did end up mastering the use of calendar apps by Google and Apple. I was also exposed to numerous Email and cloud services. To cut the story short I was being bombarded by not only the digital data but also the various options that had become abundantly available by then. The numerous variations apart, the existing options were themselves evolving, every now and then new versions were released and the learning curve was at such an incline that even after mastering a methodology, one would feel that something was missing. Some great tools like Sunrise Calendar got sold out to bigger giants like Microsoft who themselves were offering OneNote as a productivity platform. Then there were forums like Forte Labs, The Sweet Setup and The Asian Efficiency to help you become better with organising your digital data. These forums still exist and excite me. There are Youtube channels like Keep Poductive by Francesco D’Allesio and other masters of digital productivity like Carl Pullein and Ali Abdaal. It is after learning from all these as much as using different platforms/apps and methodologies that added experience to my journey as a Digital Nomad so far.
There was also an aspect of different devices. From the Symbian based devices like Nokia E71 and the BlackBerry OS based BlackBerry phones to the early versions of Android on HTC, the learning curve on the productivity bandwagon always remained interesting. Then came better cross-platfrom availability linking phones to computers. This led to discussions/debates on which platform was better and how much better. In the initial years of cross-platform productivity systems, I had a hybird setup of Windows-based computers and Android phones. There was a lot to learn there. Over a period of time and as and when my finances permitted I began to acquire Apple devices. Today the ecosystem for me is totally Apple. Am I satisfied? Yes and no. Yes, because I know the environment deeply enough and no because the frequency of changes that lead to the next level of evolution is fast enough to to keep me jogging on the learning curve. One cannot really be called a master as was possible a couple of decades back, inspite of learning so much and investing so much time and often money in the endeavour to keep up. The debates and discussions still continue on the internet. I am a little wiser now and choose to stick to what my requirements are rather than falling to the bells and whistles of every new shiny app on the block. I will venture out only if my requirement changes, else the status quo is the best for me. That is wisdom for any Digital Nomad. One can after all do only that much.
The biggest question is have I adapted to the digital world? A part of me says yes and the other part just laughs off in an offending manner. Thankfully now I am pretty clear about what I need to know and what I need to pursue and learn to keep from getting swamped. But to say that I am a master of sorts would be as incorrect as saying that the Sun is in a different Solar system. The debate still rages hot — should I follow Chris Dacy or should I start to work on “How to Stop Being Constatntly Overwhelmed” by Thomas Frank. All this while I was thinking that the technology is changing and so must I endeavour to adapt to the ever-growing demand of the digital world, screaming for change. The following thought is what strikes as something that is closest to the truth.
“Clearly, the thing that’s transforming is not the technology — the technology is transforming you.” Jeanne W. Ross | MIT Sloan’s Center for Information Systems Research
As time passes I know one thing for sure that it is the basic principles of digital productivity that matter more than the devices or the apps. If you are the master of those principles and if you broadly understand numerous methodologies then digital productivity is a cake walk. Another thing is that it is important to know the guiding philosophy of digital productivity and that is whatever apps and platforms you may use your flavour of the way you deploy your system will be unique. Two people using the same set of apps and platforms are in all likelihood to have their own unique workflows. There is no correct or incorrect method of implementation as longs as the basic principles of digital productivity are applied. A well implemented set of workflows howsoever different will stilllead to an optimised digital productivity. Another great lesson in the journey of digital productivity is that after doing adequate research, choose your platforms and/or apps well. Therafter do not fall prey to the bells and whistles of new apps as and when they come out. There will always be a a better version of the app with better features. There will always be the most selling app, the app of the year and what not. These are are a swamp that will drive you away from your own sytem. You would be tempted to try out the new app. What should be borne in mind is this — is there something that is you are missing in in your existing apps/platforms or your workflows. If the answer is yes then it is worthwhile to explore otherwise it is a sheer wastage of time and effort. Once you find something better, try out all permutations and combinations for all possible contingencies before you proceed to implement the new one, discarding the old one. This is a cat and a mouse game of sorts. So it is prudent to be mindful and deliberate in applying change. The best thing to do is sit down with pen and paper, (yes, pen and paper) and design your own productivity system, make your own workflows and choose your platforms/apps after doing adequate research. Deploy the system and work on it to keep refining till you are satisfied. That should do the trick for being digital productive.
Yet, at the end of the day one would still have to evolve. The following lines are evergreen and especially relevant to the journey of every Digital Nomad: -
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change” Charles Darwin | English Naturalist and Geologist.
Have a productive New Year 2021. | https://medium.com/@yjadon/the-productivity-experiments-b2ed78946a89 | ['Yadvendra Jadon'] | 2020-12-28 05:41:50.784000+00:00 | ['Digital Nomads', 'Digital Transformation', 'Productivity'] |
Some of the best Indian TV actors | There are several TV actors who make way into the hearts of the audience by entertaining them day and night on the small screen of the country. Out of the lot, it’s only a few that manage to leave an everlasting positive impression on the viewer’s heart. Following is the list of some of the best TV actors who have done a great contribution towards the industry:
1) Kushal Tandon
One of the most talked-about TV actors of recent times; Kushal Tandon is a renowned name of the industry and was majorly known for acting in the serial Beyhadh. He also featured in some well-known reality shows such as Bigg Boss and Nach Baliye. He is undoubtedly one of the most good-looking actors on the small screen and also made headlines when he was involved with the fellow contestant of Bigg Boss, Gauhar Khan.
2) Mohsin Khan
Mohsin Khan is another versatile artist of the TV industry and who boasts of having a huge amount of fandom, all credits to the very renowned show of the country, Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai in which he played the leading role of Kartik. His majorly known for his chocolate boy image and he was recently in the news for seeing his reel life co-star Shivangi Joshi in real life as well.
3) Nakuul Mehta
Another eye candy for all the viewers out there, Nakuul Mehta is the Ishqbaaz actor who hs worked in the TV industry for a good long time. He is said to be the perfect mix of talent and good looks. He is quite renowned for playing the role of Shivaay Singh Oberoi in Ishqbaaz and has a series of other shows to his name.
4) Shabir Ahluwalia
Another very renowned face of the Indian TV industry, Shabir Ahluwalia made his professional debut with the show named Hip Hop Hurray. After that, he went onto gain recognition from the television show named Kahiin To Hoga. Apart from this, he has a few other shows to his name as well such as Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and Kumkum Bhagya.
5) Karanvir Bohra
Another well-known name and face of the Indian TV industry, Karanvir Bohra has contributed to the industry to a great extent. He is one of the most well-established name of the industry and has worked in a great number of shows. He starred in the tv shows such as Dil Se Di Dua… Saubhagyavati Bhava?, Kasautii Zindagii Kay, Naagin 2, Qubool Hai, Shararat and many more. Apart from these, he is also the owner of a menswear clothing line.
Hope you liked this blog!
To book TV actor for New Year or any other event, please visit StarClinch (India’s №1 artist and celebrity booking website). | https://medium.com/@bhuwankochhar551/some-of-the-best-indian-tv-actors-d09265833924 | ['Bhuwan Kochhar'] | 2019-10-22 12:15:01.947000+00:00 | ['India', 'Starclinch', 'Actor', 'TV'] |
Pop Culture Mondays/6.14.21 | Pop Culture Mondays/6.14.21
Welcome to my brain
HAPPY MONDAY my pop culture junkies and happy Pride month and all the celebrations around it and happy JUNETEENTH week and happy almost June 15th to California which like WTF are you doing tomorrow if you live in CA and the world is opening up? I might be hiding under my bed tbh. I mean it is sort of crazy how fast most of us adapt and I know there are people who say “I will never go back to the way I was before” but let’s see how long that lasts. Traffic is back. Lines are back. Colds will probably be back. SOOOOO…under my bed I go. BUT not before I write this monster of a PCM because there is JUST SO MUCH HAPPENING. And I know a lot of you are waiting to hear what I have to say about Jeffrey Toobin (🤡) and I know this because I have heard from SO many people asking, “what are you going to say…?” so here I go because I DO NOT WANT TO add his face to my newsletter because gross and because I do not want to waste more time and energy on him and what this whole thing says but to summarize…
…the Toobs got “caught” masturbating during a Zoom meeting with his New Yorker colleagues 7 months ago. Yes that’s right, during the height of the pandemic, while all of his esteemed colleagues are meeting via Zoom to discuss the topics ahead, the Toobs COULD NOT BEAR it anymore and decided to engage in some frisky masturbation during the call. Problem is he left his camera on. (I mean there are a lot of problems but let’s just focus on this one.) Let us just for ONE SECOND think about his colleagues and what they were confronted with. LOOK, I am liberal AF. I am guy’s girl and a girl’s girl. I am not a prude and I love old fashioned chivalry I am not going to lie. I do not grow AGHAST at all things others might deem as inappropriate and I try not to judge because I AM NO SAINT but I draw the line at a dude pulling his pants down and blah blah blah. I think this is pretty STANDARD response. He was fired by Conde Nast and CNN put him on suspension. WE assumed surely his broadcast days were done. Well, ENTER Jeff Zucker (shocker) who now is all puffed up like a peacock because he has more power than ever due to the Discovery deal and he decides the Toobs (a bro of his) has paid the price and HE IS BACK ON AIR. But even worse, he does an interview which, let’s be clear, you KNOW most CNN anchors were VYING to do because WHY not, and he proceeds to say he has had a TERRIBLE 7 months but he worked in a food bank so YAY he’s paid the price. AND HE IS BACK (CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO). I am not one for cancel culture but surely when we are cancelling young women for tweets they did when they were in high school ten years ago and albeit terrible tweets they have shown they have evolved since then…SURELY a man who proceeds to take his pants off to masturbate in the middle of the day while his colleagues watched…SURELY….no never mind. FORGET it. But I will say it will be VERY hard to see the CNN anchors known for their eye rolls and sarcasm and judgement take that tone moving forward. SO if you are a politician NOW IS YOUR TIME for public masturbation and being caught on camera because at the very least CNN better have NOTHING to say about it. HAVE FUN LINDSAY GRAHAM. GO FOR IT.
And with that, this is PCM. Welcome to my newest subscribers…I am normally not ranting but THIS had to be said. Hopefully the rest is less RANTY but I cannot promise as I write this in real time and have no editor…OBVIOUSLY… (we all need editors tbh).
Enjoy…. | https://medium.com/popculturemondays/pop-culture-mondays-6-14-21-3a1d5ddad31c | ['Brooke Hammerling'] | 2021-06-14 18:29:03.623000+00:00 | ['Conspiracy Theories', 'Football', 'Pride', 'Christian Eriksen', 'Pop Culture'] |
GitOps Deployment and Kubernetes | Riskified developers deploy code to production multiple times a day, which requires us to have a robust deployment process. When we started migrating to K8s, the deployment process was a significant concern for us. We had to replace a trusted process built over time: a script that looped through the servers, pulled and started the new image, and waited for healthcheck. It was a simple process, but moving to K8s, we could no longer perform a loop. In K8s, you must update the deployment object with the new image tag.
We started designing a new deployment process by setting four goals we wanted to accomplish:
Easy to understand. The less magic, the better. Declarative. We want to declare the new state of our service. GitOps. Git is our single source of truth, and every process should start from a change in Git. For our deployment process, that means we declare our state in Git, and an automated process applies it to the cluster. Observability. It should be easy to understand how each component of the application had been deployed, and monitor the status of the components at all times.
After evaluating a few tools and processes, we decided to combine Helm and ArgoCD. In this article, I’ll share with you how we’ve used these tools in our GitOps deployment, and list the benefits of the new process.
Deployment phases
Deployments can be split into two phases. The first starts with a commit/merge and ends with a new image in the registry. The image has passed all the tests and can be used in production. This phase is pure GitOps as it is triggered by a Git action.
The second phase starts with a new image in the registry and ends when all the servers are running the new version, and passing health checks.
GitOps: the second phase
The second phase was the focus of our efforts. Our first idea was to save the K8s objects in a Git repo and update them at the end of the CI, then trigger another action to apply the new update to the cluster. This will create a great GitOps declarative flow, but K8s objects are complex and we want our developers to manage them.
Helm
Helm is a package manager; it provides the ability to template K8s objects so that they could be reused. Using key-value files, users of the template can provide different values. With Helm, we created a set of generic templates that developers can use to quickly deploy their images to K8s, hiding the complicated parts of K8s and decreasing the learning curve for developers. You can read more about this in my previous blog post. Using this technique, our deploy process begins when the image tag value is changed, or when any other value changes.
Observability: ArgoCD
Helm introduces magic to the process. From a small set of values, it generates a deployment, a service, and a lot more objects. Magic makes it harder for developers to understand the production environment. Our fourth parameter should cope with this problem. Good observability can detangle some of the magic and make the process more understandable.
ArgoCD is a GitOps continuous delivery tool for K8s and had recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). ArgoCD allows to continuously sync helm charts to the cluster. Among other features, ArgoCD has a rich UI that increases observability, displaying all the application components and their status in a single place.
In the above picture, you can see our rails-demo application. You can see the K8s components and their health status, and you can see that it is synced to the Git repo. The application was composed using our generic Helm chart. The developer enjoys a simple Helm chart while also getting a view of the result in production.
ArgoCD in practice
ArgoCD is kind of a reconciling loop from Git to K8s:
ArgoCD watches the Git repo and runs the Helm template; these templated files are then compared to the desired state in the cluster — this is the sync status in the application view. If there are differences, ArgoCD can apply the templated files and change the K8s desired state — this can be manual or automatic. ArgoCD also watches the live K8s objects and compares them to the K8s desired state — this is the health status in the application view.
No `$helm install`
ArgoCD doesn’t use `$helm install`. It is not a Helm rapper, but rather a declarative GitOps deploy tool. The way you construct the templated K8s objects in Git doesn’t need to be related to the way you deploy them to the cluster. We use Helm for templating, and we use ArgoCD for deploying and managing the cluster. Each tool is the best for its purpose. `$kubectl apply` is also the easiest way to change the desired state in the cluster. Using it helps us reduce the magic around the deployment process.
The complete deployment process
After publishing a new docker image, we trigger a script that commits the new tag to the application Helm chart and another script that forces sync in ArgoCD and waits for the ArgoCD application to return to a healthy status.
Summary
Migration to K8s comes with significant risk. The deployment process should reduce the risk and generate more confidence in the process. Using ArgoCD and Helm as described gave us the confidence we needed and reduced our concerns. Reducing magic and increasing observability can help you do better deploys. | https://medium.com/riskified-technology/gitops-deployment-and-kubernetes-f1ab289efa4b | ['Omer Kahani'] | 2020-05-27 11:10:25.106000+00:00 | ['Argo Cd', 'Sre', 'Gitops', 'Kubernetes', 'Helm'] |
Tell Me About Yourself | Mastering awkward interview situations..
Shutterstock ID #579867070
Here I have listed down few questions that are frequently asked during job interviews, and probably not with the best intentions..
Q: Did you complete your PhD? Why not?
After spending few years in IT industry, I started to find this question totally irrelevant, considering that most companies I worked for often had team members or even senior managers who didn’t even have basic Bachelors or Masters degree in IT or Computer related fields (like Chemical, Polymer, Civil / Construction majors). Even those who claimed to have a total 10–15 years of work experience, only 2–3 years were actually relevant to the job.
In my case, this article clarifies why I decided not to continue my PhD even though I had several research publications and strong R&D experience - https://medium.com/@pamruta/programming-for-entertainment-47cf67ac2105
After 3–4 years into PhD program, I realized, I was far more excited and enthusiastic while talking about some class project I did on Humor Analysis in FRIENDS tv-show (something I hardly spent 2–3 weeks on), than what I was doing for my PhD for 3–4 years.. If you read the above article, you will see that manually annotating Physics dialogs that repeatedly talk about Newtons laws (trying to find the sentiments or whatever) just didn’t fit anywhere in the overall big picture or long-term career aspirations..
PhD is something a person should feel proud of (not embarrassed) while explaining to others.. And somehow, I was far more proud of my FRIENDS paper on Humor than anything related to Physics dialogs or Word Senses (Master’s thesis)..
I wanted freedom to explore my own unique ideas, but apparently in USA, your PhD research is sponsored by and therefore confined to the scope of the research grant your advisor has (in my case, a chat-bot tutor that teaches newton’s physics laws). As an international student, you are in no position to bargain.. It’s more like “be thankful we gave you admission and funding, when we receive 100s of applications every year..”
Apparently, just two words “PhD Student” on your CV or LinkedIn profile can raise lot of questions and eye-brows. After constantly having to explain myself for 10 years, I decided it was best to just get rid of it to avoid any confusions. But the fact that I landed 5 PhD admission offers with full scholarship from top universities, including Carnegie Mellon and Twin Cities (Minneapolis) is I think worth mentioning somewhere..
Q: I see you switch jobs very often, any particular reason?
Short answer is: “Lack of Creativity at Work”.. something I was never willing to compromise on (and also why I left my PhD by the way).. If the majority of daily work seems like a mundane chore lacking creative aspect, then your organization will be better off hiring clerks..
What’s more important for your company? Longetivity or Productivity? Because I can very well show you examples of prized employees from large corporations who have spent 10–20 years there doing nothing useful or interesting throughout their careers! If I can produce the same amount of work or even better (both in quality and quantity) in just few months compared to what others accomplish over many years, it’s not the same..
I have worked in organizations where Creativity and Innovation just wasn’t in their DNA (only Engineering & Delivery was), and often I had to push very hard to convince my superiors to allow me at least some freedom so I don’t end up hating my job or quitting right away! In companies where there was absolutely no hope or scope to get creative, I did exactly that — found the nearest exit door and walked out never to look back again!
Just like PhD, the scope of my creativity at work was often confined to what the client wants (if it’s a service company), or what the “business” wants (if product). Nobody seemed to care “what I want”.. If the client wants something “rubbish”, yes you are supposed to deliver the “rubbish” w/o questioning..
Q: Are you married? Do you have children?
None of your business.. I could be married to a film star or beggar on the streets, why do you care? If that’s your hiring criteria, put it in the job description!
Q: Why did you move back to India from US?
If all your family & relatives live across the world, and you have to travel 30 hrs (flight + transit time) just to see them once in a year or two, you will know exactly why! In retrospect, abandoning your parents and grand-parents in their old age to fulfil your own dreams of living abroad just seems super-selfish..
Summary:
In my experience, if the interviewer makes you uncomfortable, it’s probably because — they are just looking for some lame excuses not to hire you, or more often, these dimwits just want to show off they are smarter and better than you.. In either case, you are better off not joining the place that lacks a positive and inspiring work culture.
The problems are worse when people who hire you don’t ask these questions upfront, but rather leave it to speculations and guess-work, creating problems later on after joining.. Honestly, I see no reason to explain myself, especially to unproductive losers who are just busy gossiping at work..
Impromptu Interviewers
The worst interviews I had so far, however, are those when the HR person randomly pairs you up with someone, just because they are the only ones available and free that day to conduct interviews, even though they have no relevant background, or experience like yours.. Very often, these spontaneous interviewers haven’t even read your CVs beforehand, when they start interrogating you naively..
My reaction: I have literally stormed out of few interviews, promising myself never to set foot in that company ever again! If you have spent days preparing for your interview, why should the interviewer not even spend couple of mins studying about your background to ask at least relevant questions beyond the usual “tell me about yourself”.. If they have the right to interrogate us, we should be equally entitled to question their qualifications and accomplishments, especially if they seem unfit to take the interview or make fair decisions.. | https://medium.com/@pamruta/tell-me-about-yourself-df8b76579c4d | [] | 2020-12-30 11:18:23.844000+00:00 | ['Communication Skills', 'Career Advice', 'Job Interview', 'Soft Skills'] |
“Mank” Was Everything I Hate About Films About Classic Hollywood | “Mank” Was Everything I Hate About Films About Classic Hollywood
I went into David Fincher’s new film Mank with high expectations. I’m generally a sucker for a film set in classic Hollywood. I love the way that many filmmakers are able to capture a little bit of the magic of that period of filmmaking, and I especially enjoy watching contemporary stars transform into their counterparts of yore. This being the case, I though I would really love this film, in the same way that I had Trumbo and Ryan Murphy’s television series Hollywood.
Unfortunately, Mank ended up being everything I hate about films about Hollywood: self-indulgent, too clever by half, and empty of anything of substance.
Starring Gary Oldman in the title role, it’s essentially an old-style biopic. As the film begins, Mank has been commissioned by the boy-wonder Orson Welles (Tom Burke) to work on a script for the film that will become Citizen Kane. Given that it ends up becoming a thinly-veiled commentary on newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), the film devotes considerable time to flashbacks that explore Mank’s relationship with the old man and especially with his mistress, Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried). While he ultimately wins an Oscar for writing, he has to share the credit with Welles, a bitter pill for the proud Mank.
It’s pretty clear from the get-go that Mank intends to be a biopic in the style of old Hollywood. As the character himself says as he begins to work on the script for Citizen Kane, “You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.” Unfortunately for Mank, and for the film as a whole, it really doesn’t manage to do that.
It’s certainly not for lack of trying. The film is beautiful, there’s no question about that. The black-and-white cinematography is a strong choice, and it helps to capture the aura of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood filmmaking. The dialogue crackles with intensity, intelligence, and wit, which is again a fitting homage to the cinema of the period. And, of course, the performances are extraordinary. Though some have taken issue with Oldman’s casting as being age-inappropriate (since he’s in his 60s and Mank was in his 40s at the time of the film), alcoholism takes a terrible toll on a body, so that didn’t really bother me. Amanda Seyfried is radiant as Marion Davies, and Charles Dance (as he always is) is truly extraordinary, if criminally underused, as William Randolph Hearst.
Unfortunately, all of these strengths can’t make up for the fundamental deficiencies that afflict this film from the beginning to the end.
At the level of storytelling, for example, Mank is something of a mess. As a viewer, I quickly grow impatient with multiple flashbacks for, unlike in reading a book — where you can keep track of switches in time relatively easily — it’s hard to keep multiple points in time in your head while watching a film, and it’s even harder to see how they relate to one another. In this case, all of the flashbacks just seem to blur into one another, so that it’s very difficult to see the relationship between the past and the present in any sort of coherent fashion, other than the general antagonism and betrayal that Mank feels toward Hearst. However, Dance’s Hearst is given far too little screen time for his role in Mank’s life to feel genuine or authentic, and the same is true of Davies. It’s clear what they’re supposed to signify, but they end up falling flat because the story fails them.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with a film like Mank. It seems to be laboring under the assumption that, because of its subject (the writer of one of the most influential films in the history of Hollywood) and its external trappings (the black-and-white cinematography, the performances), that it can get away with cheap and lazy storytelling. It is, essentially, the same rage-against-the-machine fetishization of the auteur, though here the writer than the director, that we have seen time and time again. In this universe, it’s male creatives that matter, while the women, including Mank’s long-suffering yet eternally-supportive wife Sara— who he, and everyone else, refer to dismissively as “Poor Sara” — are given second, third, and fourth billing. In essence, they’re little more than window-dressing to the titanic conflict between male egos, whether that’s between Mank and the blustering and cruel Louis B. Mayer (who’s little more than a caricature) or between and Welles (whose final confrontation about screenwriting credit is one of the worst scenes in the entire film).
Normally, I’m not in the habit of taking a film to task for not being the film that I wanted to see made, but I’m going to do so in this instance, because I do think it’s unfortunate that Hollywood, with some notable exceptions, continues to produce these kinds of stories. Did we really need another tale of old Hollywood focusing almost exclusively on men, their conflicts with one another, their dick-measuring contests? Did we really need another film about a male artist struggling against the system? Did we really need this story when there are so many others about marginalized people and groups that we could have had? Where’s the biopic about renowned costume designer Edith Head? Where are the biopics about Dorothy Arnzer and Ida Lupino, female directors who struggled to find success in the all-male world of Hollywood? For that matter, where’s the biopic about struggling queer stars such as Farley Granger and Tab Hunter? These are stories that could be told, but instead we’re subjected to the same masturbatory male fantasies as always, with the added daddy-issue complex that the idea for the film apparently was Fincher’s father’s.
Perhaps had Mank not so slavishly tried to replicate the ethos and look of classic Hollywood biopics, it would have succeeded. As it is, it can but be a pale shadow of those great films old, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. | https://medium.com/screenology/mank-was-everything-i-hate-about-films-about-classic-hollywood-2732ea4c3ba8 | ['Dr. Thomas J. West Iii'] | 2020-12-10 16:18:59.313000+00:00 | ['Film', 'Culture', 'Film Reviews', 'Movies', 'Movie Review'] |
“It’s time for Democrats to learn how to make an argument for something rather than running as ‘not Republicans.’” | “It’s time for Democrats to learn how to make an argument for something rather than running as ‘not Republicans.’” Amanda Sakuma ·Nov 13, 2020
Establishment Democrats were quick to blame the party’s left flank for their losses in down-ballot races this election, but perhaps they should be looking at themselves, Katelyn Burns writes. Moderate Democrats failed to put forth a coherent message and instead followed the lead of polling-obsessed high-priced campaign consultants. They only have themselves to blame. | https://gen.medium.com/its-time-for-democrats-to-learn-how-to-make-an-argument-for-something-a26619566a2c | ['Amanda Sakuma'] | 2020-11-13 18:58:10.995000+00:00 | ['Democratic Party', 'Alexandria Ocasio Cortez', 'Polling', 'Establishment Democrats', 'Election 2020'] |
Avoiding the “Automatic Hand-off” Syndrome in Data Science Products | A view on the evolution of data science products
Evolving data science products for new teams can be a daunting task. There are conflicting requirements embedded in the nature of data science products. First constraint: product teams want to move proof of concepts to market as fast as possible. Second constraint: data science (DS) teams need a growing infrastructure for efficient experimentation. Data scientists usually lack adequate infrastructure to meet their growing needs. Third constraint: engineering teams (ENG) value system stability and reliability. This makes them unable to keep pace with the “idea generation” coming from the research teams. The combination of these constraints leads to routine delays in machine learning pipelines. Delays can have a serious impact on morale and business value creation. Crucially, this rears its shadow at model creation and model monitoring time. As a community, we need to identify the components and workflows that are prone to delays and failures, to transcend the current state of Data Science/Machine Learning engineering to higher standards.
In this trifecta of teams, i.e. (Product, DS, and ENG), a central question gets asked very early on. Who should be the primary owner of the data science product computational pipelines?
As the trifecta dwells on this question, the ownership question becomes more refined. More questions such as the following start appearing:
Where is the current data science project in the product life-cycle?
What is the project trade-off for engineering reliability versus data science flexibility?
How much business value is this project creating, and how mission-critical is it?
These questions can help guide the data science and engineering groups. It can help them decide when and how to divide the work of exploration vs exploitation.
Is It Mission Critical Yet?
For this, the trifecta needs to think about the worst case. Imagine we have a week-long snafu and we can’t fix anything on the model or the data pipeline supporting it. What would be the impact? Here is a ranked list of scenarios:
The model is returning bad predictions but there is no loss of business value. The predictive power of the model is becoming stale. This leads to a slight business value loss. The predictions of the model are so wrong that we are losing a major amount of business value. The predictions of the model are damaging our customer relationships. The model is triggering major business value loss and is impacting the brand.
With this simple list, the teams can give a Mission Criticality score to their projects. This can help them look at their options for the DS to ENG interactions.
Without this Mission Criticality Score evaluation, risk-averse engineering groups commonly suggest a full hand-off of the project. Right after the first model iteration. Too soon. Let’s call this the “Automatic Hand-off” Syndrome in data science products.
From Mission Criticality score to DS pipeline
Here is a pattern to use to avoid this automatic hand-off. I saw this work this across the AI projects I worked on in the recent past. After determining the mission criticality, the team can choose one of the two paths below.
Two different methods of ML product management based on mission criticality
For non-mission critical products, the DS project owner should promote full DS ownership. That way, the data scientists that are leading this product can also own the DS pipeline:
Two different methods of ML product management based on Mission Criticality
For less mission-critical products, the DS project owner should promote full data science team ownership. That way, the data scientists that are leading this product can own the DS pipeline:
Data preparation
Feature engineering
Model training
Model serving
Model monitoring
To succeed at this, a data science platform team can provide light “platform” level support. The DS team can depend on the upstream data pipelines. These are usually available for reporting functions in the parent business.
On the other side of the equation, the mission criticality of the projects can become too high. Significant levels of business value can be lost because of in-flight turbulence. In this case, it is advisable to adopt a complementary scheme. The engineering builds a hardened pipeline for production usage. This deals with “stability-first” data preparation, feature engineering and model training/serving/monitoring. The DS team keeps on developing new feature engineering/models in parallel.
It is useful to keep the serving/monitoring decoupled from the production pipeline. The experimental DS pipelines can use the serving/monitoring infrastructure used by production workloads. This also prevents the occasional divergence in model serving compatibility.
This simplifies future “hand-offs” when the product grows to be mission-critical enough. The “pseudo-invariant” serving layer encourages the team to seek models compatible with it. A great opportunity to use the Dependency Inversion Principle. The serving layer interfaces between the consumer/client queries and the predictive services. But, it can serve to build a contract between teams. Both the experimental and production pipelines can share this service. The drawback of this strategy is that it reduces the ML search space. Both API contracts and DB table schemas can serve as contracts. This keeps the experimental and production pathways in sync.
Two more questions stay unanswered:
How to divide work between DS and ENG team members to enable them to use their complementary skills?
When and How to evolve this interaction between the experimental and production level?
Dividing work between DS and ENG
Here is one method to model the DS vs ENG interaction, split into two complexity axes:
Computation Performance Complexity
Machine Learning Complexity
“Computation Performance Complexity” (CPC) is a wide abstract term. I will use it here to describe any processing that does not “fit” on a data scientist’s laptop.
“Machine Learning Complexity” (MLC) is also a wide and abstract term. I’ll use it for any processing that needs extensive knowledge of machine learning.
The goal is to help DS teams decide how to divide various project components. DS products can remove some of the unnecessary couplings. This requires decoupling the CPC from the MLC. We explain how to split the components based on the specialization of DS and ENG teams.
Possible Data/DS/ML Component refinement directions
The idea with this split is to break it apart in meaningful components. The concurrent implementation of the components has sped up the time to production.
Early in a project, there is not enough ML or performance complexity in the problem at hand. But everyone gets involved by default. This method adds a good deal of communication overhead inside the team. Data engineers can manage specialized low latency and big data stacks. Data scientists and ML engineers can manage machine learning components.
The separation of concerns using this framework is an art. This framework can guide the initial attempts to build modular machine learning pipelines.
When and how to evolve experimental work to production levels
ML Evolution pathways
Monitoring is key to the data science product evolution. DS owners pay close attention to the business value creation of live models. The diagram above proposes a method for a simple feedback loop. It is a simple map for making the jump to full production support.
DS teams can use the decision chart above to select a strategy. The diagram helps determine the mission criticality of the pipeline over time. The DS team can choose the experimental pipeline or the full production support. In the experimental pipeline, data science ownership is for the complete pipeline.
The experimental pathway provides full flexibility. This includes generating many versions of the feature engineering and model training steps. At the egress of the pipeline, there are two types of DS monitoring. “Predictive performance” and “Business value” monitoring. The predictive performance guides the next iterations of the DS team. This allows them to improve their model/feature engineering techniques. The business value monitoring guides the evolution from an experimental to a production mode. The DS team can keep on iterating while they build a solid case for full production support.
In experimental+production mode, engineering owners replicate the best performing ML recipe. This recipe comes from the experimental pathway. They harden the modules that have issues with performance or reliability constraints.
This dual-mode allows the DS team to keep on iterating. Modifications to the existing pipelines produce the next best recipe. This next best recipe aims to become the production pipeline. As in the experimental mode, the DS team uses the predictive performance to iterate. The business value monitoring determines the need for further production hardening. The DS projects are full life-cycle projects. As such, we can use the business value metrics to determine any sun-setting. This is necessary to make room for future DS products.
Conclusions
Delays and painful debugging of ML pipelines are costly. Part of the problems is the Product + Data Science + Engineering trifecta workflows. All these individual parts work well in isolation. But the communication overhead slows down projects. This blog post explained the forces that lead the “Automatic Hand-off” syndrome. DS teams hand over projects to engineering from day one, for implementation. This method has drawbacks on the evolution of the machine learning product.
To counteract this, we described 3 simple guidelines. This is to help deal with this kind of premature optimization. First, we described how to approximate the mission criticality of a project. This includes how DS pipelines can adapt to support both ends of the spectrum. Second, we described guidelines on how to divide up a single complex DS application. We used two axes of complex performance and complex machine learning. Finally, we described a method to track and adapt to the experimental+production mode. Using the business value monitoring we can adjust the ML pipeline mode of operations.
That’s all folks.
I hope you enjoyed this post. It aims at helping you grow your machine learning project architectural design skills.
Please note that the opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
We are hiring! If this interests you please check out our open positions at Xandr Data Science Platform Engineering:
https://xandr.att.jobs/job/new-york/data-science-platform-engineer/25348/12859712 | https://towardsdatascience.com/avoiding-the-automatic-hand-off-syndrome-in-data-science-products-11be20315f1d | ['Moussa Taifi'] | 2019-08-22 20:58:49.037000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Architecture', 'Machine Learning Engineer'] |
Bundle your React app with Rollup.js | According to Tooling.Report maintained by GoogleChromeLabs , Rollup.js performs better than other bundlers.
In this blog post, we will see how to bundle a React.js app with rollup.js.
Let’s start
Make sure that you have installed a node.js version in your machine. Nvm makes things easier and allows us to have multiple versions of node.js in our machine.
Let’s install the latest stable nodejs version:
nvm install stable
Now using node v15.3.0 (npm v7.0.14)
Cool! We’re ready to go.
Setup your project:
mkdir react-rollup-app
cd react-rollup-app
npm init
The above command will create the initial package.json . We're going to enhance this file later.
package.json
Create the html file which will host your React.js app.
index.html
Open it with your browser:
That’s a good start, but soon or later you’ll need a web server to load other static files such as javascript and css files.
How rollup.js works?
It’s pretty simple:
It takes an input file with your code It performs some actions to your code based on the provided plugins you gave It produces one or more output files
Give me a dead simple example
OK, fair! Let’s change the body background colour of our page.
src/index.js
document.body.style.backgroundColor = "yellow";
Install rollup and some plugins for development
Rollup.js comes with a variety of plugins and one of them can play as web server to host all your static files. We will also need another one which reloads the page after each edit of our javascript files.
Install rollup and the above 2 plugins:
npm i rollup rollup-plugin-serve rollup-plugin-livereload --save-dev
Create the rollup configuration file:
rollup.config.dev.js
In our case the output file dist/bunlde.js will be used by our index.html to run the javascript code.
Include it to your index.html file:
index.html
Add the build:dev script to package.json
package.json
and run the command npm run build:dev .
This command, will load our yellow page to localhost:3000.
So far, so good. Now it’s time to run some React code.
Setup your React code
Install the react and react-dom libs:
npm i react react-dom
Create your first React component:
src/App.jsx
Edit the src/index.js to run the react code.
src/index.js
Run the build script again:
npm run build:dev
This happens because JSX is not valid JavaScript and must be transpiled to valid JavaScript. Babel is one of the most popular JavaScript tranpilers out there.
Babel also allow us to write modern JavaScript. It converts ES6/ES7 to older versions such as ES5 which are compatible with old browsers.
Install babel and the related react-preset .
npm i babel @babel/preset-react @rollup/plugin-babel --save-dev
Edit the rollup.config.dev.js
Run again the build script:
npm run build:dev
Error No #2. (!) Unresolved dependencies . The packages react and react-dom cannot be found.
To overcome this issue, we need another rollup plugin. The @rollup/plugin-node-resolve.
npm i @rollup/plugin-node-resolve --save-dev
add it to rollup.config.dev.js:
Run again the build script:
npm run build:dev
Error No #3, name exports, this time. Let’s fix it.
For this we need the @rollup/plugin-commonjs plugin which converts CommonJS modules to ES6.
npm i @rollup/plugin-commonjs --save-dev
add it to rollup.config.dev.js:
Let’s run the build script again:
npm run build:dev
The build was successful. But, there’s a last error in the page.
Error No #4, Uncaught ReferenceError: process is not defined. In order to fix this issue, we need a last plugin. The @rollup/plugin-replace which replaces strings in files while bundling.
npm i @rollup/plugin-replace --save-dev
Include it to the rollup config file:
rollup.config.dev.js
Let’s run the build script again:
npm run build:dev
🚀 Congrats! You have your first React & Rollup.js app is up and running. 🚀
Find the full source code at my github repo.
And the live working example at https://dusaitis.co/react-rollup-app/index.html
Thanks for reading. | https://medium.com/@dusaitis/bundle-your-react-app-with-rollup-js-46e4d3740002 | ['John Dusaitis'] | 2020-11-26 15:26:28.795000+00:00 | ['Rollupjs', 'Frontend', 'React', 'Bundler'] |
Launching a self-service analytics programme (part 3) | So here we are, the final part of this blog series about launching a self service analytics programme.
Hopefully you are collecting information from lots of different sources in order to build out a successful project.
This final blog post looks into the more hidden things you should consider. What else are you training and delivering to your audience other than the technical elements?
Remember your goals?
I won’t lie to you. After the 2nd or 3rd rotations I realised my programme was missing something. Sure the content was good, people gave some decent feedback and were becoming productive and supporting their teams with data.
Something for me just didn’t click.
I took some time away from running the programme and hit the pause button.
There was another large scale project which I was heavily involved with and was not able to give the programme the attention it needed. I’m actually really glad I realised this and communicated to my stakeholders that there was going to be a break. The demand was there, but the resource was not.
This time out was exactly what I needed. I did some more research into Tableau communities. I attended Tableau conference in New Orleans (TC18) and attended a lot of sessions about Centre of Excellence, Community and other customer stories on this topic. There are some really great examples and I strongly recommend checking out Paul Banoub from UBS, Paul Chapman from JLL and others.
The things I realised was that this was something more than just an instructional series of training sessions. I was exposing people to a new concept and ways of working. It was one part training and two parts convincing.
I also realised that not everyone has the knowledge of how to develop themselves. I wanted to make this clear in my programme. It was as much learning about Tableau and data visualisation, but also about being able to control your own development. Most people don’t often do more study once they are employed. I have massive respect to those who commit to additional qualifications while being working a full time job and some also supporting a family as well!
So where am I going with all this philosophical talk?
