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Tutorials and courses worth taking NOW | Hi,
you want to learn how to code and get the best development job?
Now is the best time to get the right education online.
I’ll tell you something. In my 20 years of development path, nobody has ever asked me what University did I take. The only thing they wanted to know was what I know and what I can do for them. Strange, ha!
I’ve got some reviews of courses and tutorials for you. In a ton of courses and specializations, it’s hard to find the best one. I know.
Here are my latest reviews. The rest you can find in my Medium publication or at my YouTube channel.
Just a hint. There is a SALE on Udemy happening right NOW. You can get the courses for the price of a pizza. Just make sure you pick the best one.
Mongodb Tutorials and Courses Worth Taking: ARTICLE / VIDEO.
Stephen Grider: Microservices with Node JS and React: ARTICLE / VIDEO
Best ANDROID app development courses: VIDEO
Enjoy your day!
Jana | https://medium.com/ucan-learn-to-code/tutorials-and-courses-worth-taking-now-f9dc18f3cac4 | ['Jana Bergant'] | 2020-09-09 14:51:54.357000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Programming', 'Web Development', 'Course', 'Review'] |
Spring vs. Spring Boot: A Comparison of These Java Frameworks | Spring vs Spring Boot: A Comparison of These Java Frameworks
Want to learn more about these two popular Java frameworks? Check out this Article how they each solve a different type of problem.
What is Spring Boot? And, what is a Spring Framework? What are their goals? How can we compare them? There must be a lot of questions running through your mind. At the end of this blog, you will have the answers to all of these questions. In learning more about the Spring and Spring Boot frameworks, you will come to understand that each solve a different type of problem. More Additional Information On Spring Boot Online Training
What Is Spring? What Are the Core Problems Spring Solves?
The Spring Framework is one of the most popular application development frameworks for Java. One of the best features in Spring is that it has the Dependency Injection (DI) or Inversion Of Control (IOC), which allows us to develop loosely coupled applications. And, loosely coupled applications can be easily unit-tested.
Example Without Dependency Injection
Consider the example below — MyController depends on MyService to perform a certain task. So, to get the instance of MyService, we will use:
MyService service = new MyService();
Now, we have created the instance for MyService , and we see both are tightly coupled. If I create a mock for MyService in a unit test for MyController , how do I make MyController use the mock? It's bit difficult — isn't it?
@RestController
public class MyController {
private MyService service = new MyService(); @RequestMapping("/welcome")
public String welcome() {
return service.retrieveWelcomeMessage();
} }
Example With a Dependency Injection
With the help of only two annotations, we can get the instance of MyService easily, which is not tightly coupled. The Spring Framework does all the hard work to make things simpler.
@Component is simply used in the Spring Framework as a bean that you need to manage within your own BeanFactory (an implementation of the Factory pattern).
is simply used in the Spring Framework as a bean that you need to manage within your own BeanFactory (an implementation of the Factory pattern). @Autowired is simply used to in the Spring Framework to find the correct match for this specific type and autowire it.
So, Spring framework will create a bean for MyService and autowire it into MyController .
In a unit test, I can ask the Spring Framework to auto-wire the mock of MyService into MyController .
@Component
public class MyService {
public String retrieveWelcomeMessage(){
return "Welcome to InnovationM";
} } @RestController
public class MyController { @Autowired
private MyService service; @RequestMapping("/welcome")
public String welcome() {
return service.retrieveWelcomeMessage();
} }
The Spring Framework has many other features, which are divided into twenty modules to solve many common problems. Here are some of the more popular modules:
Spring JDBC
Spring MVC
Spring AOP
Spring ORM
Spring JMS
Spring Test
Spring Expression Language (SpEL)
Aspect Oriented Programming(AOP) is another strong side of the Spring Framework. The key unit in object-oriented programming is the class, whereas, in AOP, the key unit is the aspect. For example, if you want to add the security in your project, logging, etc., you can just use the AOP and keep these as a cross-cutting concern away from your main business logic. You can perform any action after a method call, before a method call, after a method returns, or after the exception arises.
The Spring Framework does not have its own ORM, but it provides a very good integration with ORM, like Hibernate, Apache iBATIS, etc.
In short, we can say that the Spring Framework provides a decoupled way of developing web applications. Web application development becomes easy with the help of these concepts in Spring, like Dispatcher Servlet, ModelAndView, and View Resolver.
If Spring Can Solve so Many Problems, Why Do We Need Spring Boot?
Now, if you have already worked on Spring, think about the problem that you faced while developing a full-fledged Spring application with all functionalities. Not able to come up with one? Let me tell you — there was lot of difficulty to setup Hibernate Datasource, Entity Manager, Session Factory, and Transaction Management. It takes a lot of time for a developer to set up a basic project using Spring MVC with minimum functionality.
Take your career to new heights of success with an Spring Boot Certification
<bean
class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
<property name="prefix">
<value>/WEB-INF/views/</value>
</property>
<property name="suffix">
<value>.jsp</value>
</property> </bean>
<mvc:resources mapping="/webjars/**" location="/webjars/"/>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>
org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>/WEB-INF/my-servlet.xml</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
When we use Hibernate, we have to configure these things like a datasource, EntityManager, etc.
<bean id="dataSource" class="com.mchange.v2.c3p0.ComboPooledDataSource"
destroy-method="close">
<property name="driverClass" value="${db.driver}" />
<property name="jdbcUrl" value="${db.url}" />
<property name="user" value="${db.username}" />
<property name="password" value="${db.password}" />
</bean>
<jdbc:initialize-database data-source="dataSource">
<jdbc:script location="classpath:config/schema.sql" />
<jdbc:script location="classpath:config/data.sql" />
</jdbc:initialize-database>
<bean
class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean"
id="entityManagerFactory">
<property name="persistenceUnitName" value="hsql_pu" /
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
</bean>
<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager">
<property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="entityManagerFactory" />
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
</bean>
<tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="transactionManager"/>
How Does Spring Boot Solve This Problem?
Spring Boot does all of those using AutoConfiguration and will take care of all the internal dependencies that your application needs — all you need to do is run your application. Spring Boot will auto-configure with the Dispatcher Servlet, if Spring jar is in the class path. It will auto-configue to the datasource, if Hibernate jar is in the class path. Spring Boot gives us a pre-configured set of Starter Projects to be added as a dependency in our project. During web-application development, we would need the jars that we want to use, which versions of the jars to use, and how to connect them together. All web applications have similar needs, for example, Spring MVC, Jackson Databind, Hibernate core, and Log4j (for logging). So, we had to choose the compatible versions of all these jars. In order to decrease the complexity, Spring Boot has introduced what we call Spring Boot Starters.
Dependency for Spring Web Project
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId
<version>4.2.2.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId
<artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId
<version>2.5.3</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-validator</artifactId
<version>5.0.2.Final</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>log4j</groupId>
<artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
<version>1.2.17</version>
</dependency>
Starters are a set of convenient dependencies that you can include in your Spring Boot application. For using Spring and Hibernate, we just have to include the spring-boot-starter-data-jpa dependency in the project.
Dependency for Spring Boot Starter Web
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>
The following screenshot shows the different packages under a single dependency that are added into our application:
There are other packages that you will see. Once you add that starter dependency, the Spring Boot Starter Web comes pre-packaged with all of these. As a developer, we would not need to worry about these dependencies and their compatible versions.
Spring Boot Starter Project Options
These are few starter projects to help us get started quickly with developing specific types of applications. | https://medium.com/quick-code/spring-vs-spring-boot-a-comparison-of-these-java-frameworks-14a1b594657 | ['Priya Reddy'] | 2020-02-05 03:22:23.325000+00:00 | ['Spring Training', 'Java', 'Spring Boot', 'Spring', 'Framework'] |
Memories of the Old Man | My dad’s been gone for 20 years, but memories of him are clear as a bell. | https://chumworth.medium.com/memories-of-the-old-man-9941ce627820 | ['Phil Johnson'] | 2019-10-01 16:46:02.114000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Dads', 'Comics', 'Cartoon', 'Parenting'] |
Anarchic Magick | Anarchic Magick
An unholy manifesto
The greatest danger to magickal practice is orthodoxy. Orthodoxy can assert itself in surprising ways and at unexpected moments. This is a cri de coeur against orthodoxy. I call my personal system anarchic magick. And if you like my approach, I invite you to honor it by throwing away my term and using your own.
Here’s the rub: Our alternative spiritual culture is rife with systems, many of which I honor and practice. They go under names like sex magick, ceremonial magick, chaos magick, New Thought, spell work of varying sorts, and so on. All are focused on the same goal. Which is tapping the powers of psychical causation, of locating a medium between oneself and creative forces.
If you take a spiritual approach to life, as I do, you share my conviction that we participate in some process of mental and emotion selection (a term I prefer to manifestation). I have written previously about the process of how metaphysical and magical systems may work. Those I mention above have aesthetic and sometimes intellectual differences, as well as different lineages — but all are geared toward tapping and directing one’s causative spiritual power. By spiritual I mean extra-physical.
My problem with all these approaches, including the least conformist of them all, chaos magick, is that each assumes a set of psychological and even liturgical boundaries. This can needlessly limit and box in the individual. Consider, as an example, sigil magick, the central practice of chaos. In essence, this practice asks the individual to distill his or her desire into an abstract symbol; with the symbol as a decoy for your desire, you focus on the sigil and “charge it” in a moment of ecstasy, usually through sexual climax; then you purposefully forget all about it.
The principle is that by transferring your wish onto the sigil, you have eluded the rational apparatus of the mind. You are no longer “in desire,” which is a feeling of want not fulfillment, and you allow the sigil itself, through climax, to enter into the subconscious , and thus be joined to the transcendent channels of causative intelligence. Some people offer different explanations; but I think this is a fair representation of what occurs in sigil magick.
I know many gifted and capable people who report extraordinary results with this method. But, as much as I respect and admire the practice (I have a sigil tattooed on the back of my neck), I have not, as of this writing, personally experienced success with my use of it. I have wondered why. It is probably because I, and maybe you, experience difficulty with one of the key facets of sigil magick, which is purposeful forgetting. Virtually every guidebook and every practitioner counsels not to dwell on your desire, not to remain in a state of hope or wanting. Rather, you must transfer your desire onto your sigil and, through the process of concentrated climax, effectively satisfy your desire. This assumption is at the heart of most ritual magick.
If you’re like me, however, the imperative of bypassing may prove a chronic barrier. Personally, I think eagerly and continually about my wishes. I cannot “forget” or transfer them. It is not in my emotional or intellectual nature. Magickal partners have scolded me about this quality — but it persists. I think, just as the bird rides air currents, the shark hunts, or the cat roams nocturnal. It is not a barrier to be negotiated around, as New Age or Eastern orthodoxy often goes. It is my nature.
Here enters anarchic magick. I do not believe there is any sole way to approach New Thought, magick, ritual, affirmation, prayer, or spell work. Call it whatever you will, all of these methods involve externalizing and concretizing your wishes; arousing and employing the causative or selective agencies of the psyche.
Many occult writers and practitioners insist that the royal road to psychical causation necessarily involves working around, not through, the rational mind. I question that. Based on personal result and observation, I believe that we can employ these psychical energies through consciously aware means. Our lives are innately physical and extra-physical; five-sensory and extra-sensory; linear and infinite; material and transcendent. You are not bound by any sole method or approach in exploring and exercising the wholeness of your nature.
I am not taking issue with any system. A system is valuable based on its results, and on the conduct it produces. That is all. I am taking issue with any dictate about what is required to obtain the result.
Anarchic magick allows you to be you. If you’re hyper-intellectual, and hence prone to dwell on your aim, or if you’re emotive, or movement-oriented, prone to ponder or roam, mentally, physically, or otherwise, let no one tell you that quality is a barrier or requires compensation or a workaround. Why would that be so? Has that been proven in the laboratory of experience? Not for me. You can devise you own approaches, like the 10-Day Miracle Challenge, to cite one example, which encourages dwelling on rather than evading your desire. Or the practice of “sex transmuation,” which involves consciously redirecting your thoughts away from physical satisfaction when aroused and toward some concrete aim.
The point is to question and overturn every assumption in favor of whatever spiritual method provides you with functionality, variety, self-direction, and result. Anarchic magick is purposeful heterodoxy.
* * *
I do poorly with timed rituals and spells. I never fully know when I will be prepared to bring passion and a sense of internal morale (call it faith) to the wish at hand. Mind and emotion united prove a powerful combination. Hence, you must remain open and ready to practice, the same way a sculptor, painter, writer, or noise artist must have his or her tools at hand for when momentum bursts into action. Spontaneous practice can be very powerful. I find it much more efficacious than stratified and orderly spells or rituals. In a previous piece about anarchic magick, I made this observation:
On a winter afternoon about 10 years ago, I climbed to the top of a stone tower on the banks of the Charles River in Weston, Massachusetts. The Victorian-era oddity was built in 1899 to commemorate a Viking settlement that some believe Norse explorer Leif Erikson founded on the banks of the Charles around 1,000 A.D. Named Norumbega Tower, after the legendary settlement, the 38-foot column had iron bars on its windows and doors to keep out snoopers, ghost hunters, and beer-drinking high schoolers. All I knew was that I wanted to go inside. I slithered my six-foot-two-inch frame through a loose grill, discovered some graffiti left by devil-worshipping metalheads (Satan love them), and climbed a dank stone stairway to the top. At that time in my life, I had one great desire burning in my heart: to become a writer. I had already been active in this direction, but I was not young — I was past 40. I swore from the top of that tower that I would establish myself as a known writer. I asked all the forces available to me on that frigid winter day, seen and unseen, physical and extra-physical, to come to my aid. Something swelled up within me at that moment: I felt in sync physically, intellectually, and emotionally and at one with my surroundings; my wish felt clear, strong, and assured, as though lifted by some unseen current. It was a totalizing experience, which went beyond the ordinary. In the years immediately ahead, I did become known as a writer — I was published by Random House and other presses, won a PEN literary award, and received bylines in places including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and the Washington Post — publications not typically drawn to the kinds of occult topics I pursue. My act that winter day was entirely spontaneous and spur of the moment. I didn’t plan or prepare for it, and I wasn’t reciting any ceremonies, spells, or rituals from a book.
I recently had a similar experience in the lobby of a magnificently restored neo-futuristic hotel in New York City. I experienced a moment of utter conviction and self-unity, similar to the one I just described, about the people and settings I wish to dwell among. Something went forth from me. I am awaiting (and will report back on) the results.
* * *
In anarchic magick the world is your temple — quite literally. I believe deeply in petitionary prayer, of a radical sort. I think we have overlooked great wisdom and possibilities by neglecting the petitionary outlook of our primeval ancestors. Our ancient ancestors personified energies as deities, giving them names like Set, Minerva, Jupiter, or Kali, and sought relations with these deific beings. I consider such an approach deeply valid and intimate. (In fact, I believe the old gods are lonely and hungry for our attention — note this as a special opportunity.) I offer this exchange that I had in an interview with the journal Secret Transmissions:
Q: Mythology is intimately intertwined with magic, whether it’s Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Celtic or other. But let’s say that you don’t feel compelled to join a group ruled by a specific pantheon but are nevertheless deeply moved and inspired by these deities and want to make them a part of your spiritual life; how might that be achieved? A: Well, to share a personal story, many years ago on Canal Street near Manhattan’s Chinatown, I discovered an old office building that had a beautiful profile relief of Mercury above its entrance. Apropos of what I was saying earlier, I harbor questions about the lingering energies of the old gods. I made a practice, for many weeks, of taking the subway to that slightly out-of-the-way place every morning and praying to that image of Mercury. I used to stand on the sidewalk in plain sight and pray in front of a very nice and indulgent Latin American woman who sold newspapers from on top of a milk crate in front of that building. I don’t know whether she thought I was crazy — there is a greater tolerance and embrace of occult religious methods in Latin America, so I might not have seemed very odd to her. In any case, I venerate the personage and principle of Mercury, and this was a means of expressing that, as well as petitioning favor. I felt some satisfaction, though no sense of conclusion, from this act.
These are private acts to be conducted based on one’s set sense of need, aesthetic, disclosure, and passion. Your practice of worship is exquisitely personal. You can experience worship, which I define as self-expansion (“as above, so below”), in any setting, including a movie. My friend Michael Muhammed Knight, a brilliant scholar of Islam, began his conversion at age 15 after seeing Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. “Can a film be sacred scripture?” Mike wondered. I say emphatically yes. I find a similar experience apropos of the character Abel played by Oscar Isaacs in the movie A Most Violent Year. Abel embodies the kind of self-sufficiency and hard-won ethics that I venerate. The movie takes me to an elevated state and opens me to a wish. A podcaster told me that she saw qualities in artist Courtney Love that she felt drawn to emulate, even to worship in the sense of expanding oneself. Traditionalists be damned, I say that all this represents a legitimate spiritual act.
Most traditionalists (I use the term colloquially, not to describe the thought movement called Traditionalism) do not know what spirituality is. They know a system, usually one that makes them feel protected from perceived dangers, such as irrationality or irreligiousity, and call it truth.
If I have any ancestor, it is Emerson who wrote in Self-Reliance:
I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — “But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”
If I have an adversary, it is an English professor who wrote me several years ago to complain about the paucity of analytic notes that appeared in a small collection of Emerson’s essays I had once published. He protested that it is “impossible” (he used that word) to read Emerson without analytic notes. I cannot imagine anything less Emersonian, less validating of the search. But even my Moriarty’s dogmatism facilitates my search. We need polarities. To exist is to be in polarity.
In 1790, William Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Opposition is true Friendship.” Only through being tested, opposed, and thrown onto our hidden reserves do we get anywhere. That’s what drove me to anarchic magick. Years of study within more formalized orders and systems (both alternative and traditional — I had an orthodox bar mitzvah and later spent much time within esoteric communities) forged my conviction that every principle must be challenged, tested, and measured. Including the old saw that a teacher once used on me: “There are no shortcuts.” I do not know that. Neither did he.
I noted above that we all have a sense of our personal nature — and such a nature should not be mislabeled as barrier or attachment. Who’s to judge what should be considered personality versus essence, inner versus outer, material versus spiritual, higher versus lower, and so on. I am not throwing out ethics or principle. Not at all. I have written widely about the necessity of soundness and purpose in how we treat others. But I am persuaded by years of experience that life, despite whatever terms we use to demarcate it, is all one thing. I can no more criticize my neighbor for the drive to attain than he can criticize my drive to express. (And I honor attainment, as well.)
* * *
Now, I have often said that to throwaway the rulebook you must have first mastered the rulebook. This principle appears in the process of many artists, writers, and thinkers. It has been part of my own approach. I have argued that the astrologer should know something about astronomy. The Kabbalist should possess a working grasp of Hebrew. The Tarot reader should know the authentic history of the cards (even it it challenges one’s sense of romance). The witch or wiccan should be versed, to the extent possible, in the ancient nature religions. Focus creates power and true choice.
And yet, as I was remarking to a brilliant podcaster this morning, I am loathe to create a new tollgate to experience. Efficacy is in result. Hence, anarchic magick requires only satisfactory outcome on the part of the user. I believe in an ethic of cosmic reciprocity, but that, too, is a truth that the user must forge for him or herself.
The highest honor you can give my ideas is absorbing what is useful and throwing out the rest, including terminology. Whether I like it or not. Now go and experiment.
_____________
I know how valuable your time is and I appreciate your read. If you enjoyed this article, you might also like this one: | https://mitch-horowitz-nyc.medium.com/anarchic-magick-4ab25c746da9 | ['Mitch Horowitz'] | 2020-09-01 23:47:46.026000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Spiritual Growth', 'Philosophy', 'Religion', 'Occult'] |
The Terror of Typing “git init” | Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels
The act of programming isn’t typically thought of as “dangerous”, but the two scariest skills I’ve every learn are how to weld and how to work like a programmer… and maybe not in that order…
When I was learning how to weld, my welding guru explained that the first handful of welding sessions have nothing to do with learning how to weld, but rather getting accustomed to the action of welding. Welding is an energetic process, and that energy can be intimidating and mysterious. When you weld, you wear unfamiliar, bulky protective gloves and visually restrictive face-shield. You have to get the set up sequence just right, lining up your metal wire to the work piece and then flipping your face-shield down without moving any other muscle. Then you start the electric arc while blind, the filter of your face-shield blocking out normal light, and you just hope haven’t moved a muscle even though you’re trembling a little bit. First you see a flash, then you hear a zappy **tssssssz* of the arc and the air starts to smell like iron and electricity. All you can see then is a little orange glow of molten metal (if you’re lucky), shaking from your quivering hand.
Even if your head understands what’s going on, the physical action of welding the first few times is shocking to the body. And it’s the same way with programming and developing.
— — —
I recently started a data science boot camp. It’s already been enlightening for many reasons, but mostly because this is the first time I’ve really been in a group programming environment. A lot of students have enrolled in this program to become more comfortable with programming, so the instructor has design the course to go over Python basics and common-place programming tools. Since I started my programming journey about a year ago, I don’t really think twice about loops and conditional statements or about tools like git, GitHub, and Conda. But one of my classmates said something that instantly transported me back to the first couple months of taking HarvardX’s CS50:
“the most stressful moments of these classes for me are the first 5 when I have to open everything…”
This statement may be said following up with an “lol”, but back in a beginner headspace, opening a terminal and typing in a command elicited the same kind of fear I felt learning how to weld. I know rationally that I’m not nearly in as much danger as I might be if something goes wrong welding (yes, I shocked myself several times), but emotionally, the fear felt the same. What if I didn’t type the commands in the right order? Why do I need to write all these weird git commands anyways? What if I type something without really knowing what I’m typing and my computer explodes?
Unfamiliar tools. Intricate sequences. Intimidating and mysterious.
Looking back, I don’t think there was a massive turning point where suddenly I learned the last thing I needed to learn to grow comfortable with Command Line Environments (CLIs) or with git and GitHub. Instead, again like welding, I just needed to do it enough times, making a few silly mistakes along the way (at least it’s not a shock), and these tools / workflows became second nature…
Want to conquer your fear of programming tools? Use them as much as you can. We often think of programming and data science as a purely cerebral process, but in actuality, there is some type of muscle memory that is formed as you grow more comfortable with the tools of the trade. I’m here to let you know, you can do this. Expect to break things but do so on these smaller introductory projects so you don’t repeat those mistakes on big important projects. Be patient with yourself. At some point, using CLIs, git and other developer tools like Conda will become as trivial as writing in Word or Excel; two months from now, you’ll be looking back in amazement of how far you’ve come.
— — —
Looking for sources on learning developer tools?
All programmers work in the terminal. The blinking white cursor may be scary to you, but soon you’ll feel the power at your command. For general CLI commands, this Command-Line Basics article from alligator.io gives a thorough review of all the commands for navigating your file structure within a terminal. This is step one of getting comfortable with a CLI. After that, there is creating files and directories, working with files and with directories, and searching for files and directories.
You might not feel this way now, but git will save your butt someday. This guide on Everyday Git is perfect for distilling down to barebones git commands you’ll use as a solo developer (where most people start out). Seriously 80% of my git command flow looks like this:
git init
git status
git add .
git status
git commit -m "COMMIT MESSAGE HERE"
git log
Not very intimidating when you see it listed out like that. When something goes wrong with you code, that’s when you’ll Google how to roll back to a previous commit or how to create a separate branch.
Now, as your code gets more complex (looking at you, aspiring data scientists and machine learning designers), you’re going to need tools that can manage packages and virtual environments for you. There are many way to do this, but Conda is an all-in-one tool which it widely use. I’m a visual learner, so here’s a great under-30 minute YouTube video which will get you up and running with Conda quickly. One word of advice: it really doesn’t matter if you install full Conda or miniconda. I remember getting stressed about making this decision when I was first installing Conda. Full Conda comes with some common packages pre-installed, but you’re super savvy and will be making a new environment with specific packages for any project you start, so it’s not necessary. If you’re not a visual learning, or if you just want more information, here’s Conda’s guide on getting started. | https://medium.com/@dianagiulietti/the-terror-of-typing-git-init-8ba924db104f | ['Diana Giulietti'] | 2020-12-15 20:58:59.702000+00:00 | ['Git', 'Programming', 'Conda', 'Command Line'] |
Introducing | TRIPLANT | Triplant
Triplant the “Next Generation Living Implant” is a new dental solution unveiled through joint research and development between Korea and Japan. The objective of Triplant is to establish a proper medical platform using the blockchain technology of 28VC. Overall to provide a support system that considers teeth and gum conditions, oral structure, facial balance, mastication etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-DOw3NaQc&t=62s
The implant industry
Dental experts say the true meaning of healthy and stable teeth indicate being able to use your 28teeth without loss until the age of 100. In modern society, it is difficult to maintain healthy teeth due to such diverse diets and eating habits. Research has shown that most people will get an implant after the age of 40 and that teeth implants cover a large aspect of health issues today. Therefore, the need for implants within the dental industry is expanding and so far, implants have become unavoidable to people in life. The Triplant dental solution, developed through long research and consideration to the implant industry and has aimed to provide people with a new acknowledgement of implantation that will promise healthy teeth through implants.
Why use Triplant?
Structural contradictions and side effects of existing implantations have led to health and economic loss and therefore a next generation of implants is ultimately required in the dental field.
The “Triplant dental solution’ is a new concept of implant. It can be said that the new implant is a human body type implant that will prevent the problems of re-treatment due to infection. Existing implants have a structure that is easily infected with alveolar bone loss, nerve loss due to mechanical insertion during implants.
The 4th living Triplant provides a solution that is close to natural human teeth and therefore, preserves nerves and blood vessels and reduces alveolar bone loss. It is structured to minimize side effects and pain whilst maximizing the functions of teeth and the characteristics of human teeth. The solution does not only provide better quality teeth but will also resolve all implications such as time, costs, and the process of implant.
Triplant feares
>Regeneration of blood vessels and nerves
By reducing the overall power used during the implant, it reduces jaw join pain and prevents damage to the opposing teeth.
>3Circular barrier defenses
3 circular barrier shield designed on top of the implant.
>Secure alveolar bones
Designed to gather the alveolar bone lost during implantation into the 4th generation transplant. | https://medium.com/@28VC/introducing-triplant-9b59f079d442 | [] | 2021-11-25 05:55:04.408000+00:00 | ['Dentistry', '28vc', 'Blockchain', 'Triplant', '28vck'] |
Paradigm Shift: From Victim to International Champion for Hope | What happened next was even more unexpected. Even though I was targeting people with an opposing opinion, there were many people who read the poetry in the comments of social media news pages and started commenting on how much they appreciate the sentiment. As I wrote more, people began to ask if I have a book of poetry that they can purchase. I would always roll my eyes and reply with, “A book? I am not a ‘Writer’, I am a political activist. I don’t know the first thing about writing. I’m just trying to help people understand the suffering of others, and encourage them to have more compassion and empathy.” Readers commented that the poetry inspired them to get involved in their community to help the homeless, the elderly, or others in need.
I began to amass quite a diverse group of friends on social media who wanted to keep up with what I write. People across town, across the state, across the United States, and across the world from Pennsylvania to Pakistan, Ohio to Ireland, Nebraska to Nigeria, so many people wanted to read what I write, I began to fear I could not possibly live up to their expectations.
As more time passed, the poetry I write to use as comments in news stories progressed to becoming poetry written for mental health magazines, and poetry for the first-ever English edition of a magazine in Nepal. I was published in two books of poetry that were created to express the need for social change. Former homeless people and survivors of domestic violence went out of their way to thank me for giving them a voice, for putting in the effort to try to help people understand their struggles.
My poetry was turned into songs for church and it was featured with an effort to raise money for a homeless shelter. Military veterans messaged to thank me for writing about the tormented mind of a soldier with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One thank you grew to ten, then one hundred, now countless hundreds.
Psychologists who read the poetry I write and used as replies on news pages asked if they could use the PTSD poetry as one of many tools they use to work with veterans, encouraging them to write their own story. Counselors in the ‘Alternatives to Violence Program’ (AVP) asked if they could use the poetry with their counseling of incarcerated youth and adult prisoners. The AVP program is proven successful to encourage inmates to look away from violence and towards the arts to express their emotions, heal from trauma, and help set them on a course to becoming productive members of society. Those who fight for freedom in Syria messaged me to tell me that the poetry I write about the struggles and suffering of the people in Syria inspires them, encourages them to continue to fight for freedom despite the odds, and despite their exhaustion. They asked if they could share the poetry on their social media pages and I quickly agreed. They chose Christmas Day 2015 to share what I have written. | https://medium.com/modernidentities/paradigm-shift-from-victim-to-international-champion-for-hope-90c900721047 | ['Agents Of Change'] | 2020-12-25 16:12:08.595000+00:00 | ['Hope', 'Heroes', 'Life Lessons', 'Self-awareness', 'Chronic Pain'] |
The Need for New Student Information Systems (SIS) in Higher Education | By: Shaheer Sandhu
What are Student Information Systems (SIS)
Higher Ed Student Information Systems (SIS) store, track, and use student data that then allows faculty to manage university operations. This data includes grades, financial aid, admissions info, etc. that is all being used in a central service that is the SIS. Examples of traditional functions of SIS include registering students for courses, dispersing financial aid, and building student schedules. This article will examine the need for updated SIS, as they will allow universities to quickly complete tasks that traditional SIS have been able to do, whether that be properly tracking a student from the moment they accept their decision to attend the university, or keeping in touch decades down the road as that student becomes an alumni.
The Need and Benefit of Modernized SIS
The National Research Center for College and University admissions finds that nearly 75% of US universities are using 10+ years old SIS that no longer meet the needs of said universities. Most outdated SIS require manual input of data which is both costly to universities as well as very time-consuming as they have to physically enter student data into a desktop on the universities site.
Even once that data is stored, traditional SIS has only allowed universities to be able to track data but not necessarily utilize that data in any meaningful way. As analytics grow more prominent and of more use in the higher education space, universities will need to implement new SIS solutions that allow for cloud computing and storage as well as support for CRM, or Customer Relationship Management. This will allow them to take that data and have it inform actionable engagement strategies with their students.
The Transition to Online Learning Due to COVID-19 Requires Updated SIS
COVID-19 has caused nearly all universities to transition to online learning, making it almost impossible for administrators to have access to onsite desktops where most of these archaic SIS are available. If universities can pivote to SIS that are stored entirely on the cloud this solves the issue of onsite accessibility and allows any user of the service to access the system from the safety of their own home.
Furthermore, this transition to the cloud will allow professor and university administrators alike to easily understand the capabilities of their SIS solution. A common complaint of traditional systems is that only those who are trained onsite know how to properly use them, whereas companies that provide the system on the cloud can easily host webinars and virtual trainings so all staff members can take full advantage of the SIS.
Additionally, CRM or Customer Relationship Management is gaining traction in the higher education and SIS world. Giant cloud software companies like Salesforce, Oracle, and Workday are recognizing this traction and are working to integrate CRM into their SIS solutions. CRM is becoming more relevant because more universities want to be able to track students over their entire lifecycle. Whether that be using their data in an effort to make their marketing and advertising more effective in getting students to apply to the school or solicit donations from alumni through personalized strategies and newsletters. At a time when universities are being financially hit by the pandemic, having a SIS that tracks this data and effectively manages students is crucial in saving universities time and money. | https://insights.theberkeleygroup.org/the-need-for-new-student-information-systems-sis-in-higher-education-d53a9bbb080e | ['The Berkeley Group'] | 2020-12-17 00:29:58.837000+00:00 | ['Higher Education', 'Student Information Sys', 'Strategy', 'Nonprofit', 'Students'] |
Lets break the SILENCE 🔨 | So, How do you act when you met some sort of accident or mishap, which just flips your life up side down?
Unfortunately, majority of our population after confronting the same situation acts like they are no more.. They shut all the doors facing outside, making themselves responsible for everything, and torturing their soul to the extreme.
In such a manner, i decided to present a platform to recover or grapple mental illness from peoples life. Then, what are we waiting for? Let’s start with the mainstream problem.
This problem comes in various forms having different levels like stress, anxiety, depression, mood swings, eating disorder, schizophrenia and psychotic disorders. And if we connect them all, it comes under the heading of MENTAL ILLNESS.
This is the state of psychological maladjustment that influences an individual’s reasoning, feeling, conduct or state of mind. These conditions profoundly sway everyday living and may likewise influence the capacity to identify with others. On the off chance that you may have psychological sickness but, the main thing you should know is that you are in good company. Mental well-being conditions are definitely more normal than you might suspect, principally on the grounds that individuals don’t prefer to, or are frightened to, talk about them. In any case:
➡ 1 out of 5 adults experience psychological sickness every year.
➡ 1 out of 20 adults experience genuine psychological sickness every year.
➡ 1 out of 6 youth aged 6–17 experience an emotional wellness issue every year.
➡ Half of all lifetime psychological instability starts by age 14, and 75% by age 24.
Alas! most of us criticizes them after confronting with their misdeed…
This serious issue results in some more serious mess, likewise suicide or murders, family crises and many consequential health disorders (cardiac , excretory and digestive, immune, respiratory and some major muscular pains). Meanwhile, Insomnia appears the most deadliest of all. Insomnia and psychiatric illness are in direct relation with each other. Increment of one side will ultimately leads to surge other.
It’s more creepy than this picture.
Accordingly, i step out to escalate a platform for all those who closes themselves in a nutshell and presents the only face which appears to be jovial. We will take online sessions of people facing this gigantic issue, provide them with opportunity to speak, to open themselves and will engage them with some fun activities that will ultimately make them feel comfortable.
First of all,we will approach people socially through Facebook and Instagram and conduct surveys. Secondly, we’ll provide them opportunity to join our sessions for free to minimize the negative pressure of society. And at last we’ll conduct online sessions twice or thrice a week and help them minimize their mental instability.
This project helped me to empower myself to take the first step and at least try to approach it with a positive mind. The sense of just doing something for the society that I have been living in is a breath of fresh air for me. Nothing makes me more excited than the idea of serving the community in any way possible. This project gave me a closer insight into the feeling and what it would feel like if I actually start doing this humanity. It was basically a close-up for me of what it would feel like to become a social entrepreneur and do something for the society and serve my soil. | https://medium.com/@aisha-iqbal174/lets-break-the-silence-eadfa07077c5 | ['Aisha Iqbal'] | 2020-12-24 17:41:26.774000+00:00 | ['Amal Academy'] |
drippy | by steve wardrip
Just under the surface,
Is a place, a horizon,
The other side of land,
Where the sky begins.
I can take you there,
You will tread the same path,
The underworld treasures,
All upside down and transcended.
A bold achievement for the unknowing,
The ones who will never be able to know,
An atmosphere of uniqueness and original,
A veritable circus amusement all the way inside.
Lights on, engine fired, throttle up, stoked,
Reminiscent of Chapeau Cowgirl Hats,
Pinks, soft, puffy, proud, perky,
And glitter, oh my! Egyptian to the core.
Stone quartz geodes and fluorescent glow,
Black Light zone in orange and purple,
Never a zebra, domino piano, playing plain,
Worn marble steps descending to the Sun.
If ever you take a fancy or folly,
Random trolley a sort of port,
A sport for rollers and derbies,
Jammers, Blockers and support from within.
Ten on the track, referees and officials,
Flattrack misses on parade of x-rays,
Hundreds of teeth lost, broken noses,
Bones of mad mean mistresses who finished.
dippy took you there, battered, walled,
You are nuts, crazy coconuts, up a tree,
Insane in the brain, and a square snare,
Brown Booted thug from a jacked up lug.
Take it on down to your embattled shore,
Throw wide open the castle walled door,
Hit the gas with a smash and damn the dike,
Get the distressed, mashed up constable free. | https://medium.com/rosine-magazine/drippy-55a9a8979f5f | ['Steve Wardrip'] | 2017-10-10 03:30:21.018000+00:00 | ['Comedy', 'Poetry', 'Humorous Life Lessons', 'Humor', 'Hacks'] |
May Results: NordFX Trader Earns Over $50,000 on Bitcoin Collapse | NordFX Brokerage company has summed up the performance of its clients’ trade transactions in May 2021. The total income of the three most efficient of them exceeded 175 thousand USD.
The undisputed leader at the end of the month was a trader from China, account №1546xxx, whose profit amounted to USD 81,648. This solid result was achieved on transactions with the British pound (GBP/USD), gold (XAU/USD) and euro (EUR/USD).
The second step of the podium with a result of 53,207 USD was taken by a representative of Vietnam, account №1416xxx, who showed how to make money during market crashes. Their profit was mainly obtained from transactions with bitcoin (BTC/USD), the quotes of which fell by about 40% over the month.
The third place is a trader from Indonesia, account №1506xxx, who earned 41,799 USD in May on gold transactions (XAU/USD).
The passive investment services:
in CopyTrading, one can mark the KennyFXPRO signal -The Compass. It has shown an increase of 108% since November 2020. At first glance, this is not such an impressive result (although it is ten times higher than the interest on bank deposits). But combined with a moderate maximum drawdown of 22%, this signal becomes quite attractive for subscribers who have invested over 45,000 USD in it.
in the PAMM service, the same trader, KennyFXPRO, also shows a good result, which may be interesting for investors who prefer moderate earnings with moderate risks. This manager has seen a 24% capital gain since the end of January with a maximum drawdown of 16%.
Among the IB partners, NordFX TOP-3 is as follows:
the largest commission of the month amounting to 6,568 USD was credited to a partner from India, account 1527xxx;
the second place is a partner from China, account №1522xxx, who received 4,146 USD;
and another Indian partner closes the top three, account №1229xxx, with earnings of 3.975 USD.
https://nordfx.com | https://medium.com/@nordfx/may-results-nordfx-trader-earns-over-50-000-on-bitcoin-collapse-60c80a312d6a | ['Stan Nordfx'] | 2021-06-08 07:57:10.341000+00:00 | ['Trader', 'Forex', 'Nordfx', 'Bitcoin', 'Pamm'] |
Executive Summary | The emergence of customer-centricity is demanding businesses to put the customer at the centre, bringing with it the need for customer empathy, or an operationalised, deep understanding of the customer. As humans we build empathy through human connections, listening and putting ourselves through the other’s experience.
Yet, for large organisations, getting everyone in direct contact and ‘closer’ to the customer is a challenge in practice. This research study aimed to explore how empathy for the customer can be cultivated amongst those that often sit far removed from the customers, such as head office employees in large organisations.
This publication is the result of a Master research for the MA Digital Management at Hyper Island, Stockholm. The pilot for this research was tested at a global fashion retailer. Any company-related findings or internal information is, however, excluded from this publication.
The following findings were drawn from this research:
Connecting non-customer-facing staff with customer-facing staff already increases the perceived closeness to the customer
The ability of companies to digest customer empathy and qualitative insights is a foundation for operationalised customer empathy
Customer empathy needs companies to value the right balance of quantitative and qualitative insights
Employees need to see the value behind qualitative insights and initiatives that cultivate customer empathy
The full overview of findings from primary and secondary research can be found here. | https://medium.com/we-feel-you/executive-summary-1f141b3b8d6e | ['Lisa Schneider'] | 2021-01-09 09:06:43.559000+00:00 | ['Customer Empathy', 'Organizational Culture', 'Customer Success', 'Customer Centricity', 'Customer Experience'] |
AUTISM | Toyin Odunuyi, a friend of mine is trying to raise awareness for autism in Nigeria. We had a conversation and here’s what she had to say.
“I can’t remember what my childhood was like but I know life was good enough for me not to be worried about anything, at least not yet. Of course, while you grow older, things would have to change, or some things might stay the same.
Having to explain to people that my brother is autistic can be draining because they begin to ask so many questions. I once told a friend that my brother has autism and she said “oh he does not look it”. I didn’t even know whether or not to take offense to her statement. I understood that people don’t know enough about it. I can’t blame them, there was a time I was also ignorant about the topic.
A few months ago, I started writing a tell-it-all book on autism which I plan to launch on the 28th of December 2020 but seeing as Nigerians do not engage so much in reading, I decided to work on a documentary. This documentary film could help to spread awareness of autism and other developmental disorders. I felt the film would reach a larger audience than the book will.
In Nigeria, things like autism are blamed on spiritual forces and by the time reality sets in, it might be too late for basic treatments. It is not easy taking care of autistic people so I do not even blame parents that keep the children in institutions for disabilities. It can be draining, but there are a lot of things special about these individuals.
It is important to create awareness because there are a lot of people out there that need help, especially in the rural areas who might not know how to address the matter. The government needs to get involved in the awareness and management of special needs. The private institutions provided for these individuals are really expensive and we cannot blame them. I’m not saying they make services free, I’m saying they make things better. We, as a country need appropriate services.
The Nigerian media does not put these disorders out there for people to learn about so I hope my documentary will help change the perception of autism in the country. But it would be nice to see a film on autism or cerebral palsy.
I plan to use the money from my book launch to fund the documentary project, because of the unavailability of sponsors. I have sent emails and direct messages to different people. I have gotten some responses and I am trying to follow up. I also want to use social media to reach out to see if I can get sponsorships from other random people.
The documentary and book have always been a dream of mine. In my way, this is me trying to make my brother’s life better as well as the lives of other children like him. Of course, if everyone understands and accepts these individuals, it would make the world a better place.” | https://medium.com/@eyitemiadeola/autism-9d22f393627c | ['Adebari Adeola'] | 2020-12-14 20:00:32.724000+00:00 | ['Autism'] |
Build yourself a simple CRM from scratch in PHP and MySQL | Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a system that manages customer interactions and data throughout the customer life-cycle between the customer and the company across different channels. In this tutorial, we are going to build a custom CRM in PHP, which a sales team can use to track customers through the entire sales cycle.
We’ll be creating a simple CRM system for salespeople to:
Access their tasks
View their leads
Create new tasks for each lead
Create new opportunity
Close a sale
Sales managers will be able to:
Manage all customers
Manage sales team
View current sales activities
Download Demo Files
Building Blocks of a CRM
Here is a list of the essential components of the CRM:
Leads : initial contacts
: initial contacts Accounts : Information about the companies you do business with
: Information about the companies you do business with Contact : Information about the people you know and work with. Usually, one account has many contacts
: Information about the people you know and work with. Usually, one account has many contacts Opportunities : Qualified leads
: Qualified leads Activities : Tasks, meetings, phone calls, emails and any other activities that allow you to interact with customers
: Tasks, meetings, phone calls, emails and any other activities that allow you to interact with customers Sales : Your sales team
: Your sales team Dashboard : CRM dashboards are much more than just eye candy. They should deliver key information at a glance and provide links to drill down for more details.
: CRM dashboards are much more than just eye candy. They should deliver key information at a glance and provide links to drill down for more details. Login: Salespeople and managers have different roles in the system. Managers have access to reports and sales pipeline information.
System Requirements
PHP 5.3+,
MySQL or MariaDB
phpGrid
Create CRM Database
We will start by creating our custom CRM database. The main tables we will be using are:
contact — contains basic customer data
— contains basic customer data notes — holds information collection from Contact by sales people.
— holds information collection from Contact by sales people. users — information about sales people
The Contact table contains basic customer information including names, company addresses, project information, and so forth.
The Notes table stores all sales activity information such as meetings and phone calls.
The Users table holds login information about users of the system such as usernames and passwords. Users can also have roles, such as Sales or Manager.
All other tables are lookup tables to join to the three main relational database tables.
contact_status — contains contact status such as Lead and Opportunity. Each indicates a different stage in a typical sales cycle
— contains contact status such as Lead and Opportunity. Each indicates a different stage in a typical sales cycle task_status — the task status can be either Pending or Completed
— the task status can be either Pending or Completed user_status — a sale person can be Active or Inactive
— a sale person can be Active or Inactive todo_type — a type of task either Task or Meeting
— a type of task either Task or Meeting todo_desc — description of a task such as Follow Up Email, Phone Call, and Conference etc.
— description of a task such as Follow Up Email, Phone Call, and Conference etc. roles — a user can be either a Sales Rep or a Manager
Complete Database Schema Diagram
A database schema is the structure that represents the logical view such as tables, views, or primary and foreign keys of the entire database. A database schema includes entities and the relationship among them.
It is a good practice to have one primary key for each table in a relational database. A primary key is a unique identifier for each record. It can be the social security number (SSN), vehicle identification number (VIN), or auto-increment number. This is a unique number that is generated when a new record is inserted into a table.
Below is the database diagram of our simple CRM. The key symbol in each table represents the table primary key. The magnifying glass indicates foreign key linking another table in the database. Sometimes we call it the “lookup” table.
install.sql
Once you have an understanding of the database table structure, find the “install.sql” script in the db folder and use a MySQL tool such as MySQL Workbench or Sequel Pro to run the SQL script. It should create a new relational database named custom_crm and its database tables.
A Side Note on ZenBase
The CRM application is also one of the many application templates readily available at ZenBase (built on the top of phpGrid) for anyone — with or without coding skills — to use and customize for their own needs.
Setup phpGrid
Our CRM contains many datagrids. The datagrid is a spreadsheet-like data table that displays rows and columns representing records and fields from the database table. The datagrid gives the end-user ability to read and write to database tables on a webpage. We can use a datagrid tool from phpGrid. We use a tool instead of building them from scratch because developing the datagrid is usually tedious and error-prone. The datagrid library will handle all internal database CRUD (Create, Remove, Update, and Delete) operations for us with better and faster results with little code. To install phpGrid, follow these steps:
Unzip the phpGrid download file. Upload the phpGrid folder to the phpGrid folder. Complete the installation by configuring the conf.php file.
Before we begin coding, we must specify the database information in conf.php , the phpGrid configuration file. Here is an example of database connection settings:
PHPGRID_DB_HOSTNAME — web server IP or host name
— web server IP or host name PHPGRID_DB_USERNAME — database user name
— database user name PHPGRID_DB_PASSWORD — database password
— database password PHPGRID_DB_NAME — database name of our CRM
— database name of our CRM PHPGRID_DB_TYPE — type of database
— type of database PHPGRID_DB_CHARSET — always ‘utf8’ in MySQL
To learn more about configuring phpGrid, check out phpGrid complete installation guide.
Page Template
Before we can start building our first page of the CRM, it is a good practice to make the reusable page items such as header and footer.
The page will comprise of a header, menu, body and footer. We will start by creating a reusable page template.
head.php
This is a basic HTML5 template header. It includes a link to a custom stylesheet that will be created in a later step.
menu.php
Notice the usage of $_GET['currentPage'] . Each page will set a value which will highlight the name of the current page on the top menu bar.
Include the following code in style.css for menu styling (minified). It will transform the above, unordered list into a menu.
footer.php
Simple closing body and html tags.
Complete Page Template
This is the complete page template. The main content will go after Section Title .
CRM Main Pages
Are you still with me? Good! We can now finally develop the first page in our CRM.
Our CRM for the sales team members has four pages:
Tasks
Leads
Opportunities
Customers/Won
Each page indicates a different stage in a typical sales cycle.
Sale People Page Design Mockup
Here’s our CRM design mockup for the sales people.
Tasks Page
When a sales team member logged in, the first page he sees is a list of current tasks.
As you may recall, our Notes table holds all the sales activity information. We can create a datagrid and populate it from the Notes table using phpGrid.
The Tasks page main content is a datagrid. The following two lines will give us a list of tasks of the current sales person.
The first line creates a phpGrid object by passing the SELECT SQL statement, its primary key — ID , and then the name of the database table - notes .
, and then the name of the database table - . The second and the final line calls display() function to render the datagrid on the screen. Check out the basic datagrid demo for more detail.
Leads Page
The leads page contains list of current leads that the sales person is responsible for. Each Lead can have one or many Notes. We will use the phpGrid master-detail feature for that.
We also need to use set_query_filter() to display only the leads, Status = 1 , and only for the current sales person.
Contact status table
Opportunities Page
A Lead becomes an Opportunity once it is qualified. The Opportunities page is similar to the Leads page. The only difference is the filtered status code in set_query_filter is Status = 2 .
Customers/Won Page
Customers/Won has the Status = 3 . Similar to Leads and Opportunities, Customers/Won can also have Notes.
That’s all there is to it for sales people in our simple CRM.
Manager Dashboard
Photo by Eaters Collective on Unsplash
The sales manager will have access to all records in the sales pipeline as well as the ability to manage sales team and customer data.
We will have a single web page with tabbed menu similar to the phpGrid tabbed grid demo.
Manager Dashboard Design Mockup
My Sales Reps
Main content
Each tab represents a table in the CRM database. $_GET['gn'] will store the table name. It dynamically generates the datagrid based on table name passed.
It’s very easy to integrate jQueryUI Tabs with phpGrid. Please refer to the phpGrid Tabbed Grid demo for more information.
My Sales Rep Page
Since a sales manager needs to quickly find out whom a sale person is working with, we added a detail grid $sdg populated from contact table and link with the master grid.
sales_rep is the connecting key in contact table to the id that is the foreign key in users table. Remember the users stores all of our sales people information.
Screenshots
CRM — Sales Screen
CRM — Manager Screen
Live Demo
CRM Sales Rep Screen | CRM Managers screen
Need to Write Even Less Code?
If you are new to programming and are not yet comfortable with coding, you may want to check out ZenBase that is built on the top of the phpGrid. The CRM is but one of the many application templates readily available at ZenBase for anyone — with or without coding skills — to use and customize for their own needs.
Complete Source Code on GitHub | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/building-a-simple-crm-from-scratch-in-php-58fef061b075 | [] | 2018-07-26 00:03:02.916000+00:00 | ['PHP', 'CRM', 'Technology', 'Programming', 'Web Development'] |
Tuesday’s Gone | Tuesday’s Gone
And Cometh Again…
It was a wild week and a great one for Biden.
Seven days ago he rode the wave of Clyburn’s endorsement to a blowout win in South Carolina — resurrecting his campaign from lackluster performances in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
Since then, Buttigieg, Warren, Steyer, Bloomberg, & Klobuchar dropped out — three of whom, (so far) went on to endorse Biden. And Joe went on to drastically over-perform on Super Tuesday, take the overall delegate lead, and effectively end what looked to be unstoppable Bernie momentum.
Whew.
Ok we are not hear to recap the narrative, we will leave that to the fake news.
Let’s look at some numbers. | https://medium.com/listening-for-secrets-searching-for-sounds/tuesdays-gone-e96e57036f41 | ['Adam Meldrum'] | 2020-03-08 18:14:29.151000+00:00 | ['Democratic Primary', 'Social Listening', 'Super Tuesday', 'Google Trends', 'Network Graph'] |
On Becoming Anti-Bernie | On Becoming Anti-Bernie
I started out liking Bernie Sanders, though I leaned slightly toward Hillary Clinton. Yet I’ve come to the point where I can barely stand his face, and I just want him to stop jabbing his finger as he brays the same slogans in every single venue, over and over. How did I get to this point, especially as someone who had reservations about Clinton and who is thrilled that Sanders has been able to unlock a thirst for liberal policy within the electorate, in a way that I haven’t seen in my adult life, and in a way that I hope may change the landscape of what is possible?
It’s been a gradual process. Here’s how it happened, with the warning that this post is not a comparative assessment of the two candidates or of their campaign platforms; I’m well aware that Sanders has strengths and Clinton has weaknesses, and I’m not trying to persuade anyone here to vote for her over him; what I’m trying to explain is how and why I have come to dislike him so — even though of course I’ll vote for him in the general (and even campaign for him) if I have to:
First, I researched. I went to his website, I went to Govtrack.us, I went to other sites examining his record to see how it squared up with his rhetoric. I tried to find unbiased articles assessing his tax policy, looking at how he would fund single payer (and what he meant by that) as well as “free college” and other promises he made. I looked at analyses on left-leaning blogs that have long advocated for universal health care to see what they thought, sites I respect and whose authors I have relied on for years for their basic objectivity within their admitted points of view. And I saw none who believed Sanders’ numbers added up.
When I saw that the estimates were based on the assumption that the U.S. economy would have an average growth at a 5% rate over his term, that was it for me. And the reason is this: when Jeb! announced he was running for President, he declared that his plan would result in a 4% economic growth rate — and the other GOP presidential contenders quickly followed suit. The Republican candidates’ claims that they “would” do this had been derided on all the same left-leaning blog sites I was now looking at to help assess Sanders. The 4% assertion had been dismissed as magical thinking — or in more straightforward terms, pulled out of Bush’s ass. There was no precedent for a sustained growth rate that high within the last 60 years; commentators pointed out that Reagan had achieved 4% twice in eight years, and Bill Clinton, five times, but 4% growth four years running? Never happened in recent memory — and that was in better economic environments. Sanders’ 5% number was even more magical than Jeb!’s. And so the entire basis of Sanders’ promises for (promises I wanted to believe) was an assumption unprecedented in the last half-century. You can’t base a radical re-imagination of the U.S. economy and the imposition of the largest tax increases in U.S. history on made-up numbers. Economist Gerald Friedman weighed in positively on his plan, but that analysis was ripped to shreds by many others, who showed that Sanders’ plan doesn’t add up on its own terms (estimates are something like a $1–2 trillion shortfall even at the 5% growth assumption). So I concluded that the backbone of Sanders’ plan is founded on, functionally, a lie.
That led me to more research. I concluded that the fact that Sanders only got three bills through Congress (two of which were for naming post offices) wasn’t the only meaningful measure, so I looked at the legislation he introduced during his senate career. It turns out that, every year, year after year, he introduced the same legislation to make a point, and no one else ever seems to have signed on to it. To me, this looked like showmanship rather than governance — an exercise designed to highlight his own support for a very progressive agenda. The hard work is to draft a bill that your co-legislators can get behind, in the political climate that exists and in the place where you work. I concluded that Sanders was less interested in actually accomplishing anything than he was in staging protests where he could claim some kind of moral high ground, not interested in getting in the weeds and doing anything to actually achieve his goals within the Congress he worked in. This research put Sanders’ supposedly pristine progressive agenda in perspective: it is very easy to maintain that agenda if you never make the hard choices necessary to get things done. Classic protester — yet handily collecting his $200,000 pay check and his lifetime of benefits while doing little to enact actual progressive policies to improve people’s lives.