I kind of felt it was my responsibility to guide and nurture this new found data explorers and act like a data parent to make sure they didn’t run off with the bad crowd.
After my time away I was ready to come back for DataChefs 4.
I had tweaked my content. That’s one thing to be aware of — making sure you are keeping your training material updated with all the new product features and functions being released.
At the same time as these updates, I incorporated a few more things across the whole programme. Some things were small details, other were much larger. Here is a list of the things I added and why:
1) Another break after the final technical session (6) and before the showcase session (7)
2) More emphasis on the showcase project both on the topics and inviting an audience
3) More 121 time to help shape projects and create a safe space to ask questions
4) Additional branding of the programme. Stickers for laptops.
5) More involvement from Tableau — a welcome pack and prizes for the showcase
6) Connecting and introduction to the data team
7) Support plan post completion of the programme
Another Break
Why extend the programme for even longer? Well I had played around with having a break in the sessions. It was something I wanted from the start. You need to let your brain take some time to digest the information and even switch off from it for a short period. By doing this, my hope was that people would come back refreshed and invigorated.
It helped keep people committed. They did three sessions and have a break. It means they have the discipline to make it through those three sessions, instead of doing two and then seeing their diary having another four consecutive sessions. The same with the break at the end. This break repeats the same process between session three and four, which I advise them to use this time to focus on their projects.
This has worked really well and there has been a noticeable difference in the quality of the final projects. A little bit more polish. More attention to detail. The presentations are also a bit more practised. The have more time to review what they are going to say about their business problem and visualisation.
Emphasis on showcase
I was guilty of not making this a big deal. SHOWCASE! Was more showcase… It was falling flat and people were not giving it much energy. By taking the break I was able to use this time to get the support it needed. Inviting the entire analytics community, previous DataChefs, the Chief Data Officer, the line managers of those participating in the programme, Tableau account management team, our HR team, learning and development team and generally anyone else interested in data!
As well as generating a bit of a crowd, I also changed the format. Instead of having each person just stand up and show their dashboard, I turned it into more of an interview sessions.
“What are you trying to show us?”
“Why did you use that chart?”
“What would you do differently”
We also have voting much like an IronViz from the audience with prizes for those winning the categories of — best business question, best design and best analysis.
More 121 time
Another thing I made sure to change was the amount of time I gave to each participant. Previous I made an offer — if you need some more help, contact me. One person might.
This time, I booked the time in and normally after the first meeting there was so much more enthusiasm and questions that we ended up having 3 or 4 additional meetings. People are sometimes to embarrassed to ask questions in front of other people. This 121 time gave them a safe space. We were also able to dig deeper into their business question and help with the planning of what they were going to do. Normally on large A3 pages of paper or whiteboards.
I really enjoyed this as it felt a bit like consulting, but giving them the direction which they were coming up with.
Additional branding
The DataChef logo.
Everyone loves a sticker! One thing I had done was to create a brand. “DataChefs” was a known thing. But there was nothing physical to represent it other than this work. Cue a very talented sister (Emily Curtis) in graphic design.
End result.
So we order a bunch of stickers for laptops. Now we have people who are identifiable as completing the DataChef programme.
Not to stop there, I also wanted to give some recognition to the people who completed the programme. After a few ideas we not really viable we settled on reusable water bottles with the DataChef logo on it. This way someone can be in meetings or have sat on their desk and people can see and know that they are a DataChef.
Involvement from Tableau
The Tableau team have been great, working with me on this to help the content. They have also been really generous providing loads of Tableau branded treats for our DataChefs. We put together a goody bag containing all the things someone needs when they join the #datafam
They also chipped in with some prizes for the overall winners of the showcase session with the main prize being a copy of The Big Book of Dashboards from Andy Cotgreave, Steve Wexler and Jeffrey Shaffer.
They also help with feedback of the overall programme and give me tips to improve or expand.
Connecting to the data team
This was also a new idea. Actually setting up introductions to the team that produces the tables in the database. This contact helped educate that data doesn’t grow on trees and it goes through lots of steps to get to them in a Tableau dashboard.
Putting names to faces and personal contact goes a long way. When the database breaks or when data isn’t ready we have people who are not just complaining but helping explain to their teams what has happened and why.
Support after the programme
So in the past we tended to let DataChefs fend for themselves. This wasn’t because we wanted to, but mainly because I didn’t have the bandwidth to constantly check in on them. Now we have more support and better relationships to people are able to contact for help and issues. We use Slack as our main messaging service which has a dedicated Tableau room. Invites and updates for events and other big news all goes in there. We also invite DataChefs to other training sessions either hosted internally or if we are using an external partner.
Final words.
So there it is. DataChefs in all its glory. I’ve put a lot of hard work into the programme and it is now returning on the investment. We had over 100 applicants just from the UK for the next programme. There is clearly a big demand for data across our business, and I expect this to continue to increase in the next few years.
A big thank you to all past and present DataChefs. Having people who are keen and eager to learn make such a difference.
To my current and ex Tableau team. Account managers and product consultants. Alice Steels, who helped me get this off the ground. Steve Prokopiou, who helped advise on the content and training structure. Greg Koumoundouros, Ciaran Flynn, Tom Christian and Andy Cooper for being in sessions and doing their thing, inspiring new Tableau users and making Tableau seem so simple and easy to use. Lastly Tom Stroud for helping take DataChefs to the next level and being able to come up with the goods for me with Tableau treats. Much appreciated for all your support to help me get the most out of the software. | https://medium.com/cmding-tableau/launching-a-self-service-analytics-programme-part-3-9b78e31cba3a | ['Kris Curtis'] | 2019-10-25 14:16:47.619000+00:00 | ['Tableau', 'Self Service Bi', 'Analytics', 'Learning And Development', 'Data Visualization'] |
The Best Gifts for Writers in 2020 | The Best Gifts for Writers in 2020
Surprise the writer in your life with the perfect gift
Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash
Are you looking for a great gift for the writer in your life? Or are you a writer who wishes your friends and family would get you a thoughtful gift that aligns with your passion as a writer? InspireFirst has you covered right here with our list of best gifts for writers!
Don’t go the easy route by slapping a gift card into an envelope and calling it day. Be thoughtful with your gift choice. Buuuuuuuut if you decide to get a gift card for the writer in your life, get them a Barnes & Noble gift card because writers love to read good books.
Some of the following links are affiliate links and could pay us a small commission at no cost to you. Check out our Affiliate Disclaimer.
Best Tech Gadgets for Writers
Let’s start with some cool tech gadgets for writers. Electronics make cool gifts because they can make writing tasks more enjoyable, efficient, and convenient. Here are our favorite tech gadgets for writers:
Photo by Aleksi Tappura on Unsplash
Best Laptop for Writers
Your friend or family member would love you forever if you took the time to research and purchase the best laptop for a writer. We dedicated a huge review article that breaks down the best laptops for writers. Here are our two favorite laptops for writers:
Apple MacBook Air
The Apple MacBook Air owns the crown as the best laptop for writers because of its speed, durability, and almost 12 hours of battery life!
ASUS Chromebook Flip C434 2-in-1 Laptop
This ASUS Chromebook is the best laptop for bloggers because it’s lightweight, has the super-fast and easy-to-use Chrome OS, possesses elite battery life, and delivers seamless connection to Google Docs and Google Cloud.
Photo by Tomasz Gawłowski on Unsplash
Headphones for Writers
A good pair of noise-canceling headphones helps writers focus during their writing process. Brands like Sony, Bose, Skullcandy, JBL, and of course Apple Beats are all in the competition for the writers’ demographic. Here are our favorite noise-canceling headphones for writers.
Bose QuietComfort 35 II Wireless Bluetooth Headphones
Sony WH1000XM4/B Bluetooth Noise Cancellation Wireless Over-Ear Headphones
Time Management Gadgets
Time management is important in order for writers to be productive in their craft. You or the writer in your life needs to write when they’re supposed to write and generally organize their life optimally. Why? Because writing requires a lot of focus and diligently sticking to a schedule is the best way to dedicate time for focused writing sessions. Here are our favorite time management gifts for writers:
Time Timer Audible Countdown Timer
Use the Time Timer Audible Countdown Timer to do focused writing sessions. Use it to do the Pomodoro technique or any other time management technique that’s helpful for writers. This cool clock operates quietly, which is good for those who are easily distracted. The Time Timer is also a great timer for helping people with ADHD.
Purchase the Time Timer Audible Countdown Timer
Best Software and Services for Writers
At InspireFirst, we utilize some of the best SaaS (software as a service) applications to keep us efficient and productive. Writers, authors, and bloggers need the proper tools to build a professional brand, one that consists of quality content, an informative website, and a clean and attractive visual brand. This is when good software comes to the rescue.
Grammarly Premium
Grammarly is a dream for writers who want to boost their content’s quality grammatically and stylistically. We covered Grammarly Premium in-depth here at InspireFirst. Grammarly Premium would make a great gift for a writer because it will help them improve their content for their readers’ enjoyment. We use Grammarly Premium to review every letter for our content. Make Grammarly a gift for the writer in your life!
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
Audible and Kindle Unlimited
Good writers love good books. An Audible subscription (audiobooks) and Kindle Unlimited subscription (unlimited reading of over 1 million eBooks) will give the writer in your life unlimited access to their favorite books to keep them inspired and entertained during their downtime.
Rev Audio Transcription
What if you need to record and transcribe audio as part of your writing duties? Recording and transcribing audio is important for journalists and podcasters. If you want to be a solid friend, give Rev Audio Transcription to the writer in your life. Learn more about audio transcription services.
Asana
We love Asana because it helps us stay organized and on top of our tasks. The Asana project management platform will help you or the writer in your life know what to work on and when it needs to be completed. And it can be used on a laptop, desktop, tablet, or mobile device. This is why we believe an Asana subscription would be a great gift for a writer.
Best Notebooks and Journals for Writers
Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash
A good notebook or journal for ideas and brainstorming can help writers overcome a pesky case of writer’s block. A beaten and worn notebook is a well-used and purposeful notebook. Give your loved one the opportunity to wear out a good notebook! Get your friend a notebook that’ll last them — one that is of sustainable material and character. Here’s a list of the best notebooks for writers (in our humble opinion):
Paperage
Field Notes
AndSoTheyMade Personalised Notebook
Lightning Design Store
Pens for Writers
Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash
I know it may seem old-fashion, but fountain pens and ballpoint pens make great gifts for writers. Just like there’s a whole community of photographers who find comfort in shooting with film/analog cameras, there are many writers who do not write on laptops and tablets but on pen and paper.
You may be thinking, “A pen is a pen. As long as it functions, you should be capable of knocking out some good work.” However, there’s just something about a good fountain pen or ballpoint pen.
If you want to purchase a great ballpoint pen for your writer friend, we’ve got you covered. You can go super fancy with a Montblanc Meisterstuck Platinum Line Classique ballpoint pen. Montblanc pens can cost a pretty penny, but their value is undeniable. They can last up to 7 or 8 years! Just don’t lose it! Geesh.
I understand if you want to find a more affordable pen for your writer friend. In this case, you can’t go wrong with the PILOT Precise V5 RT Refillable & Retractable Liquid Ink Rolling Ball Pens (12-Pack) or the Schneider Slider Rave XB Ballpoint Pen (Box of 5).
Bags and Backpacks
Photo by Lina Verovaya on Unsplash
If not working from home at a desk or in bed, many writers travel around to find that perfect spot for inspiration. Writers like to get out of the comfort of their homes and write from other places — maybe a coffee shop, a library, or at the park. For these kinds of outings, it would be extremely helpful for the writer in your life to have a great bag or backpack.
There are a number of nice options to consider. There’s the messenger bag, the tote bag, and the good ol’ bookbag. Most backpacks come with laptop cases nowadays, and if you’re looking for gift ideas for a writer in the form of a bag, you’ve got to know your writer. Do they use a laptop? Do they prefer a pen and pad? This will help when buying a bag for your writer friend. Here are our favorite bags for writers:
Wxnow Tote
Cloele Tote
Kattee Store Leather Tote
Herschel Backpack
Mactso Messenger
Rustic Town Messenger
Need More Help?
We’ve given you a good number of ideas for great gifts for writers. They make good gifts for aspiring writers too…maybe just the right gift from this list will inspire them to write their first article or book!
A lot of the tools and supplies that writers value aren’t common knowledge. It’s my hope that this list was helpful for you and will be a blessing for the writer in your life.
But maybe there’s something else that you’re looking for. Join our writers’ community on Facebook and ask the community what they think would be a great gift for a writer.
Lastly, if you’re a writer and you like some of the items that I listed above, share this article with your family and friends so they can get you a great Christmas gift or birthday gift. | https://medium.com/inspirefirst/the-best-gifts-for-writers-in-2020-1c20493f0d08 | ['Christopher Luxe'] | 2020-11-17 19:55:48.198000+00:00 | ['Shopping', 'Gifts', 'Writers', 'Writing', 'Christmas'] |
What are the Benefits of CBD Gummies? | Image Courtesy of Infused, a CBD Marketplace
Are you interested in taking CBD for the first time in your life? Do you want a different way to receive the health benefits that CBD can offer you? If so, then you need to give CBD gummies a try!
Doing so can help you get a proper dosage in a fun-to-eat manner. You’ll enjoy the nostalgia and taste of things like blackberry CBD gummies daily while receiving relief from sleep deprivation, anxiety, and so much more.
See below for a guide to CBD gummies and what the major benefits are of taking them. Be sure to consider these benefits as you make your first purchase.
1. Fun and Edible
Gone are the days where you have to ingest things like bright pink liquid or chalky vitamins to give your body the boost that it needs. These days, your answer to less anxiety is only a gummy away!
Believe it or not, the fun and edible composition of CBD gummies is a tremendous help in you establishing a daily routine.
In the New York Times best-selling book, The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg uncovers the three necessary measures of establishing a habit: a cue, a routine, and a reward. When put together, these three things form what is known as a “habit loop” which strengthens each time you perform the act.
The reward is arguably the most important part. Without it, you don’t have a habit that you’ll actually stick to. To receive the benefits of CBD, it’s best to take them daily. Thanks to the fun-to-eat texture and delicious flavors, you already have a reward established.
You know yourself best! Simply try a few different flavors of CBD gummies to see which ones you like best. Then, purchase them and build a habit of taking them each day, every time you’re feeling overly stressed, and so on.
2. Better Sleep
Do you find it increasingly harder to fall asleep at night? When you wake up, do you not feel any more rested than when you fell asleep the night before? If so, then you might suffer from insomnia and not even realize it. It’s much more common than you’d think!
Insomnia is generally tied to a high level of stress, which can occur anytime you have a new wave of anxiety in your life. For example, this is common shortly after you have your first child or you’ve been involved in a car accident.
Thankfully, there’s a way to help you take the edge off at night. CBD’s most well-known benefit is helping reduce the stress levels that a person is feeling. Take one around 1 to 2 hours before you plan on falling asleep, as gummies don’t kick in quite as fast as tinctures or vape.
It can help you find peace while you fall asleep, as well as help you stay asleep throughout the night.
The benefits of a good night’s sleep are almost immeasurable. It will help increase your productivity, boost your immune system to fight off illness, and improve your overall mood throughout the day.
3. Accessibility
This might be the biggest benefit of CBD gummies overall: they can be used anywhere. You can take them on trips. You can take them to work when your job gets overwhelming. You can use them while you’re walking through your town’s public mall. Wherever you’d like!
Many CBD users that invest in vapes only are limited to using CBD outside of work. This is because they feel pressured by their peers to not smoke at work, even by taking a smoke break.
If that’s you, then CBD gummies can allow you a way to reduce your stress at any time! Carry them in your purse to be used whenever you feel overwhelmed. Store them on your desk to take before you start making cold calls each morning. Whatever works best for your routine!
4. Kills Drug-Resistant Bacteria
Did you know that there are certain diseases, such as gonorrhea and meningitis, which can’t be killed by most store-bought drugs?
Recently, a study at the UQ Institute for Molecular Bioscience was performed to see whether CBD could be used to kill traces of these harmful diseases. As Dr. Mark Blaskovich explains in his press release, “we think that cannabidiol kills bacteria by bursting their outer cell membranes”.
He goes on to say that, “This is particularly exciting because there have been no new molecular classes of antibiotics for gram-negative infections discovered and approved since the 1960s”. If you begin to take CBD gummies daily, you could receive these benefits!
5. Easy to Understand Doses
One of the only complicated parts of CBD is understanding the proper dosage you should take for your needs. Everyone is different. Some require a higher dosage than others.
If you take tinctures or ingest CBD oils, you might find it harder to track your doses. Meaning it might take you a few days to unlock the proper dosage.
With CBD gummies, it’s easy to understand. Take one the first time. If that doesn’t seem to be enough to achieve your desired outcome, take two at a time. It’s as simple as that!
Invest in CBD Gummies for Yourself Today
Now that you have seen all of the best benefits of taking CBD gummies, it’s time for you to invest in them for yourself!
Be sure to read this article for more information on the 9 benefits of CBD for cats and dogs to read how CBD can help your furry pal as well.
For more inquiries, please be sure to reach out via our contact us page and we will be happy to assist you further. | https://medium.com/@infusedacbdmarketplace/what-are-the-benefits-of-cbd-gummies-a458618a29dd | ['Infused', 'A Cbd Marketplace'] | 2021-02-16 18:25:37.910000+00:00 | ['Focus', 'Cbd', 'Calm', 'Sleep', 'Gummies'] |
The Last Words of Military and Revolutionary Leaders | HISTORY
The Last Words of Military and Revolutionary Leaders
Photo by Bogdan Kupriets on Unsplash
Accused of espionage and subversion, Policarpa ‘La Pola’ Salavarrieta turned to face the Spanish firing squad. There was to be no fatal shot in the back, as was customary for traitors of the crown. Instead, La Pola, with her dying words, inspired her fellow Colombians to break free from Spanish oppression and rise up in revolution. She shouted:
“Although I am a woman and young, I have more than enough courage to suffer this death and a thousand more!”
The dying are rarely as brave as La Pola of Colombia. It’s not often they get an opportunity to speak their final words. Here are five of my favorite quotes attributed to the fatally wounded or the soon-to-be-executed. | https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-last-words-of-military-and-revolutionary-leaders-4b690b9229c1 | ['Reuben Salsa'] | 2020-12-13 17:57:16.473000+00:00 | ['Words', 'Death', 'Salsa', 'History', 'War'] |
Why I Doubt God Is An Angry, Egomaniac! | by Mike Edwards
I am convinced there are beliefs claimed about God that lead to many tuning out God. Our relationship with God cannot exceed our understanding of God. I have written HERE how we can decide what God is really like. One’s interpretation of a Book may be the only reason to think human and godly perfection are different. Why would a Creator not love us and others how we were seemingly created to love others?
The Bible often does portray God as an angry hothead.
Many Old Testament passages just can’t be rationalized away. The story starts off by God destroying the world minus eight with a Flood. Even if it was a local as opposed to global flood, the metaphor still stinks! There were surely a few people innocent of evil so horrific to escape such actions by God. Who doesn’t think it is wrong to drown just one child in a bathtub? It gets worse by killing babies in Egypt and God supposedly ordering the Israel army to “not spare them: put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys”(I Sam. 15:3). Hundreds of passages seem to advocate evil behaviors in God’s name.
Hundreds of passages also speak of God’s love and mercy. Did the biblical writers think it sacrilegious to not portray God in controlling terms like the others gods at that time? We have every right to question if the writers’ views of God evolved over time. God can handle it. I wish the writers had clearly indicated God was angry at evil as opposed to people. God violent one minute and merciful and loving the next minute sounds like an abusive spouse or parent.
Doesn’t the Bible say “fear God” or else?
We are often encouraged to fear God as if God thinks such fear and obligatory loves leads to a genuine relationship. God supposedly demands fear for ego reasons or as a sign of reverence. Fearing someone seldom leads to an inspiring relationship with that person. Some scholars suggest “fear God” is better phrased “respect God.” God’s request for respect (glory) is no different than a loving parent’s hope for respect because their love should have their child’s best interest in mind.
Are humans really holier or more moral than God?
A human parent warns or gets upset with a child’s actions not in their best interest or the welfare of others, but that doesn’t lead to them wanted to annihilate their child. What God or parent doesn’t know sin has its own consequences; God doesn’t seek to pile on the anger. God doesn’t worry that their unimaginable love gives us further license to keep sinning. Acting selfish is natural and doesn’t wait for permission. God seeks to continually assure us of their love so we don’t every give up no matter how demoralized we may feel.
God couldn’t be egotistical!
If God was so worried about their reputation, God certainly would not have given us freedom to contradict their wishes. All the evil in the world suggests God isn’t controlling. God is not more concerned with restoring their honor than expressing a desire for a relationship freely chosen. Many religions today imply their god expects certain beliefs or face immediate extinction. Not the God of the Bible! And what kind of all-powerful God wants to be friends? Abraham (Jm. 2:23) and Moses (Ex. 33:11) are called God’s friend, and Jesus called the disciples His friends (Jn. 15:15). God is our Creator and Friend.
God isn’t possessive of their glory.
What kind of parent wants to be alone in their glory? Jesus says in John 17:22 after speaking on fulfilling his mission with his disciples and then turning his attentions to all who believe: “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.” We cannot be God, but we can strive to be like God. God’s request for glory is not self-infatuation. Imagine a world that glorified God in all they did! There would be no evil or suffering caused by others in the world. There would be no physical or sexual abuse in the world. There would be no parents living out their dreams through their children. There would be no bigotry based on the color of your skin or the gender you were born. There would be no locking of cars and houses. God gets a bad rap when portrayed as selfish or obsessed with themselves. | https://medium.com/@donewthreligion/why-i-doubt-god-is-an-angry-egomaniac-54512ae0ebf2 | ['Done With Religion'] | 2019-08-01 17:53:29.483000+00:00 | ['Anger', 'Relationships', 'Acceptance', 'Christian Living'] |
Meet Ate Lanie — The Rise of a Transwoman Shaman | “She is a beautiful woman who looks to be older than me, but still youthful. Her body is radiating but isn’t translucent like mine. Her brown skin is reminiscent of the earth, clay crafted in perfection…She wears a beaded necklace and a beautiful golden amulet reflecting the Moon’s silver light. Her energy feels grounded and firm, like the earth, though she stands here, floating in the sky. She reminds me of the symphonies of nature, the trees, and the soil. Remarkable.”
Today I’d like to talk about one of my favorite characters to write. She is the divine and flower-like Babaylan of the Taal Kingdom: Ate (ah-teh) Lanie.
Ate Lanie is a transwoman shaman from the Kingdom of Taal who draws power from Lakapati, Deity of Fertility and Agriculture. She serves as a mentor for our protagonist, Mala, on their journey, as she teaches them about the power of lakas, while also showing them that one’s identity is not defined by their biological sex.
The concept of coming out as trans is magical, but that doesn’t mean it is imaginary. In history, many trans shamans existed in the pre-colonial Philippines and had influential social roles in their community. Ate Lanie is a character that celebrates transwomen as these powerful leaders. According to the Aswang Project, the rise to Shamanism for Transwomen, or gender variant/nonbinary spiritual intermediaries
“are found in many Pacific Island cultures, including the bajasa of the Eastern Toradja people of Sulawesi, the bantut of the Tausūg people of the South Philippines, and many other shamans of the pre-Christian Philippines. The Babaylan and Katalonan (shamans in the Visayan and Tagalog regions) were female, but were often transwomen (sometimes called Bayoguin or Asog) who were assigned male at birth, but identified — and were socially accepted — as female. In regards to the Philippines, it is important to point out that the transgender shaman is almost exclusive to the areas that were influenced by the Indianized Kingdoms. The concept does not exist in early anthropological and ethnolinguistic studies done in Northern Luzon, the mountainous areas of Mindanao, and about the indigenous Negritos.”
As I wrote a story about shamans in the Philippines, it was indeed culturally and historically pivotal for me to ensure that a transwoman was represented in the most beautiful and powerful light.
LGBTQ+ representation is as important as ever, in today’s society. Trans representation is lacking in practically every form of media, and when they are given the spotlight, books, and movies keep creating transgender characters as aggressors/villains. But in reality, trans people are far more likely to be victims of violence — not causing the violence. The Trans Murder Monitoring project reported 331 murders of trans and gender-diverse people globally in the year to September 30, 2019, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). From a CNN article, Susan Stryker, author and Yale University gender studies professor told CNN, “as a historian, I’ve just seen this for so long, and it’s such a longstanding trope. It’s like a trans person is someone who is deeply deranged and is a danger to other people and kills people out of their own sense of being psychotically flawed.” We can see this example in stories like JK Rowling’s Troubled Blood series, which features a cross-dressing serial killer.
GLAAD also did a study that found reoccurring themes of transgender characters being negatively exploited as either victims or villains in stories, and that more work needs to be done to represent roles of trans characters with more fully-formed, complex, and real storylines that provide a better portrayal that truly honors trans people. The most recent example I would like to mention is Lingua Franca — a story on Netflix about an undocumented trans Filipina caregiver who pursues a marriage to obtain a green card.
“Media has a history of telling the world a story that transgender people are always victims or villains, instead of true depictions that show the transgender community as citizens worthy of equality and respect. On Transgender Day of Remembrance — a day on which we remember those who lost their lives due to anti-transgender violence — we hope television networks will think about what they can do to combat ignorance by improving their depictions of trans people.”- GLAAD President Herndon Graddick.
This concept of queer grief/villainy is a dangerous trope that has existed for a long time for trans people — especially in the US — and it needs to end. Ate Lanie is a character that fights this dangerous trope, as her purpose is to affirm and celebrate the power of transwomen as influential and powerful characters.
We can see this with Ate Lanie’s relationship with Mala, our 16-year-old protagonist, still young and struggling to understand their genderfluid identity while becoming a magical shaman that must fulfill an ancient prophecy. The queer theme of chosen family comes to mind between these two characters. At the beginning of the book, we experience with Mala their desire for a sisterhood:
“I want to talk about pearls with them and yearn to have that sisterly bond that they have between them, but then one girl suddenly whispers something to the group. The girls mockingly laugh at me and leave the shopkeeper’s selling stand. Once they see me, I can always feel the girls’ energy change. The sudden shift in the vibration of their spirits makes me cringe. I sense the waves change from gentle to malicious. I can tell the girls are confused and also fearful, as if I am haunted, in spite of my own feelings of hurt. Is it the way I look? I ask myself. And then I hear it, the whisper of “monster” under their sly breaths as they hide away from me. Am I a monster to them?”
This experience of being treated like an “other,” and even worse, a “monster,” in our homes and communities is why the concept of chosen families exists: people that identify as LGBTQ+ are not always accepted by the people that they are directly related to. Chosen families are thus important to the life of many trans folks, as humans need to feel accepted by their peers in order to thrive. This is a pain that many within our community suffer alone.
When Ate Lanie finally meets Mala, she shares with our protagonist memories from her vulnerable past, and that she often prayed to Lakapati for guidance. Lakapati answered Ate Lanie’s prayers, and provide her with a magical seed. Ate Lanie nurtured this seed until it grew into a tree that surrounds and protects her home outside of the City of Jati. This experience solidified her purpose not only as a Babaylan but her self-love as a woman: “I grew to love and learn about myself because of this tree. I had finally accepted my womanhood at an early age.”
I chose Lakapati as the deity to represent this Babaylan and ancestral spirit relationship because depending on the region or myth, she is known and described as an androgynous, intersex, or transgender Goddess. In all myths, she is known for her great kindness to humanity and her love for giving — which is reflected in Ate Lanie’s nature. It was important to me as a writer to have Ate Lanie’s source of power be from a Deity that understands her as a caregiver, and as a queer entity.
After hearing this story, Mala begins to feel empowered in their own identity and starts to have a better understanding of their responsibilities as a new shaman. They also find a new sister to add to their family — their chosen family — and is no longer alone in their journey of self-acceptance. As a non-binary writer, I thought that it was important to offer my protagonist another queer character to relate to in my story, as I have been reminded throughout my life that while LGBTQ+ allies are important, they can only offer so much support. There is nothing like a well-written queer character in literature or media, just as there is nothing like an LGBTQ+ friend to help you accept your own identity. | https://medium.com/@jaimekoauthor/meet-ate-lanie-the-rise-of-a-transwoman-shaman-419852f1c7e7 | ['Jaime Martin Ko Atilano'] | 2020-12-27 23:47:24.299000+00:00 | ['Representation', 'Books', 'Fantasy', 'LGBTQ', 'Transgender'] |
My Dad Got a Doggy Miracle for Christmas | There is a website called doesthedogdie.com where you can search books and movies to find the fate of canine companions. While not listed on the website, I can reassure you that the dog in this story is very much alive. And that is a true doggy miracle.
My family is composed of dog people. We stop to pet dogs on the street, have canceled plans because there was a dog sleeping in our lap and often remember dog names better than those of the humans that care for them. I begged for a dog almost as soon as I could talk and have successfully been surrounded by dogs since I was 7. It seemed only natural, when my parents separated, that my dad got a big black pitbull named Kal from one of the local rescues. Depressed, heartbroken and lonely, my dad needed a companion. He needed someone that was happy to see him and would give him reason to get out of bed in the mornings and leave the house. In Kal, he found everything he was looking for plus the unconditional love that he didn’t realize he needed.
Kal is a bundle of need covered in a very thin veneer of fur. Separation anxiety doesn’t begin to explain the frenzy that Kal will whip himself into whenever he sees one of his people. My dad once said that Kal is his emotional support animal. I pointed out that it was far more likely that he was actually Kal’s emotional support human.
On the morning of November 29, Kal went out for his usual morning patrol of the yard and to pee on everything in his domain. While in the yard, he suffered a seizure and became incredibly disoriented, slipping out from under the fence and running away from the house. Unfortunately, my dad lives quite close to a major highway and it was there that Kal was next spotted. Scared and confused, he was running across the highway when he was clipped by a passing car.
It is important to highlight the kindness and generosity of all the people who stopped what they were doing to help get a poor dog to safety. Complete strangers dedicated hours to searching for him and I received hundreds of responses to my posts about him missing.
It was six excruciatingly long days without any news or sightings. We had given up hope of ever finding Kal, dead or alive, and had begun reconciling ourselves to a life without him. My dad still went out to the spot he was last seen every day and wandered around, calling him, just in case he had returned.
In what can only be described as a doggy miracle, a wonderful couple had stopped on the day that Kal ran off and had tried to coax him to safety. A week later, they hiked an hour and a half up the mountain, just to see if they could find anything. And they found Kal.
The poor guy had two broken legs, hadn’t eaten or drank anything in six days so his organs were in rough shape and he was too weak to even wag his tail. But he was alive.
A week in doggy ICU and he was finally allowed to come home. Kal doesn’t like restrictions and jumped a baby gate (still with two broken legs) so that he could properly greet someone at the door. Last week, my dad received an urgent call out for work and I was tasked with babysitting the needbeast and making sure he didn’t try anything else crazy while left alone. Kal always loves to snuggle but he was especially grateful for the company that day.
It’s going to be a long road to recovery but there is no possible better ending than this.
They lived happily ever after. (And Kal got all the snacks he wanted) | https://medium.com/@dmontgomery878/my-dad-got-a-doggy-miracle-for-christmas-a59ac08adea | ['Dakota Montgomery'] | 2020-12-24 02:59:09.155000+00:00 | ['Pets', 'Survival', 'Miracles', 'Happy', 'Dogs'] |
affair | affair
A poem.
Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash
She insisted
the pressures of marriage caused her cancer
her man-child
ill-equipped to empty the dryer.
“I can only get off
if your girlfriend is on the phone
as we do it. I don’t make the rules.”
She knows too much about
hotels and checking in
free breakfasts and checking out
It’s fine.
Nobody is going to break up —
It can be summarized
as a business trip
as an essential expense.
“I cannot get off unless I know
there’s no way in hell you’re going to
want to marry me. I don’t want to
fight over who takes out the garbage or
going to the store or this or that.”
He gets to claim he’s going to climb mount
everest and don’t ask too many questions.
Lined with skepticism. that’s not
this game.
Plans are fine
Plans burn down.
Why did anyone ever think
one person for life would ever work?
What nonsense is this
almost inhumane.
“you expected something
impossible? that’s not
my fault. why are you
mad at me
for your insane expectations
of what im supposed to be? huh?”
Monogamy is too many people for me
I think they made the rule
to have the excitement of breaking it
like only drinking after 5
like no parties when the parents are
Away
They made the rule
so we could have
naughty boys and dirty girls.
so we could be punished, held
punished again. | https://medium.com/are-you-okay/affair-8526271eb859 | ['Lisa Martens'] | 2020-09-07 18:44:43.063000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Sexuality', 'Poem', 'Sex', 'Love'] |
Someone Just Tried to Blackmail Me | But Shaming Won’t Work If You Aren’t Ashamed
Image by CSO
I’ve been on Medium for a relatively short time, but long enough to have begun to make a name for myself as someone who talks really openly about her private life, including her sexual life. I talk about sex clubs and three-ways and I write erotica, much of it based in real experiences. And although my writing is open and honest, my profile is one that assures my anonymity. It’s part of what allows me to have both vulnerability and privacy at the same time, and so far it’s worked out pretty well.
But today I got this threatening message in my email, addressed to my real name and naming an actual password that I use. It is no way associated with my Medium profile or activity but it got my attention:
Lets get right to point. You do not know me and you’re most likely wondering why you are getting this email? No-one has paid me to investigate you. Well, I actually setup a malware on the X streaming (pornography) website and you know what, you visited this web site to have fun (you know what I mean). While you were viewing videos, your browser initiated working as a RDP with a keylogger which provided me with accessibility to your display and web camera. Right after that, my software program gathered all your contacts from your Messenger, social networks, and emailaccount. After that I created a video. First part shows the video you were watching (you’ve got a fine taste haha . . .), and next part displays the recording of your web camera, yeah it is you. You have only 2 options. We will read each one of these solutions in particulars: 1st choice is to dismiss this e-mail. As a result, I most certainly will send your actual videotape to all of your contacts and then think concerning the shame you will definitely get. Not to mention should you be in a romantic relationship, exactly how it will affect? Other choice will be to compensate me $7000. I will describe it as a donation. Then, I most certainly will straightaway remove your videotape. You will continue on daily life like this never took place and you surely will never hear back again from me. You will make the payment through Bitcoin (if you do not know this, search for “how to buy bitcoin” in Google).
There was more but that was the main gist of it. And even though I knew this was a scam, in part because I don’t masterbate to porn I watch on my lap-top, so there is no video, and in part because I vaguely remembered hearing about this kind of blackmail attempt, it was still disconcerting to see someone waving my password at me. I immediately called my partner, James, and proceeding to change the password on the two accounts I had that used that one. Fortunately, neither of them were bank accounts.
As James and I talked it over, we realized that even if this were real, that these attempted blackmailers had no power over us. As much as we both like our privacy, and as uncomortable as it would no doubt be to have some of the details of our sexual life sent to everyone in my contact list, it ultimately would be a tempest in a tea cup because we aren’t ashamed of who we are or how we live.
You cannot drive someone using shame when that just isn’t a factor in the equation.
A desire for privacy is an entirely different animal. We maintain privacy, in part because we live in such an uptight world that even some of the people who do know all about us have expressed discomfort when we were honest with them.
Friend of James: What are you going to do this weekend? James: My wife set up a three-way for us with another woman to celebrate my birthday. Friend of James: Yeah, right! Oh…… you aren’t kidding. Oh, well….. so what do you think about XYZ that’s going on at work?
We are not uncomfortable with them knowing. It is they who are uncomfortable realizing that people who seem outwardly a lot like them don’t all live a straight vanilla life. In other words, they too could be sexually self expressed and pursuing their fantasies, or doing something else that isn’t perfectly mainstream, if only they had the same courage. At least that’s my take on what is at the root of their discomfort.
Not everyone wants to go out and be sexually adventurous, but what else are they potentially not doing that they might want to, due to fear or shame. The potential for shaming may very well be a part of what keeps them from living out loud in some other way. In our case, as James and I talked through each theoretical worst-case scenario, we realized none of it would actually be that bad because we embrace who we are. We love US, we love the life that we lead, we enjoy writing about it and talking about it with those who are comfortable doing so.
What if there were a video of me masturbating? Well, again, not something I’d want to see widely distributed, but mostly because that would make the other people in my life uncomfortable. I’ve had sex in a club in full or partial view of strangers before. And from doing that, I learned that I actually am not much of an exhibitionist and much prefer more privacy, but I’m not ashamed to be a sexual being either.
“And then think concerning the shame you will definitely get. Not to mention should you be in a romantic relationship, exactly how it will affect?” That one kind of made me laugh, because my romantic relationship is with my full-fledged “partner in crime” and it would not impact that negatively in any way, shape or form. We embarked upon this lifestyle together, in mutual agreement and constant communciation about all aspects of it. There are no lies or indiscretions that we fear being uncovered and so therefore there is no leverage. But I do feel sorry for those who feel they cannot be their real sexual self with their intimate partner.
Interestingly, I’ve understood since I was a young teen that if you aren’t hiding anything, then it can’t be weaponized against you. Only politicians worried about affairs or their in-the-closet homosexuality can be blackmailed. The more above-board you are, the less potential for pressure.
So you have two choices; either don’t do things that you wouldn’t want others to possibly learn about or else do them fairly openly.
No one can blackmail you about anything if you aren’t afraid to take the consequences of being who you actually are. I’d love to live in a world that is more accepting of non-monogamy. I’d love to have a society that relishes female sexuality instead of both simultaneously objectifying it and stigmatizing it. I hope for a day when everyone can be their true consensual sexual selves. But meanwhile, somewhere in the world there is some poor bastard scraping together $7,000 in response to threats like these. However, that person is not me, and it never will be! | https://medium.com/inside-of-elle-beau/someone-just-tried-to-blackmail-me-3d4210e4d342 | ['Elle Beau'] | 2018-07-24 12:24:01.089000+00:00 | ['Shame', 'Sex', 'Bitcoin', 'Society', 'Human Behavior'] |
Raja Karl Fritz : Sang Pahlawan sebenarnya di Seri Shingeki No Kyojin #Anime | in In Bitcoin We Trust | https://medium.com/@rajifalumni/raja-karl-fritz-sang-pahlawan-sebenarnya-di-seri-shingeki-no-kyojin-fb32f3173c9e | ['Muhammad Rajif'] | 2021-01-02 03:13:08.604000+00:00 | ['Titan', 'Bahasa Indonesia', 'Indonesia', 'Attack On Titan', 'Anime'] |
VITE Vs. VITE ERC20 | Many of our users have been asking questions about whether or not they can trade Vite tokens on exchange platforms that support ERC20.
This depends on what kind of Vite token you have. There are currently two types of Vite tokens.
If you have VITE native coins: these are labeled as “VITE” with a “Vite Coin” subtitle. You can obtain these coins when you participate in the daily Airdrop rewards, campaigns or the High Roller dApp game.
You cannot trade VITE native coins on an ERC20-supported exchange.
Once the ViteX DEX has launched, you will be able to trade VITE native coins. Please note that VITE native coins cannot be converted to Vite ERC20 tokens.
If you have VITE ERC20 tokens: these are labeled as “VITE” with the “ERC20 Token” subtitle. If you are relatively new to Vite, chances are you do not have these tokens. The reason that VITE ERC20 tokens exist is because when Vite was first founded, we issued VITE ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum network. However, with the launch of the Vite TestNet in November 2018, we released a Vite wallet update with the option to migrate VITE ERC20 tokens to VITE native tokens at a 1:1 ratio. | https://medium.com/vitelabs/vite-vs-vite-erc20-ca15caa93b27 | ['Vite Editor'] | 2019-05-10 22:43:15.408000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Vite Labs', 'Digital Wallet', 'Blockchain', 'Resources'] |
Recipe of Ultimate Dry fruit cake | Hey everyone, welcome to our recipe site, looking for the perfect Dry fruit cake recipe? look no further! We provide you only the best Dry fruit cake recipe here. We also have wide variety of recipes to try.
Before you jump to Dry fruit cake recipe, you may want to read this short interesting healthy tips about How to Elevate Your Mood with Food.
A lot of us have been trained to believe that comfort foods are bad and to be avoided. At times, if the comfort food is a sugary food or some other junk food, this is very true. Other times, however, comfort foods can be totally healthy and it’s good for you to consume them. A number of foods honestly do raise your mood when you eat them. If you are feeling a little bit down and you’re in need of a happiness pick me up, try some of these.
Eggs, believe it or not, are terrific for helping you battle depression. Just be sure that you do not throw away the yolk. The yolk is the part of the egg that matters most in terms of helping raise your mood. Eggs, specifically the yolks, are loaded with B vitamins. These B vitamins are terrific for helping to raise your mood. This is because they help in bettering the function of your neural transmitters, the components of your brain that affect your mood. Consume an egg and feel a lot better!
Now you realize that junk food isn’t necessarily what you need to eat when you want to help your moods get better. Try a few of these suggestions instead.
We hope you got benefit from reading it, now let’s go back to dry fruit cake recipe. To cook dry fruit cake you need 8 ingredients and 3 steps. Here is how you cook that.
The ingredients needed to cook Dry fruit cake:
Prepare of katori maida. Use of oil. Prepare of milk powder. You need of chopped dry fruits (pistachio, almond, cashew, raisins). Take of baking soda. Provide of baking powder. You need of condensed milk. Use of Milk as required.
Steps to make Dry fruit cake:
Put oil and condensed milk in a bowl and beat them. Seive all dry ingredients and add this mixture in the condensed milk mixture.. Now add dry fruits and milk in it and mix it well and make a smooth batter. Grease the cake tin with butter and put the cake batter in it and spread the some almond flakes. Now take a kadai and preheat the kadai on medium flame for 10 minutes and after 10 minutes put the stand in the kadai and put the cake tin on it and cover it.. Bake it for 30–35 minutes and after 30–35 minutes turn off the gas stove and let it cool down and cut it. Your dry fruit cake is ready to serve..
Use your favorite dried fruits or try purchasing the dried fruitcake mix from King Arthur Flour. This easy fruit cake by one of our younger readers, Bree Hamilton, is simple, uses storecupboard This delicious light fruit sponge is packed with storecupboard staples like nuts and dried fruit, it’s. Fragrant spices, nuts, dried fruit, and plenty of rum make fruitcake a special treat. A dense cake filled with dried nuts and fruits and spiked with spiced rum that just happens to be gluten free. Brandy softens the fruit and mellows the cake part of the fruitcake.
More ( Recipe ) For your day !! | https://medium.com/@cookpedia/recipe-of-ultimate-dry-fruit-cake-828d9d1dcafd | [] | 2020-12-21 20:03:04.189000+00:00 | ['Recipe', 'Recipe Book', 'Recipes For Cooking'] |
The difference between CSS units (px, pt, rem, em, vh, vw, ch, ex and the rest) | I’ve seen a lot of developers (especially novices) and other people who deal with CSS who do not really know the difference between units in CSS. And that’s kind of understandable — there are so many of them, one can get easily confused.
Let me shine some light on this topic. In this article, I’ll talk about three types of CSS units: Absolute, Relative and Viewport.
Absolute
As their name suggests, these units are of fixed size. They do not change according to screen size or anything else. After all, a centimeter is always a centimeter, right? These include
cm — centimeters
— centimeters mm — millimeters
— millimeters in — inches
— inches pt — points
— points px — pixels
— pixels pc — pica
1 in = 2.54 cm = 254 mm = 72 pt = 96 px = 6 pc
Relative
This is where it gets a bit more complicated… In most browsers, the default font size is 16px — I suggest using this value as a basis for any relative calculations. Relative units are comprised of
% — percentage
— percentage em — font size of the element , relative to its parent(3em means that 3 times the normal font size)
— font size of the element , relative to its parent(3em means that 3 times the normal font size) rem — font size of the element, relative to the root html element
— font size of the element, relative to the root html element ch — width of the “0” character (in monospace fonts all characters are of equal width)
— width of the “0” character (in monospace fonts all characters are of equal width) ex —x-height of the font used (the height of “x” character)
Note, that ch and ex will change with the font you are using.
Viewport Units
Viewport units are relative in their nature as well, though they are different from Relative Units. As the name suggests, they are relative to your browser’s viewport size. They include: | https://medium.com/level-up-web/the-difference-between-css-units-px-pt-rem-em-vh-vw-ch-ex-and-the-rest-b2cfdf069230 | ['Bradley Nice'] | 2019-10-23 11:27:09.755000+00:00 | ['Tips', 'Web', 'CSS', 'Web Development', 'Web Design'] |
Volume Six of The Best Illumination Writers Christmas Reads | Volume Six of The Best Illumination Writers Christmas Reads
Illustration by kind courtesy of Pixabay
When I first mooted this idea of Christmas themed reads, I never thought for one moment that our wonderfully talented, not to say gifted, Illumination writers would come up with such an incredible variety of pieces. And I certainly didn't think I would get as far as six volumes.
Reading through all of the pieces I have come to realise, as if I didn't know already, that for some people it is a time of loss and despair, for others a time of great joy and happiness. Some of us struggle through the festive period, and some of us sail through it.
At some level or another, all of the pieces resonated with me. I have spent many a Christmas totally alone, cut off from the ones that I loved (parental alienation leaves a lot to be desired) and I have had unforgettably ecstatic Christmasses that will live on in my memory forever.
Through them all I have learned that every single experience is a valid one, as is every painful or joyful recollection of those experiences. For that reason, the one singular rule I set was that if a piece was well written, then into the collection it goes. Here I present you with a grand selection of what I have come across. Enjoy and have a very happy Christmas.
Paul Myers MBA
Emily Wilcox
Adam Borowski
John Ross
Rebecca Stevens A.
Sebastian Purcell, PhD
Kylie Craft
Britni Pepper
Tree Langdon
Camille Cordova | https://medium.com/illumination/volume-six-of-the-best-illumination-writers-christmas-reads-cce05e00bc67 | ['Liam Ireland'] | 2020-12-25 00:08:41.937000+00:00 | ['Illumination', 'Christmas Reading Gifts', 'Short Stories And Poems', 'Writing'] |
How to build your business brand? | BUILD YOUR BRAND
Business branding has evolved over the years from being what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos referred to as “what people say when you are not in the room” to what people see when they do a search for you on Google.
Your brand should be able to deliver the message you want your customers understand. This is one of the most important aspect of the business, having a clear branding and consistent message in every social media platforms will have a big impact on your business.
How to build your business brand?
First, Get Clarity.
Are you clear about your product? What is the problem that you are solving? What are the core values of your business?
Those are few questions you need to give an answer before projecting your business brand to the masses. The power of social media and online ads can make or break your business brand. Be clear with your brand message. Example: Apple , their branding is about imagination, design and innovation.
Second, Be a Unicorn.
Having a USP or Unique Selling Point will help your brand stand out from the competition, you need to have an understanding of your unique value and problem that you are actually solving.
You need to keep your customers become loyal to your brand.
Third, Update your Online Profile.
Company profile is the first requirement for most of the banks to open a business bank account, this also applies to your Online Profile, you need to be consistent on your messaging. Keep your business profile online updated.
Build an audience from Facebook, linkedIn, IG, and even Tiktok. You can be easily recognized by sharing your online profile consistent with your branding. | https://medium.com/@freelancefinance/how-to-build-your-business-brand-f9805328f64b | [] | 2021-11-27 08:41:54.453000+00:00 | ['Accounting', 'Bookkeeping Services', 'Business Brand', 'Uae Startups', 'Branding'] |
Trump Loyalists Are Going Full-Blown Fascist Now | Politics | Media | News
Trump Loyalists Are Going Full-Blown Fascist Now
Even Fox News is having a tough time swallowing this pill
Within the past two days, many in the President’s inner circle have begun to swing to the ultimate dark side, as White House staffer Peter Navarro took to Fox News to tell of an election stolen from Trump, saying that Trump should appoint a special prosecutor to overturn the election that resulted in a victory for President-Elect Joe Biden. He produced his own “fraud report” that he claimed detailed bulletproof evidence of fraud in the election.
Never mind the fact that the national security agencies in charge of it said the election was the safest in American history. Never mind the fact that the companies that made voting machines said there was no systemic failures with their machines and batted down vast conspiracy theories about them having ties to Antifa and Venezuela, and other groups who Republicans allege have helped Democrats steal the election.
Never mind the fact that local and state Republican governments all found that Biden fairly won the election. Never mind the fact that Trump lost by a margin that’s too big for him to come back from without hundreds of thousands of votes having been manufactured — something that’s nearly impossible to slip under the radar in our election system, some in the Trump Republican camp are still beating the long-dead and decaying horse of fraud claims instead of just accepting the loss, taking the L, and moving on.
Weird flex, trying to fraudulently steal an election by saying the other guy is the one doing the very fraud that you yourself are trying to pull off, but okay.
Fortunately, Fox News interrupted him and wouldn’t let him continue to spew obvious and blatant falsehoods on their network. Bravo, Fox. Well done.
Much of this has to do with the proverbial death of the savior. Trump, as his supporters (followers might be a more apt term) believe, is very much like a savior figure and Trumpism is very much like a religion. This is why there is no “next time” for many in the Trump camp. Trump brought onboard many of the disheartened, the distrustful, and the disenchanted, and the misanthropic.
For this subset of Trump voters, 2022 just represents a return to the swamp of RINOs, the politicians who they feel are fraudulent Republicans who they feel aren’t serving their interests. There is no 2024 because there’s no new savior on the horizon. Accepting a Trump loss means accepting the loss of their movement and all of their political ambitions, ambitions which are admittedly a little vague to the rest of us.
What do Trump supporters really want? I’ve asked myself this question many times. I’ve speculated the possibilities and I keep drawing a blank. And I keep drawing a blank because Trumpism is a movement that changes day by day.
One day, it’s war with Iran they want. Then the next day, it’s to bring the troops home. Then it’s back to war again the following day. Whatever Trump tweets is the official policy. Whatever the leader says becomes the new gospel.
It’s been five long years of news cycles dominated by this bipolar and erratic jerking back and forth about from various thing to various thing, whatever inflames everyone for just a moment being the most important thing in the world, only to be forgotten the following day when it’s something new.
The more I ask myself, what do Trump supporters really want, the more I reach for policy ideas, and the more I draw a blank; and the more this happens, the more I keep coming to the same conclusion: they want power.
Many Trump supporters simply want power, just as Trump himself simply wants power. Raw, naked power is what many in the Republican Party are increasingly falling back on as their go-to raison d’être.
It’s become and ideology of sorts. From Mitch McConnell using procedure in completely contradictory and hypocritical ways to nominate justice that make him look favorable, to the back-and-forth contradictions that littered Trump’s entire presidency — contradictions we must not forget nearly the entire Republican Party signed off on — maintaining power and political advantage seem to be the driving forces behind every decision made.
This couldn’t be better evinced than by another jaw-dropping moment that happened on live TV, when disgraced former National Security Advisor (and convicted felon) Michael Flynn suggested that Trump can utilize the U.S. Military and implement martial law. He took that suggestion a step further saying the outgoing President could then hold another election, one which the President would win.
Here is Michael Flynn, the Former National Security Advisor who’d gotten a Presidential Pardon from Trump earlier this month, now on TV talking about using the military to undo the election that unseated Trump and hold another election in which Trump would win, presumably through rigging.
Quote, “He could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states, and he could basically re-run an election in those states. People are talking about martial law like it’s something we’ve never done.” His rant then goes on to say that he’s concerned about Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court and that they’re not
How else am I supposed to interpret that but drifting off into the final reaches of American Fascism? How else am I supposed to see this besides knowing that some people on the American right want to tread down the murky path that so many totalitarian regimes have in the past, from Franco to Mussolini?
Never in my lifetime did I think I’d see a former military general calling for an outgoing President of the United States to use the military to overturn an election that he didn’t win, just because he didn’t win it…and they can’t accept the results.
And no, I’m not conflating the word “fascism” with the word “totalitarianism” or “authoritarianism.” Trump’s brand has all the hallmarks of fascism proper, from anti-intellectualism, anti-free speech, anti-scientific tendencies, the courting of religious radicalism, the in-group and out-group dynamic, and, if my suspicions are right, power as the fundamental dynamic at work, the prime motivating power, the autocratic and self-sustaining force that wants power at all costs. Never mind if it has no idea what to do with that power.
This naked clinging to totalitarianism ticks off the final box of the traits shared by fascist leaders since fascism was first penciled in as an ideology:
And now we can add totalitarian ambitions to the list. Over the course of the next month, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump tried something like this. If I woke up one day and realized that Trump had attempted to order the U.S. military to go into states and overturn elections, holding a new election that was rigged in such a way as to favor him, I wouldn’t be shocked. It would be just another news cycle.
The silver lining in this cloud is that the institutions have held. In a weird, twisted way, I’ve never been prouder to be an American because of it. I’m grateful for the dedicated men and women in the military, the intelligence agencies, and the justice system who’ve all made sure the Republic that I know and love has held itself together.
And because of their dedication, along with the countless journalists who’ve broken the stories that we needed to know about all the dirty tricks going on behind the scenes, Trumpism appears to be on the decline. At least for now.
Perhaps this is just the death rattle of a fascist movement in decline. One can only hope. | https://joemduncan.medium.com/trump-loyalists-are-going-full-blown-fascist-now-24b8761460e5 | ['Joe Duncan'] | 2020-12-19 18:19:27.371000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Election 2020', 'News', 'Media', 'Trump'] |
Aggressive Management No Longer Works: Here’s What Does | Gone are the days when managers and bosses could tell you what to do. Especially in sectors where job growth is high, employees have a lot of leverage to up and leave if they aren’t happy — and both the employee and the manager know it. That’s why companies in the Silicon Valley spend so much money on cafeterias and Foosball tables for their employees: they know that happy employees are productive employees.
But what about the rest of us who don’t work in Silicon Valley, or who don’t work in high-growth sectors?
Actually, I’ve found that, even though I’m working in Seoul, South Korea where workplace culture is known to be hellish, people are quite ready to up and leave if something doesn’t suit them.
Quite simply, people are less patient these days. Blame it on selfishness, millennial-mentality, or low pain tolerance brought on by parental pampering and endless gaming. No matter what you call it, people are not willing to put up with the boss’s bull**** for very long these days.
That’s bad news for managers who are still trying to get by with the old methods. Threatening to fire kids just doesn’t have the same impact anymore. They’ll just quietly accept their fate and mosy on back to their parents’ apartment — or, if they’ve got talent and gumption, they’ll just find a new job.
Now, usually when people at the management schools talk about incentives for employees to perform better, they talk about monetary incentives and promotions first. It’s all about the money, right?
I may not be a business manager, but I recently met a really great teacher at the place I currently work. And watching him work with both the students and other teachers as head teacher got me thinking.
The thing about this teacher is that he’s really subtle about giving orders. He never gives an outright order, and when he does, he frames it as more of a suggestion. On the way, he’ll look at you and ask for your input as he’s giving you his ‘suggestion.’
“So, does that sound good?” is a phrase you’ll hear countless times from this teacher. And it works. Like magic, the other teachers smile and nod enthusiastically because, after all, he is the head teacher and humans are hardwired to want to go along with those in authority. But even those contrarians who aren’t quite so ready to go along will get a chance to speak and add suggestions, if they want. When this teacher asks for feedback, he is really asking, not just posing for the PR.
So the simple answer to how we can manage people better is to let them have a voice.
And the second suggestion from my personal experience would be to recognize people’s unique strengths and praise them for their micro-wins. I had a friend in San Francisco who used to celebrate every little victory her friends had with wine and a night of Netflix. She would specifically say that we were celebrating “the interview” or “the job offer,” which made us feel good. Maybe we would have still drank wine and watched Netflix if we’d not gotten that win — but what was important was that little bit of celebratory glass-clinking and support. Sometimes, a simple, heartfelt “good job” by those in authority can do wonders for motivation, especially if that authority figure is a couple of rungs above the employee.
To recap:
Aggressive management / micromanaging doesn’t work. Don’t give orders without asking for suggestions and getting buy-in first. Praise always sounds better when coming from someone the employee truly respects. Take some time to find out who this is, and have them praise the employee for doing good work.
Happy managing, everyone! | https://jennajlee92.medium.com/aggressive-management-no-longer-works-heres-what-does-f09b22800668 | ['Jenna Lee'] | 2019-09-16 07:39:54.289000+00:00 | ['Management'] |
Is the Future Controllable? If We Could, Should We? | Copyright 2020. All rights reserved
Human progress often takes place when an individual genius offers an innovation that transforms everything. We benefit from an ancient inventor who decided that carrying things would be better by using wheels. The same with the domesticators of fire. Ask anyone what inventions are society-changing and they will rattle off electricity, the light bulb, vaccines, automobiles, radio, TV, and the Internet. We adopt these new technologies because they are demonstrably superior to what we did before. The problem is that there is an unacknowledged period where the innovation begins to show its flaws or, more worrisome, have negative effects.
Let’s look at some quick examples: Automobiles allow us to easily travel long distances in physical comfort. But they also produce suburban sprawl and spew carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. They also support sedentary lifestyles that can lead to our maladies of diabetes and heart disease. Taking another, the Internet gave us long-distance, instantaneous communications, but also (in ascending order of awfulness) cute cat videos, email spam, online trolls, cyberstalking, and manipulated elections. Are these just unanticipated consequences, or could they have been mitigated or managed in some way?
As a species, we need to find ways to think through the future of innovation without having to fix a problem that the future as thrust upon us. Sadly, I do not have an answer, but perhaps a way to talk about it.
As we look at the rise of monopolies and oligopolies in technology — in search, online buying stuff, social media — what we see are innovations that were originally innovative. But over time their adoption and business growth tends to crowd out the next generation of innovations. Granted, there are always potential disruptive innovators who come at the problem from a radically different angle (Thank you, Clayton Christensen), but quite often they are adopted, bought out, or destroyed by the existing paradigm. Here’s a thought experiment: When was the last time you produced a business document that you wrote using word processing software not created by a multi-billion-dollar tech firm? I use Microsoft Word — an application that was first created in 1981. (Does anyone remember WordStar?)
We have let technology companies grow to become monopolies partly because they are beneficial, like Amazon, and partly because they are predatory, like Amazon. Let us not just accept these realities without asking ourselves if these business concentrations have costs to society, justice, and even freedom. Amazon may offer incredible ease and convenience (Our neighbors thought we ran an online business because of all the delivery trucks that came to our house in the run-up to Christmas — they were all Amazon orders. Yes, we have a problem.), but the company also pushes their workers hard to keep the line moving, sometimes to the detriment of comfort and even safety. Jeff Bezos may be the richest man in the world, but his wealth depends on a lot of other people, and he does not share very well. (He needs to read the wisdom of Robert Fulghum — he may be able to find it on Amazon.)
There’s a remedy for monopoly power, it’s based in a 19th Century law, the Sherman Antitrust Act. It’s been used to break up companies from Standard Oil to AT&T. The problem with it is that it’s used after the fact. After the damage to competition and the free market have been done. Granted, no one knew that John D. Rockefeller was going to become a monopolist when he started Standard Oil in 1870, but by 1880 the New York World observed that it was “the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country.” (Wikipedia) It remained so until 1911, when it was broken up. So, legally, we are running behind the curve. At least until now, maybe.
One of the more recent and profoundly powerful innovations, CRISPR (short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology offers a rapid and relatively easy method to change our genes — genetic engineering in other words. Is this a good innovation? Or a harbinger of a dystopian future? It could be used to address the genes that cause sickle cell disease or cystic fibrosis or Duchenne muscular dystrophy, forever. Not only the recipient of the gene therapy may be spared these maladies, but their children and children’s children. It sounds great. But there are both costs and risks.
Editing genes is still experimental, meaning very expensive even now and not assured of success. There’s still much we do not know. Its expense puts it in the class of luxury goods, only available to those with the money to pay for the procedure. Moreover, so far, it’s not legal. That’s actually where it becomes interesting for the future of the procedure, but also for the future of innovation.
The newness of this innovation buys us some time to consider the costs and benefits of the approach. Granted, a Chinese researcher claimed to use the technique to provide immunity to HIV in 2018, but he was sentenced to prison for doing so. The rest of society still has time to take a breath and consider the ramifications of genetic engineering. If we proceed, there are methods for research that allow us to test safety and efficacy before broad application. We also have time to wrestle with the thornier issues of the ethics of such manipulation and the implications of its cost. Yet, this is a biotechnology issue before it becomes a monopoly issue.
What can we do to address the problems of the next tech innovation that breeds a new generation of monopoly? Perhaps start building in some safeguards in patents to allow a pause in implementation before widespread application and growth. Subject such patent applications to a societal impact assessment like environmental impact studies before we make irreversible changes. Yes, it will slow down the pace of innovation, but what if we had such a consideration before the Internet was loosed on the world? It had no security layer and was wide open to hacks that compromise systems. Would we be better off if there had been a short pause to reflect on the future? If we brought in a technology Devil’s Advocate?
There’s no perfect answer, but the answers we have been getting in the last generation or so don’t look so good where we stand now and as we turn our gaze forward. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/is-the-future-controllable-if-we-could-should-we-3d331f644d42 | ['David Potenziani'] | 2020-07-27 06:16:14.610000+00:00 | ['Monopoly', 'Social Impact', 'Technology', 'Innovation', 'Biotechnology'] |
那個賣祕密的男人 | 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/yp%E6%8A%95%E8%B3%87%E7%90%86%E8%B2%A1%E7%AD%86%E8%A8%98/%E9%82%A3%E5%80%8B%E8%B3%A3%E7%A5%95%E5%AF%86%E7%9A%84%E7%94%B7%E4%BA%BA-c201099b6ab2 | ['Yp Chen'] | 2020-12-20 14:02:40.963000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Wealth', 'Finance', 'Investment', 'Investing'] |
Embracing the Power of One | Photo by Andreas Fidler on Unsplash
Our culture will try to sell you on the concept of the power couple, the dynamic duo who is more powerful together than apart. It’s just accepted that two is better than one, and that may be true when it comes to trying to figure out the solution to a complicated problem. But being single isn’t actually a problem. Not unless we make it one.
We make it into a problem when we’re single but don’t want to be. When we focus on all that we’re missing, we make our relationship status into something broken that needs fixing rather than a natural state of being. We also tend to overlook the positives in our lives in favor of a focus on what it is we don’t have. It can become easy to get so wrapped up in chasing what we want that we lose sight of what we have, and often lose it altogether.
I’ve recently suspected that the most powerful version of me is the single version.
There’s something about being entirely self-reliant that brings out my strength, resilience, and capability. Because there’s no one to lean on, I begin to lean on myself. I learn to trust myself, trust my intuition, and rely on my own resourcefulness to make up for anything that I’m missing.
While there are days that I would like to lean, I know that I am more than capable of standing on my own two feet for the rest of my life.
Thinking about the truth of personal power brought me to another conclusion.
People who are standing in their own personal power can’t just settle for any partner who comes along.
We actually need strong partners- if we choose to seek companionship in a relationship at all. We need another soul who understands the power and beauty inherent in loving oneself and being able to be independent. We need partners who understand a need for space and separate interests, for open dialogue, and for honesty. We require that kind of personal power- not to be mistaken for monetary or social power- in order to have a healthy relationship.
I can tell you from personal experience that when we pair ourselves up with people who are not personally powerful, it doesn’t usually bring them up to our level. It usually knocks us down to theirs.
It’s the partner with low self-esteem who tries to make us feel bad about ourselves rather than learning to love themselves. It’s the partner with a negative relationship with money who happily spends every dime that comes into the relationship and leaves us in debt, late payments, and financial devastation. It’s the partner with sexual hangups who tries to shame us for owning our own sexuality and knowing what we want (and don’t). It’s the partner who says they love our strength and then tries to bend us to his (or her) will.
This isn’t a judgment of good or bad, but it is an assessment of our own journeys. We need to understand this as we come into our own power. When we embrace self-love and self-care, personal responsibility and accountability, and a deeper authenticity, we need to learn to require that of any potential partners.
It’s all about balance. When a relationship has a severe power differential, it’s not going to be in balance. It’s going to have a substantial imbalance- one that will likely mean we’ll expend more of our energy trying to “fix” someone else or make up for what they’re not contributing themselves. It becomes a drain on our time and resources, and we aren’t able to focus on simply loving and being with the other person. We’re certainly not able to focus on the things that are priorities to us.
And outside of relationships, there are those of us who have chosen a single life- not because of lack of options or standards that are far too high but because we enjoy the freedoms that come with it.
There’s nothing like putting my children to bed at night and coming downstairs to light a candle and listen to a record, putting in a classic film, or curling up with a good book. That might sound boring to a lot of people, but I had a relationship once when I couldn’t really do any of those things regularly. My introverted soul needed time and space, and sometimes silence, but I had to negotiate a relationship that involved a lot of Netflix and football and demands on my personal time.
I’m not a person who is unwilling to compromise, but I was all compromise all the time. My personal power began to flicker, and I feared that one day it might go out entirely. I needed to tap into my inner resources, but I was too drained to manage it completely.
When the relationship broke for an entirely different reason, my power slowly began to come back. Not at first- I was too broken and grief-stricken to get it back all at once. But as the smoke cleared, I began to remember myself. And in remembering myself, I began to feel the strength returning. I didn’t need to lean to survive. I could do this on my own.
I thought about dating again, but then I decided that I would try a new path. I wouldn’t go back into that world of online dating, and I wouldn’t go looking for the next relationship. Instead, I would put myself firmly on the path of my choosing and let the Universe provide a powerful partner on that journey- or not. I accept that there might not be a partner for me. It’s not a fact that trips me up very often, and that’s mostly because I enjoy my life.
I’m not focused every day on the things I don’t have. I don’t spend every moment pining to be paired. I focus on what I do have, and I make my priorities central in our lives. I raise my children, and I work my dream job doing freelance writing and working on a series of novels. I make every dollar stretch and still manage to work in the occasional treat for myself and the kids. I plan out my days and my limited personal time based on my own preferences, and I don’t feel like my power is depleted from not being paired up.
No, I’ve embraced the power of one.
The power of one person to make a difference- be it with social issues, the environment, or even politics. The power of one person to live a dream. The power of one person to carve out a good life.
I’m not saying I’ll never have another partner, but I am saying I won’t exchange my personal power for it. And I won’t settle.
After all, aren’t we all enough on our own?
I know I am. | https://crystaljackson.medium.com/embracing-the-power-of-one-fec4b7b3d3c | ['Crystal Jackson'] | 2019-12-19 02:03:06.178000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Empowerment', 'Love', 'Personal Growth', 'Self Love'] |
Australia‘s Nationwide Attempt to Make Porn Ethically | A thin, scruffy man sits in an armchair in a bright, sunlit room. He’s watching something the viewer can’t yet see. “Sometimes in a relationship you need to shake things up a bit,” he says via voiceover. His facial expression vacillates between happiness and lust before the camera turns to reveal a man and woman on the bed opposite him, kissing and touching each other lightly. Soon, the woman gives the narrator an inviting look, and he joins the action. Over the next six minutes, a montage of bisexual sex acts follow — ranging from oral sex to double penetration. The camera lingers on the intimate glances they exchange, and their facial expressions as they come. The short film, Trinity, ends with the woman leaving the two men at home together — the reveal being that they were the couple who wanted to “shake things up.”
Trinity, which has screened at four film festivals and won awards at three of them, is shot with natural light and doesn’t shy away from stretch marks and body hair. It feels low-budget, yet it’s set to a gorgeous score, beautifully shot and masterfully edited by Ms. Naughty, an Australian pornographer who self-identifies as ethical. On her website, BrightDesire, she reveals that Trinity was cut down from more than two hours of footage (though there’s a longer version available to members of her site). She also reports that the scene was proposed and co-directed by the performers themselves. And while it was made by an Australian pornographer and is lauded by other Australians as one of the best examples of Australian porn, it was shot in Berlin with an international cast.
Technically speaking, porn-makers Down Under are all outlaws, meaning they keep their operations small. They’re often one- or two-person operations who shoot on shoestring budgets and rely on creative solutions to perennial problems. The result is often artistically made, but relatively low-budget indie porn like Trinity. Also like Trinity, a lot of it is made ethically — i.e., with the comfort, consent, desires and input of the performers held in high regard.
Of course, the real challenge is disseminating it. Porn isn’t illegal in Australia — it’s fine to own and to consume it — but the laws around its production and distribution are largely considered the most restrictive in the Western world. According to Jarryd Bartle, policy and campaigns advisor at Eros, Australia’s longest-serving adults-only industry association, “Production [of porn] is illegal in all States and Territories, except for the Australian Capital Territory,” a small, yet cosmopolitan area encompassing Australia’s capital city of Canberra.
Depending on how the material in question is produced, distributed or exhibited, punishment can range from a simple government-issued takedown notice to a $215,000 fine and/or 10 years in prison. Although porn laws are rarely enforced and apply primarily to — as one producer put it — “the meat world” (as opposed to cyberspace), Australian porn producers tend to keep their heads down both online and off. “Most Australians get around [the laws] by shooting elsewhere and editing elsewhere and then uploading to international servers,” says Morgana Muses, a 52-year-old porn star, writer, director and producer.
Still, it’s a risky business. In 2009, for example, the offices of AbbyWinters.com, a successful porn company out of Fitzroy, Victoria, was raided by Victoria Police and brought up on charges of child pornography (a charge that was later dropped) and 54 counts of making objectionable films for gain and for possessing a commercial quantity of objectionable films. Ultimately, the charges against the company’s CEO were dropped, but AbbyWinters.com summarily relocated to the Netherlands.
Distributors and sellers of porn DVDs, too, must keep a low profile. Once produced, says Bartle, “Depictions of real sexual activity can only be sold in the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory.” These two areas, vastly removed from each other geographically, are far from the cultural centers of the country. In fact, the Northern Territory boasts less than 1 percent of the Australian population across its desolate, nearly 5.5-million-square-mile expanse. Yet, it’s where most of Australian-made porn films are mail-ordered from — since it’s only one of two places it’s legal to do so (the Capital Territory obviously being the other).
In large part because of these laws, escorting and brothels are larger industries in most of Australia than porn. In fact, some prominent porn stars and producers got started doing other types of sex work before stepping in front of the camera. “By the time I shot my first-ever porn scene, I’d already been a prostitute (my preferred job title) for 12 years, and a sex worker peer counsellor and low-key advocate for six years,” says Madison Missina, perhaps Australia’s biggest porn star.
“Once I moved to Australia, I started escorting,” adds American Kim Cums, a performer and one-half of the team behind KimCums.com, a small online porn company. “Through that, I was offered an opportunity to be in a porn film. I did a couple scenes and absolutely loved it!” That said: “If starting up a porn site had been our original intention, starting one in the States would’ve certainly made a lot more sense and been a lot less of a hassle.”
Part of the push for ethical porn is to end that hassle. “I think that if we, as an industry, focus on trying to make ethical, good-natured porn, not coercive, sexualized violence or porn filmed in public spaces, that we will mostly be okay,” Missina says.
The word “ethical” when applied to porn production is definitely malleable — depending on which ethical practices a producer chooses to champion. Missina, for instance, brings up the difficulties around safer sex practices and STI testing in the Australian industry. “In Australia,” she says, “performers are asked to show up to set with printed-out test results, but often it’s months between shoots.” That means the tests aren’t always up-to-date, and according to Missina, they “can be faked in numerous ways.”
Similarly, Missina won’t shoot without condoms anymore, but she says, “I’ve had many producers who publicly claim to make ‘ethical’ porn refuse to shoot me with condoms.”
“No company ever gets this 100 percent right,” says Michelle Flynn at Light Southern Cinema. “The most important part about our ethics is full disclosure from the moment you start having communications with a performer.” From the start then, Flynn sends as much information as possible in writing before every shoot so performers can make informed decisions about what they end up doing on camera. “On set, it’s about creating a safe and comfortable environment for people to do their jobs. I make sure that they know they’re in charge of the shoot,” she continues. “It’s mostly common sense and treating people with respect.”
Cums, who worked with several of the larger companies in Australia as a performer before she began producing for herself, says, “The majority of my experiences with companies have been positive, and their shoots have been run ethically.” Only one company, which she said “tried to claim that what they do isn’t porn,” gave her pause. “Downplaying the fact that your performers are actually engaging in porn may attract performers who aren’t truly ready to face the stigma associated with working in the sex industry.”
Her negative experience, she says, led to her “writing a full brief to each performer that I shoot with,” including shoot dates and times, a list of items to bring, how much they’ll be paid, what to expect on shoot day and details of the scene itself. “I want to give them every detail I can think of in advance because I want them to be able to veto anything they aren’t comfortable with and not feel pressured.”
There are a few notable exceptions to the small, indie Australian porn paradigm — most notably Aussie Ass, whose very-Australian work is easy to find at their website or on PornHub. Aussie Ass didn’t respond to an interview request, but its website is a slick affair that mirrors big mainstream companies like Brazzers. And there’s a lot more content on it than, say, KimCums.com. And its videos are the most popular blatantly Australian porn available on free porn sites — e.g., its scene, “Friends With Benefits — Fucking Her Tight 18 Year Old Pussy in her Own Bed” has nearly 6 million views on Pornhub. But while its online footprint might be larger than most Australian companies’, Aussie Ass is beholden to the same rules as their smaller counterparts: And so, they’re not technically an Australian company. Instead, they’re owned by a parent company, TMC Media Group, which has its business address in Delaware.
Back in Australia, the government’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has expressed interest in replicating recently passed British legislation that requires age-verification software on all porn made in and viewable to the U.K. Along the same lines, several of the pornographers I spoke with noted that they were wary of recent moves toward more conservative values in their government generally.
All the while, Aussie pornographers have to do battle with the same free streaming porn tube sites that have hobbled the American industry — an exhausting task for one- or two-person companies. “I’m pretty burned out,” Ms. Naughty told LifeHacker in May. “There’s a huge learning curve ahead of me, and a large part of me doesn’t have the energy for it.”
Flynn at Light Southern Cinema, however, believes this is mostly frustration talking and that the “amazing work” of Aussie pornograhpers isn’t going anywhere. In fact, she cites Ms. Naughty as one of her biggest inspirations. “Ms. Naughty produced one of the sexiest threeway scenes I ever saw in her film The Fantasy Project,” Flynn gushes. “Overall, everyone here brings something of theirs to the table. That’s what really sets Australian pornographers apart. We have such an eclectic mixed bag of fucking great content that frankly the world needs!”
Lynsey G. writes about sexuality, feminism and porn for outlets like Bust, McSweeney’s and Nerve. She last wrote about the MILFs and GILFs who start making porn after 40.
More Porn Around the World: | https://medium.com/mel-magazine/australia-s-nationwide-attempt-to-make-porn-ethically-e61beff17e6a | ['Lynsey G'] | 2017-10-19 16:32:25.831000+00:00 | ['Sex Work', 'Sex', 'Porn', 'Australia', 'Pornography'] |
Create AWS Lambda Layers for Python packages | Check/Install Python
You can check to see if your desired Python version is installed on your Cloud9 environment.
which python3.8
If the required version doesn’t exists, install it following these steps
# install prerequisites for Python before installing it.
sudo yum install gcc openssl-devel bzip2-devel libffi-devel
sudo wget
sudo tar xzf Python-3.8.6.tgz # Download the Python from the Python official website.sudo wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.8.6/Python-3.8.6.tgz sudo tar xzf Python-3.8.6.tgz cd Python-3.8.6 # compile Python 3.8 from the source code and install
sudo ./configure --enable-optimizations # make altinstall is used to prevent replacing the default python binary file /usr/bin/python.
sudo make altinstall # move downloaded source archive file from your system
sudo rm -f /opt/Python-3.8.6.tgz # check the version
python3.8 -V
Create Lambda Layer
now install the packages you want. Here I am installing pandas. You can use requirements.txt as well.
Put the correct version of python where you see python3.x.
mkdir folder
cd folder
virtualenv v-env -p python3.x
source ./v-env/bin/activate
pip install pandas
deactivate
Then type the following code line by line to create your layer. Please note that I have two version of python for the compatible runtimes.
mkdir python
cd python
cp -r ../venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/* .
cd ..
zip -r pandas_layer.zip python
aws lambda publish-layer-version --layer-name pandas --zip-file fileb://pandas_layer.zip --compatible-runtimes python3.7 python3.8
AWS Cloud9
If you don’t have AWS CLI setup on your machine, you can use AWS Cloud9 to run the commands in the cloud. | https://medium.com/@amirhos-imani/create-aws-lambda-layers-for-python-packages-1bf303f45cab | ['Amirhs. Imani'] | 2020-12-23 06:07:53.208000+00:00 | ['Lambda', 'Python', 'AWS', 'Cloud9', 'Pandas'] |
8 Tips for Marketing | Photo by Merakist on Unsplash
Before Going on I want to mention that most of this article I was able to write thanks to my colleague and friend, Head of Marketing Department of Fnet Sona Madoyan.