I did more research than the above, but the two overarching themes I just described (magical thinking and ideological purity over practicality) seem tied together in terms of what Sanders has to offer the country with respect to governance. Further, those themes reveal a person who, while he has deep convictions about the ills of income inequality (which I wholeheartedly share), seems to be constitutionally incapable or unwilling to undertake the difficult task of actually coming up with workable, meaningful legislation and therefore who, in his own way, actually lacks character. What I started to see, and which seems to be on view more and more as this campaign goes on, is a person and a campaign that is intellectually and actually dishonest, hypocritical and sanctimonious, sexist, unprepared, lazy, cultish, and dangerous — and he has a poor temperament to boot.
Intellectual and actual dishonesty:
The tax plan is not intellectually honest. Using economic assumptions that effectively have no basis in modern historical reality so that you can make promises that are literally impossible to keep — even if you are elected and manage to sweep Congress — is not intellectually honest.
Pretending that these plans could be enacted, without acknowledging the reality of how the legislative body works, is not intellectually honest.
Rejection of compromise is not intellectually honest. Nor is it a workable strategy. It is intellectually dishonest because in the absence of a supermajority, legislation cannot be passed without compromise. As a Congressman, Sanders knows this, and, actually, compromise is not a bad thing. Should 51% of the people impose a radical new agenda on 49% who don’t want it? It makes sense to require compromise and the need for it is baked into the democratic process and our Constitution.
In rejecting compromise as a mark of lack of integrity, or worse, corruption, Sanders accomplishes two deeply disingenuous goals: (i) he sets himself apart from his colleagues in Congress as the only one who is allegedly “true” to his “values,” thereby creating the myth that he is morally superior and incorruptible; and (ii) he turns the necessity of compromise — without which literally nothing can get done in Congress — into a negative, very similar to the Tea Party and hardliners on the far right in Congress, thereby allowing him to transform his failure to compromise and thus his failure to have achieved any workable progressive legislation in 25 years into a “virtue” — a testament to his supposed integrity.
Attacking Hillary Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that her husband signed when she was First Lady is intellectually dishonest. This is so on several grounds. First, his attacks omit that he himself voted for that bill; Clinton supporters have had to bring that up. Second, Sanders keeps attacking Hillary for having on one occasion, two years after the bill was passed, used the term “superpredator”, when she has already apologized for it, said she would not use it today, and has put it in context (which I think makes clear it was not intended as code for race or to apply broadly), and yet he never admits that he used the term “sociopath” when supporting that same bill, nor has he ever apologized for doing so. Instead, he rips out all context and background for that bill, pins the entirety of its consequences on Hillary (who did not vote for it), and omits his own role in voting for it and the reasons why so many people supported it at the time, including him and the Congressional Black Caucus, despite its warts. So he blames Hillary for the draconian sentencing rules that the GOP insisted on in order to pass the bill, contributing to a false narrative he has constructed that Hillary is not actually a liberal.
And when confronted about his dishonest and hypocritical approach to discussing the crime bill and his own support for it, he lied. He claimed that he supported it in part because it included an assault weapons ban. This is false. He voted in favor of an earlier version of the bill, which did not include that assault weapons ban. Other Democrats — not Sanders — then insisted on that assault weapons ban and he voted for the new version of bill after that language was added. It’s dishonest for him to take other people to task for the consequences of a bill he himself voted for, which was the product of having to compromise with the GOP to get anything done, while blaming Hillary for the GOP’s actions, lying about his reasons for voting for it, and refusing to acknowledge or take any responsibility for his own role. It would be so much more productive to have a national dialogue about what we learned as a nation from these mistakes, the role of systemic racism in mass incarceration, and a proposed set of recommendations and legislation to correct it now, instead of disingenuously attacking, blaming, and lying by omission about Hillary, and further erasing the historical reality in which that bill was passed.
Sanders’ corruption argument — which has now become almost the entire message of his campaign — is also intellectually dishonest. The role of big money in our election process is disgusting and I think everyone despises it. Citizens United, that awful Supreme Court case that gutted campaign finance reform and opened the floodgates to PACs and superPACs and dark money, has been universally condemned by Democrats, who have tried and failed to get the Senate to pass legislation required to begin the process of amending the Constitution to overturn it. Hillary Clinton has personally been on the receiving end of coordinated attacks by that kind of money for many years, and the Citizens United case itself arose out of a challenge to the FEC’s restriction on advertising an anti-Hillary film during the 2008 election. She denounced the decision and overturning it is part of her campaign platform — whether through appointment of more progressive judges on the Supreme Court or by Constitutional amendment, and that was her own platform and position before Sanders announced his candidacy.
So this is not an issue he “owns” or brought to light despite claiming — falsely — that he does not accept money from PACs. Sanders has called Clinton and other Democrats corrupt as he runs on the Democratic platform, undermining the very party he claims to want to lead and, again, suggesting that only he can be trusted because their fundraising is suspect, while his is not, because he does not “take” money from corporations. This argument is dishonest, sanctimonious, and misleading, and has allowed Sanders to set him himself on a pedestal while fomenting unfair negative impressions about Clinton and others. Here is why:
· Sanders insinuates Clinton’s positions on Wall Street reform and other issues are driven by campaign contributions. He hasn’t pointed to and can’t point to any instance in which Clinton’s vote or action anywhere has been a result of a campaign contribution. Her campaign platform, moreover, includes all kinds of regulation on many of the industries that Sanders insinuates she won’t take on. There is literally no proof or evidence that she has ever voted based on a contribution or that she will do so — it is pure insinuation.
· Sanders accepted $10,000 from a Hillary PAC in 2006 when he was running for re-election. Apparently PAC money is only bad when Hillary is his opponent; otherwise, he’s okay with it.
· Sanders accepts money from other PACs. The PAC money he has accepted has typically been from unions, lobbying groups, single-issue groups, and other special interest groups, but these are still PACs — they just happen to be for groups in industries that he does not revile. The fact that they are left-leaning does not mean they are not PACs.
· Sanders insinuates, and has started to state outright, that Hillary and other Democrats’ positions on Wall Street reform, universal health care, and climate change are based on ties to industries that oppose reform. The insinuation itself is at odds with history. The Democrats enacted Dodd-Frank (which has a process for breaking up banks) after the financial crisis — how or why did they do this if they are all the corporate shills that Sanders claims they are? Obama raised over a billion dollars to get elected in 2008 and then again to be re-elected in 2012 and has done more for progressive causes than anyone since LBJ — is he a corporate shill, bought and sold, corrupt? Did his climate change efforts not go far enough because he is corrupt, or because of implacable GOP opposition? Are the Democrats who have pushed for health care for years, including Hillary, lying when they put forward a platform that calls for progressive change?
· Sanders uses terms like “Wall Street” and “fossil fuel industry” to imply that entire industries have engaged in a coordinated effort to dump piles of cash on Clinton — and have done so as a quid pro quo. The reality is that campaign contributions come from individual human beings, who then indicate what line of work they are in on their contribution form (corporate contributions are prohibited). Sanders uses the fact that he has few contributions from people who work in the financial sector to suggest that Hillary is in bed with the “industry” and that that is the reason she does not demand the immediate breakup of the big banks. But Hillary was NY’s senator for eight years and the financial sector is a huge source of jobs and tax revenue for the state of NY; it’s hardly surprising that individuals in that industry would not give money to the man who vilifies them multiple times a day as immoral scourges ruining America, and who wants to break up banks without having a clue as to how he would do so or what he would do afterward to address the effect on the economy. In other words, support for Hillary from these people doesn’t mean she’s bought and sold by them; it means they don’t want Sanders, and who can blame them?
What Sanders does is very devious: he trades on legitimate and widely shared concerns about the role of big money coming from the wealthy, including billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, to then suggest that individual contributions from anyone in any industry he doesn’t like are part of a coordinated industry/billionaire attempt to avoid regulation and to further enrich the one percent, and then he insinuates that Hillary must be bought and sold by those industries because of those individual contributions. That way, anyone who supports her is part of the problem. And then it becomes an act of immorality to vote for her, and a symbol of one’s own moral purity, indeed a rejection of corruption itself, to vote for Sanders. Clever. Intellectually dishonest, McCarthyite, and gross, but clever.
And he even goes even farther. He attacks anyone who does not agree with him or who endorses Clinton as “establishment.” Thus, Planned Parenthood, which has been subject to so much hate and false attack and whose employees risk their lives on a daily basis to go to work in the face of death threats and bombings, is “the establishment” — so its endorsement of Hillary is to be written off and distrusted. Same goes for NARAL. Same goes for the Human Rights Campaign, and long-time public servants like Barney Frank, and Emily’s List, which is dedicated to electing women to office. The list goes on and on. According to Team Sanders, there is no legitimate reason not to support him — if you don’t, it must be because you are a shill, an establishment member, an apologist for the status quo, not a true progressive, not a real liberal. There is no space for considering that Planned Parenthood and NARAL endorsed Clinton because she has been a champion for reproductive rights, not simply a supporter. There is not space for considering that gay rights groups endorsed her because of her record on LGBT rights. There is no space for considering that Sanders’ paucity of endorsements from other politicians and organizations could possibly be based on the view that Clinton is more qualified, more experienced, has a better platform, is a better leader, is more likable, is more likely to achieve progressive goals, has done more to advance equality, has a better record, or any other metric. Hillary’s disagreement with aspects of Sanders’s proposals (disagreements which are relatively minor in any event) couldn’t possibly be based on her conclusion that his ideas are not well thought out, or have potentially offsetting negative consequences, or are unworkable; no, her disagreement must be a function of her corruption or her political calculation.
· Sanders said on April 13th, at his rally in Washington Square (and I’m paraphrasing), that how one runs a campaign and who one takes money from shows what kind of person a candidate is. By that metric, he doesn’t fare so well either. Sanders has over $23 million in unsourced, potentially illegal campaign contributions that he has not explained. He’s received three separate letters from the FEC questioning thousands contributions including identifying thousands in excess of $2,700 (the individual limit), and he had $10,465,912 in aggregated $35 donations all made on a single day from Washington DC that have not been explained (that would mean 299,026 donations were made on one day, when DC’s entire population is about 660,000). If this had been the Clinton campaign with these sorts of questionable contributions, it would be worked into that same old stump speech as a reflection of her lack of character. One standard for Hillary Clinton, another standard for Bernie Sanders.
· Sanders attacks Clinton for attending big-money fundraisers (he even called the Clooney event “obscene”), even though the fundraisers are also to raise money for multiple down-ticket Democrats who must be elected if any progressive legislation is to get through Congress, and even though these fundraisers are nothing next to the fundraising the GOP engages in. Further, in the past he has attended big-money fundraisers for himself and other Democrats — it is only now, in this election, that he has taken issue with them. While I know he sincerely wants to fix our system, his attacks are less about how to fix the system (because that can only be done via Constitutional amendment or the Supreme Court) than they are about positioning himself and political posturing — by de-legitimizing every aspect of the fundraising that is essential for getting Democrats elected within the system that we unfortunately have, and falsely conflating the role of individual contributions with the outsized role of dark money, he both deliberately builds distrust for Clinton as corrupt, and creates a false narrative that Clinton wants neither to fix the system nor enact sufficiently progressive change. This is intellectually dishonest and hypocritical.
· Were Sanders to win the Democratic nomination, he would have to take corporate PAC money in addition to the PAC money he already accepts, and he would need to attend big fundraisers because he would need hundreds of millions more dollars to compete with the flood of GOP money in the general both to win himself, and to support other Democrats. It would be a necessary evil, as it is for Clinton. If he eschewed the money in the general, he would lose (and Democratic-affiliated super-PACs and dark money that he cannot control would support him anyway). Thus, his supposed moral purity concerning campaign contributions is purely situational, as is also evident from the examples I gave above. And though I haven’t looked into it much beyond the $10,000 in PAC money he had no problem with taking from Hillary in 2006, it appears he’s taken over $2.2 million from PACs during his senate career.
· So, basically, what Sanders does is selectively attack the use of aggregated funds to tarnish Hillary, while exempting himself from scrutiny. In his narrative, the PAC money she takes is tainted both because she has more of it than he does and because it comes from people who have jobs in industries he knows are despised by the progressive left; whereas, when he takes money aggregated from an industry we all feel better about (a nurses group, a trade union, a tech company), that money is “good” money, pure money — that money is just fine. But applying that very reasoning, then the fact that he has accepted over $300,000 in contributions from employees in the defense industry must mean he is in the pocket of the arms industry, or that he’s lying when he says he wants to reduce defense spending. We must question his commitment, even though he co-sponsored legislation on this very subject, and assume that but for such contributions, the legislation would go much further, right?
And when a bundler bundles money from individual contributors for the Clinton campaign, even if that lobbyist has 40 clients in many industries, Sanders picks out the one industry that is despised — fossil fuels — and contends that the bundler, and thus Hillary herself, has ties to the fossil fuel industry, when he could just as easily picked a different industry the lobbyist works in, like Hollywood or technology. But that’s not going to slime her in the eyes of progressives; they don’t care about her “ties” to technology companies (after all, Sanders has them too), so he selects oil and gas. Tiny grain of truth there, but then it’s picked up and amplified and now many Sanders supporters think Clinton is in the pocket of “big oil” — never mind that she’s received a total of about $308,000 from individuals in the oil and gas industry, compared to Sanders’ approximately $54,000, both drops in the bucket of their campaign totals, much less measured against the millions the GOP has received from people in that industry.
But Sanders doesn’t mention these facts. Instead, he attacks her, and his supporters seem to believe him, as being a tool of the fossil fuel “industry”. And then he says that that is why she doesn’t support an absolute ban on fracking and that means she must not care about the environment! She couldn’t possibly have developed a less absolute position because the issue is complicated and a total immediate fracking ban has consequences worth considering — from job losses to the immediate effect a total ban would have on our oil and coal dependence (and prices for electricity).
Similarly, Sanders suggests Hillary’s reluctance to run in and break up the banks is evidence of her “ties to Wall Street”, when, in fact, the government already has that capability and rules for making it happen under Dodd-Frank (facts he seemed unaware of during the Daily News interview). It couldn’t possibly be that Sanders’ idea is a bad one, could it? Or that Hillary’s regulatory proposals for dealing with “shadow banking” participants actually make more sense and will do more to reduce risk than Sanders’ one-note idea?
· Sanders also falsely peddles the corruption narrative based on Clinton’s speaker fees. Not only has he suggested that merely giving a paid speech is evidence of corruption, he has lately ratcheted up this attack to imply that her Wall Street reform proposals are a function of having been bought by Goldman because she received $675,000 for speaking to their employees three times. Indeed, at the most recent debate he appeared to blame the collapse of the financial system on 2008 on Hillary’s “Wall Street ties” while she was a senator (conveniently omitting that she had nothing to do with repealing Glass-Steagall or with his own vote in favor of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which many analysts consider to have been a substantial factor in the massive amounts of risky trading that helped lead to the financial collapse). But his attacks on her speech-giving are disingenuous and problematic for a number of reasons.
1. There is no connection, nor could there be one as a matter of chronological reality, between Clinton’s receipt of speaker fees between 2013 and 2015, and any positions she held or decisions she made before those dates. Hillary’s paid speeches were made in the three year window between leaving the State Department and announcing for the presidency; she could not receive such fees while serving as FLOTUS or U.S. Senator or Secretary of State — positions she held for basically 20 years in a row. Thus, no aspect of her record has any connection to any speech she gave after the fact.
2. The majority of the money Clinton received from her paid speeches went to charity.
3. Hillary’s fees are in line with what other former secretaries of state and people of similar stature have received. No other candidate has ever been attacked as corrupt for giving a paid speech. Further, no other speaker in history has been both a former First Lady of a very popular president and a former Secretary of State for another popular president — not mention also having been a two-term senator from NY (first female to hold that position), not to mention having also come closer than any woman in U.S. history to obtaining a major party’s nomination for the presidency and being a recognized leader for women’s rights. Somehow — despite decades of examples of former elected officials accepting speaking fees — it is now nefarious for people to be willing to pay to hear her speak, and corrupt for her to accept a fee when out of office? This is a new standard apparently invented by Sanders only for Hillary Clinton.
4. This new conflation of speaking fees while out of public office with corruption while in public office is analytically false while superficially appealing, rendering it all the more slippery and scurrilous. Sanders insinuates that because Clinton gave talks at Goldman, she must be doing their bidding. A look at the list of the speeches Clinton gave and received money for reveals that they include speeches to companies and associations across an array of industries, as well as to women’s groups. But Sanders focuses solely on the three Goldman Sachs speeches. He notably ignores that a speech she gave in 2014 at the Goldman 10,000 Women dinner argued forcefully for equal pay for women and gender parity. Her use of that platform to push the same progressive agenda she has been at the forefront of for decades is conveniently absent from Sanders’ screeds against her. This speech, while unpaid, gives the lie to his accusation that speaking to Goldman employees equates to corruption or that her policy positions are dictated by Goldman.
But even if it did not, the argument, reduced to its essence, is that the very act of receiving a speaker fee is itself a form of corruption — at least, if the speech is given by Hillary Clinton, and given to a group Sanders does not like. This is intellectually dishonest. He’s certainly not attacking her speeches to women’s rights groups, or questioning her motives there, because he can’t. So he selectively focuses on a bank that symbolizes greed in the public’s mind and attacks her receipt of the fee as “evidence” she will not support the very regulation she has proposed. What Sanders’ selectivity shows, however, is that his focus on her speaking fees is a campaign tactic adopted to push the false corruption narrative, allowing him to deflect criticism of his own blunderbuss “break up the banks” platform by painting Hillary’s arguably superior alternative platform as the product of corruption rather than legitimate disagreement.
Hypocrisy:
Some examples of Sanders’ hypocrisy are above. But that isn’t the end of it.
Sanders claims he wants a political revolution to achieve progressive goals. But he has not supported the election of other candidates who will be necessary to pass progressive legislation through Congress. Until a few days ago, Sanders had raised $1,000 for candidates besides himself — compared to over $20 million Clinton has raised. Now he is supporting three candidates. And in speeches and debates, Sanders now draws no distinction between Hillary and the GOP, contributing to the Nader-esque view prevalent among a subset of his supporters that there is no difference between the parties and that Clinton is a closet Republican.
It is one thing to keep his campaign alive to the end to get the message out, but it’s another when the campaign pretends that progressive goals can be attained by him alone, without Congressional support, or by young people simply showing up at his rallies. It’s also another thing when Sanders insinuates that Democrats are the ones impeding progressive goals, rather than doing what they can in the face of lockstep GOP opposition. He’s willing to shout the shout, but not walk the walk, and he doesn’t seem to be doing a thing to translate the enthusiasm he’s generated into anything but more money for his campaign and hatred for Hillary. In fact he actively works to undermine confidence and trust in the Democratic party and Clinton, its likely nominee — knowing full well that the more his attacks take root in the minds of his supporters or the broader electorate, the more difficult it will be to unite the party and win in the general — ultimately hindering the prospect of electing a Democrat for president and of winning more Senate and Congressional seats.
You could make the argument that continuing to fight in this manner is a smart tactic because it will make him even more indispensable to Clinton in June and require her to make promises for an even more progressive agenda than she might otherwise have done, but I think he’s gone so far in the character attacks (which he originally said he would not engage in) that there may not be any going back. I cannot believe my eyes when I read some of the comments on the public sites. It’s like they were written by the Tea Party — just a frothing cauldron of hatred of Hillary and mindless repetition of debunked rightwing lies and new false Sanders memes about her supposed corruption or her murderous tendencies. And I actually had a friend tell me the other day that Hillary “directed the murder” of Bertha Caceres! (Never mind that the situation in Honduras began in 2010–11 and the Obama administration had good reasons for not declaring a coup and that Hillary has been out of office since 2012; somehow a murder in 2016 by Honduran assassins is not only Hillary’s fault, she “directed” it!) I almost responded, “Yes, Hillary was plotting to kill Caceres while she was stabbing Vince Foster to death.”
So Sanders has gone too far, and character assassination and innuendo have subsumed his campaign. Instead of discussing progressive solutions, he now spends more time arguing that Hillary is “unqualified” because she is corrupt, untrustworthy and immoral based on her fundraising or speech giving. Many of his supporters will come around (recognizing that a GOP victory in November would be catastrophic), but he has disciples, and I don’t think they will. The Bernie or Bust movement is real and its adherents appear immune to reason and to fact. They seem honestly to believe not only that Sanders is morally superior, but that there is no distinction between Hillary and the GOP, that she is corrupt, and that they cannot be “true to themselves” and the ideals they like to think they stand for, unless they do not vote against her. And the difficulty in bringing them around is largely a product of Sanders’s own making. Much of it is due to his dishonest character assault on Hillary and his refusal to acknowledge any meaningful difference between her and the GOP. It is hard to see how they will ever believe Sanders’ (present or future) back-pedaling that Clinton is an acceptable human being after hearing for months that she is a corrupt member of a corrupt (undefined) “establishment.”
And this is where I find Sanders to be the most hypocritical, dangerous, and downright hateful: he knows Clinton is a liberal, and a very liberal liberal at that. He knows she’s to his left on guns and women and LBGT and a range of issues. He knows her leadership on equality issues and the range of progressive achievements she had and helped secure, and he knows that she has developed a full range of progressive solutions in many more areas than he has and to a much more detailed and targeted degree than he himself has. He likely knows she’d be more effective than him in office, and I do not doubt that he knows she is a good person. But he pretends otherwise and smears her and all his congressional colleagues as shills. If he would have just stuck to the issues and spread his message in a positive way, we would not have this bitter, festering hatred of Hillary that he is stoking and exploiting, which could really have negative consequences in the general, both at the presidential level and downticket.
Sanders is also hypocritical because he attacks Clinton for not being transparent, but has failed to disclose his tax returns, and both he and his wife, Jane, have lied about it when questioned.
· First, they both said all their returns had been released. This was false. The Washington Post reported that they had released a page or two from their 2014 return, but not the whole return, and nothing from any prior years. Clinton has produced her returns going back about a decade and every major presidential candidate produces their tax returns. (Sanders has only now, after much pressure and ridicule, released the full return for 2014 — but only for 2014.)
· Second, originally Sanders claimed he could not produce his tax returns because his wife does them. That’s absurd — his tax returns from prior years are all finished; it doesn’t matter who does them, he’s responsible for them because he signed them and has access to them.
· Third, his wife Jane lied in an interview the other day when asked if they had produced their returns, saying they had done so (even though the Washington Post had already demonstrated that claim was false). When pressed by the reporter, Jane then said she would produce them “if” she could find them, and when asked how hard finding her returns could possibly be, she shifted gears and said, “we’ve been kind of busy,” so yeah, maybe, when she gets a chance; and then she claimed they hadn’t produced the tax returns from prior years because “they” had not been running for office in the past; and when the reporter reminded her that her husband has been in office for many years, she just sat there.
I don’t know why Sanders does not want to produce the tax returns, but simple-minded lying about why they have not produced them is a very poor reflex and suggests something is up. My suspicion is that their income and assets may be higher than they have let on, which no one would care about at all, but for the fact that he’s staked out this ground of moral superiority based on that supposed lack of assets — in other words, the returns are likely to reveal he has more than people think and may not be in the 95%.
Sanders also sets himself as the one true progressive, turning himself into some kind of human litmus test for progressive purity. His more credulous supporters have totally drunk this Kool-Aid and it’s been grotesquely effective, and I really can’t stand him for it. The reason I can’t stand him for it is that while Hillary Clinton has made mistakes and made judgments I do not agree with (same with Obama, whom I love), she has spent her life striving to make the world better for women and children and people of color and dedicated her life to doing so in actual, concrete, provable ways that have had real results for people’s lives. Sanders sits on his moral high horse and attacks her, while he’s accomplished little (and some of the legislation he’s been on board with is outright disgusting — for example, his support for gun manufacturer immunity and opposition to the Brady bill):
· So while Bernie Sanders was writing about women fantasizing about being simultaneously raped by three men (see more below), Hillary Clinton was going under cover in the deep South to expose racist practices.
· While Bernie Sanders was running unsuccessfully for office with the Vermont Liberty Union Party as a protest candidate, Hillary Clinton was working for the Children’s Defense Fund and helping the poor get representation.
· While Bernie Sanders didn’t have job until he was 40 years old — on the public payroll as a mayor in VT — Hillary Clinton was the first woman partner in her law firm, served on the board of the Legal Services Corporation, founded Arkansas advocates for Children and Families, and served as first lady of Arkansas.
· Hillary’s lifelong commitments to helping others, including getting health care for millions of children, has been erased from the narrative by Sanders, and his most fervid supporters attack her as a tool of the insurance companies and a corporate hack as if her life’s work never happened.
· Meanwhile, while Clinton was working in the trenches to understand the issues and learn from her health care task force failure, which then led to CHIP and insurance for millions of children, where was Sanders? “Literally, standing right behind you” will laugh his supporters, because there’s a picture of him behind her at a photo-op from 1994. But other than standing in the photo, what did he do to “support” the effort? He voted against the bill. What legislation has he drafted that has helped any child or person obtain insurance?
Sanders is out there attacking Obama and Hillary for the Affordable Health Care Act as if the Democrats sold out the progressive agenda in 2009–10 when they fought tooth and nail against lockstep GOP opposition for what they could get and managed the greatest legislative achievement (even though it is far from perfect) in generations, so that 20 million Americans who did not now have health insurance, and Sanders attacks them and suggests they are corporate shills in thrall to the insurance companies? This is outrageous. It is disingenuous. It is wrong. And it is lazy, binary thinking that omits history and political reality. But this is of a piece with Sanders’ entire approach — he’s a professional protester, and little more.
Except. Except, apparently, when it comes to guns, and environmental racism, and pork from the military-industrial complex for Vermont. His opposition to the Brady bill and support for gun manufacturer immunity are well-known and, in my view, are indefensible positions. The argument that he opposed modest regulations regarding guns because of hunters or small gun shop owners in VT can’t pass the laugh/smell test. His active role in pushing to get VT’s radioactive waste dumped in a poor Latino community in TX (Sierra Blanca) (his wife is an alternate on the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission) is ignored by his supporters and omitted by his campaign. And he worked hard to bring home the bacon for VT in the form of a $1.5 trillion war machine known as the F-35, which is the walking definition of waste in defense contracting.
These things matter because they were not votes Sanders made as a compromise to secure important progressive legislation. If they were, I might not have a problem with them, especially because in long political career, there are going to be a few examples of legislation one does not approve of. The reason I mention them, though, is that Sanders has falsely wrapped himself in this mantle of perfect progressivism and civil rights championship while claiming Hillary is a “panderer” and he has set himself up as different from other politicians, one willing to take on supposedly corporate interests. These examples show, again, his hypocrisy. That he sought to dump nuclear waste on a voiceless Latino community is at odds with his self-positioning as a person who will champion the needs of minority communities. The F-35 example gives the lie to his commitment to reduce wasteful military spending — apparently, it’s all bad unless the pork comes home to benefit VT.
And one of Sanders’ worst hypocrisies concerns the primary process itself. Sanders has been an independent for years. He joined the Democratic party in October not because he wants to be a Democrat, but because he knows he cannot get elected as an independent. He said himself in an interview that the reason he switched was that he needed the media coverage in order to run a viable campaign at all. And now he’s running as a Democrat trashing other Democrats as corrupt. Sanders’ negative messaging isn’t about the GOP — it’s about the Democratic Party and its most likely nominee. I doubt independents care much about this, but it’s really pretty disgusting. The Democratic nominee is the head of the party and has an obligation to try to work with the party to elect its candidates and to advance its collective platform. Sanders works actively to undermine the Democratic Party itself.