What is especially important marketing trends? When developing a marketing strategy, you always need to take into account the specifics of the industry; requirements, and specifics of potential buyers. In addition to all this, you always need to follow the news and a few important “marketing rules” that are relevant at all times.
So, what to do?
1. Be smart spending Marketing budget
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Since the marketing budget is largely insufficient to take advantage of all the ways and means fo) implementation of marketing goals, it is very important not to focus the entire budget on one direction, but to diversify it. You need to choose the means and ways that are most effective and show results faster. And to evaluate the effectiveness of the chosen path or advertising tool, you can use the ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) indicator.
2. Create unique content
Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash
Focus your forces on content marketing and create original content, especially giving preference to video content.
As the famous marketer David Baba would say․
𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞. 𝐈𝐟 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟, 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐚 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞.
3. Combine online and offline strategies
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Even though the usage of digital platforms and being active in a digital environment are prioritized. You need to reach the audience in several ways and inform about your product/service. It is also important to use offline tools. And it is very important to properly and effectively combine online and offline marketing strategies: they must be long-lasting and additional.
4. Gamify the offer
Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash
Another important trend to follow is Gamification. It is probably no secret that almost always interactive, critical, and useful content provides a wider audience. And because people like to compete with each other through games, it may provide more engagement.
5. Consider each generation
Photo by Jessica Lewis on Unsplash
Generation Z (as the digital generation is often called) is the youth that created and will continue to create demand. Therefore, except for specific goods and services, in all other cases, it is extremely important to follow generation Z, since marketing and product trends are built by this generation, and products (goods and services) must be formed in accordance with their expectations.
6. Find more partners
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
Creating partnerships and relationships with companies in different areas can lead to synergy. By combining your audience with partners and other resources, joint marketing activities with lower costs can bring the greatest results.
7. Customize your offer
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
The offer of any product or service must be segmented and personalized on a behavioral basis. Try to make an offer in such a way that everyone who receives it is sure that this product or service is for them.
8. Direct all funds to promote sales
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
Despite the divergence in views and ideas, and structure of some companies, Marketing and Sales department are like brothers working towards the same goal. Sales is a part of Marketing, and Marketing is a component of Sales, and it is important to aim your marketing strategy at stimulating sales.
I’ll elaborate on the issues concerning marketing-sale relationships in other articles.
Thank you very much for reading this article, hope you’ve enjoyed it. Special thanks to Sona Madoyan, Head of Marketing Department of Fnet, for making this article possible.
If you have any questions feel free to ask it in comments or contact me directly via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Stay safe and best luck! | https://uxplanet.org/8-tips-for-marketing-deb7eddac139 | ['Daniel Danielyan'] | 2020-08-24 16:14:50.441000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'UX Research', 'Digital Marketing', 'Sales', 'Success'] |
“Stumbling In” | “Stumbling In”
Lyrics to “Stumbling In” by Stroke 9
Listen free here.
I was long gone before I went away
I didn’t have what it takes
There was something in your eyes
Struck out when you walked in
Blacked out in a tailspin
I Wasn’t thinking right
that night
this won’t be the first time it’s crashing on me
I know someday you’re gonna find
a place to rest your weary mind
but when?
Now I’m standing in the light
Can’t you see the stars shining bright
for you
Standing in the light
That’s the best I’ll ever do
Well I’m not scared anymore
Like the time before
All i ever wanted were the simple things in life
nothin more, nothing more
Throttle wide open on the 442
Swallowing pills just to see what they do yah
Stumbling in -
Stumbling out-
It’s was all over when you started to shout HEY!
Are ya hearing me now?
Now I’m standing in the light
Can’t you see the stars shining bright
for you
Standing in the light
That’s the best I’ll ever do
Yah It’s all that I can scream about for a minute
Life’s what I dream about with you in it
Don’t walk away
What’s left to say | https://medium.com/stroke-9/stumbling-in-c07b8c3b8679 | ['Luke Esterkyn'] | 2020-04-10 18:59:37.429000+00:00 | ['Stroke 9', 'Lyrics'] |
Secretary Geithner’s budget speech, part 2 | Yesterday I praised Treasury Secretary Geithner for three elements of the fiscal policy speech he gave at the Harvard Club of New York this past Tuesday.
Future budget deficits are caused in part by both demographics and rising health costs. (I would strike “in part.”) We can’t wait to address our fiscal problems. The markets will at some point force action but we don’t know when. If we wait until they do, the solutions will be much more painful. Higher interest payments are a cost of inaction that will squeeze out other policy priorities.
Today I will provide a few areas of disagreement, with more to follow in future posts.
In the first two points below my goal is not to prove Secretary Geithner wrong, but to show a set of reasonable conclusions that differ from his.
All quotes below are from Secretary Geithner’s speech.
4. I think the Administration’s proposed deficit and debt reduction is too little and too slow.
If we put our deficits on a path to get them below 3 percent of GDP by 2015 and hold them there, with reforms that politicians commit to sustain, then the federal debt held by the public will peak in the range of 70 to 80 percent of GDP, and then start to fall.
A 3%-3.1% deficit is the break-even point for a constant debt/GDP ratio. So with a 3% target, “start to fall” actually means “basically hold steady, and start to fall by only the slightest amount.”
There is a huge difference between 70 and 80 percent of GDP. The President and the Secretary are leaving themselves a lot of wiggle room ($1.5 trillion if we measure it relative to this year’s GDP).
if we measure it relative to this year’s GDP). The maximum deficit I would prefer would be 2% of GDP (roughly the historic average over the past 50 years), and I’d be happy to support lower. I am uncomfortable with debt/GDP that high and would want to lock in a sharper decline in that ratio. To do that, at a minimum you need smaller deficits. I remember fondly when balance was the goal, and would still support that goal and the spending cuts needed to meet it.
deficit I would prefer would be 2% of GDP (roughly the historic average over the past 50 years), and I’d be happy to support lower. I am uncomfortable with debt/GDP that high and would want to lock in a sharper decline in that ratio. To do that, at a minimum you need smaller deficits. I remember fondly when balance was the goal, and would still support that goal and the spending cuts needed to meet it. The biggest problem with this weak deficit goal is “with reforms that politicians commit to sustain.” Unlike in business where you can sign a binding contract, Congress by definition has the ability to change the rules in the future. You need to be more aggressive in your initial fiscal goal precisely because you have to allow for the likelihood that future Congresses will make things worse rather than better. If you only minimally satisfy your fiscal goals, then any future bad event or unwise action immediately puts you in bad territory again. Given Congress’ track record, this is a risk not worth taking.
Of course, it’s easy to say “I’m for more deficit reduction” if you don’t specify how you’d get there. For the time being I will say that I support the Ryan budget, plus I would slow the growth of (“cut”) Medicare spending in the short run as much as is needed to hit my more aggressive deficit target. I would prefer repealing the new health care spending from last year’s two laws. If I couldn’t get that, I would increase cost-sharing in Medicare. If I couldn’t get that, I would cut all Medicare provider payment rates. I would also make explicit changes to slow Social Security spending growth, although those effects would be outside of this budget window.
5. I have a two part goal, one part of which is deficit/debt reduction.
The Secretary (and the President) defines the fiscal goal as follows:
For the United States, this means a deficit below 3 percent of GDP. Achieving this is the essential test of fiscal sustainability.
A deficit/GDP target is one essential test of fiscal sustainability. The other essential test is that government not perpetually expand to consume an ever-greater portion of society’s resources. If we have budget deficits of 3% but spending and taxes grow to 25%, then 30%, then 35% of GDP, then individuals, families, and businesses will have ever fewer resources to address their own needs and to solve problems they face.
I would instead say, “The essential test of fiscal sustainability has two parts. Budget deficits should be no more than 2% of GDP, and preferably less. Government spending should stay stable as a share of GDP, so that the benefits of an expanding economy are controlled by private citizens rather than by the government.”
To read more of this argument, please see my earlier post: Deficits are an important but incomplete metric.
6. I don’t think the President’s new budget proposal is credible.
Secretary Geithner puts the best face on a proposal that I think in most respects lacks credibility because it lacks detail. I also disagree with several of the President’s proposals where he has provided detail, but my complaint here is claiming you have a proposal when you don’t. Rather than rehash this argument, please see my earlier (long) post: Understanding the President’s new budget proposal.
Note for instance how Secretary Geithner finesses a trillion dollar deficit gap between the President’s outline and the Ryan plan:
The fiscal plans that are on the table include roughly $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 to 12 years so there is broad agreement on the ultimate goal and timeline.
As I explained earlier, there is about a trillion dollar deficit difference between using 10 years and using 12 years. There is not broad agreement on either the ultimate goal or the timeline. The Administration (implicitly) confirmed this, and it invalidates this claim by Secretary Geithner.
I will respond to more points from the Secretary’s speech in future posts.
(photo credit: Wikipedia) | https://medium.com/keith-hennessey/secretary-geithners-budget-speech-part-2-67760bf34e3b | ['Keith Hennessey'] | 2016-12-22 04:05:15.041000+00:00 | ['Budget', 'Economy', 'Taxes', 'Health', 'Seniors'] |
How to Gain Intuition and Learn Fast | Book Excerpt
How to Gain Intuition and Learn Fast
Tapping into your brain’s powerful “procedural learning system” can help you develop intuitive problem solving and learn more quickly Olav Schewe Jun 2·13 min read
Image credit: Christian Horz.
Can anything good come out of playing video games all day long? For Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the answer is yes. Blevins is one of the world’s most famous gamers. For him, gaming is a full-time job that reportedly earns him around $20 million a year from sponsors and followers. Blevins typically spends ten to twelve hours per day playing games, which he streams to his more than 20 million followers. Much of our discourse is on how to learn information from books, videos, and lectures. But what about when you want to become an awesome gamer like Blevins? Or become an outstanding race car driver, translator, mathematician, writer, or musician? Although conscious understanding built on strong sets of neural links can help, it’s still not enough to bring you to top levels of expertise.
You can enhance and broaden your learning by tapping into your brain’s powerful, mysterious (you’re mostly not even conscious of it!) procedural learning system.
Declarative Versus Procedural Learning
Here’s a little surprise. When you learn something, you’re depositing sets of neural links in long-term memory. But there are two completely different ways you can deposit those sets of links. One way uses the relatively quick-to-learn declarative learning system. This system is closely integrated with working memory, so you’re mostly conscious of what you’re learning (in other words, you can “declare” it).
But there is a second, equally important learning system: the procedural system. When you deposit sets of links through the procedural system, those links go into a different place in long-term memory than where you deposit links declaratively. It’s like having two legs to stand on instead of just one. If you learn something using your declarative system, and then build on it by also using your procedural system (or vice versa), you have a much richer and deeper set of links for whatever you’ve learned.
Let’s say you’re learning how to serve a ball in tennis. In the beginning, you proceed consciously and declaratively by keeping your eye on the ball. When you first hit the ball, using your working memory to retrieve from declarative links the simple steps for hitting the ball, your serves are pretty bad.
But after lots of practice, serving the ball becomes an automatic procedure. This is because practice allowed you to place and strengthen “how to serve a tennis ball” links in the procedural areas of your long-term memory. When you draw on strong procedural links, your serve becomes smooth and natural.
For any given serve, once you decide consciously and declaratively (with the starting nudge of working memory), to serve a tennis ball, you begin to move your arm. The procedural system kicks in, and off the ball goes. Together, the declarative and procedural systems work hand in hand to give you a great serve.
For many decades, researchers thought that procedural learning only involved motor skills — like serving that tennis ball, kicking a football, playing the piano, or learning to type. Then researchers realized that the procedural system was also involved in habits, like putting your pants on before you put on your shirt in the morning, or nodding hello as you greet someone.
But now, researchers are discovering that the procedural and declarative systems work together in most kinds of learning, including writing, language, math, music, and, of course, video games. Unlike declarative learning, you’re largely not aware of when you are learning through or using your procedural system. (This is why, once you’ve driven to your house many times, you can become lost in thought and drive home on automatic pilot, without even being aware of how you got home. You first learned how to get home declaratively, but once you practiced enough, your procedural system can take over and you drive home unaware of your actions.)
In essence, the procedural system is a black box — you can’t see what’s going on inside. The procedural system can receive input from your working memory (such as when you decide to try to serve a tennis ball), or input from what you sense (such as seeing a pothole ahead when riding a bicycle). But you are unaware of how the black box of the procedural system does its learning. All you know is whether you hit the baseball and it went to where you wanted it to go, or whether your bicycle glided smoothly around the pothole — or it crashed.
Despite its “black box” behavior, the procedural system can be extremely sophisticated — it can help you learn both simple and complex patterns without consciously thinking about them. Toddlers and children, with their exceptionally powerful procedural systems (their declarative systems don’t come online until they grow older), pick up virtually their entire native language using their procedural system. Do you know how to solve a Rubik’s Cube quickly? You’re using your procedural system. Do you like to watch real-life surgeons in action on television? Their procedural systems play an important role in their expertise.
Well-developed links in your procedural system allow you to be lightning-quick, even in stressful situations. These links involve not only actions such as serving a tennis ball, but also the ability to quickly see relationships such as 7 and 5 sum to 12 without having to think about them, or that a certain type of calculus problem requires taking a derivative. When you face a native speaker of the language you’re studying, procedural links are also what enable you to speak comfortably and fluently, instead of finding yourself searching for words. Together, the speed and smooth confidence of the procedural system, coupled with the flexibility of the declarative system, can make you a learning force to be reckoned with.
Learn Using Both Systems
The declarative system is kind of humdrum. It learns best through step-by-step explanations. But the procedural system is unusual. It learns by intuitively feeling out patterns. In fact, you often cannot explain what you’ve learned procedurally, or at least not very easily: try explaining how to tie shoelaces without resorting to “watch me.”
Let’s cut to a key point. It’s not possible to flip a switch and consciously move back and forth between declarative and procedural learning. As we mentioned, the procedural system learns by developing a feel for patterns. That happens through practice — and lots of it, in a variety of situations. So let’s look at several different subject areas to get a feel for how to best use practice to improve both your procedural and your declarative learning.
Use Your Procedural System to Improve Your Problem-Solving Intuition, Speed, and Confidence in Math and Science
It’s relatively straightforward to learn math declaratively. Just follow the step-by-step procedure you’ve been taught to solve the problem, and you’re done. But this straightforward approach does little to help build links in long-term memory through your procedural system. A much better approach is to internalize key, exemplar problems. This helps develop your intuitive, fast procedural system.
To internalize a problem, you should pick a problem where the complete worked solution (not just the numerical answer) is available — but don’t look at the solution or procedure explanations. Listen to your internal voice instead — can you feel or intuit a whisper of your first step? (Remember, your procedural system often can’t put what you’re doing into words, as the declarative system can. But it can hint!)
If you do get an intuition about what that first step is, great! Do it. If you don’t get word from your intuition after trying hard, take a peek, and then do the first step. Then try to do the next step on your own. And the next — all the way to the end of the problem. Only peek if you need to — and, of course, after you’re done, to check that you’ve done the problem correctly.
If the material is difficult, you may find yourself taking a peek at virtually every step the first time you try to solve a problem — that’s okay. Be sure to work the entire problem by writing it down — don’t skip steps. Then try to work the problem again — hopefully without peeking until you are finished.
Here’s an example, just to give you a sense of what we mean.
Key Point
The way to develop your problem-solving intuition is to try to draw the solution from inside yourself when working on problems. Only peek at the next step of the solution if you absolutely have to, and then make sure you practice the problem again, later on, to make sure you can do it all without peeking.
Here’s an example of what you might be thinking as you look at each step of an algebra problem. (As you advance further in math, you may not be able to verbalize the steps.)
3(3 + x) = 21 + x
How can I simplify this? Oh yes — multiply the 3.
How can I simplify this? Oh yes — multiply the 3. (3 × 3) + (3 × x) = 21 + x
Okay, just need to multiply the items inside the parentheses now.
Okay, just need to multiply the items inside the parentheses now. 9 + 3x = 21 + x
Hmm — how do I get the x’s by themselves more? If I move the 9 right and single x left, that’ll do the trick.
Hmm — how do I get the x’s by themselves more? If I move the 9 right and single x left, that’ll do the trick. 3x–x = 21−9
At this point, I just need to do simple subtraction.
At this point, I just need to do simple subtraction. 2x = 12
To get x entirely by itself, all I need to do is divide both sides by 2.
To get x entirely by itself, all I need to do is divide both sides by 2. x = 12 / 2
This is simple math.
This is simple math. x = 6
I’m done!
Most students do not do this extra internalization practice, and it’s a big mistake that differentiates pro learners from ordinary learners. Once you’ve internalized the problem you’ve selected, and several other problems that share resemblances — and differences — with the first, your brain begins to develop an intuition for how to solve these kinds of problems. That’s your procedural system in action!
In other words, as your brain internalizes seemingly simple but important procedures like “get rid of the parentheses” and “group the x variables on one side and numbers on the other,” you begin to develop a deeper sense of the patterns involved in this and related types of problem-solving. This deeper, broader pattern sense can allow you to tackle problems even if the problems might seem superficially quite different from anything you’ve solved before.
This means, to develop your problem-solving intuition, you should internalize different types of problems, each over several days, until the solutions flow out easily with no peeking. (You don’t need to wait to internalize one problem completely before you begin internalizing others.) Eventually, you should be able to just look at a given problem and step quickly through the various parts of the solution procedure in your mind, almost as if it were a song.
Don’t be surprised if, the first day you try to internalize a problem, you feel it’s just too hard. When you try again the next day, you’ll be surprised at how much easier it is. And by the third day, it will start feeling natural — even, yes, intuitive!
You can quickly check your answers in math using a website like WolframAlpha or Mathway. Just enter what you want to calculate or know about, and AI technology will get you to the solution.
Remember, though, that you can’t always look it up — you need a solid internal structure so you have an intuitive understanding of what’s behind the computations.
Start Interleaving
The next strategy to use with your internalization technique is interleaving — that approach where you alternate different types of problems — for example, alternating module 3 problems with module 7 problems. If you build interleaving practice into your internalization studies, you’re laying a solid neural foundation. This will help you create sets of links about how to use specific techniques. It will also show you how those links relate to other sets of links involved in other techniques. You’re allowing your procedural system to do one of the things it does best — detect different patterns. Later, on tests, you will find you have a natural, faster intuition about which technique or concept to bring into play.
What Should You Internalize?
How do you know what material is best to internalize? A great place to start is with the example problems that are worked out step by step in a textbook. They may seem easy, but they are often trickier than they first appear, and they usually demonstrate important concepts. Problems your instructor has worked out, as well as practice questions from old tests, are also great to internalize — that is, if you know that the solutions are correct. (As we mentioned earlier, taking practice tests is a great way to prepare for tests.) The broader your pool of internalized problems, the easier you will find it to see analogies and transfer your skills to other, more distantly related areas.
Use Your Procedural System to Improve Your Foreign-Language Studies
As a child, you naturally used your procedural system to learn to speak your native language. But as you grew older, you began to rely more on your flexible, fast-learning declarative learning system.
When it comes to learning a second language, however, that reliance on declarative learning is both good and bad.
The declarative system can allow you to easily learn new vocabulary words and to quickly learn the patterns for verb conjugations or noun declensions. The problem is, when you find yourself in front of a native speaker, you often struggle. This can happen because you have put the links of learning in your slower-to-retrieve-from declarative memory. You haven’t yet deposited sets of links in your procedural system. And it’s the procedural links that give you easy, natural fluency in a language. The more you’re able to develop your procedural links when learning a specific language, the more fluent your language skills become.
The Value of Retrieval Practice, Spaced Repetition, and Interleaving
No surprise, language learning needs a lot of retrieval practice — additional repetitions of retrieval practice almost always improve your ability to learn and retain the material. But realistically, there are only so many hours in a day and you’re probably facing a deluge of new vocabulary words. So what’s the optimal time for you to space out your repetitions? Minutes, days, weeks, or months?
Probably the most important question to ask yourself is how long you want to remember the material. If you have a test in a week, repeat the material each day for a week. If you want to remember it for a year, review it once every three weeks. Once you’re comfortable that you’ve got a word or phrase down, put the next repetition further out — expand the spacing gap. And remember that sleep and brief periods of mental relaxation help.
Of course, interleaving and spaced repetition are also important — they improve not only declarative but also procedural learning. When it comes to language learning, interleaving means mix it up! Don’t just study static lists of vocabulary words written on a page. Instead, create either electronic or handwritten flashcards and shuffle them, so they’re always in a different order. If you’re studying three verb tenses over three weeks, don’t just study one verb tense, and then the next and the next (textbooks and teachers love to do it this way). Instead, give yourself a chance to roughly grasp each tense as it is presented. Then, as soon as possible, start mixing up the tenses. This approach is harder and more confusing at first, but you’ll learn better.
The best form of interleaving is to speak with a native speaker. You never know what words and sentences are going to be lobbed at you, or in what order. Start practicing with a native speaker as early and as much as possible in your studies, mistakes be damned. Get onto a website like italki and exchange conversations for free or hire a tutor. Remember that classroom instruction tends to emphasize declarative learning, whereas immersion (or as near as you can get to immersion) will help build your procedural system.
Sometimes people feel that they simply aren’t capable of learning a new language. Often, they really could learn the language — it’s just that the declarative approaches used in classrooms don’t necessarily work well for those who tend to lean on their procedural learning system. For these more procedural types, diving into the deep end of the pool and speaking with native speakers from the very beginning, going back to look things up in books when necessary, can be a good approach.
Good Language-learning Sources
Duolingo (an app that teaches you vocabulary, phrases, and sentences)
Busuu (another language learning app)
italki (a video chat platform that connects you to native speakers)
Preply (a video chat platform similar to italki)
Yabla (a platform with captioned videos that allows you to slow the speaking speed and break the video into small, easily repeated sections)
FluentU (a platform much like Yabla, with a somewhat different selection of languages)
Use Gestures To Help You Remember Words
Intriguing research has shown that making a meaningful gesture while learning a new word in a foreign language can help you remember and understand that word better. For example, if you’re learning the word for “write” in another language, you might say “write” in the new language as your hands make a writing motion. If you’re learning the word for “high,” you might move your right hand up above your head. As you “drink,” you would move your hand as if drinking from a cup. These gestures seem to help bind the sound of the word to its actual meaning.
Improving Your Writing and Artistic Skills
Famous statesman Benjamin Franklin used a special technique to improve his writing. Is it a declarative or procedural technique? We think it’s a bit of both. In any case, it works.
To use the “Franklin approach,” find writing you admire. Take a paragraph and jot a word or two down to remind yourself of the key ideas of each sentence. Then use those keywords as hints to see if you can recreate the sentence. Check your sentence against the original and see which one is better. Does the original have a better vocabulary? Better prose? If it does, you’ve just learned how you can improve your writing. Notice — you’re not just memorizing other people’s writing. You’re actively beginning to build your own sets of links about how to write well. Eventually, using this technique, you will discover ways you can write better than the originals you’re learning from.
Of course, this technique can work not only for writing, but also for art, language study, and other creative endeavors. | https://betterhumans.pub/how-to-gain-intuition-and-learn-fast-9a859a9b8ac7 | ['Olav Schewe'] | 2021-06-02 16:07:51.964000+00:00 | ['Brain', 'Study', 'Learning', 'Problem Solving', 'Book Excerpts'] |
Block Talk — Pittsburgh Grand Prix | ICO Alert Block Talk is a collection of street interviews where we test the knowledge of the public on subjects like Bitcoin, blockchain, cryptocurrencies and ICOs.
In this episode, we were on site at the Pittsburgh Grand Prix auto show to find out which cryptocurrencies people sold to buy their sweet Lamborghinis! | https://medium.com/ico-alert/block-talk-pittsburgh-grand-prix-e3457ef613a5 | ['Evan Schindler'] | 2018-07-17 13:30:55.182000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'News', 'Blockchain'] |
Welcome Rascals | It was 30 minutes before the university interview. Clara was nervous about her university entrance because that was a military university and she never had a military background in her life time. She was almost uncomfortable for another reason. Clara was wearing a saree at that time and she felt awkward that dress. The military staff came to the hall where Clara and her family were and took all the interviewers there. Clara said bye her family and went with the strangers.
This is her first interview in her life and she is here because she was selected as an undergraduate of software engineering after passed the university exams and today is that interview. Now the military officer align the interviewers according to the given number. Clara’s number was number 3 and a thin, tan color girl was sat before her. She was looking at her file and when Clara looked at her, she said hi to her. That moment Clara felt really relax because she was tension to face for the interview.
“Hi, I’m Sarah and nice to meet you” Sarah was friendly girl with a straight hair. That’s how Clara met her ever lasting friend Sarah. “Yup…I am little bit nervous to face for this but I am happy, you are going before me for the interview” Clara said that with a smile in her face. Then Clara and Sarah had chat with them. Both of them faced the interview well and they have shared their number. They left from that place with a hope to meet soon.
Then It was January, Clara is packing her good to stay at a boarding place and her first experience living without her parents. “ Clara, be friendly with your friends always, You want to listen to them and you can’t be as you were at the home and make sure don’t stay inside the bathroom for a long time. If you were like that you may have to face lots of troubles ok” Clara’s dad was giving her advices because he really loves her little girl and he is the only one knows about how mischievous girl she is. “Ok daddy, I know how to live with other…mom please tell father to stop this nonstop chatting” Clara said to her mother. “what is your dad is telling right. We want to teach you how to be at a boarding place. Otherwise blame will come to us. You can’t spread your power at there either you are the youngest” her mother replied to her. Clara and her sister made an insulting laugh at her mother to stop her advising speech. Clara only has a sister and she means her lot. Both loves each other and her sister is really sad and upset of saying good bye to her little sister. Then Clara had her first night at the boarding place without her family and she felt alone when her family went to home by leaving her at the new place.
It was 7.45a.m and Clara’s phone was ringing. It was Sarah. “ Hey we are getting late for the lectures, I am in front of the gate. Come quickly.” “Ok, Give me 5 minutes and I’ll be there” Clara answered to her. Then both of then went to the lecturer hall with other 7 friends were there at the interview. When they have arrived to the hall it was filled with new students whom were selected from another interview in another day. Clara and Sarah were difficult to find a place to sit at the hall and luckily there was 2 chairs empty at the 4th row of the lecturer hall. That was the moment of the unbelievable friendship began. “Excuse me Is there anyone in this two seats” Clara asked from the tall girl after that empty chairs. “No, you can sit here”. She answered to Clara and took her bag which was on that chair. Then Clara and Sarah sat there but two of the wanted to sit at the front row in the first day of their university lectures. But this is how the rascals met in the university.
This group of rascals are with 6 girls. That number is small but when they have gathered with together that doesn’t seem like small. There was a small interval in the middle of the lecture. “Hi I’m Sarah and this is Clara and nice to meet you all” Sarah began the conversation to know about the person left to her and the others also. “Hmm…Hi…Nice to meet you both and I am Yumi” She spoke short and turned at the fair and chubby girl next to her. “I am Alisa and this is Mona and Sofia. Can you please give the note book because I was unable to complete the note as she was speed”. Alisa was a talk active girl. Then Sarah took my book and gave it to her without asking me. That much friends we were because Sarah was a relaxed girl with a good heart. Then 6 of us went to the cafeteria to have our lunch. Most of the times still they are together at the cafeteria and have a great time with others.
“Hey, It vacation we will go to Sofia’s home town. That was pretty much cool men”. Yumi started the conversation like that. After the exams, they were having two weeks vacation and with the stress of the exams they are planning about a picnic. “Yha men, I can come by train and I will pick you all from there. You can stay at our house but you all have only my room. It s not a problem. I guess” She smiled at us and continue describing her place. “Ah I forgot to tell you guys, There is a tiny rainfall and really nice location and we can go there too” Sofia was a really cool person with a different qualities. When she hates a person, she tell that to the person directly. So as we arranged, we went on that picnic at Sofia’s place.
Photo by Svetlana Kuznetsova on Unsplash
Mona was the most creative girl in the team. She was designing cards with papers and pictures by rolling papers and those were really nice and that needs patient to complete that whole work. Mona was like a soda bottle. She was quickly getting angry and getting cool down as much fast. But she was really sensitive girl in the team. “Clara don’t ask for the last piece of my ice cream. I will not give that to you. Don’t look like that I don’t give that for sure” Mona was running at the park which was only the place university students can hang on with the friends. That place is surrounded with long mango trees and calm and quiet place with benches. Clara was running after Mona to get that last piece of her ice cream and finally she won and took the ice cream. “Ok this is the last time. I won’t give you again” while Mona is telling like that Clara was laughing loudly. “You have to finish that before she came here” Yumi told sarcastically because she has eaten her ice creams before. “Hey we are having an assignment. so we will leave now. There were 60 slides in a one lecture note” Alisa spoke to all to remind that they were getting an assignment tomorrow. Alica is bit of frighten for exams and she was taking things serious most of the times. When any one in the team has a trouble, No doubt, all of them were getting advices from her and she was a good secret keeper.
Alica and Yumi were roommates. When Yumi was talking others can’t stop there laugh. It was the day of the fair well night. 6 of these girls also went there to have a fun. Sarah is the person whom has bring them to the party. The dj was started after photos were taken. “Shall we go and dance there. We have come here to have a fun. Then why are we sitting down and watching what others doing at the dancing floor. If you people can’t then I will go alone and dance” Yumi said to others because she wanted to have some fun.
Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash
Then there were so many things happened in there lives with happy, funny, sorrow, guilty, curious, romantic and hilarious. But these 6 rascals were still together to share those with them. | https://medium.com/@changaheshani1997/welcome-rascals-4cbb752a5f79 | ['Changa Hettiarachchi'] | 2020-12-22 18:41:19.605000+00:00 | ['Friends', 'Sad', 'Love', 'Best Friends Day', 'Friendship'] |
Asustor AS6602T (LockerStor 2) review: This NAS box is a super streamer | Asustor’s NAS-box offerings continue to impress, with the $399, two-bay, AS6602T (LockerStor 2) being the latest to come through the lab. It sports a more business-like look than the recently reviewed AS5202T (Nimbustor 2), and it adds M.2 NVMe slots for caching SSDs to the mix.
It’s the same high-quality, 2.5GbE product as its cousin at its core, but NVMe caching is expensive overkill for the home environment.
Design and specsAt first glance, I was far more impressed with the the business-like styling of the AS6202T than the “gamer-oriented” look of the AS5202T. The front is still black, but with a matte finish, and the all-metal shell is pewter. It reminds me of QNAP back in the day, but with more sculpting and defntely more style. It’s a very impressive-looking box.
What’s inside is equally impressive. There’s 4GB of DDR4-2400 memory and a latest- gen Intel Celeron J4125 CPU running at 2GHz. There’s a second SODIMM slot if you want to expand the memory to 8GB. And to jump the gun on the performance discussion, an investment in additional memory versus NVMe might deliver a better return than for most users.
The two 3.5-inch bays feature push-button release and are combo metal/plastic rather than the pure plastic that most boxes this price use. There are no quick-change rails, but I’ll take the small hassle of screws if it means metal over lastic.
The front of the AS6602T hosts the power button, a single 5Gbps Type-A USB port, and the typical power and drive status/activity LEDs. On the back, are two 2.5GbE (RJ45) ethernet ports that can be aggregated for better performance. There are also two additional 5Gbps Type-A USB ports, an HDMI 2.0a output, a Kensington lock port, and a barrel-shaped power jack.
Asustor Asustor outfits the AS6602T with dual 2.5GbE ports, as well as twin 5Gbps USB ports and a 4K HDMI output for external displays.
As with the recently reviewed Synology DS720+, the AS6602T has two M.2/NVMe slots for SSDs. Unlike the easy-access panels on Synology’s box, the AS6602T requires that you remove the shell and a PCIe adapter card to install them. The Synology approach takes less than a minute, the Asustor 5 to 10 minutes. That’s not really a big deal since installing SSDs is likely to be a one-time operation—if you do it at all—but it’s worth mentioning.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best NAS boxes for media streaming and client backup, where you’ll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product.OS and appsAsustor calls its Linux-based windows-in-a-browser operating system Asustor Data Master, and while it’s not quite as mature as those delivered by QNAP and Synology, it’s darn close—and getting closer.
Media-server options include iTunes, several UPnP/DLNA servers, the popular Plex media server, and the highly regarded (and very expensive) CD-quality Roon Audio Server.
Mentioned in this article Synology DS720+ two-bay NAS box (unpopulated) Read TechHive's reviewSee it In addition to FTP backup, there’s sync with online services, SMB, Rsync, and so on. Asustor also provides EZ Sync clients for major operating systems and smartphones, so you can also keep your mobile data backed up.
The Asus Portal app is required to output video to a TV or computer display attached to the AS6602T’s HDMI port. Once Portal is installed (select it during setup), you can stream, browse the web, and play movies from the box directly to said display. Resolutions up to 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) are supported.
ADM makes link aggregation/trunking of the two 2.5GbE ports super simple and, unlike with many other boxes, no special switch or router is required if you use round-robin mode. That’s unique in my experience. All told, I’d say QNAP (QTS) and Synology (DSM) should be looking over their shoulders. ADM is a worthy rival.
PerformanceSimply with SSDs or hard drives and the included 4GB of memory, the AS6602T is an excellent performer. The NVMe caching definitely improves small file write performance when large data sets or heavy usage is involved, but that’s not something most home users or even power users typically experience.
Below are the sequential throughput numbers from NAS Tester 1.7 (8GB single files), a test that’s proven more reliable recently than others for measuring sequential throughput. As you can see, SSDs (in the main bays) are fastest, followed by a bare 14TB WD Gold hard disk drive (240MBps), then the same HDD with NVMe caching. The extra step of caching will reduce write speeds slightly with the AS6602T’s 2.5GbE connection. This would not be the case with a faster 10GbE connection.
IDG Obviously, the dream scenario is using SSDs in your box, but the far more capacious hard drives aren’t far behind in sustained sequential performance. NVMe caching in this case actually hurts a bit. With a 10GbE connection, this would likely not be the case.
Caching reads of any type is far less effective than caching writes, as the drive must still seek for the data. Only with multiple requests for the same data will read caching have a positive effect. CrystalDiskMark 7 uses random reads, so those results show little to no improvement with NVMe caching over bare drive reads.
All writes are cached, on the other hand, so those will show the effectiveness of the cache. Remember that NAS boxes already use part of their onboard memory for caching, likely a gigabyte or two on a box such as the AS6602T, with 4GB on board. That will effect the results with smaller data sets.
Because of that, I ran CDM 7 with the SSDs, bare HDD, and the HDD with NVMe caching 1GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB data sets. DRAM caching is no doubt helping the 1GB through 8GB tests somewhat, but the NMVe caching does seem to help after that quite a bit. There’s a major drop-off in cache performance somewhere between the 32GB and 64GB marks.
IDG The NVMe caching definitely helps with random writes, but starts losing effectiveness somewhere after 32GB or sustained stress.
That’s good, but given that the NVMe SSDs I used are capable of 2TBps transfer rates, I was expecting more. How Asustor is implementing the caching no doubt has a great effect, but I was not privy to their methods.
For clarity’s sake, NVMe caching for hard drives, or even SATA SSDs is a well-known storage strategy than can increase performance greatly with high-end equipment or very heavy workload. But it’s a very expensive option for smaller NAS under typical end-user or small-office loads. To be fair, Asustor markets this box to power users and the SMB (small to medium-sized busness) market.
Note: testing was performed on Windows 10 64-bit running on a Core i7-5820K/Asus X99 Deluxe system with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (NVidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, an Asmedia ASM2142 USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbs) card, and a Gigabyte GC-Alpine Thunderbolt 3 card. A QNAP QNA-T310G1S Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE adapter was connected to one of the 10GbE SFP+ ports on a Zyxel XGS1210-12 10GbE/2.5GbE/gigabit switch.
It’s a great box, but will you benefit?The AS6602T is a great NAS box A bit old-school in design, but by that I mean super-solid metal construction and quality where it counts. Throw in the dual 2.5GbE, plus the healthy app environment and HDMI output and you have a winner. Indeed, all things being equal, I’d keep this in the rack over the AS5202T.
But things are not equal for the end-user. The AS6602T costs $100 more, and once you add NVMe SSDs, you’re talking a delta of at least $225. Given the minimal gain in performance, the cheaper AS5202T is a far, far better deal. Indeed, even power and workgroup users might be better off with a cheaper box with more memory rather than NVMe—depending on workload of course.
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/@Shanell85742017/asustor-as6602t-lockerstor-2-review-this-nas-box-is-a-super-streamer-82938b4eea24 | [] | 2020-09-25 20:25:54.244000+00:00 | ['Cutting', 'Security Cameras', 'Streaming', 'Home Theater'] |
สร้าง Single Page Application ด้วย Vue.js และ Firebase authentication | Authorization check and log out from the app
หลังที่เราทำการ sign-in เราได้ทำการ reload หน้า ซึ่งผลจากการ reload คือทำให้เกิดการ reset Vuex state เป็นค่า initial value ซึ่งเราต้องทำการจัดการปัญหานี้ ด้วยการใช้งาน Firebase ในการแก้ปัญหา โดยที่ทาง Firebase ได้มี method onAuthStateChanged ซึ่งจะช่วยให้เราตรวจสอบว่า user คนนี้ได้ทำการ sign-out ไปแล้วหรือยัง
ทำการเปิด src/main.js และเพิ่ม created() lifecycle hook ของ Vue instance โดยทำการเรียก dispatch autoSignIn โดยส่ง firebaseUser เป็น argument ดังนี้
main.js
/* eslint-disable no-new */
new Vue({
el: '#app',
router,
store,
render: h => h(App),
created () {
firebase.auth().onAuthStateChanged((firebaseUser) => {
if (firebaseUser) {
store.dispatch('autoSignIn', firebaseUser)
}
})
}
})
จากนั้นทำการเพิ่ม autoSignIn action โดยทำการ set ค่า firebaseUser ดังนี้
action.js
autoSignIn ({commit}, payload) {
commit('setUser', payload)
}
ถึงตอนนี้เราก็มี function สำหรับ sign-up และ sign-in และหลังจาก sign-up และ sign-in เรียบร้อยแล้ว เราได้ทำการ redirect user ไปที่หน้า BNK48 ทีนี้เราจะทำ function สำหรับ sign-out และหลังจาก user กด sign-out เราก็จะทำการ redirect user ไปที่หน้า sign-in
อ๋อ ลืมไปเลยครับ เรายังไม่ได้สร้างปุ่มสำหรับ sign-up และ sign-in เลย งั้นมาสร้างพร้อมปุ่ม sign-out เลยละกัน ทำการเปิด src/App.vue
App.vue
ทำการเพิ่ม isAuthenticated property และ toolbarItems property ใน computed โดย isAuthenticated property จะทำการตรวจสอบว่า user ได้ทำการ sign-in แล้วหรือยัง และ toolbarItems property จะเป็น list ของปุ่ม sign-up และ sign-in
isAuthenticated() {
return (
this.$store.getters.getUser !== null &&
this.$store.getters.getUser !== undefined
);
},
toolbarItems() {
return this.isAuthenticated ? [] : [
{
icon: "face",
title: "Sign Up",
link: "/singup"
}, {
icon: "lock_open",
title: "Sign In",
link: "/singin"
}
];
}
และทำการเพิ่ม userSignOut method
methods: {
userSignOut() {
this.$store.dispatch("userSignOut");
}
}
พร้อมทำการเพิ่ม userSignOutใน action โดยทำการ set user state เป็นค่า null พร้อมทำการ redirect ไปที่หน้า login ทำการเปิด src/store/actions.js และเพิ่ม
userSignOut ({commit}) {
firebase.auth().signOut()
commit('setUser', null)
router.push('/signin')
}
จากนั้นทำการเพิ่มปุ่ม sign out โดยเปิด App.vue ทำการแทนที่
...
<v-btn icon @click.stop="rightDrawer = !rightDrawer">
<v-icon>menu</v-icon>
</v-btn>
<v-navigation-drawer
temporary
:right="right"
v-model="rightDrawer"
fixed
>
<v-list>
<v-list-tile @click.native="right = !right">
<v-list-tile-action>
<v-icon>compare_arrows</v-icon>
</v-list-tile-action>
<v-list-tile-title>Switch drawer (click me)</v-list-tile-title>
</v-list-tile>
</v-list>
</v-navigation-drawer>
...
ด้วย | https://medium.com/firebasethailand/%E0%B8%AA%E0%B8%A3%E0%B9%89%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%87-single-page-application-%E0%B8%94%E0%B9%89%E0%B8%A7%E0%B8%A2-vue-js-%E0%B9%81%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B0-firebase-authentication-1c8219aa77bd | ['Wattanachai Prakobdee'] | 2017-12-14 02:12:05.730000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Vuex', 'Bnk48', 'Vue', 'Firebase'] |
Thanking John Lewis | Yesterday, I met Congressman John Lewis. I shook his hand, spoke with him, and posed for a few pictures. I listened as he told a group of students about his life growing up in rural Alabama, about his father who was a sharecropper, about the way he always questioned segregation, though his mother warned him to stay out of trouble and stop asking questions.
We’re all fortunate that he never stopped asking questions. That the innate sense of injustice he felt as a boy drove him to act as a young man. We still have a long way to go in this country, but people who look like me wouldn’t be as far along as we are without people like John Lewis. People willing to risk their lives for a movement from which they might never benefit.
My origin story — how I got involved in political organizing and campaigns — pales in comparison to his. Rep. Lewis held the entire room in thrall as he told us that meeting Rosa Parks at 17 and Martin Luther King, Jr. at 18 is what turned him into an activist.
He talked about marching in Selma and barely making it out alive.
He talked about the importance of voting, how it was life and death in those days.
It’s still life and death, but it’s not as visceral and immediate, so folks seem to have forgotten. Rep. Lewis urged everyone to vote, to do their small part to save our democracy. It’s precious, that vote. A flame we have to hold in cupped hands as the winds lash around us. Because that flame can go out.
As I listened to this powerhouse of the Civil Rights Movement, I thought about how annoyed I am whenever someone tells me they don’t plan to vote, or they ran out of time, or they aren’t even registered and don’t care. It infuriates me, but I can’t even imagine how frustrating it must be for someone like John Lewis. I never rode into the segregated south to make sure people had the rights I take for granted every day. I have never been beaten on my way to the polls. As flawed as race relations in America still are to this day, I have never feared for my life when exercising my right to vote. That is a gift. And people like John Lewis are the ones who bestowed it upon every person of color in this country. But gifts can be taken away.
One woman asked what made Rep. Lewis decide to run for office. His eloquent response was immediate, and it brought tears to my eyes. Recounting it here would not do it justice, but as my activism is a mere echo of the fire of John Lewis’s activism, so too can my words be a distant echo of the ones he spoke not even 24 hours ago.
He said that he watched as John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And then he lost his friend, Martin Luther King, Jr. He was with Robert Kennedy when he heard the news. They were friends too, and they mourned together. And then, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated as well. He said that of the 10 speakers at the March on Washington, where MLK gave his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, he was the youngest, and he is the only one still alive today. That loss of life, the threat to the movement, is what compelled him to run, to serve, to keep pushing for what was right. He urged us to heal the division in this country, and quoted his friend:
‘ We must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools’.
And, oh, what fools we’ve been. Not bothering to vote. Watching as a group of motivated members of one political party make all the rules for the rest of us. Allowing hyper partisan politics to divide us into even smaller, less effective groups.
I’ve always voted, but I haven’t always been involved. That laziness, that distinctly American acquiescence, stopped on November 9th, 2016. John Lewis’s activism started in his youth, when he questioned segregation, and those burning questions led him to action. I had questions too as a very young woman, but there was no spark, no inferno, until I feared the prospect of losing the rights Rep. Lewis’s generation fought so hard to secure.
History is a wheel. The same things happen again and again, and only the players are different. We stumble into the same mistakes because we don’t listen to those who came before us, those who saw the impending darkness of tyranny or lived the reality of brutal racism firsthand. I’ve tried to listen well in the last two years, but it’s so hard to know, in the moment, if you are helping the cause or hurting it. And it’s a cushy kind of activism when you never have to worry about losing your life. Does that make it less worthwhile? Or is that another thing for which to thank activists like John Lewis? Even in the semi-enlightened age of 2018, not everyone my color can protest without swift, sometimes violent repercussions. But many of us can. And that is a gift too.
Before he left for the airport, I thanked John Lewis for everything. He smiled and thanked me. I’m sure he hears so much of what I said from the thousands of people he meets every year. But I meant every unoriginal word. So much of what I have, so much of what I take for granted, was only available to me because of the sacrifices he and many others made. The ones who risked their lives and safety. The ones who did not make it to the promised land.
I wish I could have found a way to say all of this to him, and to promise that there are so many of us trying hard to continue the work that he started at 18. But words failed, and I could only say thank you. | https://tessmartin.medium.com/thanking-john-lewis-80ec65271e0 | ['Tess Martin'] | 2018-10-14 13:27:20.115000+00:00 | ['Voting Rights', 'Activism', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Voting', 'Civil Rights'] |
Creating a Mind Map for a More User-Friendly Experience | The line between useful and… useless (or pushy or simply annoying) is thinner than you think.
That’s why creating a mind map that aligns your site’s content structure with the user intent is… critical.
“Whether you’re a product owner or designer, you don’t want your website to be a maze with nothing but frustrating blind alleys.” (source: altexsoft.com)
And there’s no guessing work or discouragingly complex process in identifying the current user flow on each web page on your website:
Just take a look at the behavior flow report in your Google Analytics. No rocket science here…
Take it from there and:
identify the roadblocks
restructure content on each page so that it matches user intent and is fluid and easy to read
But let us give you a hand with that. With mind mapping your current customer journey and planning its improved version:
In this respect, in today’s post we’ll:
give you the “anatomy” of a user-friendly website: what elements make a website, well, user-friendly?
define mind mapping with respect to designing the user experience on a website
teach you how to create a mind map: an easy step-by-step guide
show you how to use a mind map to make UX improvements on your website
1. The Anatomy of a User-Friendly Website: 4 Essential Features
“A vague objective leads to poor results.”
There’s no point in creating a mind map that would hopefully make your website more user-friendly if… you’re not quite sure what key elements make a website user-friendly.
So, here’s the list of must-haves for any website aspiring to deliver a great user experience:
1.1. High Speed
It’s no news to anyone: the page loading time has a huge impact on the user experience.
Unnecessary interactive elements, that don’t match users’ needs and don’t play any role in the conversion process either, will only get you a clunky and… well… slow website.
1.2. Useful Features
And “intuitive” I must add.
Again, we go back to the “elements justified by the user’s needs” principle:
Is that slider useful and relevant for the user behavior on your website? It it too bulky, loaded with endless options that just … discourage the visitor?
You might want to re-evaluate all the features on your website: are they relevant and intuitive enough?
1.3. A Well-Structured Information Architecture
Information that’s:
easy to access
easy to interpret
… is key for a wannabe user-friendly website.
1.4. Content that Matches User Intent
If users are looking for online cooking classes, let’s say — and that’s precisely what you promise to deliver them — and you’re only trying to sell them kitchen gadgets on your website, the only result that you’ll get is them bouncing off in seconds.
2. What Is Mind Mapping with Respect to Designing the User Experience?
An overly simplified definition would be:
A way to brainstorm and present the generated information in a visual way.
Now, since I’ve promised you a definition “with respect to” creating the user experience, here’s a more… context-specific definition:
Mind mapping is a vesatile technique where you put together a visual hierarchy of your site’s present or future content. It lists out the key pages on your website (homepage, service pages, blog page, etc.), the various relations between different web pages, the links and CTAs on each page…
In short: mind mapping reveals how data is structured on your website.
Of course, you’ll then consider creating a mind map of the target version of your current website. The more user-friendly one…
3. Main Benefits of Using Mind Mapping: From Great Ideas to… Actionable Steps
Finding new ideas is exciting.
But jumping on every new great idea that someone in your team has, without first checking whether it aligns with the user intent, is just like… making shapes out of soap foam.
Not only that they’re not future-proofed, but that clutter of ideas might not work together either.
By using one of the best mapping tools available online for structuring those ideas as they… pop out, you turn them into actionable steps in your strategy for improving the UX on your website.
And the clear benefits to mind mapping are:
you define your ideas’ roles : what role do they play in your UX strategy (if you can’t assign them a role, they’re just “Wow” ideas with no solid justification)
: what role do they play in your UX strategy (if you can’t assign them a role, they’re just “Wow” ideas with no solid justification) you assess their value : how does implementing this new idea bubble up to the user experience?
: how does implementing this new idea bubble up to the user experience? you identify the various relations between them: you might want to avoid “island-ideas”, with no connections to other ideas listed out in your mind map
4. Creating a Mind Map: 5 Simple Steps
Now that you know what a mind map is and why on earth you’d bother making one, let’s see how you can actually put one together:
4.1. Create a Mind-Map Template
Just so you can have a basic idea of the current information architecture on your website.
List out how data’s being structured on your website now and how you plan to structure it for its more user-friendly future version…
4.2. Map Out Your Ideal User Flow
How would you like your website visitors to engage with your content? What actions would you like them to perform?
Once you’ve outlined the key pages on your website (homepage, services, features), start planning out the user flow.
4.3. Compare it to the Current Behavior Flow Available on Your Google Analytics
Before you can properly map out the user flow, you need to know what’s the standard customer journey on your website now.
For that, just delve into your Google Analytics data and look for the user behavior report. It’ll show you all you need to know about:
how users are engaging with your website’s content
what paths they usually take when navigating through your current information architecture
4.4. Identify the Roadblocks
The user behavior data might reveal to you some unwanted realities regarding the user experience on your website:
poorly structured content
a bulky and tiresome collection of interactive elements
irrelevant features (embedded videos, interactive elements, social sharing functionalities)
too many tools that don’t respond to users’ needs
4.5. Make the Appropriate UX Decisions to Influence the User Behavior
Now that you’ve identified the main roadblocks in delivering the best user experience, it’s time to… remove them, one by one:
turn chaos into a logical content hierarchy
trim irrelevant page elements, with zero value in the conversion process
adapt web pages’ content structure to the needs of specific audience segments (make sure to include relevant information for those customer personas, redesign your CTAs if needed…)
5. How to Use a Mind Map to Make Powerful UX Improvements
Creating a mind map is but the first step:
Turning it into powerful UX decisions should be your main objective.
So, the answer to the question “Are mind maps effective/useful?” is:
They are if and only if you make them useful and… usable.
You can turn your mind map into:
an effective sitemap
a customer journey map
But let us take a real-life scenario and point out specific UX decisions that you could make with your mind map at hand.
It’s an example that I’ve run into reading Mindmaster team’s great blog post: A Simple Way to Design UX, UI and CX Using Mind Maps:
Say you’re targeting 3 different customer personas on your website. You then need to plan 3 different user flows.
You start by grouping the web pages on your site into 3 categories, each of them corresponding to one audience segment.
Then, you start doing some user behavior mapping: how do you want each customer persona to navigate to the corresponding web page so that he/she clicks the CTA placed there?
Now, it’s time to make some critical UX decisions:
what relations to set up between various pages on your website? You might have a user on a service page and you need him/her to visit your “get a quote” page, as well
what’s the best CTA design for each one of your 3 types of pages?
what key information should you include on a page, depending on the customer persona accessing it?
See? Not only that creating a mind map helps you put together an effective information architecture, but it’s also a great technique for generating content ideas that match the user intent.
6. Final Word
In the end, it all comes down to goal setting.
Creating a mind map is a great way to:
understand your website goals: what type of conversion actions do you want users to perform?
achieve those website goals by delivering a user-friendly experience: content that’s useful, accessible, easy to read and to interpret
The END!
Do you usually create mind maps when building new websites, to ensure they’ll deliver the best user experience?
Or for existing ones, to improve their UX?
Do you consider them critical or optional in designing the user experience? | https://medium.com/@OPTASY.com/how-creating-a-mind-map-helps-you-make-your-website-more-user-friendly-91e57f5d673f | [] | 2020-02-20 17:47:45.685000+00:00 | ['User Experience Design', 'Mind Mapping', 'Information Architecture', 'User Experience'] |
Reluctant fantasy | “I can’t do this anymore,” she said to herself in a desperate whimper. “There is no point in doing anything anymore. The whole thing is one big farce.”
She wiped her tears, pulled her sweater down, shook her head as she inhaled the deepest breath she would take all day and opened the door. She stepped inside to the sounds of loud children, clanking dishes, her grandmother coughing in the distance, the television blaring the evening news that no one was watching. In that instant she forgot her declaration and she took on the challenge of taking care of her family.
This was a daily ritual. Admitting and declaring “I can’t do this anymore” was therapeutic, she thought. It allowed her to “get it off my chest”, never believing she would follow that thought with action. So she allowed herself this one indulgence of selfish thought. At night, between taking care of everyone and closing her eyes in hopes to initiate deep slumber, she would briefly drift off into a millisecond of an action plan. It was a subconscious sliver of a thought nestled between her conscious and subconscious mind. It did not ever lead to anything more than imagining herself walking barefoot on freshly cut grass in some unknown and far away prairie. Sometimes it was a flash of laying naked on a secluded beach allowing herself to be covered in the rich warmth of the sun. Or on particularly tiring days, on days when her entire family, and even her wife annoyed her, she imagined laying in bed with a young woman she met at a coffee house. She spoke to her briefly one day- and only once- on a spontaneous stop for coffee, but she found herself thinking about that young woman often. Her attraction to her was new as she had never been attracted to anyone other than her wife and it made her a bit uncomfortable. But when she was falling asleep, the young lady’s face would appear and her stomach would feel funny. As the days went on, she imagined the woman more often and always without intention. The thoughts went from laying in bed next to her — and talking about coffee, books, art, music, ideas and philosophy- to sexual fantasies. And it was at this point that she decided to go back to the coffee house to see this woman again.
When she went back she tried her best to not make eye contact with the woman. There was a young man working the counter and she found herself talking nervously to him and avoid the woman at all costs. She somehow feared eye contact might reveal the sexual fantasies she had experienced in the last few weeks. Masturbating as she imagined having sex with this woman on a blanket in the open beach had been the latest mental episodes that helped her escape her “I can’t do this anymore” life. She was not ashamed of having those escapes but she was afraid to give anything away to the star of those fantasies. The idea of having sex -even in a fantasy- with anyone other than her wife of more than 20 years was a new experience. She was uncertain if she was guilty of being unfaithful or if this was normal. Adding to her confusion was the fact that this woman was not her “type”. And yet she thought only of her at night. The woman did not cross her mind at all during the day nor did she have any interest in actually speaking to her much. She liked the idea of the fantasy. “Why ruin the fantasy by getting to know her?”
She visited the coffee house once or twice a month just to get a refreshed view of the woman and to be able to imagine her without any trouble. But she never talked to her beyond pleasantries and ordering coffee.
The fantasies became more elaborate and with greater detail. The shame and guilt no longer bothered her. The “I can’t do this anymore” ritual became less brutal as she knew she would have a personal escape from it. | https://medium.com/@mtlanda/reluctant-fantasy-efc44d1a84cf | ['Maite Landa'] | 2020-12-18 20:13:19.404000+00:00 | ['Marriage', 'Escape', 'Fantasy Lover', 'Coffee'] |
Chaya Greenspan on the Importance of Accessing Adaptive Play | Playing with other children is an important developmental process that kids go through strengthening their social skills, physical coordination, cognitive development, and emotional intelligence. This can present a huge problem for children with special needs who may be unable to participate in certain activities with their peers due to their physical disabilities, neurological disorders, or other impairments.
In some cases, they are shunned by other kids or even adults, which is a bitter pill to swallow for a kid that just wants to play and feel normal for a time. In other cases, they exclude themselves from taking part due to their own insecurity or limitations. It doesn’t help matters that many of the activities and games that most of us take for granted are not well suited to those with special needs. Even seemingly basic children’s toys can require the kind of fine motor skills to manipulate that many special needs kids don’t possess.
That’s where adaptive play comes in, which is a term that describes any toys or activities which are well suited for use by kids with various disabilities or disorders. Sometimes modifying or adapting a toy is necessary to optimize a child’s success in play. Sometimes choosing the right fit of toy and ability lends to success. Start by looking at what a child is naturally already doing and liking. Experiment together to find patterns, textures, sounds, and smells the child enjoys.
These include toys with adaptive switches that make them simple to use as well as sensory toys like fidget spinners. Chaya Greenspan, a pediatric occupational therapist and the founder and CEO of Work n’ Play Inc., which works with children and their families to help them best tackle the specific challenges they face, says that virtually any game or activity can be adapted so as to be more inclusive of those with special needs.
Bigger is Better
For many such kids, bigger things are often better, allowing them to be seen and handled more easily, which is why ultra-sized crayons and paper are perfect for drawing, while the larger Lego Duplo blocks beat out the much smaller standard Lego blocks for building impressive monuments. Another favorite at Work n’ Play Inc. is playdough, which can be a great tool for developing children’s tactile awareness, building their hand strength and coordination, and relieving stress according to Chaya Greenspan. She cautions that some children may be averse to the feel or smell of playdough, however.
Video Games- the original adaptive Play
Video games are often a favorite pastime of kids with disabilities, potentially allowing them to compete on an even playing field with able-bodied kids, though many are stymied by the complicated controllers. Gaming companies are now reaching out to that market directly with their own adaptive play devices, such as Microsoft’s Adaptive Controller for the Xbox One, which features two large pressure-sensitive pads rather than the dozens of tiny buttons that can be a nightmare to manage for those with special needs. Video games can also be a great way for kids to socialize and learn how to work together or compete against each other, though Chaya Greenspan warns that video games can be extremely addictive for all special needs kids, including those with executive function disorders (ADHD) or those on the autism spectrum.
Modifying Objects for Accessibility
Repurposing readily and affordable materials to make an interesting toy accessible is your best bet for cost and variety. Toys designed with special needs in mind can be quite pricey for just one and may not even attract the interest of the child. Colored tape for visual contrast, foam blocks for easing motor demands, screw drivers to adjust sounds from inside the toy, strings to attach the toy to a weighted crate for ideal positioning are just a few ways to customize a toy. The dollar store has many items you can buy to make a toy of the month with many sensory opportunities. Simple recycled containers can be used till they are destroyed from rough play to hide surprises and encourage motor exploration.
In conclusion, Chaya Greenspan believes the increase in accessibility that toys and games have seen over the past decade is fantastic for helping children with disabilities or disorders participate in the joy and rite of childhood play. However, she insists that the best are still the spontaneous family projects that include the ingenuity of all its members that produce unique toys and games using things you already love. | https://medium.com/chaya-greenspan/the-importance-of-accessing-adaptive-play-aba22f96ed46 | ['Chaya Greenspan'] | 2019-09-09 15:01:50.555000+00:00 | ['Disability', 'Play', 'Occupational Therapy', 'Children', 'New Jersey'] |
How to Become a Great Software Engineer | Value Your Relationships With Others
No matter how hard you work, your relationships are extremely important.
No amount of money can buy the time you spend with your family or loved ones.
Sacrificing that time and instead simply trying to focus your whole life on software engineering will make you less happy, which can also make you feel less connected to others and more miserable. As a result, you are more likely to get fewer things done.
As the founder of YC Combinator Sam Altman puts this:
“Don’t neglect your family and friends for the sake of productivity — that’s a very stupid tradeoff (and very likely a net productivity loss, because you’ll be less happy).”
In the end, we are human beings, not human doings.
We need time to recharge and connect with our loved ones.
Professional relationships
Whether or not you are the only engineer working on a project, you must not let your ego cause you to think only of yourself.
For engineers, ego is the worst enemy.
Some engineers tend to think win/lose, in which others have to lose for someone to win. You think you are going to get promoted or get a raise if your colleagues look bad in front of your manager.
As a result, you will orient your actions toward showing off as much as you can, taking credit without merit, or belittling your colleagues, all to represent yourself as superior.
This will not only give you a superficial type of contentment (as you are continuously trying to belittle your colleagues), it’ll also probably damage your team productivity as a whole, as you and your colleagues will not be willing to work together at all.
If you want to be an effective engineer, you need to set yourself apart from what the majority of people are doing.
In every situation, you should try to reach the best alternative for the whole team.
You should think about mutually beneficial solutions that will ultimately lead to a better long-term resolution, rather than if only one person in the situation gets their way.
Cultivate the habit of asking yourself questions like these: “What’s in it for them that I can also benefit from?” “How can we both get some portions of what we want without damaging our relationship?”
You may sometimes have misunderstandings and short tempers with your colleagues, but this does not mean that the harmony and the relationships you have will be destroyed.
Your ability to deal with people is one of the key areas in your life.
Avoid arguments as much as you can and focus on long-term benefits.
When you begin with the end in mind, you do not want to be alone, even if you reach your biggest goals. Living on a big island with no one nearby is probably an adventure you do not want to experience.
There is no doubt that large projects are developed by a lot of people that work as a team.
Bill Gates started Microsoft with Allen, who even came up with the name Microsoft.
Elon Musk created his first IT company, Zip2, with his brother Kimbal, and he then sold the company to AltaVista for $307 million in cash and $34 million in securities. Instagram was initially started by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.
Amazon has more than 341,000 employees. Microsoft has more than 120,000 employees.
Google, after tons of research on building the perfect team, has found that some of the most productive teams were the ones with an environment that cultivated synergy and embraced psychological safety.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson describes psychological safety as “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.”
Everyone has the freedom to contribute, collaborate, and get involved in everything they want. Whenever you find yourself part of an argument with a colleague, try to understand their core interest. Address them so that they become reciprocally beneficial and productive.
In this way, your team can be a lot more productive by taking advantage of the strengths of every member. Teamwork is greater than the sum of its parts.
If you want to be an effective programmer, try to help your team become more synergetic. That can be done by valuing every teammate’s freedom and helping them feel very comfortable expressing different points of view without the fear of embarrassment. Allow everyone to contribute to and collaborate on everything they find interesting and worth contributing and paying attention to.
Be very kind.
Say thank you and please a lot.
Praise other people’s efforts.
Apologize as soon as possible. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-become-a-great-software-engineer-dbb0373ec771 | ['Fatos Morina'] | 2020-10-20 16:08:42.151000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming'] |
The Hopeful Decline of Partisanship in Congress | Source: Pixaby
2020 has been a maliciously eventful year — this being the one thing we as the American public can agree on. Filled with COVID difficulties, racial injustices, riots, and the controversial 2020 election it assimilates a plot to a bad horror movie. A common denominator for many of these issues is the political partisan pandemic making waves in our country.
In March of 2020, COVID became a real, serious, and frightening problem in the United States. Schools, restaurants, and businesses closed — a circumstance that was dystopian and strange. The ones that were fortunate enough to stay open required a new phenomenon to be worn — masks. A month later, in April, Reuters published an article describing a partisan divide in Congress. Democrats had proposed a COVID rescue package — one that would cost nearly $2 trillion. In response to this proposal, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — the Senate majority leader — stated that he would “be in favor” of those states going bankrupt rather than provide them with the rescue package. “I hope he comes to his senses,” is minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) response.
How is the United States expected to resolve COVID issues when our elected government officials can’t put their own beliefs aside to help their people and help one another? Simple answer — it cannot be done. In order for our elected officials and our society to grow as people and aid each other, we must work to suppress our political beliefs and partisanship to aid our decision-making and success as a nation.
Luckily as Americans, Congress and other branches of government have caught onto this. Their foolish arrogance and pride — although great — does not cloud their judgment to the point where they cannot see a sliver of reason. As Amy Klobuchar said, “When it’s for the good of the state, you put your partisan differences aside.”
Before the childish debacle that took place in April, there was an agreement to pass the CARES — Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Stability — act signed in at the end of March. According to NPR’s article on the topic, the act brought forth economic aid to individuals in need, public health, education, state and local governments, and corporations — both big and small. For this bill, Mitch McConnell “vowed to put partisanship aside”. McConnell was the one to officially sponsor this, as shown by Congress.gov.
CARES is a rarity. It is one of the few times an agreement for the greater good of the American people is not placed on the back burner in lieu of senators, congressmen — and women — , as well as other politicians proving their superiority — moral or otherwise. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), this act has aided 84% of Americans who responded to the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) provided by the BLS. Showing how the American people benefit when partisanship and hostility are laid to rest.
Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) collaboratively wrote for the Washington Post this month. Their work included the fact that economists believe the COVID relief packages passed throughout this year have benefited our country greatly by keeping “ millions out of poverty” while also preventing “small businesses across the country from closing permanently.” Both the senators claim that although there is a “broad consensus that more relief is desperately needed”, Congress has only managed “one stalemate after another.” Admirably, Warner and Collins chose to work together to help their respective states and this great country. Their acts are what all politicians should strive to achieve. Still, members of each party would rather “smear the other side than get things done,” showing that not everyone is willing to bury the hatchet.
A new COVID relief deal has been discussed — one that many hope will do more for Americans than the last one. McConnell and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), have been at each other’s throats. They have consistently and repeatedly been piling the responsibility — or lack thereof — on one another. However, Pelosi recently went to the press with an announcement that she has hope that “Democrats and Republicans are moving towards compromise” — this quote from NPR. McConnell also “acknowledged the two sides were moving toward each other” and saying to the Senate, “We know where we agree. We can do this.”
The expectations are set and clear. With the major parts of government inching towards bipartisanship and letting go of their strong and dense partisan views, benefits to all sides are expected. They are moving towards a better future, but it is not solely up to them. It is also up to us — the American people. It would be in the best interest of the country — which strangely not everyone prioritizes — that we look towards each other for help, guidance, and wisdom. Our political beliefs are not who we are as people. Our political beliefs do not control who we can befriend and who we can cherish.
For the future to be brighter and harmonious we must all understand the importance of one another. We must acknowledge that the freedom to possess differing opinions is the beauty and purpose of America. If the power-hungry and bendable politicians can understand this, so can we. America’s future depends on it. Don’t turn a blind eye when cooperation is in sight. | https://medium.com/@oneil-tay11/the-hopeful-decline-of-partisanship-in-congress-3c7446c09919 | ['Taylor O Neil'] | 2020-12-27 22:42:17.294000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Students'] |
Watch Your Tone when Writing and Speaking | Watch Your Tone when Writing and Speaking
Choose the right tone for the right impact
geralt Pixabay
Have you ever been reading an email and felt as if you had been slapped upside the head?
Have you ever found yourself rushing headlong to find out what happens in a mystery story?
Has anyone ever accused you of being abrupt or rude without you realizing you were coming across like that?
You think you are reading with your eyes, but as you read, you also are hearing the words in your head — just as if the writer is speaking to you.
That’s the tone.
Tone is what people hear when you speak and when they read what you have written.
Think about how many ways you can change the meaning of the word no just by changing the tone. (This should be easy of you have ever raised a teenager.)
Tone creates an emotional response on the part of a reader or listener. It determines how positively — or negatively —they respond.
What is the tone of each sentence? How do you feel reading them? How would you feel if someone spoke them aloud?
If you had followed up on time, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.
I need this tomorrow.
Thanks for sending this, but I actually need something different. Can we talk?
Please respond by the end of day, or we will assume that you are not interested in pursuing this.
I just got your voicemail, and I can make time on my calendar tomorrow to meet and discuss your project.
What about this sentence?
I’m so sorry you were inconvenienced.
Try hearing it in a sarcastic voice. Your emotional response changes — and not in a good way.
The good news: You can control tone when you write and speak.
Pronouns Affect Tone
Pronouns are little words that can pack a big wallop when it comes to tone. They communicate your point of view.
First Person Singular
I, Me, My, Mine: Communicate individual responsibility. The point of view is mine.
I will get this to you tomorrow.
I understand what you are looking for.
Why don’t you let me look it over.
I help my clients overcome obstacles to long-term business growth.
First Person Plural
We, Us, Our, Ours: Communicate authority, assertiveness, and formality. Point of view is that of a group, business, or entity.
We will get this to you tomorrow.
We understand what you are looking for.
Why don’t you let us look it over.
We help our clients overcome obstacles to long-term business growth.
Second Person Singular and Plural
You, Your, Yours. The point of view is that of the reader or listener. It moves you up close to the reader or listener.
Second person pronouns are used as direct address and to give advice, directions, or instructions. Most Medium articles use second person. The emotional response depends on context.
Generally, second person pronouns are not recommended when delivering bad news. It’s better to use passive voice and avoid the pronoun.
Can you hear the difference in these pairs sentences?
You do not quality for a refund under the terms of the contract, vs. A refund cannot be made under the terms of the contract.
You missed the deadline to enroll. vs. The deadline to enroll was missed.
Second person pronouns also can be used to establish accountability. Here are some examples:
If you approve this by Friday, we can move ahead with the next phase of the project.
I sent the draft to you yesterday. As soon as you get back to me, I’ll let the client know where we stand.
Use of second person in fiction is rare. When it is used, it sucks the reader into the narrative because they become the protagonist.
Third Person Pronouns
He, Him, His, She, Her, Hers, It, Its, They, Their, Them. Third person point of view is often used in fiction writing. The point of view is that of the narrator. Generally, it carries a neutral tone in business communication.
Be Positive
AbsolutVision @pixabay
You are either a naturally positive or negative speaker and writer. Most people prefer positive wording since it has a better tone, is easier to understand, and creates more impact.
If you don’t get back to me by end of day today, we will miss our deadline.
If you get back to me by end of day today, we can hit our deadline.
Avoid saying what something isn’t; instead, use what something is.
The bill cannot come before the committee until mid-December.
The bill will come before the committee in mid-December.
See the difference?
State things not as problems, but as solutions.
I can’t discuss the pricing since my partner is out of town until Monday.
I can discuss the pricing on Monday when my partner returns.
Use positive words and avoid negative ones like refuse, claim, failure, shouldn’t, difficult, doubt, fault, sadly, unfortunately, and others that have a negative effect on people.
Never make the reader or listener wrong.
You made a mistake in the report.
There’s a mistake in the report.
Start paying attention to your natural way of communicating, and if you find yourself using negative terms, switch to something more positive.
Sentence Length
prettysleepy1 @pixabay
When a fiction writer wants to speed up the action, they use short sentences. Let’s see how this works.
Ripley stopped. What was that?
She held her breath, listening.
Nothing.
She soundlessly crept down the dark corridor.
There! Again.
She froze,
A shuffling noise. Like something being dragged.
Or someone.
The pace is breathless, and the reader is racing along with the writer.
When the writer wants to slow things down, the sentences get longer.
Ripley made it back to the empty control room, set the entry pad to retinal scan, and sank into the command chair.
The reader lets out a long breath and relaxes with the protagonist.
There’s a lesson here for all writers and speakers.
Use short sentences and active voice to add impact to what you are writing or speaking. You can turn down the tone with longer sentences and/or passive voice.
Beware short sentences: They can make your tone come across as abrupt or rude.
See attached. vs. I have attached the document you asked for. I’m busy. I’ll call you later. vs. I’m tied up right now, and I’ll all you later. I need your report three days early this week. vs. Can you send your report three days early this week since I’m going on vacation and need extra time to get it ready before I leave?
Your Mood
Your mood, emotional state of mind, and attitude all affect your tone when you write and speak. If you have an argument with your partner, kid, or Uber driver, your tone will come across as angry or argumentative.
The best advice: Write, but don’t send. If you’re speaking, immediately apologize and explain it was unintentional.
Control Your Tone
Have you ever gotten the advice, “Write the way you speak”?
It’s bad advice.
It means use an informal, conversational tone. Most people prefer this when reading or listening. However, there may be times when a more formal tone or style is needed. In this case, use longer sentences and a more complex sentence structure. Passive voice also creates a more formal tone.
You have greater impact and produce better results when you use a tone that makes the reader and listener pay attention, understand, and enjoy what you are communicating.
Everything you write and speak connects you to another person. Eliminate any obstacles and ensure that the connection is clear and understood. | https://medium.com/on-being-a-writer/watch-your-tone-when-writing-and-speaking-576d31fc98f2 | ['Patricia Haddock'] | 2020-10-25 13:21:17.046000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Writing', 'Professional Development'] |
From Monolith to Microservices | How we got started with microservices
We started with just a few microservices, as we read that knowing when to create a new microservice is as much of an art as it is a science. With this in mind, we erred on the side of caution and only split out the obvious pieces first. We decided to keep our user, authentication, model metadata, alerts, and tenant management logic in a service and split out the following pieces into separate microservices:
inference ingestion
inference & metric retrieval
Inference ingestion was an obvious candidate for a new service because it could be easily decoupled from the rest of the platform, and it was something that we knew would have to scale horizontally to meet customer data load. We designed inference ingestion as a lightweight service that makes use of Kafka to ingest both streaming data and batch data. From here, it naturally made sense to create an additional service that was responsible for retrieving inferences and calculating metrics on these inferences. It was important to consider performance here and we knew that our choice of data store was crucial to our ability to serve up insights quickly. With this in mind, we were able to leverage the expertise of our data engineers to choose the right data store for our inferences and write the microservice that was responsible for retrieving inferences and calculating metrics. While our data engineers worked to build these microservices, the remaining backend engineers began tackling API design and the remaining product work. After designing our APIs and getting through the implementation of the user, authentication, metadata, alerts, and tenant management, it became evident that the alerting part of our platform was a good candidate for its own microservice. Below you’ll find a simplified diagram of the architecture we arrived at. | https://medium.com/arthur-engineering/from-monolith-to-microservices-fed2fe56478c | ['Kelsey Kerr'] | 2020-12-11 21:05:42.597000+00:00 | ['Microservices', 'Go', 'Startup', 'Technology', 'Software Development'] |
Time, like medicine should be employed wisely. | Time is not only the best healer but also the greatest teacher. — Simon King
Sometimes the hardest thing to come by is to take the right step. Times are changing and they always have been. No matter what, changing times are the foundation to our very existence.
The thought crossed my mind. While in search of comfort in what I think I can achieve, I’ve compromised on a lot of what’s literally within my grasp. Having an idea that I’m good at something, and that I could make it big at some point in the future, hasn’t taught me anything new. It’s the thought that I can focus on what’s right in front of me, that gave me all the knowledge of my existence.
I realised, time is like medicine. It should be employed wisely. That being said, what you think you can achieve is not as important as what’s right infront of you.
You are the architect of your life. Build your life from the moment at hand. Dedicate yourself to fully understand your circumstances. Do not set all your hopes on the prospect of a rewarding future. Set your dreams to the moment that you draw every breath.
Hope is the fuel that ignites the power of this moment. Realise that there’s a fine line between investing in the truth and depending on the truth. To hope for a great future is good. To hope that the future has all the answers is folly.
Rely on what’s at hand, and success will follow.
www.ascertinstitute.org | https://medium.com/@prajimmannemplavan/time-like-medicine-should-be-employed-wisely-eb045a4a30a7 | ['Prajim Mannemplavan'] | 2020-12-22 14:32:30.083000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Time', 'Future', 'Healing', 'Wellness'] |
Smarter Products for Distracted People | The interconnected world
“The products meant to make our lives better demands more of our time on it to keep it useful”.
This statement has been the very narrative of socially innovative product designed to improve people’s interaction and communication . The common ground of all this product shows that it merely offers an immersive and yet distracting atmosphere for such users while solving the problem it’s been designed for.
The continuous move towards social ease creates a singular problem environmentally than ever before, which is “digital awareness on environmental issues with no natural instinct towards them.” This just means everyone becomes aware of events happening around when it’s already happened, this just dampens our instincts to perceive threats. We hear about natural disasters on Facebook, donate for charity online, See pictures of sick kids online, and everything is now done digitally, this in itself is good, but the societal complexities cannot fully be addressed digitally.
Our fight against environmental degradation stands a chance when we re-develop our natural instinct.
Smarter products that performs adequately and accurately it’s intended purpose with minimal human supervision, will go a long way to promote and encourage environmental consciousness and awareness.
The need for smarter domestic products especially electronics will go a long way in aiding environmental and physical consciousness and awareness.
The good news is companies from tech giants to startups are beginning to realize this and implement smart logic to the products deployed. Example Stereo systems, TV’s, security systems, and cooking utensils are now becoming smarter, reducing the focus time of users and increasing more awareness.
Smart Homes.
CONCLUSION
I believe with the strong social innovation, smarter systems should be implemented to make interaction more hands off. To increase visual cognitive ability on physical objects than digital communities. | https://medium.com/@siraustine02/smarter-products-for-distracted-people-7e5aafbe655e | ['Augustine Francis'] | 2019-05-26 18:02:19.488000+00:00 | ['Smart Home', 'Phone Addiction', 'Environment', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Smart Cities'] |
How to Raise Capital using Crypto | Raise of capital in traditional practices
The different methods by which publicly-traded companies raise money to fund expansion include the use of bank debt or the sale of new shares. The three main ways in which companies can raise capital on the financial markets are share placings, open offers or rights issues.