Even worse, Sanders knew the rules of the primary process when he entered the race. The delegate and super-delegate rules were set up and agreed upon by the party in 1982; Tad Devine, his campaign’s senior advisor, had a role in that process. Though Sanders knew and agreed to the rules when he became a Democrat, once it began to be apparent he would not likely succeed within those rules, he attacked the rules as unfair. His campaign set up a meme that the super delegates are undemocratic and should not have a role in the nomination. But now that the super delegates are his only path to victory, his campaign argues that the super delegates should play a role in the process, and that the super delegates should not vote for Hillary if the polls are favorable to Sanders at the time of the convention. In other words, he is arguing that the nomination should be based on “momentum” or polling of a hypothetical Sanders/GOP match-up, regardless of the popular vote or the number of delegates earned!
At every single turn of the campaign, when something hasn’t gone Sanders’ way, the campaign has attacked whatever rule is inconvenient for Sanders as unfair. If that rule can later be twisted or broken to his advantage, then they argue for that. This has been covered a great deal on various blogs and news programs, so I won’t belabor it — my only point is that his arguments have been rankly hypocritical. There is literally no principle behind them other than the principle of whatever works to help Sanders, then that should be the rule. And the campaign is threatening a contested convention, egged on by Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver. His supporters have also been targeting delegates and super delegates to pressure and threaten them into changing their support for Hillary (regardless of how far ahead she ends up in votes and pledged delegate counts by the convention). Sanders is not only comfortable subverting, he is arguing for, for the subversion of the will of the voters if it will get him the nomination.
If Hillary were to make these arguments, or her supporters to target and threaten his pledged delegates? She’d be savaged in the press and by Sanders’ supporters.
Sexist:
I went back and read several of Sanders’ writings from the 70s. I realize these are from quite a few years ago. However, he was in his early 30s when he wrote them. And I found them to be pathetic — not just poor and embarrassing writing you might forgive if it had been written by a troubled, oversexed sophomoric boy, but very limited, reductive, lazy thinking. He bought into the idea that repression causes cancer, and illustrated that through a hypothetical in which he argued that if some nice young boy “has an old bitch for a teacher (and there are a lot of them)…” who tells him what to do, the boy will repress his feelings; a lifetime of repression will give him prostate cancer. Why do I care about this idiotic piece he wrote at the age of 31? I’ll tell you why. He assumed that the supposedly repression-causing behavior came from women telling boys what to do — he could have picked a male teacher to be the one instilling discipline in his hypothetical — but he assumed years of specifically female teachers would cause boys to repress themselves and lead to prostate cancer. And he had no problem referring to them as “bitch.” He wasn’t 16 when he wrote this.
He was 31.
He’s basically the same age as my dad. My dad at 31 had three children and a job and didn’t refer to our teachers as “bitches” and didn’t blame women for the actions, thoughts, or health of men. Sanders’ writing reveals an adolescent and sexist mindset, not to mention very limited capacity for analysis and scientific reasoning. Sanders also wrote about the dangers of sexual repression in other ways, including through a hypothetical based around women’s supposedly fantasizing about being “raped simultaneously by three men” and men fantasizing about “abusing” and “raping” women. Yuck. He also wrote that because girls reach puberty by 13, they ought to be sexually active as teenagers. Putting aside the ick factor, his writing and analytical capacity aren’t as good as most high schoolers’. This is not my idea of a champion for women.
Then there is the language of the campaign. I’ve watched this campaign, which knows full well how slim the chances of victory are, gleefully exploit 25 years of GOP smears on Hillary Clinton to ensure that a whole new generation of voters who know nothing about the history of that slime machine, swallow that drivel hook, line and sinker with no examination. Because those smears originated when Clinton transgressed historical gender norms by refusing to behave like a traditional First Lady, they cannot be unpacked from gender.
But what turns the campaign’s embrace of the rightwing’s history of character assassination against her from foul to sexist is its use of language like too much “ambition” and “unqualified” and, on Tuesday at the rally in NYC, “Democratic whores.” As every woman over 30 knows, women are routinely criticized as “too ambitious” or “too aggressive”, and face negative consequences, when they act the way any man in their same circumstances would. There is decades of research showing that men are hired and promoted over more qualified women on the basis of the men’s “potential” to achieve what their female competition has actually achieved. There is also decades of research demonstrating people’s discomfort with women asking for promotions or power. The campaign’s language is either deliberately sexist, or used with unconscious bias, but in either case it’s a dog whistle to and for people who know and for those who don’t even realize their own discomfort with women seeking power. (Perhaps this language would not occur if the top ten staffers on his campaign were not white men?)
And while the Sanders campaign is not responsible for the sexism by a media that has no problem with his crazy hair and shouting and spitting and finger-jabbing and interrupting and thick accent and rarely smiling and math-challenged proposals, the campaign is happy to ride that double-standard gravy train as Clinton is picked apart for “shouting”, or for not smiling enough, or for her clothes or hair, or for coughing, and the campaign is happy to play the so-called idealist while painting Clinton as a corporate shill, as if any woman could ever be elected with Sanders’ platform.
Can you imagine if Clinton proposed such an absurd tax plan? She’d be ripped to shreds for her inability to do math. No — the only way she can remotely be considered for this office is by being smarter, more accomplished, more experienced, better prepared. But that’s not enough — Sanders now (again, cleverly) attacks her experience and her qualifications and her preparedness as flaws — oh, she’s too much of a realist, she’s not a visionary, she doesn’t think big enough, she’s part of the system, if she doesn’t make impossible promises, she’s the “establishment” who doesn’t want progressive change, but if she does say she wants progressive change it’s a just a calculation to capture Sanders’ voters (never mind her record).
It’s of no moment that Sanders apologized for his surrogate’s use of the term “corporate Democratic whores” the day after the fact. He let the crowd cheer that sexist term, accepted their boos of Hillary, and took no responsibility for the fact that he’s basically been calling her a corporate whore for the past month, bought and paid for along with like other Democrats. His surrogate’s use of the term “whore” was the natural extension of that, just using specific and gendered terminology to drive the point home.
Then there are the “BernieBros” — the men, usually white guys, who troll women who dare either question Sanders in any way or to comment in a pro-Hillary way on every site they can find. Sanders actually has spent over $16 million on Revolution Messaging, a company that trains interns to go onto social media sites (causing one blogger to hope the company is not involved in on-line trolling). The examples on Twitter, Facebook and other social media of sexist (and racist) memes, the use of the B- and C-words to describe Hillary and women who support her, or who dare suggest Sanders might have a flaw, have been documented, although only partially. Then of course there’s the Hillaryhate, which is fostered and exploited in many ways. Many articles have been written, so I won’t here, about the BernieBros’ repulsive online trolling behavior, and on why the claim of “oh I don’t have a problem with women, I’d vote for Warren” actually demonstrates sexist bias.
Sanders doesn’t set an example at the top, he doesn’t encourage this subset of his supporters (or his campaign) to not use loaded gendered language, he allows his supporters to boo Clinton at his rallies, and he actively encourages the view of her as untrustworthy, power-driven and corrupt.
And even as Clinton and her supporters are subjected to sexist tropes and attacks, Sanders and his surrogates tell everyone that her gender is irrelevant and should not be considered as a positive factor for voting for her. Polls and anecdotal evidence (blog posts, etc.) suggest that his supporters agree with this. Thus, Sanders has very effectively neutralized if not eliminated entirely the historic nature of her likely victory, and made it almost unacceptable to care that she is a woman or to consider the benefits of her being a woman when voting for her.
It’s rather extraordinary that he has made it virtually unacceptable to care that for the first time in history a woman is poised to win the Democratic nomination and seems likely to become the president; we are told it should not matter to us that representation of the half of this country that has been excluded from the presidency for the entirety of its existence is within reach. It’s not supposed to matter that a woman who has been a leader for women’s rights and reproductive rights around the globe, and who has broken so much ground for women, an actual feminist, could possibly be our next president. Suddenly, as the country is on the verge of possibly, finally, at long last, nominating and even electing a woman, the most important thing ever is that we ignore that possibility and instead once again put a white guy in the office because he correctly observes the obvious — that we have a broken campaign finance system and we have income inequality?
Really? The first woman who might win the presidency is “unqualified” because she participates, perforce, like President Obama and everyone else, even Sanders (admittedly to a lesser degree), in the broken system? (Never mind that her campaign addresses the same issues of campaign finance reform and income inequality and never mind that Sanders’ plan is not viable.) It is amazing that this simple diagnosis makes Sanders a truth-teller whose nomination is groundbreaking, while electing a woman for the first time in history is somehow not.
Unprepared and lazy:
The Daily News interview revealed that there is essentially nothing behind or beyond Sanders’ stump speech. He hasn’t thought deeply about the solutions that are the centerpieces of his campaign. He promises a quick fix of free college or universal health care without any admission of the colossal undertaking and work that would be required to craft these laws much less get them enacted. He offers simplistic, one-size-fits-all solutions to complex problems (break up the banks!) without considering the consequences. Questioned, all he could do was revert to the set lines he says in every speech and at every debate. The interview also revealed that hadn’t thought about a number of critical foreign policy issues.
And it is clear from his record, and from his statements about Castro and the Sandinistas, that Sanders really has a 1930s-style pure-lefty mindset that does not even acknowledge the violence that characterized these regimes. Instead, he still sees them as the voice of the people in a noble pursuit to throw off the yoke of dictatorship and U.S. intervention. This critique, which he made on the air in the 1980s, was something he was offered the chance to disavow during the Univision Democratic debate — but he doubled down on his praise of Castro, disavowed nothing, and then lost Florida big. I think it is fine to critique the Cold War ideology that led the U.S. to many disastrous interventions in Latin America, as Sanders does — but he does so without any acknowledgement of the extraordinarily negative consequences of the movements he praises. And to me that signals a blinkered myopia about revolutionary movements in general and an attachment to socialist ideology that is rather shocking in its naiveté. (His comments will render him unelectable in the general. Go back and watch the video and imagine the commercial the GOP will make.)
So, while I opposed the Iraq war and believe Hillary’s support for the resolution for authorizing force in October 2002 was a political calculation that she should not have made, and I agree with Sanders’ vote against it, that single vote doesn’t make up for his lack of inquiry into or real engagement with the complexity and breadth of foreign policy issues that a commander in chief ought to have.
And more problematically, I don’t trust Sanders’ judgment, even though he got it right that one time on Iraq. Sanders has spent his life taking positions from a deeply ideological point of view, and has done so without having to ever really consider or answer for the consequences of his positions, because he’s so often been in the minority taking a protester’s position. But a commander in chief and a president has to govern in real time and from a place of reality, not ideology, and must balance many competing interests and constituencies — two things Sanders not only has never done, but has demonstrated he has no interest in doing. It is not clear he even knows how.
Temperament. Sanders is crotchety and becomes red-faced, testy and sarcastic when criticized or questioned. He doesn’t seem to have an “inside voice.” In town halls when he is asked questions he doesn’t really listen to the question or hear it; he responds with his set answers. He brushed his wife away from a lectern (“don’t stand there”) on the air; he has repeatedly (as Chuck Todd has noticed) thrown his surrogates under the bus; he blames his failure to release his taxes on his wife; the negative consequences of the crime bill he derides have nothing to do with him. This is a pattern. There seems to always be some reason why someone other than him is responsible for anything that happens. He does not “own” things, and doesn’t allow himself to be held accountable. Worse, he is all about the blame and too little about an effective solution. I will use two examples, but there are many.
First, his desire to break up the banks seems to be focused on punishment, and his opposition to TARP was also focused on punishment. To use his language, I think that his opposition to TARP “disqualified” him from the presidency. In 2008, the Bush administration and Congress had a choice about whether to let financial institutions collapse or bail them out. Sanders was willing to let those institutions, consequences be damned, fail, because bad actors had made bad choices. He preferred to have an extended worldwide global depression — the certain outcome without TARP — rather than let those actors avoid some form of retribution for their role in the collapse.
The analogy I’ve made in the past is to the Titanic. If the captain’s negligence causes the ship to hit the iceberg, and people start drowning, do you let the ship sink, rather than rescue it, in order to teach the captain a lesson? No. You have to rescue the ship, even if it means the captain’s life is saved, even if he deserves to drown, because there remain innocents on board with him and we must save them and the ship. TARP was the rescue for the sinking ship of our economy. If the banks had been allowed to fail, not only would we have seen a devastating run on all banks, but the trillions of dollars in wealth that were wiped out as it was would have been magnified multi-fold and there would have been a total economic collapse across the entire globe for many years. (And TARP, though a risk, was successful; a global depression was averted and taxpayers were repaid.) But Sanders opposed it. And then, even worse, he went on to oppose the auto bailout too because of his opposition to TARP.
I really think these two votes are indefensible. They demonstrate an inability to see the bigger picture, a commitment to ideology over realism and pragmatic decisions, and a politics of punishment rather than of solution: punish the banks, they are evil, you cannot reward their behavior — no matter the real consequences of making the more difficult choice of bailing them out even though it encouraged moral hazard to do so. The good of the country required supporting TARP. Yet Sanders stood aside when his own proposals got no support, and voted against the bailout because in his view the banks did not deserve to be saved. And because he was in the minority, the disastrous consequences of doing nothing were never realized, and he never had to answer for the ultimate irresponsibility of his position.
Second example is Flint, MI. Hillary’s response was to speak with the mayor of Flint, ask how she could help and then arrange a visit and meet with people and send help and develop a policy platform for addressing lead in water. (Her proposal was released on April 14 and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones is in heaven, as he has been beating the drum about the dangers of lead’s possible causal relation to crime for many years.) Sanders’ response was to demand Gov. Snyder’s resignation. Another feel-good, I’m better than you, punish the bums reaction that, without more, does nothing to improve the situation in Flint or anywhere else. That’s Sanders — self-righteous moralizing and retribution, but no workable solution. And while I think Snyder should resign, the situation is, surprise, more complicated than that and it’s not all about Snyder.
What all this says to me is that Sanders is unwilling, unable, and temperamentally unsuited to actually govern or to engage in responsible executive decision-making. This is not a person who listens and learns or works with others or compromises; this is a person whose entire life has been dedicated to making points from a place of ideological purity. Those points are important, and I agree with most of them, but they are not a basis for electing him to the presidency.
The rhetoric both he and his campaign use also illustrates these issues of temperament that I find so off-putting. Attacking the character rather than the argument of people who disagree with you is inappropriate in a president. Dismissing as irrelevant or ignorant entire swaths of voters who don’t agree with you is inappropriate in a president. The Sanders campaign has done both, and it has done so repeatedly and deliberately.
As discussed, character assassination of Clinton has virtually subsumed his campaign. The campaign routinely dismisses his inability to connect with people of color, or people in the South, or voters over 35, by writing them off as the “Deep South” or not young, or “African American.” This sends a message, picked up on by supporters, that voters in red states don’t matter; that “old” voters are “establishment”; and that African-Americans are too uninformed to know that Bernie is best for them or Hillary is pandering to them (not racist! really!). They dismiss women’s support of Hillary as based on their “uterus” (not sexist! really!). This language demeans voters, denies them their agency, and suggests once again that there cannot be a legitimate reason for voting for Hillary — it can’t be that she is the better candidate, or connects more with diverse constituencies, or that there are problems with Sanders. The only problem is with the electorate, too stupid or too establishment-oriented to realize that Sanders is the answer.
And the campaign’s spin of the delegate math, along with its theme of Clinton’s and the “establishment’s” untrustworthiness, actively encourages its more rabid base to believe that there is a media bias against Sanders, that the “media” is not covering him, that Hillary’s victories are somehow illegitimate, that the people who vote for her don’t matter, that the DNC has hijacked the voting apparatus in states where Sanders loses, that GOP voter suppression tactics are actually the DNC’s, that the super delegates are unfair unless they vote for Sanders, that the DNC or individual states rigged their voting laws in favor of Hillary, that Hillary is not actually 2.3 million votes ahead, that Hillary is not actually over 200 pledged delegates ahead, that somehow it is a media conspiracy to report the math — i.e., it’s media bias to report that statistically it is highly unlikely for Sanders to make up his pledged delegate/voting deficit or that that deficit comes because she’s won big in much more populous states with more diverse populations (and if the media says so they are in the tank for Hillary); that the mainstream media itself prefers Hillary (even though she has received more negative media coverage than any other candidate, including Trump). And these beliefs are spread via social media, Reddit threads, fake memes, tweets and trolling attacks, taking root as “truth”, along with the character assaults on Hillary and the myth of Sanders’ integrity, in a dangerous feedback loop of confirmation bias.
In short, in addition to hope and idealism and thirst for progressive change (which I support and share), the Sanders campaign has also awakened a dormant left-wing Tea Party that I didn’t believe existed, but that lives in a fever swamp of conspiracy-thinking and epistemic closure and rejection of fact and binary, “us v. them” thinking. And that terrifies me. The mere fact that the left’s goals are goals I largely share doesn’t make their behavior or refusal to deal in reality any more appealing than the hard right’s similar behavior. I don’t want a leftwing analogue to the extreme right’s lunacy. But that is what Sanders has unleashed among some of his supporters. In fact, he’s stoking and exploiting it, and it’s dangerous.
And so, although I will vote for Sanders in a heartbeat over anyone in the GOP (whose candidates and platform are awful in every respect), because of his words, deeds, and temperament, Bernard Sanders is not worthy of the Democratic nomination.
Author’s Note: I have updated this post to include links to sources. During the process I corrected some minor factual errors. I also came upon several analyses of Sanders’ tax proposal that suggest that while his growth assumptions have no modern historical precedent, and may be very optimistic, they might be achievable, and therefore, the conclusion that I reached in February— that his numbers were functionally a lie — is too harsh. However, I still believe it is not intellectually honest to build a tax plan around such aggressively optimistic assumptions. | https://medium.com/voluble/on-becoming-anti-bernie-ee87943ae699 | ['Robin Alperstein'] | 2016-11-27 20:43:37.222000+00:00 | ['endorses'] |
An Idempotency Library: Jdempotent | In this post, we are going to talk about an open source project we built as customer services team at Trendyol. First of all I want to explain what we are doing as the Customer Services team.
Problem & Solution
As the Customer Services team, we are responsible for the development of processes such as customer omni channels (email, push and sms), ivr (instant voice reply) system, screens used by customer services. Therefore, as you can imagine, we process millions of events every day. They include many events such as receiving an order, delivering the order, cancelling the order due to fraud, and defining a discount coupon for the customer and many more. Multiple processing of the same event can cause serious customer dissatisfaction. This situation may have more than one reason. For instance, X team may keep events in the outbox table for a week and can republish these events for any reason. As a transactional consumer, we have to handle this situation so that we don't process the same event again. That's why it was very important for us to solve this problem. While solving this problem, we thought about how we could make it more generic and then developed our tool library named as Jdempotent . Actually, Jdempotent is a library to provide idempotency, as the name suggests :)
Let’s take a look at what idempotency means by a quote from Wikipedia,
Making multiple identical requests has the same effect as making a single request. Note that while idempotent operations produce the same result on the server (no side effects), the response itself may not be the same (e.g. a resource’s state may change between requests).
We can say that Jdempotent is the implementation of this definition using Java. You can make any Kafka consumer, Rabbitmq consumer, grpc endpoint, http endpoint etc. idempotent with Jdempotent. In short, you can make any resource idempotent on the fly. Just add the @IdempotentResource annotation above the method that should be idempotent. For now, we have in-memory and redis support as datasource preference also if you want to use a different datasource, you can do it by extending to Jdempotent-core project. ( Jdempotent-spring-boot-redis-starter uses Jdempotent-core .)
Our goal is to support various datasources like Hazelcast and Couchbase also you are more than welcome to contribute :)
Let’s see how we can implement the structure easily via the sample email sender application. Following email sender application has two parts. These include a kafka listener and an http post endpoint that show multiple use cases of Jdempotent. Try to send the first http request or Kafka event to the email sender application. If this process succeeds, the event will be saved to Redis by Jdempotent to be idempotent. Subsequent requests will not be processed at all, and the corresponding response will be read from Redis and return. Thus, we do not execute the same request again.
Mail sender application architecture
Let’s code in 4 steps.
First, let’s add your Redis configuration where we will keep the hash of the incoming requests.
2. Since this example will be a simple mail sending application, let’s code the mail sender’s service layer implementation.
3. Now, let’s write a Kafka listener to show that @IdempotentResource can be used. Notice @IdempotentResource(cachePrefix = "WelcomingListener") this annotation will make the incoming emailAddress object and idempotent element. Also, the optional cachePrefix value, will make the hash key more collider.
4. There are different ways of Jdempotent . For example, we implement a new POST Method in MailController via a using @IdempotentResource annotation.
Explain
As you can see above, we only put an @IdempotentResource annotation, we didn't spend any extra efforts. Let's try to understand what happened internally. There is an around aspect that listens for methods tagged with @IdempotentResource annotation.
It generates a hash value from the object, if the method has one argument, get the first otherwise the object tagged with @IdempotentPayload is to save to Redis with the specified TTL(time to live). In case of any exception, the payload will be deleted from Redis because the process has not been completed.
In a nutshell:
Not competed successfully: we should be able to execute this request again because it hasn’t been processed yet.
Competed successfully: if no exception is thrown, it returns the response written from Redis.
The process is very simple :)
Let’s send 3 event to the kafka topic at same time
kafka-console-producer --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic trendyol.mail.welcome [email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Result:
As it is shown in the following logs, the first request is saved to Redis. For other subsequent requests, the execution will be halted since an equivalent payload exists in Redis. | https://medium.com/trendyol-tech/an-idempotency-library-jdempotent-5cd2cd0b76ff | ['Mehmet Ari'] | 2020-12-22 16:58:19.981000+00:00 | ['Kafka', 'Idempotency', 'Idempotent Consumer', 'Rabbitmq', 'Idempotency Library'] |
Building Docker Images — Advanced | Building Docker images the legacy way
Consider we have the following Dockerfile to build our container
Dockerfile for Ansible container with AWS CLI
We will use python:3.9.1-buster as base for our image here, because it already includes neccessary binaries like git, openssh . There are 5 Layers in total. We can now build our container issuing the command:
docker build -t ansible --no-cache .
Take note of the --no-cache to prevent caching, as we want to meassure the time it takes to build the image. Omiting this param will enable Dockers caching mechanism and we wont be able to have a comparable result. Typically you wont make use of --no-cache in a normal build.
The results of our build command are:
Files sent to build Context: 325.1 MB
Build time: 4:35 minutes
Image size: 1.34 GB
Recap:
The Docker build context is quite huge, because it includes bigfile.txt , even though it is not needed for the build. This is quite common as you might have frontend and backend sources together in a repository, but different Dockerfiles to build a container for backend and another for frontend. However if you exclude bigfile.txt in .dockerignore it won’t be available in both frontend and backend build context.
The image size is huge as well, because the base image is python:3.9.1-buster which has an initial size of ~324 MB and contains all dependencies from the Ansible installation.
The build took 4:35 minutes and was sequencially, even though the installation tasks could have been hypothetically executed in parallel. | https://faun.pub/building-docker-images-advanced-7fb09fad73f2 | ['Pascal Euhus'] | 2021-01-05 21:55:34.993000+00:00 | ['Cicd', 'Containers', 'Development', 'Docker', 'DevOps'] |
Creating a Daily Writing Habit Means Being the Boss of Yourself | I wake up thinking about writing.
On a really good morning, I’ve dreamed about my novel the night before and the writing just flows super easy. I know exactly what I’m going to write.
On a less good morning, it’s painful to pick a few words out of my head and it’s even worse knowing that they suck so bad there’s no way they’re going to make it to the final draft.
After I’ve worked on my novel, I write a blog post. Like I’m doing right now. It’s 8:45 in the morning. I had a decently good time working on my novel and wrote 1000 words in forty-five minutes.
I’m getting close to the end of this one. I hit 71,000 words today.
By ten most mornings, I’ve worked on my novel and written a blog post. The rest of the day is pretty scheduled. I teach classes, work on writing classes to teach later, coach clients, send emails, work on projects.
All of that is part of my writing business. I count it as writing.
But it’s the first work — the work on my novel — that I have to keep the tightest rein on. That’s the work that it would be easy to let slip. And it really is a slippery slope.
I could get so caught up in the things that feel like writing, that I actually just let my novel go all together.
Writing is Your Job
This is what I have to remind myself of, fairly often.
Even when I don’t have a book contract (and I don’t, at the moment), fiction writing is my job. I’m the boss of it. No one is going to fire me if I don’t show up. No one is going to insist that I keep to a time clock.
I am the boss.
If I want to be a novelist, I have to show up to write my novel. And I have to do that regularly. Religiously, even. Because this is the hardest work I’ve ever done. It would be so easy to let it go, without even realizing I’ve done it.
I could wait until I have more time. Or until my muse shows up and I’m inspired. Or until I have an idea that I can’t ignore.
I could wait for a thousand things and the next thing I know, I’ll be 90 years old, wishing I hadn’t let my novels go.
Teeny, Tiny Goals Are Small, But Mighty
As the boss of my novel-writing business, I schedule myself for ten minutes of work a day. I’m a freaking slave driver — that’s ten minutes a day, with no days off.
Day in. Day out. Every single day.
I can write one page in ten minutes. If I never work more than my scheduled time, I’ll write a novel a year.
Can you see how mighty that little goal is? A novel a year — ten minutes at a time. The only thing that can possibly stop me is if I don’t show up.
Your teeny, tiny goal might be different from mine. It might be smaller. Maybe ten minutes isn’t the powerful trigger for you that it is for me. For me, I’ll write my ten minutes rather than break my streak.
But maybe you find yourself skipping your ten minutes pretty often. That’s okay. Make it smaller. Write for five minutes a day and you’ll finish a novel every other year. Unless, of course, those five minutes turn into more on some days.
Schedule Small; Leave Room For Overtime
The key here is to schedule your time religiously — ten minutes a day (or less) — set it stone. Not just any ten minutes. Ten specific minutes. You’re on the clock for your writing business, after all.
But don’t squeeze your ten minutes into a hole in your schedule so tight that there’s no room for overtime.
If you’re on a roll, you want the space to keep going.
My goal for today was to write for ten minutes. That’s about 250 words. I wrote 1000 in forty-five minutes. Overtime.
My writing is hard scheduled for 8:00 to 8:10 a.m. every morning. But I don’t have something else scheduled at 8:10. I have time to keep going, if I’m feeling it. If my story is flowing and it’s a good morning.
Take a look at your calendar. When do you have time where you can schedule your writing? Pretend someone is offering you a job. A tiny one. They’re going to expect you to show up for ten minutes a day, with an option for overtime if you want it.
But those ten minutes are non-negotiable.
Be a Hard-Ass Boss
I am the most driven boss I’ve ever had. No one has ever expected more of me than I expect of myself.
I wouldn’t work seven days a week for anyone else.
I wouldn’t show up to do work that has no guarantee of pay for anyone else.
You are your own boss. And for a while, maybe even for a long time, you’re going to have to be a tough enough boss to keep things going even when you have no real indication that the work your doing is going to have the result that you want it to.
You don’t get to know if you’ll be a successful writer until after a lot of work is done. That’s the way this business works.