What are the advantages of traditional raise of capital?
The listing on a major exchange (i.e. NYSE, Nasdaq) has considerable benefits, most important being intrinsic marketing potential and trustworthiness:
A value for securities can be established;
Increased access to capital-raising opportunities (both public and private financings) and expansion of investor base;
Liquidity for investors is enhanced since securities can be traded through a public market;
Publicly traded securities are attractive for certain other purposes (as transaction currency or executive and employee compensation, for example);
Credibility and visibility with the public is enhanced, as is the corporate image;
Lower cost of capital relative to debt financing.
Now, all of this sound great. The problem is, most of us can’t list a company on a major traditional stock exchange. The quote ”You have to spend money to make money” comes to mind. It’s an old saying — historians say the phrase could date back as far as 1500 BC when ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics on their tombs which translated into “I have not been made without work” — but nonetheless true.
Although there are many benefits, the costs of going public are considerable. The requirements are even greater. Let’s take Nasdaq for example:
Nasdaq listing costs
$25,000 application fee;
between $150,000 and $295,000 in entry fees;
Upfront costs of an IPO can be significant. Underwriters’ commissions are typically 4%–7% of the proceeds of an IPO; their expenses are additional. A company will also incur other offering expenses, including legal, accounting, printing and filing fees, and will be subject to ongoing costs associated with public company compliance obligations.
Minimum requirements
>$4.00*1,250,000 (shares) + owner’s equity market cap;
minimum of 450 round lot shareholders (100 shares or more) or 2,200 total shareholders or 550 total shareholders with 1.1 million average trading volume over the past 12 months;
minimum of 3 market makers;
$25,000 application fee;
meet all the criteria of at least one standard as defined by Nasdaq:
Standard №1: Earnings
The company must have aggregate pre-tax earnings in the prior three years of at least $11 million, in the previous two years at least $2.2 million, and no single year in the prior three years can have a net loss.
Standard №2: Capitalization With Cash Flow
The company must have a minimum aggregate cash flow of at least $27.5 million for the past three fiscal years, with no negative cash flow in any of those three years. Also, its average market capitalization over the prior 12 months must be at least $550 million, and revenues in the previous fiscal year must be $110 million, minimum.
Standard №3: Capitalization With Revenue
Companies can be removed from the cash flow requirement of the second standard if its average market capitalization over the past 12 months is at least $850 million and revenues over the prior fiscal year are at least $90 million.
Standard №4: Assets With Equity
Companies can eliminate the cash flow and revenue requirements, and decrease their marketing capitalization requirements to $160 million if their total assets total at least $80 million and their stockholders’ equity is at least $55 million. | https://medium.com/@HazelProject/how-to-raise-capital-using-crypto-38e0a1209f91 | ['Hazel Project'] | 2021-09-07 13:40:23.728000+00:00 | ['Capital', 'Stock Market', 'Tokenization', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto'] |
Atomic Swaps: Decentralized trade | Usually when we want to trade between different cryptocurrencies we use exchanges or p2p trades (with or without escrow).
In both alternatives we have to trust on the intermediary (exchange / escrow) or the other party.
Don’t trust, verify!
The great innovation introduced by Bitcoin was the viability of a financial system without a trusted third party, that is, a trustless system.
Using this principle Atomic Swap was created, it’s a solution that makes possible exchange different cryptocurrencies without a third party. In the following sections I will explain how its works and give some examples of its implementation:
Requeriments
Both coins should support smart contract wich allows these aspects:
Time verify (TimeLock) — Example: Funds could only be spent after 1 week; Hash function verify (HashLock) — Example: Funds could only be spent when a challenge question (“hidden” by hash) be discovered; Visible hash input (Public Pre-image) — Example: It’s possible see challenge answer by looking transaction data.
Contracts wich has both 1 and 2 verifications are know as HTLC (Hashed TimeLock Contract) and also are used on Lightning Network protocol.
How it works
Let’s see a successfull trade of 1 BTC to 10 ETHs between Alice and Bob.
Alice generates a random value (secret), execute a hash function and obtain hashedSecret; Alice transfer 1 BTC to smart contract. To redeem funds the following conditions need to be true:
A) The transaction must contain the secret value;
B) The recipient must be Bob’s BTC address;
C) The transaction must be made within 48 hours of the contract creation. Bob transfer 10 ETHs to smart contract. The contract is similar to that created by Alice:
A) The transaction must contain the secret value;
B) The recipient must be Alice’s ETH address;
C) The transaction must be made within 24 hours of the contract creation. At this point the funds of Alice and Bob are under contracts control and the can be spent only if the secret value is know.
How Alice who generated this value, she is able to redeem to her wallet the 10 ETHs sent by Bob. Analyzing the last transaction of Alice, Bob is able to know the secret value (Public Pre-image) and have access to the 1 BTC and finalize the trade.
And if something goes wrong?
The previous example is based on a successful operation. Some problems may occur and the solution is designed to deal with them.
If Bob does not create his contract, does Alice get his 1 BTC frozen? No. To simplify the above explanation, another condition that the contract has been omitted is: After 48 hours of contract creation, Alice can refund. Bob is the exclusive recipient of funds only within the 48-hour window, after that period only Alice can receive them. The same goes for Bob, who after 24 hours can refund if Alice does not revealing the value of secret by redeem the 10 ETHs. The timelocks are distinct (48h and 24h) because otherwise it would be possible for Alice to redeem the ETHs at the end of the deadline and still have the possibility to refund her 1 BTC if Bob did not redeem quickly.
Implementation
At this link, it is possible checkout compatibility of some criptocurrencies with atomic swaps requirements.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin’s smart contracts uses Turing incomplete Script language, the code below is based on implementation at Decred’s repository.
OP_IF OP_SHA256 <HASHED_SECRET> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_DUP OP_HASH160 <COUNTER_PARTY_PUBKEY> OP_ELSE <LOCK_TIME> OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY OP_DROP OP_DUP OP_HASH160 <MY_PUBKEY> OP_ENDIF OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG
Ethereum
The following is a possible implementation of a contract using Solidity language (based on this implementation)
Cons
Privacy: It is not difficult to trace values exchanged between different blockchains since the same hashedSecret will be visible on both platforms. Usability: There are still a few tools / wallets that supports the technology. Speed: Operations are slow if compared with centralized alternatives. Compatibility: Not all of cryptocoins are compatible.
Conclusion
There are already initiatives to use second layer solutions (such as the Lightning Network) to perform off-chain exchanges, solving problems 1 and 3.
Atomic Swap is an important step towards the decentralization of trade operations. It is currently a great solution for large-value trading, but more development of tools and technologies is still required to enable mass adoption.
Further reading | https://medium.com/coinmonks/atomic-swaps-descentralized-trade-5d30b4980f3 | ['Marcelo Morgado'] | 2018-07-29 13:56:47.311000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Atomic Swap', 'Decentralization'] |
Creating A Marketplace App With Reaction Commerce: The Advantages You Can Derive From It | Creating A Marketplace App With Reaction Commerce: The Advantages You Can Derive From It Apiko Jun 10, 2020·8 min read
Once you have made up your mind to create your marketplace with an ecommerce platform, ensure you have gone through the pros and cons of the process, and be ready to go with the flow.
The most important thing is to ensure the platform fits your business needs and has the ability to expand as your app grows in might and size.
Therefore, this article is designed to help you meet the world of Reaction Commerce. This young, but already authoritative open-source e-commerce can become your one-stop solution.
Seeing is believing, so, why don’t we start exploring how “Reaction Commerce” is an accurate means to create a modern, dynamic, and user-friendly marketplace?
The General Review of Reaction Commerce
As you might have known, Reaction Commerce is a Meteor.js based open source e-commerce platform. In March of 2017, the program was officially launched and made public. However, within a short period of time, the program has been upgraded to a real-time reactive; which makes it an indefinite personalized e-commerce platform for all.
The main reason behind the evolution of Reaction Commerce was because the team discovered that most of the e-commerce businesses grow out of the ready-made platforms they use. Furthermore, to roll with the flow in the e-commerce industry and the technological change; users have to engage in a tedious process — switching from the old platform to a brand-new one, to avoid paying the exorbitant cost and waste more time customizing the new one.
Sara Hicks, co-founder, and CEO of Reaction Commerce said:
“E-commerce technology is still in the first inning and has a long way to go — we know because our team has spent decades building shops on platforms that we outgrew or broke altogether. We’ve spent the past few years honing Reaction Commerce and turning it into a platform that both evolve with the industry and inspire further change.”
So, Reaction Commerce has the ability to help you grow your business from any level to the degree you can’t even imagine! It won’t limit you to growth but foster development.
Are you interested? Then, let’s observe some of the advantages you can derive when you decide to create your personalized marketplace app with Reaction Commerce.
Read also: Reaction Commerce: Pros and cons of MeteorJS e-commerce solution
The most essential objective of the Reaction commerce team is to carve a platform, big enough to grow your business with the right technologies. And, since every house is built on a foundation, your marketplace app performance and elasticity also depend on the technology as the base. Therefore, our analysis will start from the Reaction Commerce Technical Goodies.
Check out Apiko’s portfolio and embark on a journey of developing your own profitable and growing marketplace!
Using Reaction Commerce for your marketplace app: how can it benefit your business?
Reaction Commerce is established with the latest frameworks and technologies.
Bear in mind that as a wide platform, Reaction Commerce is supported by many open-source communities. These are made possible as it adopts a popular and flexible framework and technologies in its process. And, these sets of technologies include JavaScript, Node.js, npm, React, and MongoDB. Furthermore, it also adopts NoSQL databases, in processing voluminous data without time-lag. Moreover, Reaction Commerce operates on Meteor node.js framework, which makes it real-time reactive and performs excellently.
You might be thinking: what makes Reaction Commerce special? The concepts are “Flexibility and Modernised approach,” both modes in its operation have drawn countless developers from the whole planet to its beauty. And, big thanks to their active community with over 7200 members, working ceaselessly to ensure Reaction Commerce is the top e-commerce open-source project on Github.
Ever since its birth, the Reaction Commerce community kept improving with the speed of light, a stance that signifies more opportunities ahead. Reaction Commerce team’s goal is to further enhance their effectiveness, add something new, and expand their platform; to enable brands and retailers to utilize their stores and marketplaces easily.
Reaction Commerce provides you with constant support and a manual guide
If you are thinking of customer support in case of any challenges, you have come to the right place. Their platform has a real-time support channel, to supply you immediate and effective answers to your questions. Aside from that, Reaction Commerce also made available a series of manual directions such as guides, tutorials, and forums. Undoubtedly that you are on the safe side.
You get a 100% personalized platform
Another incredible aspect of Reaction Commerce is that everything is possible, and as the Alpha and Omega of the process you get to extend or change any configuration to fit in line with your business goals. Furthermore, being completely open-source, you have access to download your codebase and enlarge the process. The stronghold — devoted members of the community and popular technologies make Reaction Commerce the perfect choice for creating a mighty marketplace that will let you meet your business needs.
Reaction Commerce offers real-time e-commerce and analytics
As a standard platform carved on Meteor Framework, information is transmitted and updated in a millisecond when a client requests it from the server.
Why is Reaction Commerce essential for online marketplaces?
The main objective of Reaction Commerce is to be an ultra-fast processing platform that creates the concept that steals the show. Therefore, such a mechanism in your program would enable a mode that draws your users closer to the purchasing arena without time lag. A practical example can be observed in Reaction Commerce offers such as product load, promotions, and pricing without page reloads or app updates.
The platform is also a single-page app. You might be wondering what that signifies? As a new user, everything you need on the platform is loaded sequentially behind the scenes. Though maneuvering through these pages may seem new and slow; however, once you’ve checked on the contents or pages you admired, another visit to these pages would seem easier and faster as all the data is now locally available.
Furthermore, once a user is on your website, such an individual would be exposed to different sets of actions; which includes product selections, clicking on it, enabling the filter, adding products chosen to the cart, and more. And, Reaction Commerce (configured to adopt event-driven technology JavaScript) is the best in handling the job. In a millisecond, Reaction Commerce will track all these processes as requested by respective users and update them immediately. You should check on the article “Why Reaction is real-time” for more analysis.
In the article there is a great example of how it works. Let’s assume a shopper has looked at the product on a website for nine times in just two days; and, on the third day, he or she observes that same product again for the 10th time in three days!!! Immediately, Reaction Commerce will send a promotional offer to the shopper in real-time, without him/her reloading the page. This function is a spontaneous reaction discharge to captivate the client’s attention and lure him or her to make a purchase at that point of time. We agree that this stuff is really cool, as it helps you to decrease the bounce rate and get more conversions.
Reaction Commerce is SEO optimized.
Reaction Commerce adopts the following tools for handling SEO:
Iron-Router conducts both server- and client-side routing and assigned normal titles for each site/document/URL.
Kadira Flow Router provides client-side routing only.
Kadira Dochead adds meta-objects.
Prerender.io — service, enables your JavaScript website to be crawled by search engines.
Based on the aforementioned, no doubt that a marketplace carved with Reaction Commerce will be SEO friendly.
What kind of project can you adopt Reaction Commerce for?
As a multi-versatile platform, Reaction Commerce is a perfect operational tool for both mono-merchant and big marketplaces, and as part of the all-round function, it is also suitable for startups, middle-size business, and companies.
In one of the speeches, the co-founder of Reaction Commerce said:
“We’re already attracting major brands, from 10 Fortune companies and 500 businesses in the Internet Retailer to vertically native startups, and everything in between”
Reaction Commerce will be up and running for your project if you:
Decide to change to a different platform
The process of transitioning from one platform to another is now made easier than ever before on Reaction Commerce. Its brain box — Reaction Commerce team — has developed transition paths from Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce to ensure your smooth switch from one to another.
Work as an e-commerce developer or run an e-commerce agency.
Reaction Commerce offers partner programs that enable you the developer’s resources, devoted support from the management, revenue-sharing opportunities, etc.
Reaction Commerce Features
Product and Inventory management
Universal tags to arrange your goods alphabetically
Order management
Customer profiles
One-step checkout
Notifications
Advanced search
Adjustable shipping rates
Discounts
Personalized themes
A system that enables the integration of thousands of open-source packages.
Reaction Commerce integrations
Reaction Commerce is integrated with the following services:
Alavara
Tax Cloud
Elastic Search
Shippo
Authorize.net
Reaction Commerce payment processors
To ensure its credibility, encourage online payment, and protect the client against extortion and other security issues; Reaction Commerce is deeply integrated with popular and reliable payment processors such as Stripe, Stripe Connect, COD, PayPal PayFlow, Express, Braintree, and Authorize.net. However, if the list does not include a payment provider you desire, you may easily integrate your own.
Reaction Commerce mobile app
Reaction Commerce mobile app is agile and highly responsive. The app can also be configured to create a native iOS or Android app.
Reaction Commerce personalization
As previously mentioned, Reaction Commerce is extendable by new features. For instance, the following are some of the features Reaction Commerce does not have but can be incorporated if desired.
Promotions and advertisements of the product
Bidding
Product reviews
Affiliate program
Custom commissions
Keyword search
Order history
Always remember that Reaction Commerce personalization has no limit and adding extra features won’t cause a glitch.
Reaction Commerce Pricing
Since you are here, I’ll be straight with you. To develop a marketplace with Reaction Commerce would require a minimum of $5000. This price includes the deployment of all out-of-the-box features and setting the server. However, if you want something more exclusive (a marketplace with wider functionality), the price would, therefore, be more than average. Nevertheless, your requirements dictate the cost. If you are interested in marketplace app development, contact us and get a free estimate for your personalized app with Reaction Commerce.
In a nutshell
Currently, Reaction Commerce is growing and expanding with diverse features and functionality. The main reason why many startups and established marketplaces keep coming to its realm is that they marvel at the incredible opportunities it makes available. If you have any questions about Reaction Commerce personalization, feel free to leave a comment below. | https://medium.com/@apiko-software/creating-a-marketplace-app-with-reaction-commerce-the-advantages-you-can-derive-from-it-c931f1507d56 | [] | 2020-06-10 08:21:58.490000+00:00 | ['App Development', 'App Development Company', 'Marketplaces', 'Marketplace App', 'Reactioncommerce'] |
Here I share the welcome letter I write to my students who take my course | First, I would like to start with a warning: Please note that this module requires you to work intensively. Therefore, it is not for the faint-hearted — you will be working very hard and you are expected to complete all the module activities, projects, and assignments.
This is an optional module. If you are not ready for it or if you do not like it, drop it. Take this module only if you are ready for the hard work.
Please note that this module requires full attendance and participation in ALL lectures and seminars. Please make sure that you are here with your whole body, mind, and spirit. You will start building your portfolio from Day 1 and you will continue working on your portfolio activities during lectures and seminars. Throughout the semester, you will be gradually building up your portfolio. This means you will need to attend all lectures and seminars — otherwise, you will be missing a lot.
We live in one of the most exciting times in history. A perfect storm of technology is shifting the landscape you will graduate into. Multidimensional technological forces involving automation, 3D printing, augmented reality, machine learning, Industry 4.0, internet of things, voice assistants, digital twins, Mirrorworld, and blockchain are rapidly transforming the future of work, organizations, and jobs. Software is indeed eating the world. Computing becomes ubiquitous and intelligence becomes ambient. Many of the things we do and experience in our careers and lives are being digitized and transformed through an ever-growing network of connected devices, power from cloud computing, insights from big data, and intelligence from machine learning.
Make no mistake; we live in a disruptive era. However, our educational systems are still largely stuck within the industrial paradigm. Universities and educational systems still prepare students (you) for large organizations and bureaucratic systems, which are struggling to cope with change and to survive. You are still taught and prepared for jobs that are becoming obsolete, and replaced by automation and machine learning. In the next decade, you need new ways of thinking about your career and investing in yourself. You need to disrupt and re-invent yourself and compound yourself through investing in continuous learning and new skill development. You need to become self-directed learners who take responsibility for your own learning and work effectively with others. You need to solve complex problems through higher-order thinking and creativity in domains you find interesting and compelling. You need to develop ‘new era’ skills for future jobs that are yet to be created, including:
- self-directed learning, - cognitive flexibility to handle complexity and ambiguity, - transdisciplinary sense-making, - creativity, imagination, and design thinking, - innovation and experimentation skills, - entrepreneurial skills and practice, - virtual collaboration skills, - openness for change and adaptive skills, - cognitive stamina and resilience to deal with uncertainty, risk, failures, and mistakes, - skills for crowdfunding, self-employment, and sharing economy, - investments and personal finance, - cross-cultural competences, - digital skills and new media literacy.
In these times, you need to be driven by your curiosity and thirst for learning. You need to read and finish a book every week. You need to sign up for more online courses than you can complete. If you are not learning new things every day, you are going backward. So, curiosity, imagination, and hunger for knowledge should be your guiding principles. As you look forward, you must zero in on what you can uniquely contribute to the world.
We are living, leading, and working in an era of clashing forces, multiple polarities, increasing uncertainty, chaos, and change. The collapse of national economic boundaries, rapid technological changes, workforce mobility, cultural diversity, and the increasing interdependence of human communities pose new challenges for organizations. We live in an era of unprecedented change.
This module is intended to help you appreciate and prepare for increasing complexity and paradox of careers and organizations in the light of social, cultural, economic, technological, and organizational changes in the global landscape. This is an applied vision and skill development module; focusing on the development of the new skill sets for professionals of the 21st century. The module will increase your awareness and understanding of the global business/career context and the self-making skills that are necessary for you.
During the course of the year, we will have intensive brainstorming sessions, professional development workshops and executive training programs to help you and your colleagues to develop and apply employability skills for your career in the 21st century.
This is not a traditional module, but a rich global learning platform and a rewarding dynamic learning network. We will not limit ourselves within a traditional discipline; instead, we will have innovative and futuristic perspectives on business, leadership, careers, and entrepreneurship.
The module draws from a new and exciting paradigm for a managerial practice called Positive Organizational Scholarship (http://www.bus.umich.edu/Positive/). The core premise of this paradigm is that management and leadership excellence is fundamentally tied to creating/enabling organizational contexts that build human strengths and unlock the positive and generative dynamics of vibrant human communities. You all have different dreams, hopes, goals, and aspirations about your future. You all have different unique gifts, talents, strengths, and skills. We want you to be truly committed, inspired, and engaged; so we will provide you the freedom and space to choose and create your own customized projects based on your strengths, dreams, and passions.
As you start your academic semester at UEA, you are getting much closer to your career in the business world. This module is designed to help you think more deeply about your future and yourself: Where do you want to be in five years? What is your dream job? Where do your passions lie? What do you want to achieve? Have you developed the skills and knowledge to differentiate yourself in the job market?
This module is one of the few business modules in the UK that challenges you to think about yourself and your future career, prepare yourself for your career, and develop the set of management skills that you need for this career. It is an intellectual tour that will expand your horizons and change your life — only if you are ready for continuous learning and creative thinking.
This is an integrative, innovative, and interdisciplinary module. It is meant to be an enriching and rewarding experience for all of us. But this all depends on our assumptions, attitudes, and collective effort. Do not focus heavily on the grade, but instead focus on your independent learning for your career. Be engaged and involved. Make this module useful and helpful for your own goals and life. Go beyond the class. Be creative and innovative. Create breakthrough projects and ideas for your future. Sharpen your skills. Challenge yourself. Bring your best contribution to the table. What you get from this module all depends on what you put into this.
Next, every one of us needs to do our best work and lead. Each of us must find meaning in our work. The best work happens when you know that it is not just work, but something that will improve other people’s lives. Do that work in your life. Your life in this world is limited — make it count. Get out of your comfort zone, your class, and even your campus/university to become leaders and change agents who have an impact out there. Do more of what you care about — get stuff done, have fun, communicate, and accomplish great things. You need to do magical things with our creations and ultimately make the world a better place.
You will probably be future leaders, creative artists, or entrepreneurs in your careers and you are graduating to the multinational and multicultural professional context. Therefore, you have to be independent professionals and life-long learners. I will expect you to take full responsibility for your learning and development. Please treat our classes as professional meetings in a multinational corporation. Full attendance and active participation in all sessions and workshops are required, without excuses. Moreover, I recommend and encourage you to start to read and follow the global business press regularly. I recommend Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Wired, Financial Times, and Fortune as initial references.
Leaders or creative professionals cannot be created only by traditional classroom methods such as lectures. There will not be grading in professional life. There are no tests, quizzes, or exams conducted in companies. In real life, performance boils down to several components which have little to do with classical assessment strategies in college: Projects, teamwork, reflection, observation, self-assessment, creativity, interpersonal skills, integrative cognitive skills, applying knowledge to make sound decisions, openness to learning and development, discipline, resilience, hard work. You can best develop proficiency in professional skills by applying and experiencing them in business-like contexts.
In today’s global, rapidly changing knowledge-based economy, learning and practicing soft skills as well as creativity is one of the smartest investments you can make for your future.
This module will add to the repertoire of future professionals who are bright, passionate, willing to take initiative, care about developing themselves, and yet also care about their colleagues, community, and the world.
This beautiful city of Norwich, a truly lovely and creative city, is a wonderful place to explore, learn, develop skills, and reflect on your career.
UEA is the perfect spot for learning and thinking about 21st-century management issues as one of UK’s most internationally diverse universities with bright students coming from all over the world.
Welcome to our global learning network. I am looking forward to seeing you and sharing this learning platform with you.
Dr. Fahri Karakas
Fahri Karakas is the author of Self-making Studio. You can explore more here. | https://medium.com/journal-of-curiosity-imagination-and-inspiration/here-i-share-the-welcome-letter-i-write-to-my-students-who-take-my-course-891def73a33c | ['Fahri Karakas'] | 2020-05-16 19:05:55.768000+00:00 | ['University', 'Big Picture', 'Inspiration', 'Masterclass', 'Learning'] |
America’s Worst Nuclear Disaster | America’s Worst Nuclear Disaster
The Three Mile Island accident
A clean-up crew working to remove radioactive contamination at Three Mile Island. Courtesy of Wikicommons
Nuclear power has been dubbed by many as the “fuel of the future”. Being carbon neutral and able to produce massive amounts of power using little fuel it is easy to see why such a statement was made. Since its development as a power source, we have seen many incidents when this “fuel of the future” turned out to be more like the “killer of the future”.
Well-known events such as the Chernobyl and the Fukushima nuclear disasters haunt the minds of the global community when the topic of nuclear power is brought up. Although the above-mentioned events are the most well-known ones there is one, less prominent, nuclear disaster which still haunts the minds of many Americans to this day, the Three Mile Island accident.
The Nuclear Age
The post-WWII era brought upon the people of the world something many dub the “Nuclear Age”. Efforts to refranchise radiation and nuclear power made it so that the general public now saw the scientific development as a tool for good rather than a tool for war. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, media about the benefits of using nuclear power flooded the world, most notably in the two biggest nuclear powers, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States of America (USA).
The Ford Nucleon. A concept car which was said to be able to run on nuclear fuel. Courtesy of Yahoo News
Throughout this era, promises of using nuclear power for more and more advanced things came about such as the use of nuclear power to help in the creation of the fabled flying car. Many hoped that with this new technology previously unusable areas of land could now be “colonised” by bringing power and thus industry to regions which before lay barren.
The dream of a “Nuclear Future” and the end of the so-called “Nuclear Age” would come with the nuclear failures of the 70s and 80s. Before Chernobyl shut down the global dream of a “Nuclear Future” the Three Mile Island accident shut it down for the American people.
Small mistakes lead to big consequences
During the maintenance of one of the eight condensate polishers of the reactor, a big mistake was made. A condensate polisher is a device used to filter the water used in these nuclear plants. The filters remove minerals and impurities which accumulate while the water cycles around the reactor decreasing the erosion such materials would cause on the pipes.
During a routine maintenance of one of the filters, those who were meant to clean the filter did not end up doing it the conventional way. Usually, compressed air was used to clean out the filters easily, however, on 27 March 1979, this didn’t seem to work. Instead, the maintenance workers used the compressed air to force water through the filter hoping that the force of the water would be enough to do the job. During this process, they also forced water into a vital air line used by the reactor leading to problems eleven hours later.
A graphic of the aftermath of the meltdown provided by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
At around 4:00 am on 28 March 1979 the problems from the mismanagement of the filter’s cleaning started to be noticed by those controlling the reactors. Due to the water intrusion into the air line multiple vital pumps across the compound malfunctioned and stopped.
This led to the rapid increase in temperature in the reactor and, unknown to those managing the station at the time, a partial nuclear meltdown which led to further radioactive material being released into the surrounding area on top of the radioactive steam being released in an effort to cool the reactor down.
The figure on the left shows the aftermath of the events, the numbers point towards the following:
2B inlet 1A inlet cavity loose core debris crust previously molten material lower plenum debris possible region depleted in uranium ablated incore instrument guide hole in baffle plate coating of previously-molten material on bypass region interior surface supper grid damage
Public response
The disaster at Three Mile Island created a lot of public outcry against nuclear power. Now that American technology failed to keep the beast of nuclear power in check many started to doubt its usefulness as the “fuel of tomorrow”. Countrywide protests and tighter regulation on the use of nuclear material as fuel followed the events at this power station.
With all of the outcry and bad press nuclear power received as a result of this event, the field started to progress much slower. Now with less funding and more regulations, it became harder and harder to innovate and find more safe and efficient ways to harness this fuel source. With all of these roadblocks came the end of the so-called “Nuclear Age”. The thought of using this vastly powerful material to fuel our future was destroyed as soon as the Three Mile Island station malfunctioned. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/americas-worst-nuclear-disaster-c8d535586144 | ['Calin Aneculaesei'] | 2020-11-24 00:02:00.984000+00:00 | ['Cold War', 'Innovation', 'History', 'Nuclear', 'America'] |
Let’s Make A Free Art Portfolio! | A Place You Can Call A Homepage
This is the quick-and-easy guide for anyone who needs a free hosting solution for a simple image gallery with no file compression — ideal for a visual artist. I’ve broken down all of the steps so that you will have a portfolio up and running in 30 minutes. We will be using Github Pages, which is a free service provided by a company called Github.
If you use this tutorial and would like help with adding any additional features, let me know and I will write up tutorials for them!
Enough talk — let’s make a portfolio.
Create A Github Account
Github is a site that hosts your project’s source code, images, and other files. We will need an account, so first things first — create a free account.
(If you already have an account, great! Just log in.)
Create A New Repository
A repository is a named location in your Github account that stores code for an individual project. You can have many repositories and many projects. We only need one for our portfolio, but it has to be named a specific name to take advantage of the automated hosting features of Github Pages.
Once you are logged in, you will see a button on the page that says “Start A Project” or “New Repository” or something similar. Click it. (Github will look different depending on if you have a new account or if you have used it previously — just click whatever is available to create our portfolio’s new repository.)
In the “Create a new repository” page that opens, in the “Repository name” field, enter the new name of your repository. You’ll want to name it github-username.github.io — the Github Pages service requires this to be the format of the repo’s name.
For example, if my Github username is technicaldebtgames then my repository name should be technicaldebtgames.github.io — the repository’s name in this case is going to be the URL we use to navigate to it, so make sure your account name is appropriate for how you want your portfolio to be viewed.
You will also want to click “Add a README file” as an initialization option. You can choose to make the project public or private — this won’t change whether people can navigate to your portfolio or not, only if they can see the repository and its code.
Basic options for initializing your repository.
Create A New File Named “index.html”
In your portfolio’s main directory, click the “Add file” dropdown button, and then click the “Create new file” option.
Give this file the name index.html and enter the following HTML into it:
Enter this file name and HTML code in the New File page.
This is an HTML file, and it uses a scripting language known as HTML. It’s essentially a series of textual tags that tell browsers how to layout information on a website.
At the bottom of the page, you will see the “Commit new file” section of the page. You can either leave the fields blank, or you can fill them with useful information in case you want to know why you did something in the future. | https://medium.com/burn-rate-zero/lets-make-a-free-art-portfolio-9da157c64def | ['Dan Brioli'] | 2020-12-15 13:16:37.602000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Free', 'Portfolio', 'Github', 'Tutorial'] |
Read Your Book Contract | Read Your Book Contract
photo: courtesy of author
Too many first-time-published writers are so excited, that they do not even look through their contract. After spending months and precious hours creating their story, they act as if someone is doing them a huge favor, and happily sign with no questions.
Not only are the details of the sale in your contract — that is, how many copies will be produced in the first print run, what the amount of royalty is, what your can expect for the timeline of re-writes and printing, and of course, the dollar amount of the advance, but there will also be details about just how — when it is time — your book will be rendered OOP, or out-of-print.
What is “pulped”?
A friend of mine called her publisher several years after she’d published a book with them, as she was doing a series of readings, and wanted to have books on hand to sell to the audience; she was told that the remaining copies of her novel had in fact been “pulped,” and they would not be able to give her any more copies.
She was distraught: not only did she need copies to possibly sell at an event, but she did not even have enough copies for family members. She’d assumed she’d be able to buy copies whenever she wanted to.
Notice
And the company should have given her notice, as per her contract.
But…she had not read her contract. Contractually, the company was obligated to give her 30 day notification that her book was about to go OOP, and the publisher was to inform her how many copies were left, and at what price the company would relinquish them to her, and there was an agreed-up on amount of time, to give her enough time to decide if, and how many, she would like to purchase.
Generally, the copies are sold at the cost of creating them. I have bought copies of my going-out-of-print books for a dollar each, or even for the price of having them shipped to my house. Often, if the company is down to a handful of books left, they’ll simply send them to you.
Buy as many as you can make use of
For most writers (as long as you have the room to store these, and a house free of those pesky things called silver-fish), it’s a good idea to buy as many as you think you might be able to sell. If you do any sort of public readings or events at which you can personally connect with your audience, this can work well, and provide with the unusual occurrence of being able to make a decent profit on your work! As a children’s writer, I have used these books to donate to libraries and schools who offer me presentations, a way to say ‘thank you.’ And when I’ve ended up with a lot of copies, I’ve even donated class sets to schools that just can’t afford new books. So worth it for the smiles that come over the librarian’s or teachers’ faces.
30 Days
This process, whether “30 days” or more, is all outlined in your contract. Read it, and know your rights.
Generally, once a book is out of print, the rights revert to you. You can try to find another traditional publisher, depending on the sales, and any prizes it had with first round. (Though, truly, it is probably taken out of print for the reason of slow or slowed sales.) Or you might like to explore options for e-publishing yourself, or print-on-demand, or posting online. There are so many options now.
In the case of my friend, the publishing company actually had to re-create copies of the book to sell her; they had broken the contract. It cost the publisher money. She ended up with enough copies for family and friends and a few to sell.
Remainders: the Big Black Slash Mark
In the above photo, someone has taken a black marker to the bottom of a book. All of us have bought a book marked thus at some point.
What does it mean? The book is “remaindered” — that is, it has been taken out of print and it is a remaining copy. The author does not receive funds from the sale, and the store has got it at cost-of-producing or some such low number. Does this matter? Should it? Re-read the bit about “the author did not receive funds.”
As a writer, it always causes me a pang to the heart.
Life comes full-circle when you receive the letter saying “We have decided to take your book out of print.”
Of course, you’ll have been busy, and will have written and published a few more during the lifespan of that particular baby.
And so…onward. | https://writingcooperative.com/read-your-book-contract-9119dc551e02 | ['Alison Acheson'] | 2020-12-24 14:01:13.944000+00:00 | ['Publishing', 'Books', 'Creativity', 'Contracts', 'Writing'] |
Train/Test Split and Cross Validation in Python | Hi everyone! After my last post on linear regression in Python, I thought it would only be natural to write a post about Train/Test Split and Cross Validation. As usual, I am going to give a short overview on the topic and then give an example on implementing it in Python. These are two rather important concepts in data science and data analysis and are used as tools to prevent (or at least minimize) overfitting. I’ll explain what that is — when we’re using a statistical model (like linear regression, for example), we usually fit the model on a training set in order to make predications on a data that wasn’t trained (general data). Overfitting means that what we’ve fit the model too much to the training data. It will all make sense pretty soon, I promise!
What is Overfitting/Underfitting a Model?
As mentioned, in statistics and machine learning we usually split our data into two subsets: training data and testing data (and sometimes to three: train, validate and test), and fit our model on the train data, in order to make predictions on the test data. When we do that, one of two thing might happen: we overfit our model or we underfit our model. We don’t want any of these things to happen, because they affect the predictability of our model — we might be using a model that has lower accuracy and/or is ungeneralized (meaning you can’t generalize your predictions on other data). Let’s see what under and overfitting actually mean:
Overfitting
Overfitting means that model we trained has trained “too well” and is now, well, fit too closely to the training dataset. This usually happens when the model is too complex (i.e. too many features/variables compared to the number of observations). This model will be very accurate on the training data but will probably be very not accurate on untrained or new data. It is because this model is not generalized (or not AS generalized), meaning you can generalize the results and can’t make any inferences on other data, which is, ultimately, what you are trying to do. Basically, when this happens, the model learns or describes the “noise” in the training data instead of the actual relationships between variables in the data. This noise, obviously, isn’t part in of any new dataset, and cannot be applied to it.
Underfitting
In contrast to overfitting, when a model is underfitted, it means that the model does not fit the training data and therefore misses the trends in the data. It also means the model cannot be generalized to new data. As you probably guessed (or figured out!), this is usually the result of a very simple model (not enough predictors/independent variables). It could also happen when, for example, we fit a linear model (like linear regression) to data that is not linear. It almost goes without saying that this model will have poor predictive ability (on training data and can’t be generalized to other data).
An example of overfitting, underfitting and a model that’s “just right!”
It is worth noting the underfitting is not as prevalent as overfitting. Nevertheless, we want to avoid both of those problems in data analysis. You might say we are trying to find the middle ground between under and overfitting our model. As you will see, train/test split and cross validation help to avoid overfitting more than underfitting. Let’s dive into both of them!
Train/Test Split
As I said before, the data we use is usually split into training data and test data. The training set contains a known output and the model learns on this data in order to be generalized to other data later on. We have the test dataset (or subset) in order to test our model’s prediction on this subset.
Train/Test Split
Let’s see how to do this in Python. We’ll do this using the Scikit-Learn library and specifically the train_test_split method. We’ll start with importing the necessary libraries:
import pandas as pd
from sklearn import datasets, linear_model
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
Let’s quickly go over the libraries I’ve imported:
Pandas — to load the data file as a Pandas data frame and analyze the data. If you want to read more on Pandas, feel free to check out my post!
— to load the data file as a Pandas data frame and analyze the data. If you want to read more on Pandas, feel free to check out my post! From Sklearn , I’ve imported the datasets module, so I can load a sample dataset, and the linear_model, so I can run a linear regression
, I’ve imported the datasets module, so I can load a sample dataset, and the linear_model, so I can run a linear regression From Sklearn, sub-library model_selection , I’ve imported the train_test_split so I can, well, split to training and test sets
sub-library , I’ve imported the train_test_split so I can, well, split to training and test sets From Matplotlib I’ve imported pyplot in order to plot graphs of the data
OK, all set! Let’s load in the diabetes dataset, turn it into a data frame and define the columns’ names:
# Load the Diabetes dataset
columns = “age sex bmi map tc ldl hdl tch ltg glu”.split() # Declare the columns names
diabetes = datasets.load_diabetes() # Call the diabetes dataset from sklearn
df = pd.DataFrame(diabetes.data, columns=columns) # load the dataset as a pandas data frame
y = diabetes.target # define the target variable (dependent variable) as y
Now we can use the train_test_split function in order to make the split. The test_size=0.2 inside the function indicates the percentage of the data that should be held over for testing. It’s usually around 80/20 or 70/30.
# create training and testing vars
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(df, y, test_size=0.2)
print X_train.shape, y_train.shape
print X_test.shape, y_test.shape (353, 10) (353,)
(89, 10) (89,)
Now we’ll fit the model on the training data:
# fit a model
lm = linear_model.LinearRegression() model = lm.fit(X_train, y_train)
predictions = lm.predict(X_test)
As you can see, we’re fitting the model on the training data and trying to predict the test data. Let’s see what (some of) the predictions are:
predictions[0:5]
array([ 205.68012533, 64.58785513, 175.12880278, 169.95993301,
128.92035866])
Note: because I used [0:5] after predictions, it only showed the first five predicted values. Removing the [0:5] would have made it print all of the predicted values that our model created.