You have to expect a lot from yourself, because for a long time, no one else will expect it from you. You have to be willing to drive yourself. You have to expect yourself to show up and do good work, even when you don’t feel it.
That’s where a daily writing habit comes from. It’s not a feel-good exercise, although it does feel good. It’s a practice. And it’s a job. | https://medium.com/the-write-brain/creating-a-daily-writing-habit-means-being-the-boss-of-yourself-b0c92ec80d72 | ['Shaunta Grimes'] | 2020-08-14 13:11:29.895000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Productivity', 'Habits', 'Ninjabyob', 'Writing'] |
Food in the spotlight — “So, it begins…” | I am starting this newsletter, generously acknowledging the fact that LinkedIn allows me to do so, in exchange for my users’ attention. This is the usual trade-off you have to face with online platforms and social media: and you need to live with that, together with the fact that if they change the rules, you have to adapt your strategy.
Truth to be told, this platform proved to be also an amazing source of information, enriching networking and brilliant ideas over the years: used correctly, it is by far the most useful social media around, together with YouTube. So, I’ll decide to give this a shot.
Since 2013 we offer you valuable information for free via foodlawlatest.com, and we always will. Hopefully from a new and improved web platform, once ready.
The last 2 years have been almost as challenging as fulfilling. Our company grew in staff as well in revenues, but if 2020 — despite COVID — was a smooth ride, in 2021 we were literally building the rocket while going to the moon. Therefore, this is a good occasion to both cheer for that and beg your forgiveness for every mail I answered late. We heavily invested in IT tools, education, and young talents to try to structure ourselves, and we are now riping the fruits of such efforts.
I guess this year you all had the chance to work with part of my amazing team: without them, I won’t be here. In the last months, they really doubled their efforts to raise the bar and keep our services’ quality excellent as usual.
From time to time, I’d like to share in this newsletter also interesting books, ideas, or tools that made my life and business better. Entrepreneurship — also if on a relatively small scale — is a never-ending learning process; and even if I have no ambition to bring you the “truth”, I am sure that sharing part of my fortunes (and most of all my misfortunes), might be very useful to younger readers.
That said, let me share some of the topics we are facing recently:
China: overseas manufacturing facility registration took a good share of my sleep. GACC Decree 248 and 249 are meant to be in force by the start of the new year. If you export to China and your manufacturing facility is not registered yet, is definitely the moment to be worried. You can find more info on the Malaysian authority’s website (in English) or on the USDA GAIN database, typing “overseas manufacturing registration” in the research field and selecting “China” as the country of interest. Once you understand what to do…guess what? the portal is fully in Chinese!
Italy: we are very active regarding the environment recently. From 1st Jan 2022, all packaging material marketed in Italy (and of course the food products wrapped with it) shall bear on the label, or provide via QR Code or other electronic means — suggesting on the label that such info are available online — two elements: the identification code of the material under EC Decision 129/97 and, in case the pack is destined to consumers, the sorting information (e.g. Plastic waste, Paper waste), to allow proper disposal. At the same time, we finally implemented in Italy the so-called “SUP” Directive (Single-Use Plastic) but exempted from the field of application biodegradable and compostable plastics in an open clash with the EU Commission and the Directive text. Typical Italian!
In the meantime, I saw and shared an interesting video about seaweed production and booming demand:
and started to move forward with our relatively new YouTube channel, publishing a snippet about accreditation, standards, and trust, taken from a recent webinar organized with our best friends Bert Popping and Francois Bourdichon:
That’s all, for now!
Cesare | https://medium.com/@foodlawlatest/food-in-the-spotlight-so-it-begins-e50f8a9ba71d | ['Cesare Varallo'] | 2021-12-27 16:02:45.777000+00:00 | ['Lawyers', 'Food', 'Food And Drink', 'Foodies', 'Food And Beverage'] |
Case Study that landed me in a full-time UI/UX designer role | illustration by Jiaxing
Before I dive into the case study, I will introduce myself in brief. I’m an engineering graduate obsessed with graphics design and animations. After I joined college, I realized that design is my passion, and it’s not too late for me to start. While I was in 3rd year of engineering, I started doing freelancing UI/UX design and luckily got a couple of projects to work on and showcase in my portfolio. After my graduation, I started applying for product design and UX design roles, and finally, My portfolio was shortlisted for a promising design agency. They gave me a PRD and asked to finish it by eight days. They will select me solely depending on the final case study I submitted. So I thoroughly went through that PRD several times and decided to begin my battle.
Introduction
‘Kalavara’ (means kitchen) is an app that I had in my mind for a long time. But none had approached me for the same, nor did I have time to give flesh and bone to this concept. So when I received a challenge to make an app that will be useful in day to day life and help you to solve a real-life problem, I felt like it’s time to give life to my idea. ‘Kalavara’ is a cooking assistant rather than an old-style recipe app, where the user will be able to find dishes that can be made from available ingredients. So you don’t have to waste your money on buying extra ingredients or spending time learning something that you will never make in real-life.
Overview
According to a 2018 survey conducted by Statista, every single day, around 6,140 apps are releasing worldwide. So coming up with a new idea is something impossible now, because someone has already implemented this idea or working on it right now. There are popular apps present in the play store that will search for meals by selecting available ingredients. For most of them, this is an extra feature, but my focus is to come up with an app that primarily focuses on this feature. Another concern while designing the app is to design it in such a way that it should be useful for all age groups.
Interview
As an initial phase, I interviewed three individuals who are extremely different in all aspects, such as profession, age, and gender. This interview was to understand their problems and how I can fix their problems through this app. One of the interviewees was a 21-year-old engineering undergraduate. He is a day scholar and doesn’t know much about cooking. I asked a few general questions to understand whether he is interested in cooking. What are the factors that stop him from cooking his favorite dishes? And also, I asked a few scenarios where he is forced to cook and what mode of learning he will go for. The other two candidates I interviewed was a housewife and a 25-year-old working man. I asked the same set of questions and scenarios to my other candidates too. Not surprisingly, most of their answers were entirely different from each other. Knowing their opinions helped me to understand some common problems and pain points. To verify this, I did an online survey, including questions that I found common among my candidates.
Here is the result of my survey
Competitive Analysis
There were tons of competitors in this field. So I took 3 out of them, which were considered as best in class apps with above 4.4 stars, and 2 of them were Editor’s choice app. I went through all three of these apps, and pretty much every app justifies its rating. Modern looking UI, Immersive guide, tones of the recipe, and everything is there. To understand the flaws in the apps, I used the google play store itself. I always use this technique to recognize deficiencies in competitors by filtering user feedback with 1–3 stars on their app and made a report. I use this report to add features from competitors that are successful and also identify features that are missing in their apps.
After going through these three apps, I understood my idea is not a unique one. It’s already implemented in one of the apps called “recipe book,” but many other excellent features were missing in this app. So there is always a room to enhance. None tried to tackle this issue by developing a virtual assistant, and hence, this app would be an assistant rather than an old-style recipe book so that it will be a fresh idea in the market.
User Persona
UI Design and Prototype
The major concern about UI was to design something minimal and easy to use. I always loved designing illustrative UI. I took inspiration from Google Assistant and a few other Ui8 templates. My primary aim was to make it simple so that a 36-year-old housewife and teenager can use the app without any hassle. I used illustrative options to make the app attractive and, at the same time, easy to understand.
Usability Test
Now it’s time to test the design and concept of our app. Due to time constraints from sketched wireframe, I directly went into high fidelity UI design rather than going through wireframes, low fidelity designs, etc. I used the Adobe XD prototype feature to give life to my design. I haven’t done the end to end prototyping. Instead, I was planning to provide a scenario to the test subject and see how he/she is going to navigate through the app without any assistance. I asked them to use the app for cooking a non-veg meal within 15 min, but you don’t know the name of any ingredients, and you don’t like to read the complete guide. Users don’t have any prior experience with the app, so I wanted to see how fast they can finish the process and where they are going to get stuck. After completing the usability test with my three subjects, I understood some of the flaws in my design and how I should improve them.
Results and Findings :
One of the issues present in my design was the size of the icons in the navigation bar, Younger subjects didn’t have any problem with the size of the icons, but 36-year-old subjects faced difficulty in understanding the icons and what they represent. So I increased the size of the icon and added text along with the icons. The second issue was the finish button. Everyone expected the button to come from the bottom, and they were not giving attention to the bottom right corner. So I replaced the rounded float button with a tab button that pops up from the bottom just like all other cards do.
Old Button
New Button
User Experience Flow
This diagram is prepared to understand the complete functionalities and how screens are linked to each other. This diagram helps me to decide where there is any dead-end or incompleteness in the design before handover the project to the developer team.
Challenges Faced
Designing the app has been a challenging and rewarding journey. It was clear from the onset that the major challenge will be to come up with something that is comparatively competitive against well-established brands. Another difficulty was to demonstrate AR technology while conducting a usability test. After conducting research and competitive analysis, it ended up with extra features that I didn’t plan initially. So I had to come up with solutions for those problems while designing this app. Also, It was difficult to design something that is easy to understand for all age groups.
Conclusion
My goal of this application is to allow users to quickly learn and prepare their favorite food or something they haven’t tried so far. Kalavara is designed in a way that it can replace all the other recipe app and save up your space. The app will show food that can be prepared with ingredients that you have in stock instead of spending extra money on buying what isn’t there. The app also tailors the nutritional values with insights about calories, fat, carbohydrates, protein, etc. This app also provides complete details about utensils required for cooking specific food items and alternatives for them.
So I send them this case study, and they responded to me with an offer letter and a higher salary package within a few days. Unfortunately, I was not able to accept that offer letter due to some personal problems and already got selected as a product designing role at a reputed product company. I hope you enjoy reading the whole UX research process I did in this case. I discovered meaningful insights that might be very useful in future projects.
Love micro-interactions and animations?
check out www.rohitkrishna.com | https://medium.com/@rohit.krishna1521/case-study-that-landed-me-in-a-full-time-ui-ux-designer-role-e185e854fce1 | ['Rohit Krishna'] | 2020-03-03 06:44:44.334000+00:00 | ['Product Designer', 'Intern', 'Case Study', 'Ui Ux Design', 'First Job'] |
Best Baby Sleep Online Training | Best baby sleep online training for all mothers who are struggling everyday sleep less night.
These Baby Sleep Strategies May Help You
Everything about baby sleep can seem frighteningly high-stakes at 3 A.M. in the morning.
Make one tiny mistake in his or her training and your child’s development will be seriously affected: he’ll either end up waking in the night well into his high school years, or worse, develop anxiety, depression, or mood swings.
And with every sleep expert offering slightly different advice on the ideal timing and method for sleep training you may be unsure about who to believe, how to proceed, or which sleep training method you should follow.
That’s where this article fits in — I’m going to help you separate sleep fact from sleep fiction by zeroing in on 6 science-backed strategies that have been proven to promote healthy sleep habits in babies and young children.
Like the rest of us, your child has a sleep window of opportunity, a period of time when he is tired, but not too tired.
If that window closes before you have a chance to tuck your child into bed, his body will start releasing chemicals to fight the fatigue and it will be much more difficult for you to get him to go to sleep. So how can you tell if your baby is getting sleepy? It’s not as if your one-month-old can tell you what he needs. Here are some sleep cues that your baby is ready to start winding down for a nap or for bedtime:
Your baby is calmer and less active — this is the most obvious cue that your baby is tired and you need to act accordingly.
Your baby may be less tuned-in to his surroundings — his eyes may be less focused and his eyelids may be drooping.
Your baby may be quieter — if your baby tends to babble up a storm during his more social times of the day, you may notice that the chatter dwindles off as he starts to get sleepy.
Your baby may nurse more slowly — instead of sucking away vigorously, your baby will tend to nurse more slowly as he gets sleepy. In fact, if he’s sleepy enough, he may even fall asleep mid-meal.
Your baby may start yawning — if your baby does this, well, that’s a not-so-subtle sign that he’s one sleepy baby.
When your baby is very young, you should start his wind-down routine within one to two hours of the time when he first woke up.
If you miss his initial sleep cues and start to notice signs of overtiredness — for instance, fussiness, irritability, and eye-rubbing, simply note how long your baby was up this time around and then plan to initiate the wind-down routine about 20 minutes earlier the next time he wakes up. (The great thing about parenting a newborn is that you get lots of opportunities to practice picking up on those sleep cues — like about six or seven times a day!)
Learning to read your baby’s own unique sleep cues is the first step to a more rested and more content baby.
Here’s something else you need to know about babies’ sleep cues, something that can toss you a major curve ball if you’re caught off guard:
Babies tend to go through an extra-fussy period when they reach the six-week mark. The amount of crying that babies do in a day tends to increase noticeably when babies are around six weeks of age.
You aren’t doing anything wrong and there isn’t anything wrong with your baby. It’s just a temporary stage that babies go through.
If your child becomes overtired, your child is likely to behave in one or more of the following ways (results may vary, depending on his age and personality):
-Your child will get a sudden burst of energy at the very time when you think she should be running on empty.
-You’ll start seeing “wired” and hyperactive behavior, even if such behavior is totally out of character for your child at other times of the day.
-Your toddler or preschooler will become uncooperative or argumentative.
-Your child will be whiny or clingy or she’ll just generally fall apart because she simply can’t cope with the lack of sleep any longer.
You will probably find that your child has his or her own unique response to being overtired. Some children start to look pale. Some young babies start rooting around for a breast and will latch on to anything within rooting distance, including your face or your arm! When nothing seems to be wrong (he’s fed and clean), but he’s just whining about everything and wants to be held all day, he’s overtired and needs help to get to sleep.
Learning to read your baby’s own unique sleep cues is the first step to a more rested and happier baby.
Because our circadian rhythm (our internal time clock) operates on a 24-hour and 10-minute to 24 hour and 20-minute cycle (everyone’s body clock ticks along at a slightly different rhythm) and all of our rhythms are slightly out of sync with the 24-hour clock on which the planet operates, we have to reset our internal clocks each and every day — otherwise, we’d slowly but surely stay up later and sleep in later each day until we had our cycles way out of whack.
Daylight is one of the mechanisms that regulate our biological cycles.
Being exposed to darkness at night and daylight first thing in the morning regulates the body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that keeps our bodies’ internal clock in sync to that we feel sleepy and alert at the appropriate times.
By exposing your baby to daylight shortly after he wakes up in the morning and keeping his environment brightly lit during his waking hours, you will help his circadian rhythm to cue him to feel sleepy at the right times.
Moreover, he’ll start to associate darkness with sleep time and bright light with wake-up time — you’ll find that it works best to take advantage of sunlight (as opposed to artificial light) whenever possible.
Studies have shown that exposing your baby to daylight between noon and 4:00 P.M. will increase the odds of your baby getting a good night’s sleep.
Some sleep experts recommend that you put your baby to bed in a sleepy-but-awake state whenever possible from the newborn stage onwards so that he can practice some self-soothing behaviors.
Others say that you should give your baby at least one opportunity to try to fall asleep on his own each day.
Lastly, some others say that there’s no point even bothering to work on these skills until your baby reaches that three-to-four month mark (when your baby’s sleep-wake rhythm begins to mature so that some sleep learning can begin to take place).
Sleep experts claim that the sleep-association clock starts ticking at around six weeks. They claim that this is the point at which your baby begins to really tune into his environment as he’s falling asleep.
So if he gets used to falling asleep in your arms while your rock him and sing to him, he will want you to rock him and sing to him when he wakes up in the middle of the night — that’s the only way he knows on how to fall asleep.
This is because he has developed a sleep association that involves you — you have become a walking, talking sleep aid.
Some parents decide that it makes sense to take a middle-of-the-road approach to sleep associations during the early weeks and months of their baby’s life — they decide to make getting sleep the priority for themselves and their babies and to take advantage of any opportunities to start helping their babies to develop healthy sleep habits.
Regardless of when you start paying attention to the types of sleep associations your baby may be developing, at some point you will want to consider whether your baby could be starting to associate any of the following habits or behaviors with the process of falling asleep:
-Falling asleep during bottle-feeding
-Being rocked to sleep
-Having you rub or pat his back, sing a lullaby, or otherwise play an active role in helping your baby to fall asleep
-Having you in the room until your baby falls asleep
-Relying on a pacifier
Here’s something important to keep in mind, particularly since we tend to fall into an all-or-nothing trap when we’re dealing with the subject of sleep.
You can reduce the strength of any particular sleep association by making sure it is only present some of the time when your baby is falling asleep.
If, for example, you nurse your baby to sleep some of the time, rock your baby to sleep some of the time, and try to put your baby to bed just some of the time when he’s sleep but awake, he’ll have a hard time getting hooked on any sleep association.
Sleep experts stress that the feeding-sleep association tends to be particularly powerful, so if you can encourage your baby to fall asleep without always needing to be fed to sleep, your baby will have an easier time learning how to soothe himself to sleep when he gets a little older.
Most babies are ready to start practicing these skills around the three- to the four-month mark.
Scientific research has shown that babies who nap during the day sleep better and longer at nighttime. While you might think that skipping babies’ daytime naps might make it easier to get them off to bed at evening, babies typically end up being so overtired that they have a very difficult time settling down at bedtime and they don’t sleep particularly well at night.
And rather than sleeping in so that they can catch up on the sleep they didn’t get the day before, they tend to start the next day too early and they have a difficult time settling down for their naps, as well.
Simply put, it is important to make your child’s daytime sleep a priority, just as you make a point of ensuring that he receives nutritious meals and snacks on a regular basis — your child needs nutritious sleep snacks during the day in addition to his main nighttime sleep meal in order to be at his very best.
In addition, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers who nap are generally in a better mood and have an improved attention span as compared to their age-mates who don’t nap.
Your baby may continue to wake up in the night out of habit even when he’s outgrown the need for a middle-of-the-night feeding.
If your baby is going without that nighttime feeding some of the time or doesn’t seem particularly interested in nursing once he gets up in the night, it might be time to eliminate that nighttime feeding and use non-food methods to soothe him back to sleep.
Eventually, of course, you’ll want to encourage him to assume responsibility for soothing himself to sleep, but the first hurdle is to work on breaking that powerful food-sleep association.
With some children, it happens quickly. With other children, it’s a much slower process.
Once you break that association, he may stop waking as often in the night and may be ready to start working on acquiring some self-soothing skills.
If you are frustrated and angry when you deal with your child in the night, your child will inevitably pick up your vibes, even if you’re trying hard to hide your feelings.
Accepting the fact that some babies take a little longer to learn the sleep ropes and feeling confident that you can solve your child’s sleep problems will make it easier to cope with the middle-of-the-night sleep interruptions.
Scientific studies have shown that parents who have realistic expectations about parenthood and who feel confident in their own abilities to handle parenting difficulties find it easier to handle sleep challenges.
See Here to know more about Baby Sleep Miracle Training
Wish your baby a happy life ❤ | https://medium.com/@soumitrahalder/best-baby-sleep-online-training-f8f74f3aab45 | [] | 2020-05-09 12:07:56.066000+00:00 | ['Baby Sleep Training', 'Baby Sleep Consultant', 'Baby Sleep Routine', 'Baby Sleep Strategy', 'Baby Sleep'] |
A Surefire Trick For Winning Every Argument | Photo by nappy from Pexels
Debate is one of the ways by which people settle their differences and search for a truth they can agree on. However, debates nowadays seem to be less about finding the truth and more about the clashing of egos. Debates should end in more agreements than disagreements but they seldom do.
I’ve been in quite a lot of arguments in my lifetime. In any group of people, I’m usually the one who disagrees most with the opinions of everyone else. Some of my arguments have been very heated to the extent that I’ve been scared that our friendship would end.
There are arguments that I won very clearly and then there are others that…well…let’s just say that the jury is still out on those ones. Over the course of my life, I’ve learned a couple of important things about having debates with people. I’ve learned that you should always clearly state definitions of terms you use(even if the definitions seem obvious) as well as another lesson which is the subject of this article. The second lesson is something that most people struggle with but once we master it, we will walk away from every debate happier than we were when we came in.
But first let’s tackle one issue.
“Winning” Every Argument Even If You’re Dead Wrong
The first thing I want us to get out of the way is this: it is possible to “win” any argument with anyone even if your position is dead wrong…but that’s through crude means. The problem with having a debate with a person is that you’re having a debate with a human being. You aren’t debating with the truth, but rather another human being, who like you, has flaws and can easily be tricked into surrendering to your flawed arguments.
If the person you were debating with knew all the truth in the world, there would be no way you would “win” the argument. That’s because there’s no way of successfully tricking the individual that you’ve won when you really haven’t. However, since humans have limited knowledge, there’s always an opportunity to say something the opponent cannot rebut because he doesn’t have enough knowledge at his disposal to do so. As such, relative to him, you have won the argument, but relative to the truth, you probably haven’t.
However, if we want to win fair and square, we are going to have to answer one question: Why do humans argue, anyway?
The Aim For A Debate
Having a debate is like playing a game. And just like most games, there is a criterion that determines whether or not a player has really won. If we want to be true winners of the game of debating, we are going to have to find out what the winning criterion is. When we get into debates, what is our real aim?
If you were to conduct a survey of people around the world, asking them why they enter a debate with anyone(like the heated debates in YouTube comment sections), the following two answers would probably be the most common:
I want to find out the truth. So after the debate is done, I want to know what is right.
I care about the other party so I want them to know what the real truth is.
These are very noble reasons to debate people, especially if both reasons are put together as one. However, if the respondents to the survey were to be honest with themselves, we would more likely see answers like these:
I want to prove the other person wrong and set her straight.
I’ve got insecurities about being told I’m wrong so I’m arguing with the other party so they also feel wrong. Revenge.
You can add to this list, can’t you? It’s easy to tell that while the initial responses showed genuine concern for the other party and curiosity about the truth, the second set of responses reflects negativity. The latter set of responses captures how most of us approach debates. People who approach debates with the latter mindset would do whatever it takes to make it look like they won the argument and let the other person feel bad. However, if you approach arguments with the mindset of finding the truth, you would do whatever it takes(even if it means changing your mind) to find it.
As such, the behaviour of a debater reflects their aim for the debate.
Your Aim Informs Your Behaviour
When the radar in our brain catches the signal of someone disagreeing with us, there’s a sharp but subtle adrenaline spike that makes us want to defend ourselves. A lot of us have made our opinions a core part of our identity such that if anyone attempts to dispel those ideas, we think the person is out to crush us. On heated matters like religion and politics, our opinions are the closest to our sense of worth.
“What religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan.” — Paul Graham, in his post, “Keep Your Identity Small”
People who aren’t interested in the truth, but rather in proving themselves right, aren’t that hard to identify. In an argument, such people aren’t interested in hearing out the other person’s opinions. They’re just waiting for their turn to launch their attack.
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” — Stephen Covey, in his book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”
Furthermore, they might intentionally sway the argument in a different direction where they can win. In extreme cases, they might even tease you till lose your cool, or they may use an ad hominem.
However, if you’re in search for the truth, your aim is different and as such your way of approaching that aim also differs. Let’s try to understand this distinction with a dartboard metaphor.
Winning Depends On Your Aim
Photo by icon0.com from Pexels
Winning an argument is like trying to hit a dartboard with a bunch of darts in your hand. The score you get from throwing the darts depends on which part of the dartboard you’re trying to strike. If you’re only trying to win an argument with a person and not with the truth, then you’re aiming for mediocre points on the dartboard. You’re trying to win an argument with a person via crude means for your own personal gratification. You just can’t resign to the possibility that you’re wrong.
However, if you want to enter debates with the aim of finding the truth, then you’re aiming for the bull’s eye. People like this aren’t afraid to admit that they’re wrong. In the midst of an argument, they may say, “Initially, I thought that Ms. A’s position was wrong, but after hearing her speak, I think that in cases B, C and D, she has a valid point.”
This is also a way to win your opponent over to your side: genuinely admit when you realize your opponent was right about something while you were wrong. That sends a signal to the other person that you listen, and so when you raise your next point your opponent is likely to reciprocate your open-mindedness.
Real Winners Aim For The Real Truth
Ultimately, if you’re searching for truth, the most effective way to win any argument is to change your mind when you realize your opinions are wrong. That’s the surefire trick. After all, if you’re searching for the truth but you’re standing where there are lies, are you truly winning?
Others may shoot their darts for mediocre points like feeling good, personal gratification and putting their opponent down. However, you’re better than that, aren’t you? You’re going for the real deal: the bull’s eye. You’re going to leave the debate room with a copy of the truth in your pocket.
Additionally, you might be able to help your opponent understand which points of theirs are wrong. However, if that doesn’t work out well, it’s not that bad. That is only a secondary goal in debating. You can’t force anyone to be fully convinced about anything(unless you use crude means I described early on). Nevertheless, you can win any argument, by finding the truth.
Conclusion
During your next debate or a discussion with people, remember the real reason humans have debates. Ask yourself what part of the dartboard you’re aiming for. Are you aiming for self-gratification or are you aiming for the truth? Your aim determines the manner in which you’ll shoot your darts.
Those who win debates aren’t those who insist on the veracity of a lie, but rather those who realize the truth and seek to embrace it. After all, that’s what a true debate is: a search for truth. | https://medium.com/magnasense/a-surefire-trick-for-winning-every-argument-fc0e06f1476d | ['Kwame Afriyie Osei-Tutu'] | 2020-06-15 12:46:07.744000+00:00 | ['Truth', 'Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Debate', 'Conversations'] |
The Next Robotics Race is On: Is Australia Ready? | This article was triggered by an article written a few months ago by the Boston Consulting Group: Robotics Outlook 2030: How Intelligence and Mobility Will Shape the Future and the forecast that:
Professional services robots will dominate the sector. Currently only a bare sliver of the market, professional services robots will have sales that may be more than double those of conventional and logistics robots. We expect the global robotics market to climb from about $25 billion this year to between $160 billion and $260 billion by 2030, with market share for professional services robots hitting up to $170 billion and industrial and logistics robot sales topping off at about $80 billion.
For many of us — we have been waiting to hear this for more than 20 years.
The first robotics race, starting 60 years ago, was to build industrial robots. This was a race for nations who needed robots to help build “planes, trains and automobiles”.
This was not Australia’s event.
Our event is Professional Service Robots.
We need robots for our “Mines, Farms and Defence⁰”
But is Australia Ready?
To answer this we need to look into the current situation.
A robot is defined as an actuated mechanism programmable in two or more axes with a degree of autonomy, moving within its environment, to perform intended tasks. Autonomy in this context means the ability to perform intended tasks based on current state and sensing, without human intervention.¹
Robots are often described in term of two classes: industrial robots (robots for use in industrial automation applications) and service robots (robots that performs useful tasks for humans or equipment excluding industrial automation applications). Service robots can then be split into two sub-classes: personal and professional. And professional service robots can be split further into different application domains of inspection, cleaning, construction, logistics, medical, rescue, defence and field robotics. Field robotics includes mining, agriculture and space; hence it dominates research in Australia.
Whilst Australia has been a global leader in field robotics research for many decades,² we have not been able to translate this success into the creation of a large-scale robotics manufacturing industry. This failure compromises our sovereign capability in the products and services that underpin our critical industries, such as mining, agriculture and defence,³ and fails to realize the value that could be created by building export-focused manufacturers (e.g., space and disaster tech)⁴ in areas where Australia has competitive advantage (i.e., knowledge workers to exploit the higher value-added segments on the Smiling curve).⁵
Australia’s inability to translate research into products is a well-known and complex problem — often referred to as the innovation imperative.⁶ It combines a lack of ambition, a failure to collaborate, limited access to venture capital, poor economic complexity and most noteworthy, the absence of any industry representation.⁷ Whilst some of these weaknesses have been addressed in recent times with the creation of the Robotics Australia Network , one of the most significant challenges which still remains is the ability of our SMEs to scale and access global supply chains. There are many examples, where SMEs have been forced to move overseas in order to grow or to be acquired by multinationals.
With advent of digital technologies, there is no technical reason why robots designed and built in Australia could not service a global market. But contrary to expectation, rather than digitalization leading to the democratization of technology across the world, it has instead led to the agglomeration of innovation. Over the past decade, we have witnessed the migration of skills, companies and capital to innovation clusters such as Silicon Valley.⁸ However, COVID-19 has the potential to reverse this trend — because governments world-wide now recognised that manufacturing is a sovereign capability that needs to be nurtured and protected. In Australian this has led to Australia’s Modern Manufacturing Strategy — which robotics and automation play a critical and sovereign role.
Robot Field Testing
Critical to the successful development and deployment of commercial field robots is extensive testing. Testing under a variety of environmental conditions — often over extended periods of time and sometimes over large distances. Historically this testing has been conducted on private sites (mines, farms) — it is only recently that public/shared test sites have been made available.
“Australia is a great test-bed for robotics and automation with our vast land mass and low population density, where robots are ideally placed to take on many dirty, dull and dangerous tasks. Our unique geography has led to the development of world-leading field robotics applications. In addition, many of Australia’s regulatory regimes are exemplars for the rest of the world. This provides us with an opportunity to exploit these strengths by developing Australia as a test bed for new technologies taking advantage of our first mover advantage in many areas to develop a true robot economy to benefit Australia.”⁹
Impact for Australia
The question to be asked is what impact will this growth have on Australia, or more importantly, what is the impact if we cannot realize this growth.
Unfortunately, robotics is not referred in the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO) which makes it very difficult to accurately assess the employment figures for robotics in Australia. Employment in robotics is scattered across a variety of industries: manufacturing, mining, agriculture and professional services. In 2018, a web-based survey by the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision identified more than 1,100 companies within Australia that broadly encompass activities in robotics (i.e. producers, distributors, system integrators and advisors). Publicly available data suggests that 442 of these “robotic” companies employ almost 50,000 Australians and generate more than $12 billion revenue each year.
Using this as base number, we can estimate the potential growth of employment in robotics based upon the GADR for each sector. This ranges from 9.5% for defence, 25% for agriculture, 27% for mining and agriculture, to 41% for Professional Robotics Services.
Averaged over next 5 years, there is a potential growth of 100,000 jobs and an additional $40 billion in value.
This growth can be supported by several examples. In Australia we have a company like Emesent, which have grown from 7 employees to 100 in two years. Overseas, we have the example of the Odense Robotics Cluster, which has grown by over 8,500 people in five years.
What Now
To take advantage of the unprecedented growth in professional service robotics we need to rapidly accelerate the scale and number of robotic SMEs in Australia. For it is the SMEs that translate ideas into action, manufacture robots, employ people, and create wealth. To do this, we need to do more than collaborate, we need to aggregate all the fantastic capability that we have across our country and direct it towards this goal — of creating a vibrant, competitive and sustainable robotics industry here in Australia.
We need to prepare for the race ahead. | https://medium.com/@elliotsduff/the-next-robotics-race-is-on-is-australia-ready-327c62fceb0d | ['Elliot Duff'] | 2021-09-10 11:07:00.692000+00:00 | ['Australia', 'Employment', 'Robotics'] |
Economic Sanctions and The Tragedy of Trump’s Syria Withdrawal | The next development in the story will likely come next week, when Congress — returning from recess — is expected to get a veto-proof majority for putting sanctions on Turkey following their aggression towards the Kurds. This should be alarming to peace activists and anyone who has opposed recent US interventions.
While sanctions are seen by many as a peaceful alternative to war, they are far from it — with it estimated that over 500,000 children under five-years-old died as a result of UN Security Council sanctions on Iraq between 1990 and 2000; a civilian casualty level exceeding that of the Iraq War. Those statistics regarding the 1990–2000 Iraq sanctions came from a survey of over 2000 children under 10-years-old across neighbourhoods in Baghdad and, also found that the level of children whose growth was stunted had increased from 12% in 1991 to 28% in 1995, while the number of Iraqi children needing urgent attention due to emaciation had quadrupled from 3% to 12% in the same time period.
Over 500,000 children under five-years-old died as a result of Security Council sanctions on Iraq between 1990 and 2000
While sanctions have become a popular way for recent US Presidents to try and change the behaviour of countries, the evidence is clear that the economic downfall they cause hurts ordinary civilians, not the ruling class. As Robert A Pape said in his study, ‘Why economic sanctions do not work’, “external pressure is more likely to enhance the nationalist legitimacy of rulers than to undermine it”.
This may be because sanctions allow leaders of the countries being sanctioned to create an us-against-them, underdog type narrative that allows them to portray the West as oppressors, and changing course because of sanctions would make those leaders seem weak. Indeed, as writer Beheshteh Farshneshani said in the New York Times in 2014, “Sanctions on Iran are severely weakening the middle class, breaking the collective will and marginalizing democratic voices while solidifying the power of the ruling elite”, showing how sanctions can do the opposite of what they intended.
“Sanctions on Iran are severely weakening the middle class, breaking the collective will and marginalizing democratic voices while solidifying the power of the ruling elite” — Beheshteh Farshneshani
Now, sanctions aren’t always unsuccessful. In South Africa many credit sanctions with helping to bring down apartheid, by showing South Africa’s isolation in the world — though, even in this case, many believe the sanctions impact was limited, compared to the huge impact of the work of anti-segregationists like Nelson Mandela. However, even though sanctions don’t always have a strong, negative impact, they are by-and-large ineffective at achieving their goal, with Robert A Pape, saying in his aforementioned study, that sanctions are only successful 5% of the time. | https://medium.com/discourse/economic-sanctions-and-the-tragedy-of-trumps-syria-withdrawal-f0da908b2917 | ['Tom Williams'] | 2019-10-16 22:49:32.132000+00:00 | ['Foreign Policy', 'War', 'World', 'Peace', 'Politics'] |
Hanoi In Three Visits | Hải Phòng City Museum
Our first destination outside of Hanoi was the fairly large but sleepy city of Haiphong (Hải Phòng). It has a population of over 2 million, making it the third largest city in Vietnam, but it felt, at least where we were, like it could have been a town of 50,000. The streets were not jammed with motorbikes the way they had been in Hanoi, and there was little in the way of tourist attractions (and none of the accompanying hustle). Life seemed to have geared down several notches.
We checked in to the clean and bright Hotel Bảo Anh in the evening (what a lovely change—a bright, windowed room that was big enough to walk around in!), and distributed literally all of our belongings on the bed, already feeling like we had over packed. After accounting for all of our items, finding we’d already lost a few, and choosing to get rid of a few more, we went out to wander the streets.
Haiphong’s French design is easy to spot
As we passed shops and restaurants, patrons and purveyors alike sitting outside, we experienced something surprising. It was the phrase “Xin chào!” (pronounced “sin jào")—meaning “hello”—and it was directed at us! We looked up to see smiles. Maybe it was just a particularly friendly resident with nothing better to do? It happened again. More smiles. We said it ourselves to some folks we passed, and received the same pleasantries back. It was no fluke: we were interacting much differently with the residents of Vietnam’s 3rd-largest city than we had with those of its 2nd-largest. These residents were, in fact, interacting with us! It was exciting. We were all smiles! This is what we had come traveling for, we thought. This is the kind of positive interaction with people halfway across the globe that you just can’t have by sitting in your kitchen. You can only have it by being out there. THIS is traveling!
But then…what did that make our time in Hanoi? Not traveling? Not worth it? Not a real experience? Is the worth of your travel dependent on the friendliness of the people? If you are not connecting to a place, or not having a good time, are you not really traveling? Isn’t all travel equally valid, since you are experiencing life wherever you are? Is that not the point of real travel—to see life in another place as it really is, not just as we wish it to be? But then...if it is all equally valid and real, why does it feel so much better to walk down the street in Haiphong than it does to walk down the street in Hanoi?
This is one of travel's magic tricks: it challenges your assumptions, but it does it so subtly that you believe you are challenging them yourself. You find yourself examining some aspect of the world that you had not considered before, or holding something out in front of you in a new light, and all of a sudden you are reassessing your framework for viewing the world. We didn't know why Haiphong felt so much better to us, or why it was comfortable to be paid attention to (or uncomfortable not to). But now we were aware. Now what to do with that awareness?
Night, it seems, is the best time to wander the streets in Haiphong, as the whole town comes out to sit together in sidewalk cafes and restaurants and enjoy being alive. We had enjoyed strolling a number of blocks before we approached a wide, multi-street intersection and saw in the middle, instead of rushing cars, a circle of motorbikes and people. We filtered in among them and saw what the spectacle was they had assembled for—a lion dance!
It was Tết Trung Thu, the mid-autumn harvest festival. Many cultures have harvest festivals, and the Vietnamese are apparently no exception. Here it is the harvest of rice that is being celebrated. There's a solid week of festivities leading up to the festival day, with many celebratory activities. Performances put on, special sweets sold in decorative sidewalk tents, and the most buzzed-about activity: the lion dance. We had seen them in Hanoi—teenage boys jumping around in flowy lion costumes and trying to solicit donations from passersby. But they hadn’t been much to write home about.
Here the skill level was much higher. There were two teams of dancers, and they really knew what they were doing. They shook and swerved under their costumes, several men to a lion, and truly made the costumes look like living animals. They could leap from the ground onto each other's shoulders, causing the lions to rear into the air fantastically. They jumped over each other and onto platforms; they made the lions breathe fire and sowed the ground with firecrackers. They had unabashedly turned a city intersection into a performance space, and attracted a crowd as they set up their act. Many of the spectators were families, the kids perched on the motorbike seats to see over the crowd, or down in front on the pavement. The parents kept their headlights on to make a sort of ring of spotlights on the impromptu stage. The lion figures jumped and whirled. Children squealed. It was a vision of fantasy and imagination, and of pure joy. | https://medium.com/@evan.ingalls/hanoi-in-three-visits-67b0d6ffd533 | ['Evan Ingalls'] | 2020-11-21 17:23:28.730000+00:00 | ['Travel Writing', 'Travel', 'Việt Nam', 'Hanoi', 'Vietnam'] |
Love & Acceptance | Love & Acceptance
“When we love someone, our communication is ignited from a place of love & there are no real obstacles. Every soul is bankrupt of spiritual power, and that is why each one wants to receive before giving. Imagine where everyone is a giver and not a taker.”
When we love someone, we want them to be happy, which in-turn makes us happy (or at-least that’s the intention); happy people are capable of making others happy. Sometimes, we say that “I am your parent,” or “I am your spouse” or “I am your brother,” etc., and I want you to be happy; when you think about it, there are certain nuances about your spouse, sister, girlfriend, etc., that seem to be irksome.
But, because we “love” that person, we accept those nuances, and during the times of an argument or anger we announce our “tolerance” or intense dislike of such nuances. How can we say that we love someone & simultaneously tolerate or dislike (or maybe hate) such nuances of their character/personality, certain habits — something that’s deep rooted part of a person we love?
Does this mean there are parts of ourselves we are just tolerating? If yes, then, do we really love ourselves? If no, then saying “I love you” to our loved ones just becomes a mere chore or an obligation.
Most people, when asked, would say that loving somebody means to accept them wholly, with all their flaws & imperfections, understanding them at, and in, their best and the worst. Let me try to give you an example. If there is something we enjoy doing, like exercising in a gym or hiking or bicycling, you and I accept it with the accompanying distractions (traffic, sweat, noise, etc.) and know that all the distractions are part of that particular activity — the end result of which is beneficial for us. Loving a person is similar in that way; it must not come with accoutrements of “but,” “if,” “only,” etc. Just as in our hobbies, loving a person, accepting a person as they are enhances their value, helps us love them, understand them, enjoy everything about them even further. Moreover, once we learn to do it with one person, doing it to people around us, even strangers, becomes easier, exponentially benefitting ourselves the people around us.
As I mentioned, happy people are capable of making others happy. Similarly, people who love themselves are capable of loving others. Just like a poor person can’t somebody another poor person, a person who does not love himself cannot love another person.
Most of us have a positive self-esteem and positive self-image. To love ourselves means to accept our own self with all our faults and imperfections and accept ourselves as humans. But, sometimes, for whatever reason, we act or say something we dislike or regret, causing mental discomfort. At such times, we realize that we are not perfects and the sense of love that we feel towards ourselves (or others) is, to some extent, a façade. During these times all the “I love you” we say becomes an obligation which is masking sense of discomfort.
At one time, only one thing may exist — either a feeling of love or a feeling of pain. Over a period of time the accumulation of pain (or discomfort) begins to take a toll on us mentally and physically and our minds will never be stable (or more specifically, at peace). We say that we sacrificed so much or we did this and that because we’re doing things outside without working on ourselves inside.
This is right kind of an action with wrong kind of thinking. It is almost like a business transaction; we are thinking and saying that I’ve done these things for you and in return you should do this for me or I should get that in return. Whatever I am today is because of whatever I did in the past, because of moments I created in the past, because of feelings I created in the past.
Acceptance is the first step of transformation. “I accept” means your behavior or actions do not create discomfort in my mind. My healing has to begin by accepting myself. Accepting my own self does not mean I am perfect or I don’t need to change.
Accepting myself turns into knowing myself; I don’t play games with myself once I accept. There is no justification needed and I learn to be honest with myself; then I am honest and transparent with others too. I am not what others think about me. True side of me is a pure being with pure thoughts, a peaceful & a graceful being, and an honest being who knows oneself. Once I know myself, I know my strengths leading to more confidence.
I accept myself, know myself, approve of myself & the result is I empower myself. Knowledge is power. This acceptance and empowering will give me strength which will allow me to improve. Because in past I depleted myself, I couldn’t change myself even though I wanted to. Empowering ourselves leads to effortless improvement.
I have to identify the area in myself to improve and, because I am empowered, that process of improvement becomes effortless. You can ignite Rama or Ravana, Good or Bad, in others depending on what you ignite within yourself. This means accepting, knowing, approving and empowering yourself and after that just being yourself — requiring nothing, wanting nothing, and no pretention. What’s inside your mind is clean; then you, as a being, emerge without alteration because you are beautiful and pure. This seeps into our relationships as loving humans. | https://medium.com/@vittorino-98/love-acceptance-6d1275df639f | ['V A'] | 2020-12-21 05:38:45.062000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Love', 'Acceptance', 'Perspective', 'Humanity'] |
Reflections at the end of Mod 6 | My Experience, Mod-by-Mod
Mod 1: Basically a continuation of the prework. Oh this isn’t so bad! If it keeps being like this, I can handle it. It’s definitely not as stressful as they said. It got a little bit more rushed during the second week, but I was able to prepare for and pass the code challenge on the first try. Our Mod 1 project went very smoothly save for Github issues (because at that point we were just getting used to it).
Mod 2: I found a video that explained the basics of Rails before we officially started on it (Flatiron School’s program has you start out on Sinatra so you get the basics of routing, and then has you start Rails the Friday of the first week) and having done the project in that video had me a bit ahead for that first week. Without that video, I would have been more lost than I was, and I recommended it to anyone that felt lost. Nevertheless, I was one out of two people who failed the code challenge the first round. It wasn’t due to not understanding Rails, but rather due to not understanding relationships fully and writing out a migration wrong. On the bright side, I learned how to write migrations to change just one aspect of a table rather than dropping the entire table and starting over from scratch every time something had to be changed.
Mod 3: All JavaScript all the time! While the prework did include a JavaScript track, I was told to do the Ruby track in order to prepare for the admissions assessment. My exposure to JavaScript prior to this had been extremely limited. They released labs that covered basic concepts, such as loops, during the weekend before Mod 3 started, but come Monday we jumped right into DOM manipulation. If you read almost any book on JavaScript, DOM manipulation isn’t covered until you start getting towards the end of the book. It was seriously like being thrown into the deep end. It all made me wish I had first looked at JavaScript back in 1999, when I first heard of it, or at the very least had started to learn the basics of coding with it instead of with Python. It’s structured almost entirely different from Ruby and it was a big adjustment.
I also failed the Mod 3 code challenge the first time around. By the time of the retake a week later, I was able to do DOM manipulation in a much cleaner way and finished the challenge in a little over half of the allotted time.
Mod 4: We move on to React! This was described as the most difficult mod by almost every student that went through it. We had a few people who ended up switching to online at this point because they felt they needed much more time to grasp it.
I didn’t find React itself hard to grasp. There is enough documentation, tutorials, and other information and opinions online to get you through almost every situation you find yourself stuck in. There are, oftentimes, React-specific libraries that do exactly what you need to do without you writing your own code. Due to JSX, I found it a lot easier than vanilla JavaScript. The real difficulty about Mod 4 was the labs/homework provided by the school for us to complete. Most were confusing and just badly written; even going back to them with a lot more experience, I still find them confusing. A former student even told us straight up that when they got to Mod 4, they did their own studies rather than follow the official curriculum. I did the same thing and strengthened most of my React skills through this amazing tutorial I cannot recommend enough.
The Mod 4 code challenge was after a week and a half into learning React, rather than two weeks into learning a new concept as it wad for every other mod. I failed it due to something I wasn’t aware was even possible. When we had to do the retake a week later, it was the most stressed I had been in years about anything. I really wanted to finish the program in the 15 weeks allotted, not only because I didn’t want to have to repeat but because I had a potential full-time job offer that was to start the Monday after bootcamp ended. If I failed the retake code challenge, I would have been pushed back six weeks. I would have had to get in touch with the job to say I could no longer begin on the day I had promised (this after I had already pushed back the original start date they proposed because it was during the middle of the bootcamp) and possibly had the offer rescinded entirely. After finishing the code challenge, I prepared myself mentally to receive the bad news. I was 90% sure I had failed because while everything worked, one single feature didn’t work perfectly. Fortunately, everybody in my cohort passed the retake and we all moved on to Mod 5.
Mod 5: In my opinion, the least stressful and most fun part of the program! There are no code challenges and everything is done on your own, unless you choose to ask for help or work with someone else. You are free to do whatever you want as long as you follow certain guidelines: You must use the stack you learned in the bootcamp, plus Redux, which was the focus of the very last two official lessons. All the requirements are written out very clearly. The first two days of Mod 5 are officially allocated to “planning” and not building, as you were not supposed to start building until your project got officially approved, but everybody started building on day 1. To get approved, you were to have a basic outline of what your app did and have some wireframes/user stories ready to show the instructors. I had my idea in the back of my mind since Mod 1, and the whole cohort even knew what I wanted to do, but I still had to put it down “on paper” to make it official. The one thing I didn’t think of was a name. I ended up using my working title as the official name and now it’s too public to go back on.
The way Mod 5 is structured is kind of like a real work environment: You are a junior dev and the instructors are the senior devs; they are sitting there close to you in case you have questions about anything. We had stand-up meetings every day where you discussed what you did the day before, what you were planning to do that day, and one thing that was blocking you. After you were approved, you just worked on your app for the next two weeks until the last Wednesday of the program. That day, the official plan was to check in with the instructors to see if everything was working for the science fair the next day, in my experience, it was just being asked if “everything worked”, I said yes, I was cleared for the next day and that was it. I have heard from former students that functionality and code was actually checked, so this may be the case in other locations and for future cohorts.
The last Thursday of the program is the science fair. Members of the public are invited to the bootcamp to come look at students’ final projects; former students, potential employers, and students’ friends and families are the ones who tend to come in. There are snacks and drinks provided. From the student’s perspective, it’s explaining and showing the features of your app over and over for three hours. It does go surprisingly fast, but you’re still tired at the end of the day.
The last Friday there isn’t any work, just the graduation ceremony. We got a “yearbook” with a picture of everybody from the cohort and with quotes that your fellow students wrote about you/the program in general. This time, only family and friends are invited, it’s a much more personal event. Afterwards everyone in the cohort went out for lunch and drinks. | https://medium.com/@dekadekadeka/reflections-at-the-end-of-mod-6-4f6ae29880fc | ['Deka Ambia'] | 2019-11-02 18:50:17.447000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Flatiron School', 'Ruby', 'JavaScript', 'Bootcamp Experience'] |
Is Saying Columbus “Discovered America” a Racist Claim? | Is Saying Columbus “Discovered America” a Racist Claim?
We neither need to erase nor flaunt history
Christopher Columbus landing in Santo Domingo. Image from Wikipedia Commons.
The high school where I teach history had a world-renowned violinist recently come and play for our students. It was beautiful and moving, and I was struck once again by the power of music to move people and unite. However, twice in her interlude discussions, the musician referenced “when Columbus discovered America” as she was placing within history some of the pieces she played.
I jolted in my seat a bit, for I had not heard this at my school in awhile. I had taught Columbus and his journey to my students for years, but the narrative I gave them did not include saying that Columbus discovered anything.
Hearing her utter these words brought to my mind a new question. I knew that believing Columbus “discovered America” was not historically accurate, but was that phrase more sinister than that?
Was saying that Columbus “discovered America” a racist claim?
Image from Wikipedia Commons
In many ways, racism is like plagiarism. Something else I tell my students is that plagiarism is blind to intent. Whether or not someone means to plagiarize is beside the point. If a student takes three or more words from a source and does not give a citation, that is plagiarism — even if the student did not mean to do it.
Like plagiarism, then, or speeding on the highway, racism is blind to intent. Put another way, someone can be a racist and not mean to do it. One’s intention does not mitigate against the effect of the claim or action.
I will use Ture and Hamilton’s definition of racism: “Racism is not merely exclusion on the basis of race but exclusion for the purpose of subjugating or maintaining subjugation.”
Consider the three boats that set sail from Spain. Remember the poem?
In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
You are probably like me in not knowing that the poem goes on and on and on, approaching its end with
Columbus sailed on to find some gold To bring back home, as he’d been told.
It would be accurate to add to the end a new line:
Many natives he shipped and sold.
‘Landing of Columbus’ frieze from the U.S. Capitol Building. Image from Public Domain Files.
To say Columbus “discovered America” is problematic, and likely a racist claim, in at least three ways:
Columbus did not discover America. There were people already here. Native Americans occupied the land for untold thousands of years before Columbus set foot on the Bahamas. There were potentially hundreds of millions of natives in the Americas. To say Columbus “discovered” something implicitly communicates that he did this for humanity, which excludes the natives from humanity and equates “humanity” only with Europeans. Columbus, on behalf of the Spanish crown, was not the first European here. Leif Erikson and the Vikings were, by hundreds of years. The claim is incorrect even when considering a Eurocentric point of view. Columbus was a colonial conqueror who inaugurated a racist genocide that resulted in the near-extinction of the native population. Between smallpox, war, and outright murder, there were few natives left a couple of generations later. The contact between Columbus and the natives in the Bahamas elicited a colonial-era of abuse and exploitation. After all, what else is colonization?
A 197 foot monument of Columbus in Barcelona. Image from nosolomarcas on Pixabay.
Columbus sold Native Americans to Spain, an act that was both genesis of and forerunner to a global slave trade that culminated with the United States of America holding on to its forced labor system until 1865 and the requisite white supremacy through the present day.
Columbus initiated a story whose conclusion we still await but whose rising action was foreshadowed by his diary entry for Ferdinand and Isabella, the king and queen of Spain: “With fifty men all can be kept in subjection, and made to do whatever you desire.”
That entry was prescient.
Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan priest, in his General History of Things in New Spain, told of an event in 1519 involving the Spanish attacking the natives:
There followed a butchery of stabbing, beating, killing of the unsuspecting [natives] armed with no bows and arrows, protected by no shields…with no warning, they were treacherously, deceitfully slain.
Bartolomé de las Casas, who saw Columbus return to Spain in 1493 when Las Casas was eight years old, wrote the 1542 book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Las Casas fiercely fought for the protection of the natives and exposed many of the Spanish evils. Of Spanish engagement with the natives, he wrote
The Christians, with their horses and swords and lances, began to slaughter and practice strange cruelty among them. They penetrated into the country and spared neither children nor the aged, nor pregnant women, nor those in child labour, all of whom they ran through the body and lacerated.
The cover of de las Casas’ book. Image from Wikipedia Commons.
Las Casas, though he later regretted this, suggested to Spain that they import Africans rather than Native Americans.
For all of these reasons and more, cities, including my own, Charlottesville, have voted not to recognize Columbus Day. Rather, they celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day the second Monday of each October, the traditional date for Columbus Day, as a way to remember and honor Native Americans.
Indigenous Peoples Day in Berkeley. Image from Wikipedia Commons.
The idea that Columbus and his efforts are worth celebrating is misguided at best, racist at worst.
It seems a racist claim to say that Columbus “discovered America,” for he did not; not only that, what he did do was colonize, steal humans and sell them, and begin a cycle of corruption that required United States’ bloodiest war to interrupt. That cycle continues in a different, renewed form. While bodies are no longer taken to the auction block and sold in America, bodies of color are maligned, stereotyped, mass incarcerated, ignored, redlined, and shot.
Saying Columbus “discovered America” forefronts a false claim and glorifies a man who helped inaugurate race-based slavery and genocide in the United States.
To reference Ture and Hamilton’s definition of racism, to disregard the native population (much less slaughter them) is indeed “exclusion” and “subjugating or maintaining subjugation.”
By Ibram Kendi’s standards — author of How to Be an Anti-Racist — this claim about Columbus is racist if it perpetuates inequity, which a false narrative certainly can do. Inequity can come from continued racist policies against Native Americans based on the non-indigenous assumption that “this land is my land.”
If saying that Columbus “discovered America” is not a racist claim, it is certainly close by.
While bodies are no longer taken to the auction block and sold in America, bodies of color are maligned, stereotyped, mass incarcerated, ignored, redlined, and shot.
What Columbus discovered was new depths of evil in the human heart.
It is not just that a new generation is thinking something new and that now we have to get on board with the youngsters and be politically correct or else be labeled a racist. That line of thinking ignores the fact that most people of color have always thought phrases like saying Columbus “discovered America” were harmful. Really, what has happened is that white people, which is to say those in positions of power, are the ones thinking differently.
People of color, particularly African Americans, have pleaded with whites to engage the truth.
Duke Divinity School professor Patrick Smith says, “There cannot be a way forward without a profound truth telling.”
Founder and president of Be the Bridge, LaTasha Morrison, says, “Reconciliation doesn’t happen without truth telling.”
Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, says, “Truth and reconciliation are sequential.”
John M. Perkins, civil rights activist and author of One Blood, writes, “We must go back before we can go forward.”
Civil rights activist John M. Perkins. Image from Wikipedia Commons.
And Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise, writes that what we learn from history is “that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth.”
The truth is that Columbus Day reinforces a dangerous story, one that is dangerous not just because it is false but because it is wretched. Columbus’ actions and what he initiated are patterns from which America still needs to recover.
We need not erase history, but we do not need to flaunt it.