Let’s plot the model:
## The line / model
plt.scatter(y_test, predictions)
plt.xlabel(“True Values”)
plt.ylabel(“Predictions”)
And print the accuracy score:
print “Score:”, model.score(X_test, y_test) Score: 0.485829586737
There you go! Here is a summary of what I did: I’ve loaded in the data, split it into a training and testing sets, fitted a regression model to the training data, made predictions based on this data and tested the predictions on the test data. Seems good, right? But train/test split does have its dangers — what if the split we make isn’t random? What if one subset of our data has only people from a certain state, employees with a certain income level but not other income levels, only women or only people at a certain age? (imagine a file ordered by one of these). This will result in overfitting, even though we’re trying to avoid it! This is where cross validation comes in.
Cross Validation
In the previous paragraph, I mentioned the caveats in the train/test split method. In order to avoid this, we can perform something called cross validation. It’s very similar to train/test split, but it’s applied to more subsets. Meaning, we split our data into k subsets, and train on k-1 one of those subset. What we do is to hold the last subset for test. We’re able to do it for each of the subsets.
Visual Representation of Train/Test Split and Cross Validation. H/t to my DSI instructor, Joseph Nelson!
There are a bunch of cross validation methods, I’ll go over two of them: the first is K-Folds Cross Validation and the second is Leave One Out Cross Validation (LOOCV)
K-Folds Cross Validation
In K-Folds Cross Validation we split our data into k different subsets (or folds). We use k-1 subsets to train our data and leave the last subset (or the last fold) as test data. We then average the model against each of the folds and then finalize our model. After that we test it against the test set.
Visual representation of K-Folds. Again, H/t to Joseph Nelson!
Here is a very simple example from the Sklearn documentation for K-Folds:
from sklearn.model_selection import KFold # import KFold
X = np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4], [1, 2], [3, 4]]) # create an array
y = np.array([1, 2, 3, 4]) # Create another array
kf = KFold(n_splits=2) # Define the split - into 2 folds
kf.get_n_splits(X) # returns the number of splitting iterations in the cross-validator print(kf) KFold(n_splits=2, random_state=None, shuffle=False)
And let’s see the result — the folds:
for train_index, test_index in kf.split(X):
print(“TRAIN:”, train_index, “TEST:”, test_index)
X_train, X_test = X[train_index], X[test_index]
y_train, y_test = y[train_index], y[test_index] ('TRAIN:', array([2, 3]), 'TEST:', array([0, 1]))
('TRAIN:', array([0, 1]), 'TEST:', array([2, 3]))
As you can see, the function split the original data into different subsets of the data. Again, very simple example but I think it explains the concept pretty well.
Leave One Out Cross Validation (LOOCV)
This is another method for cross validation, Leave One Out Cross Validation (by the way, these methods are not the only two, there are a bunch of other methods for cross validation. Check them out in the Sklearn website). In this type of cross validation, the number of folds (subsets) equals to the number of observations we have in the dataset. We then average ALL of these folds and build our model with the average. We then test the model against the last fold. Because we would get a big number of training sets (equals to the number of samples), this method is very computationally expensive and should be used on small datasets. If the dataset is big, it would most likely be better to use a different method, like kfold.
Let’s check out another example from Sklearn:
from sklearn.model_selection import LeaveOneOut
X = np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4]])
y = np.array([1, 2])
loo = LeaveOneOut()
loo.get_n_splits(X)
for train_index, test_index in loo.split(X):
print("TRAIN:", train_index, "TEST:", test_index)
X_train, X_test = X[train_index], X[test_index]
y_train, y_test = y[train_index], y[test_index]
print(X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test)
And this is the output:
('TRAIN:', array([1]), 'TEST:', array([0]))
(array([[3, 4]]), array([[1, 2]]), array([2]), array([1]))
('TRAIN:', array([0]), 'TEST:', array([1]))
(array([[1, 2]]), array([[3, 4]]), array([1]), array([2]))
Again, simple example, but I really do think it helps in understanding the basic concept of this method.
So, what method should we use? How many folds? Well, the more folds we have, we will be reducing the error due the bias but increasing the error due to variance; the computational price would go up too, obviously — the more folds you have, the longer it would take to compute it and you would need more memory. With a lower number of folds, we’re reducing the error due to variance, but the error due to bias would be bigger. It’s would also computationally cheaper. Therefore, in big datasets, k=3 is usually advised. In smaller datasets, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s best to use LOOCV. | https://towardsdatascience.com/train-test-split-and-cross-validation-in-python-80b61beca4b6 | ['Adi Bronshtein'] | 2020-03-24 15:43:53.509000+00:00 | ['Data Analysis', 'Statistics', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Employees who always complain. In remote work environment, especially… | In remote work environment, especially during the current pandemic, a small number of leaders think that their employees who underperform probably deserve more attention than the rest or those who lack enthusiasm are probably less engaged. This needs to attract managers’ serious attention as this category of employees who happen to remain restless and disengaged don’t only cause conflicts @Work and but adversely destroy the Employee Engagement Index (EEI) of the organisation.
A million-dollar question that managers must ask themselves why do these employees complain all the time just about anything and everything? Be it their work from home (WFH) issues relating to working hours, project deadlines, internet connection, laptop, cellphone or any other business tools that are needed to stay connected with the office.
On the other hand, as a manager or a team lead, who comes to your mind when you think of a perfect employee? In most cases it only takes a second or two to answer this question as you very well know your high performers. Your best employees constantly impress you with their work and the positive impact they have on others. Great employees are hard to find and replaced with. So, please pay attention to them more than anything because they talk through their feet. They will leave you if you don’t value them.
In this article, we shall attempt to discuss who are these employees who complain and why they do it?
1. Why do employees complain?
There could be multiple answers to this question: Complainants are usually frustrated, agitated and emotionally unstable people. They either don’t like their work and colleagues or they feel really good about it when they complain. This is another form of gossip and requires minimal risk, and it’s easy for them to do so.
Here’s what actually happens: Someone annoys us. We’re dissatisfied with how they’re behaving. Maybe we’re angry, frustrated, or threatened. Those feelings build up as energy in our bodies, literally creating physical discomfort (that’s why we call them feelings — because we actually, physically, feel them).
When we complain about someone else, the uncomfortable feelings begin to dissipate because complaining releases the pent-up energy. That’s why we say things like “I’m venting” or “I’m blowing off steam” Remember, dissipation doesn’t just release the energy, it spreads it, which actually makes it grow.
Complaining changes, the balance of energy and, for a brief moment at least, we feel better. It’s actually a pretty reliable process. Addictive even.
2. Why is complaining such a bad move?
Complaining creates a number of dysfunctional side effects, beyond the precious time wasted, it creates factions, prevents or delays — because it replaces — productive engagement, reinforces and strengthens dissatisfaction, riles up others, breaks trust, and, potentially, makes the complainer appear negative. We become the cancer we’re complaining about; the negative influence that seeps into the culture.
Think about it: someone yells at you in a meeting. Then you go to the next meeting, where no one is yelling and you complain about the person who just yelled. Now other people, who weren’t at the previous meeting, feel the impact of the yelling and get upset about it too. Encouraged by their support, your brief, momentary release transforms into righteous indignation and, becoming even more incensed, you experience the initial uncomfortable feelings all over again.
In fact, that might be the biggest problem: Complaining is a violent move to inaction. It replaces the need to act. If instead of complaining, we allowed ourselves to feel the energy without needing to dissipate it immediately — which requires what I call emotional courage — then we could put that energy to good use. We could channel it so it doesn’t leak out sideways.
In other words, let the uncomfortable feeling you have — the one that would otherwise lead you to complain — lead you to take a productive action.
3. When & whom should we complain to?
It’s simple. Go ahead and complain. Just do it directly — and thoughtfully — to the person who is the cause of your complaints.
Invite the person to a meeting room, shut the door and talk to the him / her who yelled in the meeting, say “Hold on. Let’s respect each other in this conversation.” If you missed the opportunity in the moment, then meet with them afterwards and say, “Please let’s respect each other in our conversations.”
That, of course, also takes emotional courage. It’s a scary, more risky thing to do. But it’s why it’s worth developing your emotional courage — because, while scary, it’s far more likely to be highly productive. It holds the potential for changing the thing that’s the problem in the first place. And rather than become the negative influence, you become the leader. Always remember, we all are working for money but not at the cost of our self-respect.
4. When is the time to escalate?
If behaviors do not change, it’s time to move from coaching to counselling. Coaching is designed to elicit positive change in behaviors by offering guidance, encouragement, and specific action steps. If the person in question holds a senior position, involve his supervisor or route your complaint through your HR.
While chronic complainers seem harmless on the surface, the damage may become irreparable in the long run. You owe it to your team, your organisation, and yourself to remove toxic behavior from the workplace.
5. Identify your employees’ potential
The chronic complainer infects the workplace culture by spreading negativity and creating doubt in team members’ minds. For managers striving to implement a new program or policy, this subtle but aggressive behavior gets in the way of driving positive change.
Becoming involved in your employees’ daily work and routines is essential because it helps you stay in tune with their issues, accomplishments or valid concerns. You might have complainers who don’t know how to address the issues they see.
They could have had good ideas in the past, but have never been listened to — so they complain to be heard. Addressing complaint culture before it causes problems prevents workplace disruption — it might also help you turn a complaining employee with unique ideas back into a productive one.
Final Word
Working with a chronic complainer is annoying and exhausting. You know the type — nothing pleases them, and they find fault in management’s every utterance, implicitly suggesting the people in charge are operating with a fatal deficiency of intelligence and common sense.
Managers should work quickly to stop these characters before the damage to morale spreads and threatens the team’s working environment. However, as with every management situation, there are right and wrong approaches for handling difficult people.
Learn how sometimes smaller things in our lives make huge impact and you can take some learnings on a personal and professional level by following me on LinkedIn and on our official website. Also follow us on social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
Muhammad Sajwani is the Founder, Managing Director and Principal Consultant at Evolve HR which aims at transforming, enriching and evolving Human Capital of Pakistan. At Evolve HR, him and his team thrives in challenging assumptions that hinder organisational aspirations, by creating innovative solutions that yield maximum impact, scalability & benefit to a wider base of stakeholders. As a Business Coach and Organisational Consultant, Sajwani knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth. | https://medium.com/@muhammadsajwani/who-are-the-employees-who-always-complain-bcb79ab791c2 | ['Muhammad Sajwani'] | 2021-04-22 07:09:59.971000+00:00 | ['Complaints', 'Employees', 'Frustration', 'Leadership', 'Performance'] |
The Monty Hall Problem: You Really Need to Switch | Story
Feel free to skip next five paragraphs.
This last Thanksgiving at the turkey table, someone thought it would be fun to quiz people on their game shows knowledge. And it got engaging as soon as it started. As this trivia went on, I searched my mind for a game show I could ask about, which is funny because I don’t really watch game shows. I couldn’t think of many. In fact, I could only think of one. It’s called Let’s Make a Deal.
I knew Let’s Make a Deal because of the Monty Hall problem, a brain teaser loosely based on the game show. The problem was something I had been introduced to four years prior in a probability class. At the dinner table, I mentioned the show, described the Monty Hall problem, and asked what everyone would do. Switch doors or nah? Some said they wouldn’t. Some said they would, correctly anticipating it was a trick question.
As I opened my mouth to explain why switching is the way, I remembered something. Actually, two somethings: i) I was rusty on the logic and the math, and ii) not everyone had a mathy background. So when I finished, my explanation was fuzzy and people were even more confused. ‘Why isn’t it just a 50% chance?’, someone asked, a very common mental block for a lot of people that attempt to understand the problem.
On-and-off, I spent the next day (maybe two, I forget) reading on the problem and explaining it in all sorts of ways. I became unreasonably invested in it (I am blogging about it, ain’t I?). Finally, after sitting on my knees for too long, pointing and scribbling on a piece of paper, somebody’s face brightened. Someone finally got it! It’s not a 50–50 chance of winning.
My non-mathy explanation made sense, so I decided to share it here with everyone else. Hopefully it makes sense to you too :)
Description of the problem (straight out of Wikipedia)
Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say №1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say №3, which [always] has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door №2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Let’s reason with 100 marbles (no math!)
A lot of people that come across the Monty Hall problem have a hard time understanding why the chance of winning is not 50%. That’s the first thing they think of. I know I did. To see why it’s not, let’s not think about 3 doors. Let’s do 100 doors. Or actually, let’s think in terms of marbles.
Our 100 marbles are identical in shape and size, but one is red and the rest are green. We put all the marbles in an opaque large bag so we can’t see the colors. I then ask you to draw one marble and put it in another smaller opaque bag. You do this without looking, so you don’t know the color of the marble in the smaller bag.
Which of the two bags would you pick if you wanted the bag that was more likely to have the red marble? The large bag or the smaller bag? Hopefully you see why it’s ridiculous to pick the smaller bag (with just one marble!). The smaller bag has a smaller chance of having the red marble (not 50%).
If you see where I am going with this, you can try finish the reasoning on your own and convince yourself. Otherwise, read on :)
Let’s say I (pretend I am the host, ok?) have the larger bag and you’re keeping the smaller bag. I ask you to draw another marble from the bigger bag (now with 99 marbles) and swap it with your older marble. Would you do it? Let’s say you’re not sure. Or let’s pretend you decide not to. (FYI: Swap them.)
To make it more interesting, I try something else: I take the larger bag, turn around so you can’t see, remove and throw away 98 marbles that are not red. Each of the two bags has one marble now. Would you give up your older marble for the one marble in the larger bag now? Hint: I am trying to help you win! Reminder: you want the red marble.
We have established that the larger bag has a higher chance of containing the red marble. Me removing 98 marbles that are not red and letting you pick the last remaining marble is essentially the same thing as you picking the larger bag, opening it, and looking for the red marble (with your eyes open!). Again, I am only removing marbles that are not red, so you should be pretty confident that you’re more likely to end up with the red marble if you give up your older marble.
If we pretend for a sec that the red marble was indeed in the larger bag (again, very likely), me removing all non-red marbles leaves you with the red marble if you pick the larger bag.
You can apply the same logic to three doors in the original problem. You select a door. The host reveals the one that has a goat in it (always the goat one!). Should you switch to the third door? You can pretend that you and the host are on the same team. Your team picks two doors instead of one (larger bag). Your teammate, the host, tells you which door has the goat (removes the 98 marbles) and lets you pick the last unrevealed door (larger bag with one marble).
Hopefully, you can now see that the door you picked initially (or the smaller bag) have a lower chance of having the car (or the red marble). It’s not 50%. Ponder the explanation above a bit more if you need to. Or read on if you want an explanation with more numbers.
Continuing with 100 marbles (with some math thrown in)
In the larger bag of marbles, any of the 99 remaining marbles could be the red marble. It’s a 99% chance that any of the marbles in the larger bag is red. That’s huuuge! On the other hand, there is only a 1% chance it’s in the smaller bag. If I, the host, take the larger bag and remove 98 marbles that are not red, I am making it easier for you to pick a red marble by removing the 98 that aren’t red.
The chance that the remaining marble in the larger bag is red is still 99%.
In terms of three doors, any of the remaining 2 doors could have your next car. Or it’s a 2/3 chance that you will win a car if you give up your first selection and take both of the two remaining doors. I am always opening the door with a goat, which is just like picking both doors and discarding the one without the car. On the other hand, you have a 1/3 chance of winning if you stay with your first door. It’s a 2/3 v. a 1/3 chance of winning. Not 1/2 v. 1/2.
If this is not a 50–50 chance scenario, what is then?
I will leave this part to you, but I will ask a question to get you started. Consider a scenario where there is initially only two doors, one with a goat and one with a car. You pick your door. I then add a third door, open it, and reveal a goat. Should you switch to the second unopened door? Does it matter?
You can think of this in terms of initial probability distribution and how it affects results.
If still not convinced: | https://medium.com/@revotesha/the-monty-hall-problem-you-really-need-to-switch-fc1d67c0eb29 | ['Revo Tesha'] | 2020-12-27 21:57:44.199000+00:00 | ['Monty Hall', 'Math', 'Towards Data Science', 'Probability', 'Puzzle'] |
How direct sourcing of shea nuts helps smallholder farmers and the environment | Shea fruits are without a doubt, an important raw ingredient for food and cosmetics. Shea fruit (Nilotica Species) grown in Uganda has especially high concentrations of Oleic acids, fatty acids, and vitamins, making it an ideal ingredient for cosmetics.
Whereas the benefits of shea butter for consumers are well known, little information is given on the importance of shea fruit for smallholder farmers and the environment. This is especially true in East Africa, where shea butter production is far less developed than in West Africa.
Smallholder shea farmers in Uganda
How do smallholder farmers benefit from the direct sourcing of shea nuts?
Let’s take a look at an area called the Ajia sub-county within the Arua district (West Nile). This is an area where over 10,000 shea trees are growing well and are shaping a beautiful wild landscape. The shea trees in this region produce their first fruit when they are about ten to fifteen years old. By the time trees reach the age between twenty and thirty years old, they start bearing fruit at full capacity and can maintain that capacity for about two hundred years!
Wild-growing Shea
Smallholder farmers in this area sell their shea kernels directly to agribusinesses like PELERE GROUP, woman-led agribusiness with 40 employees. The impact of the agribusinesses and their direct sourcing strategy on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and the environment in this area is impressive, despite the fact that the agribusinesses buying from the farmers are still relatively small.
PELERE: Example of the impact
PELERE sources about 250 tonnes of shea kernels from the smallholder farmers every year to produce 80 tonnes of high-quality Shea butter cosmetics.
PELERE pays the smallholder farmers about 4 times as much for the shea kernels compared to the local traders!
Thus, the cooperation with PELERE provides sufficient, stable annual income for 850 farmer households or about around 5.100 people. The same amount of kernel would only provide the same level of income to 215 farmers if sold to local traders.
Since shea nuts production allows intercropping the farmers involved can also continue growing cassava, beans, simsim (sesame), and maize for consumption of the household, also known as subsistence farming.
Contract negotiations between smallholder farmers and PELERE TEAM
Besides sustainable income for farmers, direct sourcing of shea nuts can also provide a significant number of jobs. PELERE is considering new contract farming with landowners owning over 10,000 Shea trees. If both sides succeed, it will result in hundreds of new jobs for workers caring about the shea trees and the related shea kernel production.
But why is shea nut production good for the environment?
Cutting down trees for charcoal production is common in many regions like in Ajia. Shea trees are especially very suitable for charcoal production. Because only a very small amount of shea trees are utilized for shea butter production, the value of these trees is mostly unknown. However, this value can be easily quantified:
Cutting down a typical shea tree results in 4–6 bags of charcoal worth each 30,000 UGX, thus in total about $ 40 USD per tree.
Such trees produce around 250 kg shea kernel per annum, resulting in about $ 140 USD income each year → One single shea tree provides $ 700. USD of steady income over 5 years compared to the one-time $ 40 USD when turned into charcoal.
Ajia: One region, two landscapes
Shea trees mainly used for charcoal production
Shea trees utilized for commercial shea kernel production
How do smallholder farmers benefit from increased transparency?
PELERE is a growing business with an increased focus on attracting international bulk buyers. For such buyers, direct sourcing, environmental protection, and social responsibility of raw material matter a lot. Thus, PELERE is using phy2App to communicate the information that potential buyers are looking for. An increase in sales of at least 20% is expected, due to the ability to assure transparency of Pelere Group shea butter products, despite the troubles caused by COVID-19 time.
What does a 20% increase in sales of the agribusiness mean for the smallholder farmers in the Ajia region?
Additional annual off-take of 50 tonnes Shea kernels, worth about $ 25,000 USD
Additional 165 smallholder farmers receive a sufficient annual income, assuring sufficient livelihood of 1000 household members
Allowing kids of these households to go to school instead of working in the field
Group of smallholder shea farmers in Uganda
Let’s summarize the key fact | https://medium.com/anteja/how-direct-sourcing-of-shea-nuts-helps-smallholder-farmers-and-the-environment-a80701f3fce7 | ['Jon Goriup Dermastia'] | 2021-04-13 11:37:59.701000+00:00 | ['Phy2app', 'Value Chain', 'Impact', 'Shea Butter', 'Smallholderfarmers'] |
5 Tools To Decode Your Target Audience | You can’t build your audience by accident. When there are hundreds and millions of people out there, finding the right one is the biggest challenge.
You need dedicated efforts and a methodical approach to find the right audience who will be interested in your products and services.
When you are planning to build high value content that can generate interest from your audience, knowing your audience is the first and the only thing that you should care about.
Chances are that you already know something about your target audience, but do you know enough?
Ask yourself some key questions such as who is the user of your product? Which age group is more likely to use your product? Who are they following on social media? Who is their hero on social media? When are they most active on social media?
Without answering these questions you are unlikely to find the right audience, thereby failing in your attempt to market your product to the potential customers.
Marketers are constantly on the lookout for new techniques and tools to identify and engage with their target customers so that they can offer them something valuable.
Related: How to Increase Twitter Engagement
With the advent of technology, variety of tools has made it possible and easy for the marketers to conduct the search for their right audience with much more ease and perfection.
Here are 5 tools that can help you to decode your target audience.
Google analytics is a tool that helps you to find out the interests of your audience. You can extract data relating to your audience demographics that includes age, location, gender, behavior, device used, interests, language and much more.
With the details extracted by Google analytics, it’s easy to find the context thereby helping to find exactly the audience who is interested in your products and services. This is a list of people who have higher likelihood to become your customers.
The data provided by Google analytics will offer your opportunity to connect well by planning the perfect campaigns that are most suitable for your audience. You can share the right type of content that will be useful and informative with help of this audience data.
2. Cloohawk
Cloohawk is an intelligent social media assistant that will assist you to grow the right audience for your products and services. The tool has the ability to dig up and generate a list of people who are most aligned to your interests. These are your potential followers.
Cloohawk can locate your target audience. It looks for people who are active and who relate to your niche. The list of people is derived from Twitter based on their profile, their areas of interests and their recent activities. You can generate a list of potential audience who are taking about your interest.
Furthermore, Cloohawk offers automation features that allow you to automatically follow people based on their interests and behavior. Knowing your target audience’s interest is the key to your products and services, as well as to design your marketing efforts to meet their needs.
3. Audiense
Audiense is yet another social media management tool that is designed to identify the right audience that is most relevant to your business. This tool is capable of finding large audience that is perfectly matched to your brand.
Audiense will assist you to not just identify the audience, but also to personalize the messages and deliver it effectively to your audience.
With the help of the social data available, the tool will analyze the interests and behavior to understand and shortlist the audience most suitable for your brand.
The filter options in the tools will allow you to create a report that is most relevant and thereby enable you to focus on the most important audience segments. The tools will analyse all connections between people with the help of machine learning and will instantly give your target audience.
4. AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is a social media management tool that enables you to understand your audience. From a single platform, AgoraPulse enables you to engage with your audience and followers.
This tool gives you the capability to segment your audience based on age, gender, interest, location, industry , spend or whatever that matters the most for your business.
AgoraPulse allows you to consolidated information regarding your audience who is viewing and engaging with your business. This information can be used to reach out and serve your target audience better.
The tool helps you to customize messages and texts based on earlier conversations so that you can reach out to the potential customers with useful information based on their past conversations.
5. QuickSprout
A successful social media marketer knows how to clearly identify the target audience.
QuickSprout is a social media management tool to help marketers to identify the target audience. This tool can be used to conduct research on various factors thereby coming up with a customer persona.
Unique and individual profiles of your customers based on their likes and behavior is called as a customer persona. QuickSprout can help you to build a personas that will represent the ideal audience that any marketer would wish to have. The tool will prepare the personas based on based on demographics such as interest, language, age, location, gender, education, spending habits, etc.
With the help of the unique personas of your audience, you can design and optimize the content that has to be shared with your audience. You can also build audience specific marketing campaigns based on the personas.
Conclusion
When it comes to picking the right audience, there’s only one rule — Choose the audience that you care about.
You may get swayed towards more than one audience that could work for your brand, but stay focused and pick the relevant one at the end.
Marketers generally tend to do the mistake of trying to please many people. But that will not work.
Don’t build an audience who don’t want to buy your product.
Social media management tools help you to find customers based on interests, geographic distribution, gender, age ranges, purchasing power and habits, behavior and many other insights.
The more specific and targeted you are, better are your chances of finding the right audience. | https://medium.com/cloohawk/5-tools-to-decode-your-target-audience-4b0d199ce313 | ['Uma Bhat'] | 2018-05-04 06:01:32.459000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Social Media Marketing', 'Marketers', 'Target Audience', 'Tools'] |
Amber Cocoon | Amber Cocoon
Disclaimer: My stories are of the ‘naughty’ nature and intended for adults only. If you are not of legal age, are easily offended or not interested in my kinky writings, please turn away now.
Main themes of this story are: big breasts, breast bondage, breast peril, fantasy
Amber Cocoon is a joint project of Gulavisual and myself. We developed the storyline together, he created awesome illustrations and I contributed the text. The story is based on his OC Yeina and … well, see for yourself.
Format is a bit unusual, but we found a massive, vertical image file works well for us. To read the story, just download the files and open them in an image viewer. Looks like the built-in viewer of Google Drive is displaying the files with reduced resolution which unfortunately makes them unreadable.
Amber Cocoon Chapter 1, Amber Cocoon Chapter 2, Amber Cocoon Chapter 3, Amber Cocoon Chapter 4, Amber Cocoon Chapter 5, Amber Cocoon Chapter 6, Amber Cocoon Chapter 7a, Amber Cocoon Chapter 7b, Amber Cocoon Chapter 8a, Amber Cocoon Chapter 8b, Amber Cocoon Chapter 8c
Amber Cocoon Text-Only Version | https://medium.com/@qexiqex/amber-cocoon-c3f8cfa6f42f | [] | 2020-12-21 08:45:57.420000+00:00 | ['Nsfw', 'Breast Fetish', 'Erotica', 'Graphic Novel'] |
Should You Ever Sleep With a Co-Worker? | I broke every rule when I got involved with a co-worker.
When we first me we didn’t yet work together. But after we got involved, we also started to work together — and it got weird until it stopped being weird.
We met at a party — the Christmas party of his company, I was just passing by, as I knew one of his colleagues. We used to work for the same company, but at different points in time. I heard of him and I knew his name, but I am not sure he knew mine. I didn’t really care. He wasn’t even my type.
The party was slow and lame, there was nothing going on. I was thinking about leaving soon. I was sipping a vodka-soda when he sat down next to me and he tried to impress me. I was the new girl, so everyone was hitting on me. It’s kind of typical. He was keeping me company, getting me drinks, telling me heartfelt stories of saved stray dogs and stories unexpected good deeds from unexpected people. I was surprised. I was having fun, so, I stayed. He managed to impress me after all.
We started to drink shots, one after the other, chatting a lot, laughing, enjoying each other’s company a little too obviously.
We went to a music club where we danced and drank some more — not that we needed it, but because there was no reason not to. We went to get another round of drinks for the group, and not to lose him in the crowd I took his hand and followed him. We got to the bar and I didn’t let go of his hand. He looked at me surprised, lifted our hands and asked me with his eyebrows. I started to speak but there was too much noise, so when he leaned closer, instead of telling him my explanation I pulled him even closer and I kissed him on the lips. He looked at me with an incredulous look on his face… then kissed me back. I never let go of his hand.
We headed back to the others, holding hands and he asked me why I kissed him — shouting because of the blaring music. I shrugged and smiled and told him that I felt like it and I guessed he wouldn’t mind. He said he didn’t mind it — which was obvious as we were still holding hands.
I have no idea when we lost the others and I have no idea what time it was. We kissed some more, and he said we should go home. I agreed.
I had a blackout in the taxi.
Next thing I knew was waking up in the morning. I peeked from half open eyelids. My clothes were scattered on the floor and I was naked under the cover. Unknown place, unknown room. And there he lied next to me, equally naked. I was mortified. I tried not to move. I was trying to put together the missing pieces from last night.
He stirred, turned towards me, lookat at me and smiled. Good morning — he sounded cheerful. Not too surprised.
I couldn’t even look at him, I mumbled good morning pulling the cover up to my nose, as if it could save me from feeling humiliated. He brought me a painkiller, asked me if I was cold. He put another cover on me. He made me breakfast, French toast with tea. I still couldn’t move. I was wondering if I was still drunk, or the shock of waking up here already sobered me up.
We ate breakfast in bed. It was delicious. He lent me a T-shirt instead of my little black dress I had on before it somehow magicked off me. I was trying to cover myself as I was putting the T-shirt on. I had no idea how to behave.
We got back to bed, and we watched videos on his phone.
After a while I mustered up enough courage and asked: Ahem, I know it sounds cheesy, but what happened last night?
He laughed and he said he had absolutely no idea from the point we arrived home.
Great!
There was another question killing me:
“And did we have sex?”
He frowned and said that he didn’t think so. But he added that we must have tried to have sex, as he never sleeps naked, and yet he woke up naked.
We laughed. The fact that he had no idea either lifted the burden.
The fact that we tried makes me smile — and I am not sure why. I like this guy.
We chatted some more, laughed some more. He has a wicked sense of humour. He is funny. I snuggled to his chest and we slept. He took me home later and we befriended each other on Facebook. | https://medium.com/swlh/should-you-ever-sleep-with-a-co-worker-9f241e60e6fb | ['Octavia Morrison'] | 2019-12-17 15:36:49.675000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Work', 'Love', 'Business', 'Dating'] |
Dear Future, I’m not ready. | So I just completed my final year of high school and now I don’t know what to do next?
A confused future
My result was supposed to come at the end of May but due to this pandemic situation outside, I can expect it until the end of July. When my finals were approaching to an end, I already had a plan in my mind about the course that I’ll choose for my further studies. But now as there is a lot of time in hand I exposed myself to many future options due to which I am stuck now. So before I tell you all the possibilities of the future, let me talk a little about my past.
When I was very young, I looked up to my mom as a role model, who’s a teacher. She taught at the same school where I studied. So I was impressed by how she has control of 100 students at the same time. And the epic thing was that children would listen to her. But later that point of view of mine changed. Due to two reasons. One because I read it somewhere that the future of education is digital. Another reason is that I got a new aim.
When I was in middle school, I watched this movie called “Gravity”. I was very much inspired by it. Fact: I didn’t understand a thing. But I was so fascinated by the space, the costume, the alien language they spoke. I mean I just fell in love with the white ghost. So I did a little digging on the internet and made it my dream to go to NASA and become an Astronaut. But later I forgot about it. In middle school, my ultimate goal was just to finish school with satisfactory grades. Until “Interstellar” came out. I was stunned. I was amazed by those amazing facts, theories that made me wanna compete for my future, and I even learned morse code. I again dug up on the internet. I did all the possible research on how to become an astronaut. I was all ready. But by the time I completed my 10th grade, I don’t know what came into my mind, and I gave up the idea of being an astronaut but picked up the idea of being a scientist. The word scientist is an exaggeration, so I’ll say I was more into research things. I thought I wanted to learn more about space science, the planets, the universe, and beyond that. So on that vision, I took PCM as the core subjects from 11th and 12th grade. But I didn’t want to be enclosed within those subjects I wanted to keep myself attached to the other activities too like programming, language learning, graphic designing, etc.
During those 2 years, I kept my interest in different fields alive like joined programming contests, took online law classes(very few), even forensic science, learned music, participated in singing competitions, wrote songs, and poetry too, did painting, participated in Google Summer of code, also International Space Olympiad, got my hands on 3D computer graphics, started a podcast but never posted after 3 episodes, even wrote down a book(well, can’t say a book cause its only 10,000 words). After doing all those things, I think I lost my passion for what I was supposed to be. As I watched a lot of spy and detective movies and series, I also had a hunch that maybe I can go for this detective thing. So I did a little research on it like how do become a detective, etc. Maybe it was all just teen curiosity.
As my finals were approaching people asked me what you wanna do after this. I told them that it’s simple. BSc in Physics(hon.), MSc in AstroPhysics, and then Ph.d. It sounded so easy. But it’s not. Most of the chances are that I’ll end up being a teacher. And I don’t want that. If I follow this path I can also go into research things and part-time teachers ain’t bad also. But I don’t know I think I’ll be confined within those walls. My other interests will be gone. I won’t be able to pursue them. In short maybe I’m not that passionate about physics. I also often had thought of pursuing journalism as I have good reading and speaking skills, but not so sure about this path.
Now your future path also depends on your parents. What do my parents want?
According to my mom I should go in that field that will provide me a Stable job later, especially in the government sector. Because there is money. So my mom wants me to either go for simple Bsc in physics or agriculture cause that’s the trend nowadays. Then later I should give the tests for banking or civil servants etc. Because it pays a lot. I gave it a little thought. I might consider it. I’m not so sure. My father wants me to pursue a course that is a high demand in the future and is respectable. In short he’s okay with whatever I do.
According to my brother, I should take psychology. Well it’s a cool name but a stressful one. But it’s not a bad option. It’s actually great. For that I can do Bsc in mathematics and then MSc in psychology. Math is my weak subject so it’s an opportunity for me to get my grip on it. On the other hand, I want to work in forensics at least once in my lifetime. Following this path, I can work as a forensic psychologist. As I even want the ability to study people and help them, I can go for a clinical psychologist. But when I researched it, I guess getting a license to practice is a bit lengthy. Not everyone gets success in this field. Seeing a lot of videos where students dropping off this field makes me want to give up this idea. But I should not worry that far.
Ultimately, this question ends up on me.
What do I want?
I need a course where my interests, curiosity won’t be limited. Such a path in which I can study beyond my expectations. I wanna know about everything. Where I can explore beyond the emptiness. When I read an article about science, I could read it with passion. When I read about human behavior, I could read it with zeal. I want such a field where I can help people. A field that can answer my questions. A field that explains our existence. I want a field that probably doesn’t exist. . . . But I can create it.
In this lockdown situation, I dug a little on the internet about all the courses that are in high demand. And it’s confusing. A lot. So I took my mind away from it and thought of learning something new. I am learning many things these days. I have a love for learning languages so I am learning Korean right now and it’s going smoothly so far. I am regular in it. I started my Podcast and even a blog. Also I am working on my next book. I accidentally discovered these webtoons on the internet and now I read them occasionally. Inspired from it, I wrote a story and currently learning how to make webtoons. And its a headache. I think I can take it as a part-time job. I have no idea how to start. I am also improving my vocals as I am a singer. Gotta work on that. Every morning I watch cooking recipes and try to make them so now I am a cook too. I am even learning how to do animation which is a lot of time-consuming. And I have completely forgotten that I have to study for the competitive exam.
Conclusion | https://medium.com/@SwastikaaSharma/dear-future-im-not-ready-a07f0fa3025f | [] | 2020-04-23 06:44:13.691000+00:00 | ['Jobs', 'Careers', 'Future'] |
ECMA Standards and Javascript | In my conversations with other Software Engineers, I felt that there was a general sense of confusion about the distinction between ECMA, Javascript, ES6, TypeScript, etc. I feel it is important to know what these terms mean for every Software Engineer.
First off, what is ECMA? ECMA is a standards organization for information and communications systems. ECMA has been responsible for standardization for languages and frameworks like C#, Javascript, etc. Since this post is only limited to Javascript, let’s dive into it.
ECMAScript = ES:
ECMAScript is a standard for scripting languages started by Netscape.
Javascript and some other languages like JScript and ActionScript are based on the ECMAScript standard.
JavaScript = JS:
JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript Standard.
The core features of Javascript are based on the ECMAScript standard, but Javascript also has other additional features that are not in the ECMA specifications.
JavaScript was submitted to ECMA for standardization but due to trademark issues with the name Javascript the standard became called ECMAScript.
Every browser has a JavaScript interpreter.
ES5 = ECMAScript 5:
Released in December 2009 (v5) and updated in 2011 (v5.1), ES5 is a version of the ECMAScript and is the JavaScript we use in the browser today.
ES5 does not require a build step (transpilers) to transform it into something that browsers can understand and run.
Features like ‘strict mode’ and ‘accessors’ were introduced in this version.
ES6 = ECMAScript 6 = ES2015 = ECMAScript 2015:
Released in June 2015, ES2015 is the latest version of the ECMAScript. ES6 is the next iteration of JavaScript, but is not supported completely in today’s browsers.
This update adds significant new syntax for writing complex applications, including classes and modules. Other features that were introduced are for/of loops, arrow functions, etc.
In order for ES6 code to run in browsers, there is an additional step of transpiling into ES5 code by one of the available transpilers. I have described one just below.
BabelJS:
BabelJS is the most popular transpiler that transforms ES6 Javascript code to ES5 code making it possible to use ES6 features.
BabelJS takes ES2015 file and transforms it into ES5 file.
Babel is built out of plugins and is very configurable.
TypeScript and CoffeeScript:
TypeScript and CoffeeScript add syntactic sugar on top of ES5 and then are transpiled into ES5 compliant JavaScript.
I hope these points will help you understand the differences between different versions of the ECMA standard and help use the features of Javascript better. | https://medium.com/atom-platform/understanding-ecma-standards-and-javascript-better-6585e482b254 | ['Kunal Thorat'] | 2018-06-02 22:44:17.941000+00:00 | ['Ecmascript', 'JavaScript'] |
Why Quantity Should Be Your Priority (Redux) | Why Quantity Should Be Your Priority (Redux)
The biggest lie we’ve been told is that we have to choose between quantity and quality. Quantity and quality are not always tradeoffs. In fact, quantity can actually support mastery and quality. If we look through history, it’s not a coincidence that some of the most prominent artists are immensely prolific:
Dean Keith Simonton has written about the relationship between quantity and quality at a master’s level, concluding, “Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity.” Even masters enlisted the support of quantity to shoot at the moving target of quality.
More importantly, not everything these masters created were great. The only reason they even became recognized as “masters” might be due to one or two breakthroughs. We could look at Thomas Edison, known for the first practical and inexpensive incandescent lightbulb. We forget the more than 1,500 patents he applied for (he successfully acquired 1,000 of them), with major failures like the concrete houses.
Quantity is far from a guarantee, and certainly isn’t the only strategy to create something that people want. But, it’s the most reliable one. Here are three reasons why:
Quantity provides structure
A week before I wrote this, Austin Kleon wrote a blog post about quantity leading to quality. He writes, “The frequency of my work — showing up at regular intervals, without worrying about results — has actually lead to better results.” Similarly, Ryan Holiday wrote, “Quantity increases quality,” encouraging readers to use quantity to commit to the workload necessary to master their craft.