Truth-telling is a baseline requirement for living into reality. We need to truth-tell about what really happened in 1492 and what did not, about what is worth celebrating and what is not. Otherwise, we will live in the Upside Down and think our wrong-headed notions are right side up.
We need not erase history, but we do not need to flaunt it.
We need to add new lines to the famous 1492 poem: | https://medium.com/an-injustice/is-saying-columbus-discovered-america-a-racist-claim-5c079efa794b | ['Sam Heath'] | 2020-10-05 14:53:00.719000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Race', 'Equality', 'Society', 'History'] |
Website Redesign: Why Do You Need it & Key Benefits | Do you think just a business website is enough to grow the revenues for your brand? Well, you are wrong if you think so. The website needs to be updated and re-designed regularly. With technology being updated every minute and new tools being introduced every single day, a simple website is a ‘NO NO’ for a growing business.
If we keep the website usability aside for a bit, there are several factors that play a major role in the success of your website, which includes security, SEO and conversion rate of the platform. Website is an essential piece of revenue and information about a brand that helps your users to gain trust and credibility in your business model. And that’s Why Your Business Needs a Website Redesign.
Users have become particular about their choices of products and services they wish to receive from a website. And thus, an outdated website or re-design is a big rejection with the growing competition. To attain maximum results and attraction online, website redesign help is a beneficial investment that brings effective results in terms of visibility and revenue. Let’s get started with simple yet significant factors you must keep in mind while thinking of updating your website.
Why Website Redesign Is Important for Your Brand?
When users are trying to buy a product or avail a service online, your brand website is not just a single source of information or benefit to them. They will always compare your services and interface with your competitors too. For instance, a user who is exploring a website to buy plants will explore all your other competitors, and will purchase from the website, which is easy to understand and access. Let’s face it: no one wants a complicated interface! Let’s figure out some reasons that will help in realizing the process of redesigning your website faster.
Your website design is outdated, resulting in lesser retention of users on the platform.
Your website is not responsive, which in turn, waste too much time of your users.
Your marketing goals are not quite clear on the website, which means no revenue from the site content.
Your branding is obsolete, which does not entice your users towards your business model.
Your website is too slow, which is a big turn off for any user globally.
You do not have a content-rich website, which, in turn, do not deliver the answers to your users’ requirement.
Your branding positioning is off that do not lift your brand in the crown or competition.
Benefits of a Site Redesign in 2021
With the above-mentioned failures, it must have been clear by now as to why website re-designing is important for your brand. Depending on your business expenditure, you must evaluate the changes you need for your website and how to receive better retention on your website.
So now when we are at a good start, and you know that website re-designing is an important factor playing in your revenue generation, it’s time to understand the benefits of the same. To clear the clouds, site redesign does not require much of a significant or big investment from your pocket; however, the results are unbelievable. Not just the retention, but users are inclined towards your website for the credibility and authenticity you serve to them. Let us Know the Key Benefits of redesigning business’s website:
Improved marking/ branding
A refreshed website will help reinforce the consistency of your image. With an advanced design, your website will advance trust and brand recognition among buyers, which is the reason a website redesign can do wonders for your image-building activities.
Potential clients that discover your business online will utilize the general design and nature of your website to assess the dependability of your organization.
Early introductions matter and they’re 94% affected by your site design.
If your site seems modest and obsolete, doesn’t function admirably, or gives awful client experience, it can dismiss individuals from turning into your clients.
Then again, a website redesign helps keep your business relevant and upgrades your image picture with a solid impression.
Better search engine rankings
Is a website redesign really necessary? Truth be told, your website’s redesign should consider search enhancement from the code right to its end responsiveness.
Eventually, that implies your site’s redesign will assist you with moving up in the SERPs, scoring you more natural traffic.
Moreover, when individuals click on your connection and see your cutting edge website, they’re more prone to stay. If your site structure is enhanced, guests will peruse through your site, look at more pages which will reduce your skip rate.
At long last, a very much designed website can likewise draw in more backlinks, which can give you a solid push for significantly higher Google rankings and extra referral traffic.
Most popular websites worldwide from 19930to 2020, y highest number of monthly visits (in billions)
And if we are talking about ranking, no engine can compete with Google. As a matter of fact, Google is the most popular website worldwide till date with the highest number of monthly visits.
Improved data stream
The core objective of your website content and data is to enable likely clients to get familiar with your business, items/administrations and eventually help close arrangements.
Regardless of whether it’s data about your organization, your originator’s story, or simply instructing them on your items and administrations, a website’s key design is to give data that assist guests with making the desired move (conversion).
Obviously, individuals expect the data they need to be directly before them at some random second. Also, to have the option to convince guests to consider your contributions and become paying clients, you have to have an ideal data stream.
Shockingly, numerous websites neglect to satisfy this serious need.
Website redesign is no silver bullet; you can give a valiant effort to structure and present your data such that all the significant stuff is anything but difficult to track down as clients stream naturally starting with one page then onto the next.
More leads and sales
A website redesign will result in more leads and sales because of the usage of front line conversion enhancement strategies and features.
Let’s be honest; changing over guests is a definitive objective of any website. Regardless of whether you need to gather their email or telephone number, drive them to plan a booking, buy a thing, or pursue a membership, conversions are where it’s at.
One of the Benefits of redesigning a website is that you can make conversions the essential centre, and you’ll do it by presenting a progression of data that channels them to buy, buy-in, or request more information. That is something most more seasoned websites simply don’t do well overall.
Increase revenue and reduce costs
All things considered, by improving brand consistency, boosting your rankings, and piping your guests to a conversion occasion, a website redesign will help increase your revenue.
In any case, do you realize that it can likewise reduce your costs?
When doing a total redesign, you get the occasion to reevaluate your facilitating and CMS (Content Management System). Also, another website may run significantly more productively, occupying less room on your worker and working more rapidly for every one of your guests.
Likewise, it’s regularly more cost-successful to do a redesign than to fix usefulness issues and add more features over the long haul. As opposed to sticking a lot of bandages to your current site, it’s smarter to go with a total upgrade and begin once again.
What’s more, a website redesign will reduce expenses of botched chances and lost revenue brought about by your old, awkward website.
Conclusion
So far by now, you must have realized the importance of website redesigning for your website. The other important question is how to get the work started? All you need is a technical and creative partner who can help you design an interactive user interface of your website. This is where Owebest Technologies will help you achieve great revenue and retention numbers as a whole.
The professional and creative team of experts understand your requirement and offer the respective solution and design, which will definitely add one more star to your brand value. After all, it is about the brand and value of the same in the market. And who can understand that matter from those experts who design such a value in the web world. | https://medium.com/@owebest/website-redesign-why-do-you-need-it-key-benefits-b45796fde96b | ['Karen Taylor'] | 2020-12-24 18:18:23.004000+00:00 | ['Website', 'Web', 'Website Design', 'Web Design'] |
Isn't everything moving too fast? | I’ve been trapped in my room trying to finish my final assignment for this last couple of days. Working nonstop for approximately 10 hours a day. (BUT WHY HASN’T IT FINISHED YET????) Other than that, I just do my usual stuff trying to stay alive and sane.
Despite the privilege of having a balcony, I don't know what's going on outside. My world is just this 3 by 3 box. I don't remember how the winds felt like and how beautiful the lights when the golden hour arrived. Because I always shut my balcony door. When I turn around, all I see is the night sky, and I need to go to sleep for tomorrow.
For me,
time is just a mere digit now, not how the sun and the moon changing. Is it how time supposedly measured? I don't even feel the movement of the time anymore. I feel numb and disconnected from everything around me.
But,
The once a week trip to the grocery store has been nothing but a blessing. The monotonous scenery looks quite different every time I go out. It somehow takes me to many different parts of my brain and recharges many different feelings. connect me back to the place and space I’ve been living.
I see the blue sky, feel the wind,
and I always surprise to see the bits different in this scenery. It's always the same route. But it always felt different.
Well,
Today,
I remember how it feels to connect again to your surrounding. But tomorrow, perhaps I will be lost again in my 3 by 3 world. | https://medium.com/@rnnabila/isnt-everything-moving-to-fast-dd7493b83447 | ['Rn Nabila'] | 2020-12-23 20:20:42.170000+00:00 | ['Im Tired', 'Quarantine'] |
Contemplating the Zen of Python | Contemplating the Zen of Python
A brief analysis of the 19 guiding principles for Python design
The Zen of Python by Tim Peters
While reading an article last week about the PEP8 Style Guide for Python, I once again came across the Zen of Python. For those who haven’t seen it before, you can easily conjure it by casting this spell in your Python interpreter:
import this
Long-time Pythoneer Tim Peters penned down the BDFL’s [Benevolent Dictator For Life, a nickname of Python creator Guido van Rossum] guiding principles for Python’s design into 20 aphorisms. This poem has served as a mini style-guide for Python coders for over a decade.
Mysteriously, only 19 of the guidelines are written down. Guido van Rosum reportedly said that the missing 20th aphorism is “some bizarre Tim Peters in-joke.”
This article contains my interpretation of these aphorisms, including examples and applications. | https://medium.com/better-programming/contemplating-the-zen-of-python-186722b833e5 | ['Chaitanya Baweja'] | 2020-01-06 19:29:09.616000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Software', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Software Development'] |
Wonder Woman 1984: A Case Study in Bad Writing | For all my creative writing majors looking for what not to do in their next workshop submission, watch Wonder Woman 1984…
Why? Well…
Superhero movies don’t work when they rely heavily on grandiose fight-scenes and fan-service. Justice League was a sad attempt and Dawn of Justice was even worse. Thankfully, Marvel usually gets the formula right, utilizing Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey to show a character go from zero-to-hero in less than three hours. There’s a focus on Resident Evil-esque boss battles, but enough character development to leave you satisfied. Character being the important word here.
Without character, no film works. But…
When there’s zero stake¹ and a tremendous reliance on that character arc, a pathetic mixture of a comic book and anything on your mom’s bookshelf is born. Hence Wonder Woman 1984.
The film is about… not a lot.
Here’s the gist: Don’t take shortcuts in life. (Emphasis on the period). Why? Because that’s all the movie offers. Diana (Wonder Woman) uses a shortcut to love, Barbara (Cheetah) uses a shortcut to popularity, and Maxwell Lord uses a shortcut to power. The problem? The entire theme was waddled down to an admittedly excellent intro sequence where DIANA ALREADY LEARNS THE LESSON.
When your main character is pure perfection, there is no story. There is no place for the character to go. The same can be said for a character who has already gone through there arc and is expected to relearn that same lesson later in the movie.
This is why Sequels don’t hit the same way as originals².
There is no suspense in Wonder Woman’s character because Diana already understands what she needs to do. The Joseph Campbell adventure here is not to learn but to face the truth that she accepted years ago. It’s okay… but not a revolutionary story nor a reason to make a sequel.
Diana must let go of her wish (bringing her dead boyfriend back from the dead) in order to get her powers back and fight the big baddies at the end. The arc, however, is only present in 5% of the film and when the big moment to “face her truth” comes, its underwhelming. Of course she’s going to sacrifice Steve to save the world. We believe in Diana and have from the beginning. There was never a moment when the audience has to stop and say, “wait, is she going to be able to solve this problem?”
This leaves two other characters to carry the emotional depth of the film… an attractive girl with glasses who becomes an attractive but heartless girl without glasses and a power-hungry man who takes the easy road to power. Neither does the job well!
Kristen Wiig’s acting was pretty good and her character should have been the center of the story. Instead, she becomes another generic bad-guy with the same powers as the main hero. (Watch every MCU film and you’ll see the same pattern) The main battle is therefore just a punching party, without the need for interesting strategy or skill to win. It’s just who punches harder.
Pedro Pascal is another example of “what should have been”. There was nothing intriguing about him except for a 3-second flash-back at the end and a few scenes with his son, who he leaves alone way too many times!³ His motivation for power was spotty and the lengths he went to obtain it seemed unplanned and uncalculating, leaving a character based on luck than skill. So, why was it interesting when he was defeated?
Each one must relinquish their one wish and go back to the life they had.
The fundamental issue with the movie is that all the characters are tasked with completing the same arc, so when each one does, it just feels bland⁴. Most Superhero movies can fall back on their interesting villains and engaging fight scenes, but Wonder Woman 1984 has none of those, leaving a failed attempt at dramatic writing and copy/paste battle sequences that look better in the new Spider-Man video game.
It’s an okay film, but in a market filled to the brim with really good superhero content, it’s one you kick under the rug.
The ending scene should NOT have been brought to a worldwide scale. It should have been made believable and built around stake in the characters we grew to love: like Cheetah’s humanity and Maxwell Lord’s fatherhood. In order to save those things from destruction, Diana would have to learn her lesson sooner rather than later. If she fails, she loses a friend (Cheetah) and Maxwell Lord loses his son.
But they didn’t do this... The bottom line? Hire me for the third one!
[1]: We know everything turns out okay due to the current DCEU!
[2]: With some exceptions (I love you, Karate Kid 2)
[3]: Someone call CPS, stat!
[4]: Oh! And Cheetah’s life was so bad before that she prefers looking like an extra in the film Cats! (Must have been a really bad life!) | https://medium.com/@aldenetrawrites/wonder-woman-1984-a-case-study-in-bad-writing-25185bc1b5e5 | ['Alden Etra'] | 2020-12-28 16:54:44.610000+00:00 | ['Film', 'Superheroes', 'Wonder Woman', 'Film Reviews', 'Wonder Woman 1984'] |
Reinforcement Learning in Health Care: Why It’s Important and How It Can Help | At a TED Talk back in 2010, game designer and author Jane McGonigal argued that video games would help change the world for the better. While she may not have been referring to health and wellness specifically, recent developments in reinforcement learning (RL) for health care have rapidly turned parts of McGonigal’s vision into reality.
In many ways, RL isn’t much different from other types of machine learning (ML), including deep learning or classic ML techniques. RL is simply a narrower subset of ML — “the cherry on the cake” of artificial intelligence (AI), according to Facebook VP and Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun. The main difference is that instead of merely inspecting data, RL agents learn by interacting with their environments and earning rewards or penalties based on their actions.
It’s a gamified approach to machine learning, one that governs RL’s two main characters: The agent and its environment. The agent interacts with this environment, which can change either through the agent’s actions or on its own. The all-encompassing goal of every RL agent is to improve the state of its environment, thus maximizing its rewards through a series of decisions and actions. It’s all accomplished via trial-and-error with no prompting or outside interference by the programmer (other than initially setting up the algorithm’s reward policy) — similar to someone playing a game.
RL algorithms optimize long-term rewards, learning the best response sequence over time as agents receive feedback about the state of their environments. Given enough computing resources, RL agents can harness hundreds or even thousands of parallel “gameplays” to gather experience faster than humanly possible.
Why reinforcement learning for health care?
For the above reasons, RL is well suited for systems with inherent time delays, including those of autonomous vehicles, robotics, video games, financial and business management, and — yes — health care. “RL tackles sequential decision-making problems with sampled, evaluative and delayed feedback simultaneously,” according to researchers Yu et al., making its unique form of progressive decision-making an excellent candidate for health-care applications. RL is also flexible enough to consider the delayed effects of treatments and doesn’t need as much contextual data to make relatively informed decisions.
“RL is able to find optimal policies using only previous experiences, without requiring any prior knowledge about the mathematical model of the biological systems,” say the researchers. “This makes RL more appealing than many existing control-based approaches in health-care domains since it could be usually difficult or even impossible to build an accurate model for the complex human body system and the responses to administered treatments, due to nonlinear, varying and delayed interaction between treatments and human bodies.”
Reinforcement learning in healthcare: Applications
While several health-care domains have begun experimenting with RL to some degree, the approach has seen its most notable successes in implementing dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) for patients with long-term illnesses or conditions. It has also achieved a level of functionality in automated medical diagnosis, health resource scheduling and resource allocation, drug discovery and development, and health management.
Dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs)
RL’s most common real-world health care application is the creation and ongoing configuration of DTRs for patients with longer-term conditions. DTRs are sequences of rules governing health-care decisions — including treatment type, drug dosages, and appointment timing — tailored to an individual patient based on their medical history and conditions over time. Clinical observations and patient assessments provide the input data, with the algorithm outputting treatment options to provide the patient’s most desirable environmental state. RL is used to automate decision-making within these ongoing treatment regimes. It has already helped design DTRs for chronic diseases including cancer and HIV, and could also improve critical care using the rich data collected in intensive care units (ICUs).
Automated medical diagnosis
Medical diagnoses are essentially an exercise in mapping patient information (such as history and current symptoms) to the correct disease profile. While this may sound relatively simple, it can, in clinical terms, be an incredibly complex task representing an enormous burden (in both time and cognitive energy required) for busy clinicians.
We already outlined the costs of mistaken diagnoses in a previous blog post: Along with being attributed to around 10 percent of U.S. patient deaths, misdiagnosed patients have been paid nearly $40B in compensation over the past 25 years. That’s why ML algorithms to improve diagnosis are so vital to the health-care industry and its patients. But RL techniques hold particular promise because most ML diagnosis solutions require large amounts of annotated data for training purposes. RL agents, by contrast, require smaller amounts of labeled data.
Health-care resource scheduling and allocation
The health-care system is more or less the same as any other service business, with patients being the customers and health-care resources being the service providers. Because of RL’s well-documented suitability to business process management (BPM), it can help hospitals and clinics manage day-to-day operations by analyzing and devising optimal resource allocation and human resource scheduling based on seasonal trends, current staffing and inpatient levels, and other data points.
Drug discovery, design, and development
Traditional drug discovery has many flaws, with the most damaging being that its human-driven, trial-and-error process is too time- and cost-prohibitive. This is the case even when using modern techniques such as computer models and simulations (M&S) to analyze the behavior of molecules and atoms. Despite all that time and money, however, success rates are still relatively low, with slightly less than 10 percent of compounds entering Phase I trials. For these reasons, RL methods are increasingly being applied to de novo drug design to automate and improve drug design hypotheses and compound selection.
Some drug developers are experimenting with advanced machine learning techniques combined with quantum computing (as explained in this CapeStart blog post) whose computing power can help researchers compare larger-scale molecules than is currently possible using classical computers.
Health management
RL has also been used to devise adaptive and personalized interventions for ongoing health management, including exercise and weight management regimes for obese or diabetic patients. AI has already proven to be a valuable tool for encouraging patient engagement and adherence to health management programs.
The challenges of reinforcement learning and healthcare
Despite its nascent success, RL in health care still faces several significant yet surmountable challenges before it ever sees large-scale clinical implementation. Transferring an RL agent from a training or simulated environment to the real thing can be difficult, for one thing, and because the only feedback the agent can comprehend are rewards and penalties, updating or tweaking the algorithm can prove problematic.
There are also instances of RL agents learning how to “game” their systems — including this OpenAI video where the agent figured out how to collect rewards without finishing the race.
But there are other challenges, including:
Data scarcity
Even though RL agents are at their best learning on the job (so to speak), deep learning researcher Isaac Godfried points out that in most cases, using real patients to train RL algorithms isn’t the most ethical approach. That means they must train in simulated environments on historical observational data of specific treatments, which is often difficult to obtain for various reasons, including HIPPA compliance and personal health information (PHI) considerations.
Partial observability
While RL agents can often account for the full state of simulated environments, the human body is much more complex and fast-moving than even the most detailed of simulations or historical data sets. This partial observability in the form of blood pressure, temperature, and other readings means RL agents in clinical settings often don’t have a full understanding of the state of their environment.
Reward formulation and configuration
Although RL agents for health care are designed with long-term success in mind, that’s easier said than done when devising a reward policy that balances long term benefits with short-term (but sometimes deceiving) improvements. “For instance, periodic improvements in blood pressure may not cause improvements in outcome in the case of sepsis,” writes Godfried. “In contrast, having just one reward given at the end (survival or death) means a very long sequence without any intermediate feedback for the agent.”
Although many challenges remain before the use of reinforcement learning in healthcare is anywhere close to perfect, there has been recent progress on several fronts — especially in the more efficient and precise development of DTRs for chronic and other conditions. As reward policies become better refined and more data is made available to build environments for RL agents, no doubt we’ll see further improvements — and, ultimately, better health outcomes for patients and more efficient operations for health providers. | https://pub.towardsai.net/reinforcement-learning-in-health-care-why-its-important-and-how-it-can-help-8f45dd896a00 | ['Gaugarin Oliver'] | 2021-01-04 07:21:27.730000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Technology', 'Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Reinforcement Learning'] |
Ice Cream, My Drug of Choice | Photo by Cera Chiu on Unsplash
I can live without a lot of things in this life. I was Catholic for a while there and every Lent found me ‘giving up’ a whole litany of stuff from swearing (yeah, THAT went well) to alcohol. But I will confess, I never, not once, ever considered giving up ice cream.
Ice cream — in my family — is a necessity, a nightly ritual, and damn near proof of life. If you are too ill to eat ice cream — its time to call 911. If you deny your children ice cream, no matter how badly they misbehaved, this is grounds for DSS notification. Ice cream is Sacred Stuff.
For many of us, the fascination with ice cream took hold on my aunt’s farm when we lined up and pulled duty turning the crank on one of several churns of homemade ice cream. When I talk to my cousins, I find we all have a preference for fruit flavored ice cream. I believe it to be those fresh peaches, strawberries, blueberries and bananas which went into the mysterious soup and magically became ice cream and thus tempered our taste buds.
My absolute favorite of all time is banana. If I find banana ice cream in the grocery store these days, I stock up. It isn’t easy to come by, believe it or not, so I usually settle for peach or strawberry. It’s not much of a hardship, those are really yummy too.
When I was expecting my kids, I would have gladly lived on ice cream. We were poor back in those days, and I remember hunting around the house for spare change to go to a soft serve shop and get a cone as a ‘treat’. Today I buy it by the half gallon, usually, a buy-two-get-three-free “deal” and stock up my freezer. I’m divorced and my kids are grown. Yes, that means its all for me.
Most every evening ends with me sitting in bed with a few scoops in my special bowl contemplating my life and all previous bowls of ice cream which have come before.
Am I an addict? Likely.
Hello. My name is Ann…
Namaste. | https://medium.com/recycled/ice-cream-my-drug-of-choice-1717b738ca7e | ['Ann Litts'] | 2019-06-18 00:20:05.712000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Ice Cream', 'Family', 'Self-awareness', 'Habits'] |
Amazon’s Plague Year | Amazon’s Plague Year
As small businesses closed and layoffs hit, Amazon expanded its power — despite a string of crises and worker uprisings
Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd/picture alliance via Getty Images
When the Covid crisis went into full swing in March, two trend lines emerged almost immediately: Small businesses were forced to close down, and Amazon started hiring. At the time, I worried that as the pandemic raged we would see an accelerated consolidation of power among the tech companies that rely on part-time gig labor and e-commerce to gain advantage while everyone else hemorrhaged jobs. That decent jobs at vital local institutions would be traded for precarious jobs at a handful of online markets and platforms. I worried that 2020 would be the year of Amazonification.
With independent businesses shuttering, unemployment would skyrocket — and the conditions would be perfect for companies like Amazon (and Uber, InstaCart, DoorDash, etc.) that hire non-benefited workers to seize the opportunity to both press their advantage against traditional retail and entrench these precarious jobs as the norm. Covid looked like an incredible accelerator of trends set in motion long ago; trends that would push Amazon and gig companies to new heights of dominance at the expense of independent businesses. I was right to worry.
It’s hard to overstate the economic devastation the virus — and near-total failure of our government to provide adequate support for workers and small businesses — has brought. Millions of people have been thrown out of work: Even after a modest recovery, the unemployment rate is 3% higher than it was in February. According to Yelp data, nearly 100,000 small businesses had permanently closed by September. Small businesses, independent restaurants, “main street” shops — these were the hardest hit by the pandemic, and 60% of all closures that happened this year have been permanent. Major retailers like J.Crew and Dean and Deluca filed for bankruptcy. As a result, one study estimates that as many as 40 million people cannot afford to pay rent, and are on the brink of eviction right now; a crisis of almost unthinkable scale looms as the CDC’s eviction moratorium expires on January 1.
Any “stumble” that allows a business to make $6.3 billion of profit in a quarter is hardly a stumble
Amazon, meanwhile, began making its fifth major hiring push of the year in late autumn, to help meet still-surging demand for the products it sells amid a year of record-smashing profits. Those who lost their bartending, bookselling, and small business-running jobs may well be the ones applying for Amazon’s part-time and unbenefitted Flex delivery driver or seasonal warehouse associate jobs.
Despite what have been dubbed as “stumbles” by the Washington Post — some distribution snafus and quibbles like failing to adequately protect its workers from a deadly virus — Amazon crashed through 2020 like the juggernaut that it is, deflecting crises like a mounting death toll of warehouse workers who’d caught Covid, warehouse worker strikes for better protections, and cracking down on dissent by firing of employees who spoke up for them. (The National Labor Relations Board determined that one warehouse worker, who was fired after organizing a protest against working conditions, was fired illegally.) At least 10 of its workers died — Amazon won’t release official fatality figures, but it did admit in October that 20,000 had contracted the virus.
Meanwhile, it faced wide-ranging criticism for the way it gave precedence in its supply chain to essential goods — critics said it favored its own products over struggling third party vendors — a separate Wall Street Journal investigation into its apparent practice of copying the products of third-party vendors selling on Amazon and undercutting them on price, and a highly publicized Congressional hearing.
None of it mattered. Amazon’s profits soared in spite of it all. As VentureBeat noted, Amazon’s “$5.2 billion in quarterly profit in Q2 was the largest ever in its 26-year history. It broke that record again in Q3 with $6.3 billion in quarterly profit, up 200% year-over-year.” According to Bezos, the company “created over 400,000 jobs this year alone.” In Q3, Amazon had over 1.12 million employees, a number up 50% year-over-year.
Those “stumbles,” which were said to help competitors like Walmart and Target get a foothold in the ecommerce space, were clearly overstated — it’s unlikely Amazon alone could seriously ever hope to deliver goods to the hundreds of millions of Americans who were ordering them, many mostly from home for the first time, so of course the other oligopoly retailers could be expected to pick up the slack. Any “stumble” that allows a business to make $6.3 billion of profit in a quarter is hardly a stumble.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’s net worth eclipsed $200 billion, making him the first person in history to amass such wealth. It is wealth that exceeds the GDP of most of the nations on Earth. Of the 180-plus recognized nations in the world, Bezos is richer than all but 52 of them; his personal fortune exceeds the GDP of Hungary, for example. The magnificent rise in Bezos’s wealth is due to Amazon’s stock rising 86% over the course of the pandemic, with analysts encouraging investors to continue buying more up through even today.
As Amazonification spreads, workers will be more vulnerable than ever
The owner of the tech oligopoly is wealthier than many European nations, while 40 million Americans are clinging to a CDC policy that restricts evictions to stay sheltered during the pandemic. That’s the world Amazonification delivers. That, not the rise of Zoom work, not Facebook misinformation or Section 230, is the technology story of the year.
And it dovetails with another major development that was somewhat papered over in the election madness of November. I’m talking about the passage of Proposition 22 in California, which shields companies like Uber and Lyft — and Amazon — from having to classify their workers as employees. It also prevents these workers from organizing. That means workers will most likely never see benefits, healthcare, or worker’s comp, even if they clock 80 hours a week. Uber and Lyft are already trying to export the model to other states, and to turn it into a national standard. As Amazonification spreads, workers will be more vulnerable than ever.