Lindsay Jean Thomson, facilitator of The 100 Day Project, wrote a similar idea, “If you want quality, start with quantity.” Even during this phase of early work, the results are real — there are 1.7 million posts with #The100DayProject on Instagram, each one documenting the progression of a person making something every day. Alex Kallaway and #100DaysofCode is another great example.
When you focus on quantity, you create, release, promote, intake feedback, and improve. Quantity works. Practice works. Consistency works.
Quantity provides motivation
Creative blocks happen when expectations of results get too high for one project to achieve. It feels like your back is against the wall; “This has to work, or I’m giving up.” Derek Sivers describes this as the failure mindset.
Quantity keeps you creating and releasing new work — which encourages you to keep going. The expectations for each one may be high, but tempered by the fact that you know there’s another opportunity coming right along tomorrow or the day after. Instead of putting all your energy and hopes into a single attempt, you split it into many.
Again, this isn’t the only strategy that works. Some people do succeed because they put their effort and energy into the single attempt. But I would suggest that many more fail with the same approach, and would have benefited from a larger portfolio of smaller bets.
Quantity encourages experimentation
Author Ray Bradbury said, “If you can write one short story a week — it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones.” In Chase, Chance, and Creativity, James H. Austin writes about four types of chance; one of them (the Kettering Principle, known as Chance II) is about motion — the premise that unluckiness runs out when you keep stirring things the way only you can.
This is what Simonton covers in his research. He defines creative products as combinations of originality, utility, and surprise. Simple enough, but it’s often difficult to maximize all three variables; for example, original ideas have a lower probability of being useful, and often surprise requires going through a lot of trial and error (like Edison’s lightbulb). Plus, there may be fragments of brilliance amidst a poor combination of work — say, a great part of a bad song, or a great turn of phrase in a rather boring blog post.
Even brilliant artists have misguided perceptions of their own work. Creating a lot of work allows for many different combinations of these creative elements and ideas to mix, ultimately creating one product that expresses what you really want to communicate, or really makes an impact on people.
Make a lot of projects
Game designer Nick Bentley writes about 100:10:1 principle, where he writes down 100 game concepts in a notebook (sometimes in just one day), picks 10 concepts and develops them, then picking the most promising concept and developing it further.
In a sense, this is a framework that helps facilitate the trial and error nature of creativity; when Pablo Picasso was painting Guernica, he went through 45 different sketches before settling on the final composition and painting.
Similarly, creative designer Joe Perez shows this process for designing the Cruel Summer album cover for Kanye West, in which they went through a whopping 325 revisions in 6 months.
At the end of the day, quantity is one way of structuring other important, but more ephemeral things — practice, experimentation, motivation — which build your skillset, open up your mind to new ideas, and build your reputation with the rest of the world.
Perfection leads to procrastination. Aim for attainable, or even acceptable, instead — and you’ll improve your skills and work much faster with the structure of quantity. | https://medium.com/@herbertlui/why-quantity-should-be-your-priority-redux-38dcd8ff3350 | ['Herbert Lui'] | 2020-12-15 16:24:28.963000+00:00 | ['Learning To Code', 'Productivity Hacks', 'Create', 'Creative Process', 'Creativity'] |
JavaScript Best Practices — Strings and Functions | Photo by Gábor Szűts on Unsplash
JavaScript is a very forgiving language. It’s easy to write code that runs but has mistakes in it.
In this article, we’ll look at using template strings and the best way to define functions.
Use Template Strings
We should use template strings whenever possible. There’re many benefits to using them.
We can put in JavaScript expressions right inside the string, and we can save single and double quotes for quoting text inside the string.
Also, it can be used to create multiline strings since we can add line breaks by just typing them in rather than adding an extra line break character explicitly to do that.
For instance, we can use template strings as follows:
const name = 'jane';
const greeting = `Hi, ${name}`;
In the code above, we have a template string that has the expression name interpolated in it. We do that by using the ${} as the delimiter for interpolating expressions.
We don’t have any spaces between the interpolation delimiter and the expression itself.
This spacing is good because we already have the delimiter to separate the expression from the rest of the string, so we don’t need more space between the expression and the delimiter.
We can create a multiline string as follows:
const name = 'jane';
const greeting = `Hi,
${name}`;
Then we get:
Hi,
jane
as the value of greeting .
As we can see, all we have to do is type in an extra line break. We didn’t have to type out the escaped line break character to create a line break.
A template string is delimited by backticks, so we can use single and double quotes for quoting text inside the string.
Use Function Expressions Instead of Function Declarations
In JavaScript, there’re 2 ways to define functions. One is function expressions and the other is function declarations.
Function declarations are defined as follows:
function foo() {
// ...
}
We have the function keyword with the name foo and we didn’t assign it to a variable.
Function declarations are hoisted to the top so they can be referenced anywhere in our code.
Function expressions are defined by creating a function and then assigning it to a variable.
For instance, we can create function expressions as follows:
const bar = function() {
// ...
} const baz = () => {
//...
}
In the code above, we defined traditional and arrow functions and assigned each to a variable.
These aren’t hoisted so they can only be referenced after they’re defined.
Function expressions are better because we don’t have to worry about the confusion that arises when we have to think about hoisting.
Hoisting isn’t good for readability since hoisted functions can be referenced anywhere in our code.
Function expressions also work with all kinds of functions rather than just traditional functions.
We can also put a name in the function, but it’s not very useful since we can’t reference it with the name after it’s been assigned to a variable.
For instance, if we have the following code:
const bar = function foo() {
// ...
}
Then we have to call the function as bar instead of foo . Therefore the extra name isn’t all that useful.
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
Wrap Immediately Invoked Function Expressions in Parentheses
Immediately Invoked Function Expressions (IIFEs) are functions that are defined and then run immediately afterward.
They’re useful for encapsulating data in the olden days, but now it’s still useful for creating async functions and calling them immediately.
We should wrap IIFEs in parentheses to make sure that everyone knows that it’s an IIFE.
For instance, we can create an async IIFE as follows:
((async () => {
const foo = await Promise.resolve(1);
console.log(foo);
})())
In the code above, we wrapped in our async function in parentheses so that we can call it immediately with the opening and closing parentheses.
Then we wrapped the whole expression in parentheses so everyone knows that it’ll run immediately.
Conclusion
If we create strings, we should use template strings. They let us interpolate expressions in a string and frees single and double quotes for quoting text.
We should define functions as function expressions instead of function declarations so that we can only call them after they’re defined. This way, it’s much easier to read since the flow actually goes in sequence.
IIFEs should be wrapped in parentheses so that we all know that it’s an IIFE.
A note from Plain English
Did you know that we have four publications and a YouTube channel? You can find all of this from our homepage at plainenglish.io — show some love by giving our publications a follow and subscribing to our YouTube channel! | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/javascript-best-practices-strings-and-functions-1dc905de6a55 | ['John Au-Yeung'] | 2020-05-23 16:10:45.893000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Web Development', 'Technology', 'Software Development'] |
Amazon Listing Optimization — CaptainBI Blog | A good listing can increase your product ranking and increase your sales. Hence listing optimization is really important. So let’s check the principle of listing optimization and get the method to better optimize your product listing.
Amazon A9 Algorithm: Listing Optimization’S Principle
The A9 algorithm determines the ranking of products on Amazon. The A9 algorithm observes a series of data such as buyers’ past browsing habits, including the position of the mouse on the page. Amazon records all the data and selects the most relevant results for the user’s search from the Amazon product pool.
The three core pillars of Amazon’s A9 algorithm are conversion rate, relevance, buyer satisfaction rate, and retention rate.
Factors related to Amazon’s measurement of conversion rate include sales ranking, reviews, QA, image size, quality, and price.
Relevance determines that the A9 algorithm directs product pages to specific search keywords.
Listing optimization to improve relevance includes the title, bullet points, and product description.
The principle of Amazon’s A9 algorithm is to maximize buyer revenue, which is also the source of Amazon’s revenue.
Listing optimization to improve buyer retention rate includes feedback and order defect rate.
All in all, the principle of Listing optimization is to use the A9 algorithm to continuously optimize the relevance of Listing and search keywords, order conversion rate, buyer satisfaction rate, and retention rate so that more products can be displayed in front of buyers in a wider range. This is a staged process that requires continuous optimization by the seller.
Tips for Amazon Listing Optimization
1. Product title
The product title allows shoppers to quickly decide whether to leave to find other products or stay on the page to learn more about the product. Effective product titles can have a positive impact on product ranking in search results.
Should do
The number of characters. The English input method does not exceed 200 characters. Use related keywords. You can use keyword tools to identify keywords that should be included in the title. Describe product details. Explain the benefits of the product. You can use this opportunity to let potential customers understand what they will get by purchasing the product. Put the most important information first. You need to make sure that the product title starts with the most important information. This means that the first word you use in the title should be related to the brand and product; add other descriptions later to help shoppers better understand the characteristics of the product. The measurement unit must be spelled out completely (such as Ounce, Inch, Gram, etc.).
Should not do
Do not use sales terms such as Hot Sale, New Arrival, Promotion, Free Shipping. No cumbersome, no overlap, no spelling mistakes. Capitalize the first letter (except for prepositional articles such as for, with, and, of, or and other meaningless words), do not capitalize all of them, and use “5” instead of Five. With little or no punctuation, do not use special symbols, if necessary, you can use spaces instead. Generally, the title cannot be changed at will.
2. Product images
When customers shopping online, they can not touch products in person. In this way, sellers need to help customers imagine what the product will look like in their hands, and this is where product images come into play.
Should do
Upload as many pictures as possible. Amazon allows 9 pictures to be uploaded, 7 of which will be displayed on the product listing. When customers click on the photo gallery on the product page, they will see the remaining 2 pictures. Show the actual use process of the product. life-like photos of the product will help potential customers imagine what it would be like to use the product in the real world, and also help to add a new perspective to the product. Show products from different angles. You can use images of different angles and sizes to help shoppers better understand the product. Doing so can help potential customers feel more comfortable and confident when making purchasing decisions. Use high-quality images. The competition on the Amazon platform is fierce. If your product belongs to the saturated category, then you need to hire a professional photographer to take high-quality, high-resolution product photos. High-quality photos can make potential customers trust your product more. Upload photos of product changes. If your product has different colors or changes, you can add photos to illustrate the product to customers. Don’t leave anything to the customer’s imagination.
Get more skills for product image optimization.
3. Bullet point
Amazon’s bullet point is actually a short description, highlighting important product selling points, such as feature introduction, system support, color size, specific use, etc. For example, some products are suitable for holiday gifts.
Also, you can use more keywords in this section to help increase your product ranking.
Should do
Keyword. At the beginning of each line, try to use short keywords to describe the core content. Outstanding advantages. The first line must be the most important advantage of the product, which is to solve the problem of consumers concern most.
4. Product description
The product description is to provide consumers with more specific details about the product and help people better understand the benefits of buying and using the product.
Should do
The sentence should not be too long, keep it between 15–25 words. Focus on benefits and functions. Mainly discuss the function of the product and the benefits that customers will get, and then discuss the product itself, so that customers believe that your product is what they need. Easy to read. The sentence should not be too long, keep it between 15–25 words, and try to tell your customers about the product by telling stories. Use the right keyword. You can use target keywords in product descriptions, but don’t fill them blindly. Learn from your competitors and customers. Don’t provide the content just based on your own experience. You can monitor your competitors to know what they are doing on the product to find out the customers’ needs.
5. Search terms
Search terms are different from the concept of keywords. It is a function of supplementing keywords. Amazon allows no more than 250 bytes keywords for the standard Search Terms field.
Besides the preferred keyword, you can include less-important keywords in the Intended Use, Target Audience, and Subject Matter fields.
Should do
Fill in a single word, phrase, and be careful not to make spelling errors. Can fully express the name of the product.
6. Product reviews
The core of conversion is the product review. However, getting product reviews isn’t easy, especially for new sellers and new products. Click here to get the method to gain more reviews for your products.
Should do
Provide excellent customer service. As a seller, the best you can do is to promise excellent customer service at every stage of the buying process. This means communicating with customers about order-related issues, sending thank-you emails, and following up after the products arrive. Send follow-up emails. The easiest way to get more product reviews from customers is to take the time to ask them. This seems simple, but many sellers seem to ignore this strategy. You can use automated email tools like Salesbacker, Jumpsend, or Kibly to get customer answers.
Final
Listing Optimization is not overnight work. You need to focus on every point in the optimization process. Analyze your competitors and learn more from customers, you will get more methods to better optimize products and enhance the competitiveness of products. | https://medium.com/@captainbi/amazon-listing-optimization-captainbi-blog-8895abcbafe6 | ['Ivy Yu'] | 2020-12-25 09:37:24.513000+00:00 | ['Amazon Selling Tips', 'Amazon', 'Fba'] |
I wish | May, 2000. AMU, Aligarh
We have been standing for hours in the long queues for getting the admission process completed. For anyone who studied in AMU, during those times would know how difficult that day is when you have to rush to 8 different admission counters across the huge AMU campus, stand in long lines in the May heat of North India to get your admission process completed. It’s a herculean task and by around 2 pm, personally I was too frustrated to go any further and was pushing him to give up and return to Kanpur.
This was me, who never ventured out of home, always the homely boy till class 12th — being put through the process of getting admitted into a university, where i was supposed to stay away from home — in a hostel with unknown people.
I could see him sweating profusely, bit worried and hassled about the whole process, fearing that if we are late, will we might be late to get the process completed in time.
And that’s when I sensed my opportunity. I asked him to take a lunch break before we go any further.
In the sprawling AMU campus canteen, I told him that it’s high time we let go of this process and go home. I was telling him that if the admission process is so tricky, imagine how bad rest of the things are going to be for me.
He was happily eating and talking and listening to me, but the determined man was clear why he was there and would leave no stone unturned to ensure we get through the process. He found a PCO nearby, made some calls and in no time we had my newly made guardians (2 of my cousins who studied there) up and ready to get us through the process faster.
By the end of the day, i was destined to stay on my own for the next 3 years. A decision that shaped me to who I am today. | https://medium.com/@FaizSpeaks/may-2000-amu-aligarh-8214dc76b3c3 | ['Faiz Uninhibited'] | 2020-08-21 08:25:28.834000+00:00 | ['Father And Son', 'Dad', 'Miss You Dad', 'Papa'] |
The #1 College Admissions Requirement During COVID-19 | Attention all high school students who aspire to attend college! Yes, all colleges throughout the U.S. are open during this pandemic and want YOU to apply to their college!
I am speaking directly to students and their parents, grades 8–12, ranging in age from 13- 18 years. I am well aware that attending school throughout COVID has been a challenge. Clearly, that is an understatement.
We all know that COVID has disrupted the once normal, daily routine of going to school. Pre-COVID, many kids dreaded getting up each and every day in the early morning hours to get on a bus, walk, or carpool to school to experience the sheer boredom of sitting in an AP Chemistry class at 7am every single day, still rubbing crusty, bleary, sleep deprived eyes. Ah, those were the days.
5 years ago, my son was that exhausted, sleep deprived, overwhelmed, over-achieving high school junior who walked to that AP Chem class as the sun was just starting to rise. He hated me, yes me, for making him take that class. As I told him then, ‘it’s not a personality contest’, and I was ok with him hating me.
As a parent, I was more concerned about him achieving his personal best, which I knew was integral to his overall emotional well-being.
I will confess, I made him take that AP Chemistry class. I also made him take a total of 8 AP courses, not including advanced classes that were not AP. I made him take the hardest high school classes his school could throw at him. I even made him take AP Calculus. Man, did he hate me for that.
Why did I make him take all those ridiculously hard classes? #FUNFACT: I knew that all Deans of Undergraduate Admissions at top colleges in the U.S. want transcripts loaded with honors, advanced, AP, IB classes, that reflect perfect to near perfect grades.
I knew that the Dean would not even consider him as a legitimate, qualified applicant if he did not take the hardest classes his school offered. How did I know this? Because I learned this when my other, older son was in middle school.
I have been playing the Admissions Game as a parent for many years. My most prized possessions, my sons, were the players, and they won the game. They earned their acceptance to Duke University as a result of years and years of hard work and sacrifice. Really.
You see, the Dean at a top college will not even consider an applicant for admission if they did not take the hardest classes their respective high school offered and received high grades.
The one constant throughout COVID, is that the Dean of Undergraduate Admissions continues to measure a high school student’s academic performance based on the classes they take and the grades they receive. Period, end of discussion. It does not matter whether a student attends school virtually or in-person.
Remember, many colleges during COVID at standardized test optional, which may continue for next year’s admissions class 2021–2022.
WISEWORDS: Classes and grades still matters, perhaps now more than ever to the Dean and will be the only measure of future academic success.
For additional insight on the college admissions process, please check out my book on Amazon!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08J1V4QLF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 | https://medium.com/@gaysnow/the-1-college-admissions-requirement-during-covid-19-c1953727f1f1 | ['Gay Snow'] | 2020-12-15 20:30:13.548000+00:00 | ['High School', 'College', 'Higher Education', 'Education', 'College Admissions'] |
Creating an AR-enabled prototype with Figma. | Creating an AR-enabled prototype with Figma.
Step 1: Creating the interface
Create your mobile app interface on the Figma. For this example, I used a plant shop template from figmacrush and tweaked it out a little bit.
Add a call to action to trigger the AR workflow, here I added a view in the 3D button so the user will be able to see the plant in the real world.
Step 2: Creating the 3D model on the Vectary
You can import the 3D model or create one yourself in vectary. For this example, I am using a free 3d model.
To import just drag and drop the 3d model.
Once your done importing, click on the viewer tab in the top bar.
In the viewer, window click on the generate button and then copy the generated URL.
Step 3: Bringing the 3D as a 2D image into your prototype.
To do this you need the Vectary 3D plugin installed on your Figma account.
Open the plugin, paste the copied URL and load the model into your Figma prototype. You can use the best view that fits your prototype by rotating the model before you save it as an image.
Step 4: Adding the AR viewer to the prototype.
Open the copied link in a new tab and click on the AR button on the top right.
Right-click on the displayed QR Code and copy the image address to copy the URL with a decoder or use a QR code scanner to get the address.
Now add this to link to the View in 3D button on the Figma prototype.
Step 5: Testing
Now open this prototype on any AR-supported phone and click on the link to see it opening the AR viewer and you will be able to see the 3D object in the real world.
Tada, your first AR-enabled prototype is ready.
Figma File for reference: https://www.figma.com/community/file/947832835915257827/View-in-3D---Reference-File | https://blog.prototypr.io/creating-a-ar-enabled-prototype-with-figma-49d5f418efe7 | ['Siddarth Kengadaran'] | 2021-02-28 12:31:09.537000+00:00 | ['Augmented Reality', 'AR', 'Vectary', 'Prototyping', 'Figma'] |
Is Democracy Dead? | What is democracy?
For so many of us, democracy is like God; we accept that it exists, even though we don’t fully understand how it works or what it is, or why we even accept its existence. We place our faith in it, as good citizens, and trust that democracy will bring us prosperity and control over our own little lives. If we believe hard enough, even we can change the course of nations. When not, we at least trust that democracy has our best interests at heart.
Like religion, democracy began with the best of intentions. It offered a way of life, a good and honest way to lead the people after centuries of kings and queens and off-with-her-heads. It seemed so simple; one person, one vote, and all are equal in the eyes of the ballot box.
Yet we are not all equal. In some democracies — the UK and US, for example — how equal your vote depends on a whole host of factors you can’t really control. Where you live, who else lives nearby, your ability to travel to vote, your citizenship, country of birth, your relationship with the law, your age, your race, all influence how much or how little your one vote counts.
Democracy is like God; we accept that it exists, even though we don’t fully understand how it works or what it is.
In 2015, a few months before the now-notorious Brexit vote, the UK held an election. Nearly four million voters, 12% of all votes cast, won just one seat in Parliament. To put those nearly-four-million votes in perspective, it took less than two million votes for the Conservatives to win the election. For the Conservatives, two million votes more than the Labour Party translated to more than a hundred seats. It took only 36.8% of the vote for the Conservatives to take power.
It is not only supporters of the far-right UK Independence Party who find themselves underrepresented playing by the rules of British democracy. The Green Party, although it failed to win as many individual votes as UKIP, also earned a disproportionately low number of seats compared to how many people it represents.
There are, of course, also positives to this system; it protects the rights of countries occupied by the English when Britain was created. Indigenous Scottish, Northern Irish, and Welsh parties win local seats far more easily than parties that cater to a geographically scattered, though large, support base. When this system starts to silence the voices of millions, however, it becomes problematic. | https://aninjusticemag.com/is-democracy-dead-7d43a7a6c391 | ['Abbey Heffer'] | 2020-12-25 15:15:31.803000+00:00 | ['Politics And Protest', 'Brexit', 'Politics', 'Democracy', 'Trump'] |
Pandas Trick #1 — Change the default number of rows returned from the head method | The pandas DataFrame head method returns the first 5 rows by default. This is controlled by the parameter n . In this trick, we will use partialmethod from the functools standard library to set n to a different number. This trick is available on the Dunder Data YouTube channel (Subscribe!).
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First, let’s read in a sample DataFrame containing bike rides from the city of Chicago and call the head method with the defaults. Note, that it returns 5 rows.
import pandas as pd
bikes = pd.read_csv('data/bikes.csv')
bikes.head()
The functools standard library comes packaged with partialmethod which allows you to set parameters of a particular method. You can set any number of parameters with it. Below, we reassign the DataFrame head method so that it returns 3 rows as a default instead of 5.
from functools import partialmethod
pd.DataFrame.head = partialmethod(pd.DataFrame.head, n=3)
bikes.head()
Why do this?
I use the head method frequently to shorten the displayed output of the DataFrame. When I am creating live tutorials, 5 rows can take up too much space on the screen, so changing this default to 2 or 3 makes sense and saves a bit of time. It can also be helpful if you have written a large report that makes use of many calls to the head method, and want to shorten all of those outputs with a single command.
General usage
partialmethod is only available in python 3 and can be used for all methods to set some or all of the parameters to a particular value.
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Get the All Access Pass now! | https://medium.com/dunder-data/pandas-trick-1-change-the-default-number-of-rows-returned-from-the-head-method-bc7c21ce0d53 | ['Ted Petrou'] | 2020-08-25 03:12:24.866000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Pandas', 'Programming', 'Python'] |
Organ donation in Islam | This is an edited version of a speech given by Mrs Tahmina Aziz
Firstly, a little bit about organ donation, as you most probably know, there are two types of organ donation: live donations, where one living person donates an organ to another, and donations from the bodies of the deceased to living recipients.
Why should we think about this?
With medical advances it is now possible to use transplanted organs and tissues to enhance the life chances of those suffering from a range of terminal conditions such as renal, liver and heart failure.
Despite these advances the official statistics paint a very poor picture for ethnic organ donation. 66% of Black, Asian and some Ethnic Minority (BAME) communities living in the UK refuse to give permission for their loved ones’ organs to be donated compared to 43% of the rest of the population.
Blood and tissue type are among the most important factors when organs, such as kidneys, are allocated to patients and organ matching is likely to be closer when the ethnicity of the donor and recipient are the same.
As a result, on average, BAME communities will wait a year longer for a kidney transplant than a White patient. Many may die while waiting for an organ to become available.
Why don’t Muslims donate?
Most Muslims in Britain are from a South Asian background, so to be able to have donations from this part of the population could potentially save thousands of lives for people with similar backgrounds.
There could be several reasons, why we don’t donate, from being scared to simply not knowing enough about the procedures and risks. Another, perhaps more compelling reason, is that religion can be a barrier to people agreeing to organ donation because they feel their faith doesn’t allow it, particularly amongst black African and Muslim communities.
What does Islam say?
In Islam there are two schools of thought with regards to organ donation. One that condemns it and one that approves it. This is a contemporary issue and there is nothing said directly about it in the classical literature. Therefore, what has resulted is we have ended up with differing views from scholars, with some trying to establish the validity of their views on Sharia and hadiths.
It is worth pointing out that according to the NHS organ donation website, all the major religions of the UK support the principles of organ donation and transplantation.
The argument against
The people who condemn it believe it’s a form of mutilation, it’s disrupting the deceased. In Islam violating the human body, whether living or dead, is forbidden. They consider that organ donation compromises the special honour accorded to man and this cannot be allowed whatever the cost. Various examples from Hadith are used to come to this decision:
Allah’s curse is on a woman who wears false hair (of humans) or arranges it for others. — (Sahih Muslim, no. 2122).
Breaking the bone of a dead person is similar (in sin) to breaking the bone of a living person. — (Sunan Abu Dawud, Sunan Ibn Majah & Musnad Ahmad).
Harming a believer after his death is similar to harming him in his life. — (Musannaf of Ibn Abi Shayba)
They also claim this is also supported by the verse of the Qur’an, where Allah Almighty mentions the words of the devil, when he said:
I will mislead them and I will order them to slit the ears of cattle, and to deface the (fair) nature created by Allah — (4: 119).
They believe that to deface the human body created by Allah, both physically and spiritually, is what the devil likes and orders to practice.
There are many more examples that have used quoting from various sources and extrapolated to mean you cannot donate because you need to honour the human body and to not cut and tamper with the human body. But are these examples a bit of a stretch?
It could be argued that the Hadith about false hair is more to do with a persons’ vanity, and that breaking the bone of a dead person and harming the dead is to mean treating the dead with respect as you would the living. There is also precedence here because people do undergo amputation (breaking the bone) to save their lives.
As to the Qur’anic verse, they imply that this is what the devil wants, I don’t personally believe this can be likened to organ donation. As the act of organ donation is not disrespectful and ultimately has good intentions.
The Muslim burial customs deserve consideration as well: it is traditional for Muslims to be buried within 24 hours, and a lengthy organ retrieval procedure may raise concerns. However as many people can attest to, in the Western World, it can be very difficult to get all the necessary paperwork in place in time to be able to bury a deceased person within 24 hours.
The argument for
And on the other side, we have those who believe very strongly that it is one of the greatest of the commendations given by Islam, for someone to give the most beautiful gift — to save a life.
Altruism is also an important principle of Islam, and saving a life is placed very highly in the Qur’an:
Whosoever saves the life of one person it would be as if he saved the life of all mankind. — (chapter 5:32).
A few other examples are used from the Qur’an regarding human life:
3:185
Every soul will taste of death. And you will be paid your reward fully only on the Resurrection day. Then whoever is removed far from the Fire and is made to enter the Garden, he indeed attains the object. And the life of this world is nothing but a provision of vanities.
6:32
And this world’s life is naught but a play and an idle sport. And certainly the abode of the Hereafter is better for those who keep their duty. Do you not then understand?
The Holy Quran talks a lot about the differences between life here and the hereafter and how this life is a vessel to arrive at the right place in the hereafter.
40:39
O my people, this life of the world is but a (passing) enjoyment, and the Hereafter, that is the abode to settle.
The argument being that if this life, and this body, is merely a vessel to the hereafter then it is perfectly acceptable for this vessel to be used to save many more lives.
Flexibility in Islam
Now Islam gives us rules and guidelines to live our lives by, but much like in early Islam these have flexibility in them. So for example a starving Muslim will be excused for eating pork, if nothing else were available and the meal would save his life. And it could be argued that you can fall back on this flexibility to suggest that organ donation should be allowed, because you are saving a life, maybe several.
To give you just two medical examples, this principle has been used previously to approve the use of pork based insulin and porcine bone grafts. On the basis of these examples, in a formal decision in 1996, the UK Muslim Law Council issued an Ijtihad (religious ruling) that organ transplantation is entirely in keeping with Islam.
And it is not just the Muslim Law council in the UK to produce this ruling, you might be surprised to know that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran and Pakistan have rules in place to say organ donation is allowed.
Even though this is agreed upon in Muslim countries, figures from the Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation body show that there are fewer organ transplants from deceased people in Muslim-majority countries, compared with the rest of the world.
Death is not always death
But there is also the concept and definition of brain stem death. Does Islam consider Brain stem death as human death? And if it does, is it permissible to remove organs for transplantation from persons who are dead based on brain stem death criteria (e.g. a person who still has a heartbeat, a temperature and is still breathing)?
So, what do we do?
As a Muslim how do you personally answer the question about organ donation? As it is not something specifically mentioned in the Holy Quran, does that mean we can all make a personal, often emotionally charged, decision about organ donation? Or has Islam given us the help we need?
Leave it to the experts
Hadith 2362, as narrated by Rafi b. Khurayj:
The Prophet (peace be upon him) had come to Madînah while they were cross-pollinating their date palms. He asked: “What are these people doing?” They replied: “This is something that has been our practice.” He said: “Maybe if you were not to do so, it would be good.” So they abandoned it and the crop that resulted was impoverished. They mentioned this to him and he said: “I am only a human being. When I command you with something regarding your religion, accept it. When I command you with something from my own opinion, then I am only a human being.”
The Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) here was clear in saying that in his opinion it seemed wrong but he left the decision to the experts. So he deemed right the decision by the farmers do to the best for their yield of dates and if we use this example from the life of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) we can say that we should look to the medical professional when asking whether it is appropriate to harvest organs from a person about to die. If they deem it acceptable then we should accept their opinion on the matter.
In the end we can build multiple levels of complexity into things when trying to argue for and against something, but for me, personally, I think the answer is simple.
If it was you or your child who was sick and a transplanted organ would save you or your child’s life, would you accept it? and if so, if you can accept one, can you give one? | https://medium.com/virtual-mosque/organ-donation-in-islam-55eeafbe7453 | ['Virtual Mosque'] | 2016-04-09 17:56:03.720000+00:00 | ['Organ', 'Donation', 'Islam'] |
Why we invested in UNIPaaS (spoiler: it’s the next big thing in B2B payments) | Why we invested in UNIPaaS (spoiler: it’s the next big thing in B2B payments) Guy Yamen Follow Feb 11 · 5 min read
Before anything else, if you’re a UK-based B2B digital platform and you’re looking for a comprehensive payments solution, sign up. UNIPaaS’s portal is live!
And now, back to where we haven’t started off yet!
Why we invested in UNIPaaS
David Avgi came marching into our office in the late summer of 2020, alongside the team he’s been working with on his new venture.
By the time he had left, two hours after, we knew we wanted to do something with him.
Since then, we had gone much deeper into analyzing the B2B payments space. And coming out of this dive we realized we just HAD TO do something together.
This short piece will describe why we got so excited in the first place, and why this initial excitement translated into a more analytics-driven appreciation of what UNIPaaS is about to do.
First meeting: September 2020
We’re in our conference room, masks on our faces (a refreshing moment nevertheless; meeting in person! six months into COVID!). The UNIPaaS team members know each other very well. They’ve all worked together in Safecharge, the leading payments technology company which Avgi sold to Nuvei for ~$900m back in 2019. They start talking, and we realize that in between the team members, there’s more than fifty years of payments experience.
They paint a stark picture of what’s currently broken in the B2B marketplaces’ payments space.
They share that the growth of digital platforms, and marketplaces in particular, is exponential, not least because of the pandemic. They tell us that the streamlining, onboarding, and workflow of marketplaces are fundamentally different than those of traditional DTC or online platforms. They continue that existing offerings seem to fall short of the unique needs marketplace customers have.
David decided to name the new venture UNIPaaS, which stands for UNIversal, UNIfied, and UNIque Payments as a Service, and as the session progresses, the same question creeps into the mind of each of the TPY team members present: “why do I get the feeling that UNI could also stand for UNIcorn”?
Then David shares with us that he’d already invested a considerable sum to launch UNIPaaS, and that he intends to invest side-by-side the lead investor, in a meaningful way.
Let’s pause on this for a moment.
There is some lingering debate in the VC world of whether having a successful repeat entrepreneur invest in his/her own new startup is a positive thing. One argument ‘against’ refers to the risk of incurring somewhat of a bi-polar mindset by the CEO, who’s both entrepreneur and investor. Another involves theories around what a healthy percent stake for an entrepreneur should be.
Our perspective is that the positives far outweigh the negatives. By, quite literally, ‘putting the money where the mouth is’, David demonstrated his level of excitement from this venture, showed his commitment to its success, and enhanced the alignment of interests between his investors and himself. Simply put, we at TPY loved seeing it.
From first meeting to closing: last quarter of 2020
Over the course of the following few months we’d spoken to dozens of practitioners in the digital payments space and to many others in marketplaces. The feedback we received was overwhelmingly similar: that the pain point described by David and his team was real, and that UNIPaaS’s approach to solving it made a ton of sense.
So what’s so compelling in the solution?
Fundamentally, that it is indeed a Payments Platform that can be offered as a service.
There’s no ‘deep tech’ in payments. No AI dark magic or a novel piece of hardware. UNIPaaS’s secret sauce is in the depth of its offering and its speed of execution, achievable only given the vast and intimate knowledge the team has of this space.
A year from kickoff, the team had developed a fully operational gateway engine, already processing thousands of transactions daily, with multi-channel (cards present; cards not present) connectivity to an acquirer (cards and APMs).
It launched a transparent billing system, offering clients real-time visibility into where the money is, and the exact fee and commission status. And it created a click-of-a-button API for pay-in and pay-out.
All written in-house, from scratch, tailored to this unique market’s needs, and based on best-in-class architecture. As a result, the platform is reducing time to payments for clients, and is built for scale, from day one.
By the end of the year, UNIPaaS will have developed a managed solution enabling marketplaces to seamlessly and effortlessly onboard sellers, vendors and contractors. It will accept payments on their behalf, enable splitting them, transfer funds, and do payouts. In short, marketplaces will have complete control over both buyer and seller experience while staying ahead of PCI /PSD2 strict regulation.
See a rough schema of what we believe UNIPaaS’s offering will look like by end of 2021:
And on top of all this, UNIPaaS obtained the UK’s regulator Payments Institution (PI) license, which enables UNIPaaS to support UK clients.
As investors, seeing the combined progress UNIPaaS has been making in product and operations in a regulatory environment has been jaw-dropping.
Now let’s bring along the best of the best to this journey!
Along the way, we introduced David to friends we thought were the absolute best B2B payments’ experts, and almost every single one of them had become an investor in this round. These included the fantastic Sarah Friar (CEO of NextDoor and formerly CFO of Square); the unstoppable Eric Sager (COO of Plaid); the fintech black belt guru Sam Hodges, CEO of Vouch Insurance and formerly President of Funding Circle; and the prolific product leader and angel investor Gokul Rajaram.
We’d also reached out to our friends at FJ Labs, the world’s leading fund in marketplaces investments, given their depth of knowledge of what future customers of UNIPaaS need, and now our partners in the UNIPaaS journey.
And when introduced David to some of our serial entrepreneurs of TPY’s portfolio companies, well, they all came back eager to participate. These included Talmon Marco (H2Pro; Juno; Viber) as well as Boaz Palgi and Erez Webman (Paramount Data; ScaleIO). It also included our friend Ofer Smadari (StackPulse; Luminate; not a TPY CEO…yet).
===
To conclude…the pain is there, the team is there, the alignment is there, the platform is there, and the clients are starting to come. And then there are the opportunities for UNIPaaS beyond payments, in expanding its offering to banking as a service and lending as a service, and the size of opportunity becomes truly huge (more on that in a separate future post).
We’re truly excited to see the evolution of this startup into what we hope will become a new industry standard. | https://medium.com/tpy-capital/why-we-invested-in-unipaas-spoiler-its-the-next-big-thing-in-b2b-payments-7864f3bbcdbe | ['Guy Yamen'] | 2021-02-11 12:08:47.814000+00:00 | ['Marketplaces', 'Venture Capital', 'Payments', 'Fintech', 'Investment'] |
My weeknotes — wc 03/02/2020. Good afternoon, I hope you all had a… | Good afternoon, I hope you all had a productive week.
This week:
- A tiring but productive Monday was followed by a fast paced Tuesday. Jay and I met up and had our first go at refining the backlog for the last sprint of developing Pipeline. I have spoken about it before but for those who don’t know, Pipeline is a service that lets local authorities share information about projects. It encourages open doors for collaboration and seeing as project information is shared, organisations can learn from one another.
We have limited time with our developers and so Jay and I thought about how to best utilize that time, by creating and refining the final backlog. I think I’m doing well at doing the ‘Definition of Done’ for each task.
- It’s National Apprenticeship Week this week and we’ve celebrated it here at Hackney Council in multiple ways. One of the ways I contributed towards this week was presenting alongside fellow apprentices. We spoke about our journey’s as apprentices, our setbacks, key takeaways so far and our future aspirations. Last year I shied away from this opportunity but this year I found the confidence to present in front of Councillor Williams, the apprenticeship team and fellow colleagues and apprentices.
The team had the opportunity to meet up before, to prepare but as I was at college, I couldn’t attend — only making me more nervous. In the end I thought that if I do present, “what’s the worst that can happen?” — a question I always ask myself before presenting. I also reminded myself that this week is to celebrate us apprentices so why don’t I go out there and represent all us apprentices the best I can. After the feedback given from a handful of people, it’s fair to say we did a great job as a collective. Well done to Sam Clare, Jessica Long, Cleo Lewis for sharing their experiences as apprentices. And a huge thank you to Ryan Bates who helped steer the team with planning for the presentation at a short notice.
- Then came Wednesday, Hackney’s apprentices awards event. A night full of registering people, photo booth images, lovely refreshments and inspiring stories. Oh and of course the awards. We swept the award ceremony with the amount of shortlisted apprentices and managers we had from HackIT, I’m proud of you all. I’m proud of my old manager, Philippa for getting shortlisted. I’m grateful for all the lessons you’ve taught me and I hope I have done you proud through the work I have produced. I also want to congratulate Susan for winning the Manager of the Year award, well deserved.
- I met up with Karim about the Procurement User Journey Trello board that I had created. The purpose of it was to capture the journey a user would go through and the tasks associated with that process — each process differs, dependent on the value of the contract. I have been given feedback and will be rolling it out to test it soon.
Quote: “There might not be a tomorrow, so do it all today”
Question: What motivates you in life the most?
Thank you for reading, I hope you all have a restful weekend. | https://medium.com/@hidayat-deen/my-weeknotes-wc-03-02-2020-24370ac0452f | ['Hidayat Deen'] | 2020-02-07 17:17:15.738000+00:00 | ['Apprenticeship', 'Local Government', 'Apprentice', 'Weeknotes'] |
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