And it’s a bad time to be a vulnerable worker at a company like Amazon. Conditions remain dangerous, and tensions are high at fulfillment centers as the virus continues its resurgence across the nation. Workers staged global protests on Black Friday to call for better protections and conditions, and some even took to protesting outside Jeff Bezos’ New York home.
Amazon says it invested billions in protective equipment for workers, and is lobbying the CDC to deliver the vaccine to its warehouse workers “at the earliest available time,” so it can keep them working as efficiently as possible. But new waves of Covid infections are hitting fulfillment centers across the globe. And far from being more open about its efforts to protect workers, Amazon is fighting efforts to make its actual policies and pandemic response more transparent — California has been forced to sue the tech giant to try to get it to cooperate with the state’s investigation into working conditions at fulfillment centers. Inside company walls, workers without health insurance are weathering the deadliest phase of the pandemic.
While workers are weighing staying home and risking eviction and going to work and possibly contracting the virus, the wealthiest beneficiaries of Amazonification are watching their riches grow, safe at home. America’s 614 billionaires increased their wealth by $937 billion during the pandemic — nearly $1 trillion dollars. If you peruse how much just the top 30 made during the crisis, you’ll note that many of them are capitalizing on the same trend; they use technologies that make work in adverse conditions possible, or exploit precarious labor, or undergird the systems that do all of the above. (As one meme that circulated widely pointed out, if just the top four billionaires in the U.S. pooled enough income to pay every American $3,000 — far more than the U.S. stimulus currently on the table — they would still be richer than when they started the year.)
They are the CEOs of Walmart and Zoom, of Oracle and Nike, of Microsoft and Amazon. Much has been made about the astronomical profits that they have enjoyed in this crisis year, but we have not fully reckoned with the expense: Imploding local institutions, the hollowing out of community culture, and the degradation of work. The word for the rising dominion of this pale, precarious world is Amazonification, the semi-automated delivery mechanism of extreme inequality in the worst year on Earth. | https://onezero.medium.com/amazons-plague-year-3d930e57a914 | ['Brian Merchant'] | 2020-12-21 19:16:59.314000+00:00 | ['Amazon', 'Business', 'Jeff Bezos', 'Technology'] |
How Africa Might Change The World | How Africa Might Change
The World
It’s both a question and a statement
Photo by Doug Linstedt on Unsplash
In 2018 the U.N. goals of solving energy poverty in Africa by 2030 are hardly on track to be met. The goal is to provide electricity to 600 million people in Africa who don’t currently have access to it using the least cost method possible.
The major barriers to this goal inertia, aversion to change, corruption, political ineptitude, and a lack of knowledge about the energy sector among political and community leaders. Border, religious, and tribal conflicts don’t help either.
Some nations may need to cooperate in the future if a solution is to be found. The debate to hurdle the current barriers revolves around who should pay for the electrification of Africa and what type of energy should be used.
Then there are the ongoing payments to consider giving the levels of poverty in many African nations. Finally, Africa will ultimately need a solution to future transport systems that currently rely on diesel fuel.
Look at Electrification.
Fuel poverty in Africa has massive implications. It means that many families use biomass to cook often in ventilated accommodation that burns kerosene lamps which also emits indoor pollution. If they can’t afford it they use diesel generators to power electrical equipment. These all have health and financial impacts on the quality of their lives.
Notice both diesel and kerosene are oil-based products. There are three ways to solve the African fuel poverty crisis.
Each African nation could simply extend its national grid into rural areas. They could build many smart grids consisting of power generation like solar Panel battery storage, automated computer control, and transmission capacities. These are ideal for households and businesses of grids or integrated with a national grid. They could also invest in standalone systems however big or small perhaps to solve individuals' needs. These could be upgraded and integrated with a smart grid at a later date.
These three methods all have a part to play where you go to look at which one is the least costly.
The International Energy Agency in 2017 estimated that smart grids could serve two hundred nineteen million people by 2030 and has the least cost option. Although free choices were mentioned earlier. Smart mini-grids are self-sufficient electricity grids that process their own power generation usually in the form of micro renewable energy such as solar, battery storage, and the ability to transmit and share that power locally.
One household can be generating energy whilst the number utilizes its power when there is a demand. Alternatively, unused energy can be stored to be used at night time if the system is large enough.
This can do away with the need to use diesel generators in homes or eliminate the need to use biomass to cook. In other words, it is cheaper to put in smart mini-grids than it is to extend the national grid into a particular area.
Also, it can be achieved at such a low cost that governments could easily persuade utility companies to help fund it. They make the ultimate cost savings in the future it can be connected to extensions to the national grid that may occur as the country economically develops. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-africa-might-change-the-world-81643f47780e | ['Mamun Ju'] | 2020-12-28 16:02:34.482000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Politics', 'Climate Change', 'Energy', 'Environment'] |
I Didn’t Report My Sexual Assault, Should I Now? | “Why didn’t you report him? How can you sleep at night knowing he is still out there?”
My boyfriend sat at the table across from me not understanding why I hadn’t publically done anything about my sexual assault.
A strong heartbeat swept through my chest and the too-familiar knot in my stomach returned. I babbled through trying to explain myself, to express the situation, reveal what happened and why, for years, I hadn’t even told anyone, let alone pressed charges:
I was so ashamed: after it happened, my entire body felt gross inside. The entire situation was humiliating and dehumanizing. I was ashamed to be myself, to be in my own skin. This isn’t uncommon, even big-time stars like Madonna have shared that “my rape was too humiliating to report.”
after it happened, my entire body felt gross inside. The entire situation was humiliating and dehumanizing. I was ashamed to be myself, to be in my own skin. This isn’t uncommon, even big-time stars like Madonna have shared that “my rape was too humiliating to report.” I felt guilty : I had been nice to him, I was wearing revealing clothes, I was drawing attention to myself…I should have been able to stop it, but didn’t…and that made it my fault. Sexual violence is a control tactic meant to threaten and manipulate people — it goes so far beyond the trauma of the moment.
: I had been nice to him, I was wearing revealing clothes, I was drawing attention to myself…I should have been able to stop it, but didn’t…and that made it my fault. Sexual violence is a control tactic meant to threaten and manipulate people — it goes so far beyond the trauma of the moment. I didn’t think anyone would believe me . Here was this “great guy”, there was no way anyone would think he actually assaulted me. It would be my word against his. I had just watched a girl I knew who went to the police after being raped and she was ultimately blamed and ostracized from the community and school as a result. That would for sure happen to me too.
. Here was this “great guy”, there was no way anyone would think he actually assaulted me. It would be my word against his. I had just watched a girl I knew who went to the police after being raped and she was ultimately blamed and ostracized from the community and school as a result. That would for sure happen to me too. My future would be ruined . I was broken, and everyone would look at me that way. There would be no way another man would ever want to touch me, let alone love me if they knew this happened.
. I was broken, and everyone would look at me that way. There would be no way another man would ever want to touch me, let alone love me if they knew this happened. I wanted to protect others from my pain. The thought of having to tell my family…sitting there telling my dad, her baby girl was hurt, was an unbearable thought. I convinced myself that by staying silent, I was protecting people in my life from feeling this pain.
The thought of having to tell my family…sitting there telling my dad, her baby girl was hurt, was an unbearable thought. I convinced myself that by staying silent, I was protecting people in my life from feeling this pain. Every part of me wanted to pretend it didn't happen . I was determined for this event to not define my life, not control me forever. I tried to push it down, put it in a box, and pretend it didn’t happen.
. I was determined for this event to not define my life, not control me forever. I tried to push it down, put it in a box, and pretend it didn’t happen. I had PTSD. I didn’t know it at the time, but I immediately dove into expressing symptoms of PTSD: I drank more and had more sex to numb myself away. I became overwhelmed by avoidance to the point it felt overwhelming to take the action of speaking out let alone filing a report. For years, every time someone’s hand came close to my throat, or my hips were touched a certain way, I would spiral into flashbacks. For years, I couldn’t eat anything with garlic, since my assailant's breath had been caked in it. To this day, I still have nightmares of being raped or assaulted.
I know these reasons, symptoms, excuses, and results aren’t solely mine to bear. Only 32% of rapes get reported, and when asked why the other 68% don’t file reports, most women respond with similar reasons.
Bustle interviewed a handful of women who shared their reasons here:
While all of these things are true and have been for years, I didn’t want them to be my reasons anymore. I didn’t want this moment to define me. I know the version of myself back then, the young girl who was wounded and hurt, did what she had to in order to survive. She used all of her strength to hold herself up, and now, I am ready for more.
I sat across from my boyfriend, this man who I admire and respect, never having felt so misunderstood, feeling so judged for not having done more. But perhaps he had a point…why now had I still not done anything? Why wasn’t I being stronger in doing more, today?
Well, the data is hard to beat. For every 1,000 cases actually reported, 995 of the perpetrators walk free.
It becomes your word against theirs. And that is a very scary thing to face.
But, this is how change happens.
This is how of those 1,000 cases, 990 walks free…then 980 walks free…and then, one day, the number of perpetrators of sexual assault who walk free is 0.
While I thought I was protecting myself by staying silent, the reality is…this person could be harming others. It is now my duty to protect them. I am ready to sleep at night knowing I did everything in my power to make this a safer place for other girls, women, and victims of sexual assault. I did everything in my power to make a better world for my future children.
While every victim may be on their own path, when you are ready and reach a point of comfort in doing more…take action. You don’t have to do it alone. | https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/i-didnt-report-my-sexual-assault-should-i-now-730d56c86b73 | ['Kirsten Trammell'] | 2020-07-24 15:00:05.288000+00:00 | ['Sexual Assault', 'Feminism', 'Sexual Assault Awareness', 'Female', 'Healing From Trauma'] |
Allahabad high court up hjs new vacancy 2020 | Allahabad high court up hjs new vacancy 2020 Dsaienterprises ·Dec 19, 2020
Allahabad High Court Prayagraj Are Invited Online Application Form for Various Post s. some eligibility is for this all notifications are given below. if you are interested then apply on their official website. if you are eligible for this post and all requirements are clear then fill the form. all-important dates are given below.
apply before these dates. | https://medium.com/@dsaienterprises2018/allahabad-high-court-up-hjs-new-vacancy-2020-cf2d662efbe1 | [] | 2020-12-19 17:21:18.537000+00:00 | ['Job Hunting', 'Government', 'Job Search', 'Jobs'] |
How We Defeated the Dark — and What it Did to Us | How We Defeated the Dark — and What it Did to Us
Lighting up the night made life safer, but had unintended consequences
Photo by Artem Kovalev on Unsplash
Before the 1700s, pretty much every human being on Earth spent a fair amount of their time in the dark. In the winter, that meant that the time when people could get meaningful work done — either for profit or personal purposes — was very short. When sources of light became so available and cheap that illumination went from a luxury to an afterthought, people’s everyday lives were revolutionized. Lighting up the night has significantly changed the way we live our lives — and not entirely for the better.
Life in the dark
Photo by Jyoti Singh on Unsplash
Though archaic humans figured out how to control fire before Homo sapiens even existed, an open fire is an incredibly inefficient way to light an indoor space, and it’s fairly useless for lighting up the outdoors. A fire creates enough illumination to allow people to navigate their way around, but it’s very hard to read anything by the light of a fire or do much of anything else.
People developed better ways to illuminate the night in the Neolithic period, using animal-fat-burning lamps, but the fuel was never abundant. By the ancient era, clever people in both Europe and China had developed the candle, which allowed a long-burning and controlled flame. After the candle was developed, lighting technology essentially stalled. Other than a few changes in the materials candle-makers used, candles remained the state of the art for almost 2,000 years.
A nineteenth-century candle advertisement (PD)
What was life like in the age of oil lamps and candles? First, lighting was expensive! The best candles (like beeswax candles, which could last a long time and did not smell terrible), were too expensive through the early modern period for everyday use outside of religious ceremonies and the homes of nobles. Plus, they weren’t very good at, well, lighting. Candles convert only .01% of their chemical energy into light. An average candle packs about 1/60th of the lighting power of one of the three 60-watt-equivalent bulbs I’m sitting under to write this.
These factors combined to make light thousands of times (perhaps hundreds of thousands) more expensive than it is today, as economist William Nordhaus has found. Even in the 1700s, after the more efficient and long-lasting spermaceti candle had been developed (using the goo from a sperm whale’s head as the primary material for the candle), George Washington complained that burning just one candle every night for a year would cost him about $1000 in today’s money.
Lighting has gone from a luxury to essentially free (Our World in Data)
The dark cities of the past were both scary and exhilarating. They were far darker than anything most of us experience in our light-saturated present. On the one hand, the darkness was terrifying. People carried a number of superstitions about what awaited them in the dark, from witches to werewolves. There were real dangers, too — the murder rate was far higher than it is today. Killers, thieves, and arsonists prowled cities, and they were almost impossible for authorities to see, catch, or identify. Authorities were essentially unable to ensure people’s safety at night.
Darker nights were deadly (Our World in Data)
The dark night of the pre-modern past wasn’t all bad — it gave people some freedom. In hierarchical and restrictive societies, the night was the only opportunity for people to move freely, express themselves, and enjoy each other’s company. People honed skills that we have since lost in order to navigate the world by starlight, navigating by sound and touch.
Historian Roger Ekirch has found substantial evidence that human sleep patterns were quite different — and perhaps healthier — before artificial lighting. For most of human history, people went to bed early in the evening, then rose for an hour or two at night, then went back to bed until morning. During the period of wakefulness, Ekirch says, people “did practically everything imaginable,” from having sex to telling stories. It may be that our modern method of trying to sleep for eight straight hours is neither natural nor healthy.
Defeating the Dark
Thomas Edison on the cover of Scientific American (PD)
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, inventors in Europe began to make the first significant strides against darkness in centuries. In 1807, Friedrich Winzer, a German inventor, installed the world’s first public gas street lamps in London. Using coal-gas (a byproduct of the cooking process), most major cities in the world were able to light their streets in the early 1800s. The light produced by these lamps was 75% cheaper and 12 times brighter than a candle. By 1850, the Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner figured out how to distill kerosene from coal, creating a portable, bright-burning liquid that could be used to push back the darkness.
By the late 1800s, it was possible to navigate lit city streets at night and read a book affordably after dark, thanks to gas and kerosene. In 1882, Thomas Edison demonstrated the final big leap in lighting technology, the electric light bulb, which made indoor lighting safer and more reliable. Unlike the kerosene lamp, the Edison bulb required a massive infrastructure, with power plants, grids, and lines, to make it work. The economic infrastructure of the Gilded Age made this possible, with bankers like J.P. Morgan bankrolling the early power plants. Electrification was the “greatest engineering achievement of the 20th Century,” according to the National Academy of Engineering, and 70% of America was electrified by 1930, with much of the world following suit in the next few decades. By the middle of the twentieth century, much of the world’s population could banish darkness with the flip of a switch.
What have brighter nights done to us?
Paris lights up the night, 1878 (PD)
How did defeating the dark change the human experience?
In wealthier countries, going out into the night went from being an opportunity for private and disreputable behavior to a safer, more public experience. Street lamps both protected potential victims of crime and allowed the authorities to surveil people who were out at night. The mystery and terror of the night-time faded.
People had access to many more productive hours of the day. This, of course, was a double-edged sword. Working or reading at night went from a luxury for the rich, who could afford indoor lighting, to a more universal experience, but it was also the beginning of the process by which work has crept into every corner of our lives. It was the first step on the road to you sitting in bed at night answering work emails at 10 pm.
Many of our modern problems with sleep may be attributable to advances in artificial light. References in historical sources to the segmented sleep pattern that Ekirch describes started to disappear among upper-class people in the 1700s. They disappeared entirely in industrialized societies by the early twentieth century. Sleep disorders are incredibly common in industrialized societies; as many as 70 million Americans may suffer from one, and at least a third of us don’t get enough sleep. Some of these problems may be due to the fact that our modern sleep patterns don’t conform to the cues the natural world is giving us.
We’ve lost the experience of the night. Any city-dweller who has ever been out a night in a truly remote place has been stunned by how much there is to see in the sky when you’re away from the city lights. After the 1994 earthquake, a number of Los Angeles residents called 911 to report a strange sight in the sky. It turned out to be the Milky Way, they had never seen it. The combination of awe and unease that the night instills in us is gone.
It’s not just us
Photo by Alfonso Navarro on Unsplash
We shouldn’t forget that artificial lighting has also affected the natural world. Cheap lighting has allowed governments to illuminate city streets, but it has also allowed innumerable people to leave the porch light on all night and string 24–7 lights on their deck. All of this light has an effect on the species around us. Sea turtles are the most famous case — they need to hatch at night and use moonlight to find their way to the water, but almost every animal in our bright landscapes is affected.
Artificial lighting misleads migratory birds and is likely responsible for the death of millions of birds every year. Other migratory species, like Atlantic salmon and monarch butterflies, are similarly confused by our bright cities. Male fireflies can no longer attract mates because their lights aren’t brighter than the artificial ones around them. Tree frogs that find themselves in areas with a lot of artificial light simply stop performing their mating calls. Many species’ reproductive cycles are timed to the cycles of lengthening or shortening days. These have been altered by nighttime light, which means that offspring are born at times of year that make it harder for them to survive.
In recent years, there’s been a small movement to slow our millennia-long effort to push back the darkness. Some cities have started to adjust their lighting during bird migrations, and some nations have passed laws limiting the amount of light that new construction can emit. Arizona even makes the darkness of its skies a feature of its tourism advertising. Let’s hope there’s a way to enjoy safe and productive nights while keeping ourselves and the natural world healthy. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/how-we-defeated-the-dark-and-what-it-did-to-us-fa457666c6cf | ['Historical Insights'] | 2020-12-24 06:02:46.898000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Science', 'Society', 'History', 'Technology'] |
Young Bertrand Russell. The English Gentleman That Never… | Quick Intro
The second entry in this Masters of Many series, perhaps one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, is none other than Bertrand Russell. A Nobel Prize-winning writer, extraordinary philosopher, revolutionary mathematician & social activist, he undoubtedly exemplifies the DNA of a true polymath.
Leading an unfathomably productive & turbulent, long life, Bertrand often found himself on opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of public appearance: at times the champion of the people, & at other times scorned by the public & outright jailed for his beliefs. His legacy as one of the most important intellectuals in modern times, however, cannot be denied. As Einstein himself commented on Russell:
As previously expanded on with the previous Benjamin Franklin piece, the existential focus of this mini-biography is to answer the question: what was he like in his twenties?
Note-Worthy Accomplishments
— One of the most influential Western philosophers of all time, publishing key pieces like A History of Western Philosophy & The Problems of Philosophy
— Accomplished mathematician, particularly in the field of logic which he evolved with his timeless Principia Matematica
— Lifelong peace activist & humanities champion who put forth the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, protested multiple wars, criticized key figures (such as JFK) directly, & was accordingly arrested multiple times for said beliefs
— Nobel Laureate in Literature that’d publish more than 70 books & ~2,000 essays throughout lifetime, spanning & pushing along multiple topics
20s To 30s (1892–1912)
Prior to his twentieth birthday, Russell’s life was already marked with extreme emotional turbulence. Yes, he was born into a rather privileged, wealthy, aristocratic family that opened multiple doors throughout his life. However, as we’ll expand on later below, this privileged upbringing likely meant little considering the multiple, horrifyingly-tragic life events he endured in his childhood. Mainly, the deaths of many immediate family members. At the age of four (1874), his sister & mother passed away. Less than two years later, his father died too — so he was sent to live with his paternal grandparents, the former Prime Minister Earl Russell & his wife, the Countess Russell. Another two short years later, his grandfather died, again leaving an eight-year-old Bertrand without a fatherly figure. While a gregarious Franklin’s pre-20’s were marked by experimenting, exploring, & very much wander-lusting, our hero journey this time around starts with one introverted, mourning Bertrand — to whom learning provided the single light in his life.
Bertrand turned twenty in the year 1892. In a startling similarity to Franklin (who joined the Freemasons at a young age), Bertrand, in his second year at Trinity College, was elected to the famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective & the time period covered) Apostles. Founded in 1820, the Apostles is a small, informal society that regards itself as the intellectual cream of Cambridge University. A double-major in mathematics & philosophy, with first honors in the former, in 1893, he decided to continue his studies as a Fellow in the latter (specifically on the philosophy of non-Euclidian geometry).
Bertrand @ Trinity College — Circa. 1893
The following year was relatively tranquil, except in the last month of 1894, when he married one Alys Pearsall Smith — much to his Grandmother’s disapproval. Now aged twenty-three in 1895, he spent the majority of the year abroad, attending lectures on German social democracy.
Officially kicking off his career as a lifelong author of math, philosophy, & social matters, Russell published his first essay in 1896: The Logic of Geometry. This same year, he spent the last quarter of the year abroad in the United States (worth noting here that both Franklin & Russell traveled extensively in their 20s). He culminated the year, aged twenty-four, with a second publication: German Social Democracy.
At the mid-age of twenty-five, he put forth his largest essay to-date: An Essay On The Foundations Of Geometry. As his official thesis, Russell undoubtedly displayed his piece with youthful pride; later, however, he consistently repudiated it as fundamentally flawed:
Apart from details, I do not think that there is anything valid in this early book.
Additionally, he also published a review on the then-groundbreaking mathematical branch of set theory: Review of Couturat. This same year, 1897, he begins breaking with the leading, contemporary philosophical principle of his time: idealism.
The following year, 1898 was marked by two rather large life adjustments. First, his dear, beloved grandmother (Countess Russell) passed away early in the year — no doubt a huge sting to the man that she single-handedly raised since the age of four. Next, he, along with famous philosopher G.E Moore, finally broke with idealism, setting the path for their adoption of realism (a common topic that’d surface in his philosophical writings for coming decades). Once again he spent a handful of months aboard, spreading his time between Italy, Germany & France.
Depicting Idealism vs. Realism
Now twenty-seven, Bertrand continued to expand his three-tiered knowledge-base. First, he spent a semester lecturing at his alma mater on Gottfriend Wilhelm Leibniz, another historically-significant polymath that coincidentally (or maybe not), also balanced mathematics & philosophy. Next, he published a review of one Alexius Meinong’s Über die Bedeutung des Weber'schen Gesetzes. Later in the year, he defends his thesis (though begins to admit internally it’s many flaws) by publishing a response to Henri Poincare’s criticism. Last, he spent a handful of months diving deeply, once again, into Cantorian set theory.
The turn of the century, the year 1900, twenty-eight year-old Russell’s obsession with set theory fully blossomed & pushed his intellectual curiosity into overdrive. Now an attendant at both the International Congress of Philosophy & the International Congress of Mathematics, it was in the latter that he met Giuseppe Peano, one of the original founders of set theory. Immediately intrigued, he compiles & devours all of Peano’s publications & rough-drafts on set theory. Near the fall he publishes an expository on his previous lecturing-material: A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. Additionally, he finished the first draft for one of his more famous mathematical works, “The Principles of Mathematics.” Towards the end of the year, he begins to identify possible paradoxes in set theory, however, he remains silent on the matter except to Alfred North Whitehead.
The following year, a twenty-nine year-old Bertrand accelerated his pace of productivity in one field (mathematics), while also becoming deeply inspired to begin authoring essays & books on a second topic: the humanities (primarily peace & agnosticism/atheism). In contrast to previous years of introverted efforts, this year also marked one of professional companionship; he spent the majority of the year collaborating with Whitehead, together putting forth two important mathematical papers: “Finite & Infinite Cardinal Numbers” & “Logic of Relations.” Interestingly enough, according to Bertrand’s autobiography, it was the relationship with Whitehead that sparked his feverish interest in authoring essays & books on humanity. While watching Whitehead’s wife suffering from an angina attack, he found himself:
filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty…and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable — at the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person.
The closing year of this mini-series, 1902, the year Bertrand turned thirty, he expressed two main discoveries — one internal & one academic.
First, he acknowledged that he was not at all happy in his marriages to Alys (the first of many personal relationships that’d deteriorate over time). Second, he finally, fully identified the great paradox in set theory (today known as Russell’s Paradox). This second finding helped round out his first major, historically-significant mathematical publication that he’d publish early in the next year: The Principles of Mathematics.
Quirks, Rumors & Controversies
Onto the less-spoken of negative characteristics that remind us that these Masters of Many, like all of us, are far from perfect. Again, there is no such thing as absolute morality — even one of the most important logicians & philosophers in history fails to rationalize away all his actions. Like Franklin, he struggled to maintain single, faithful marriage; throughout his life he had multiple affairs & marriages. Unlike Franklin, however, Bertrand dealt with quite serious mental health issues early on. Additionally, while Franklin reluctantly & eventually took part in the young colonies great separation, Bertrand’s attitude towards global conflicts & wars, mainly outright resistance & rejection, were markedly more pronounced — leaving our hero cast away from his alma mater (temporarily) as well as flat-out jailed.
His first marriage with Alys Pearsall Smith, the American Quaker five years his senior, lasted fewer than five years before he realized he no longer loved her, which led Russell to turn to infidelity. The callousness only extended one-way: Alys remained deeply in love with Russell for the rest of her life. Russell, on the other hand, displayed cold apathy towards her during & after their marriage — a rare contradiction for the man who’d go on to champion philosophies of peace & anti-imperialism. He’d go on to marry an additional three times for a total of four marriages.
Next, we’ll travel back to before Bertrand’s twenties, during the childhood plagued by multiple, familial deaths. In order to kick-off this mini-series appropriately, we skipped over the real depths of his introversion, misery, & depression in his childhood. It’s likely near-impossible to paint the darkness he perceived in his early years. To give an idea, however, we can glance to his auto-biography, where Russell himself expands on harboring strong & consistent feelings of suicide:
There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.
As mentioned in the subtitle, paragraphs above, & his direct quote, it’s no exaggeration that Bertrand regarded continuous learning (particularly about math & philosophy), as one of the most important endeavors an individual can undertake. Marred by suicidal thoughts early-on, it’s sincerely inspiring to witness his blossoming spirit as he aged — demonstrating ever-increasing happiness & appreciation for life.
Last but not least, Bertrand championed worldviews that were quite contrarian given their time period. This, unfortunately, did not always sit well with those in power. At the start of World War I, within a few days of the UK officially joining, he immediately engaged in pacifist activities & protests — as a Fellow lecturer at Trinity College without tenure, he was dismissed for this stance. Not one to bow down to anyone or anything but his own truths, he continued to protest what he perceived as an unnecessary & interventionist effort; a short year later, he strongly campaigned against the USA entering the war & was subsequently jailed for six months. Much later in his life, circa 1961, at the age of 89, Russell was again jailed for his beliefs, this time after taking part in anti-nuclear protests. Now a world-renowned figure & frail elder, the magistrate (court judge) during the trial offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged himself to “good behavior”, Bertrand simply replied: “No, I won’t.”
In Closing
Who was Bertrand Russell in his twenties? An extremely brilliant individual with tremendous personal conviction & an insatiable hunger for knowledge.
Was he accomplished in his twenties? Soft yes. He breezed through the typical high-level education path through his mid-years; the latter years, however, demonstrate a pace of learning, writing & discovering that would only increase over time.
A champion of both rational & humanity subjects, he’s a fascinatingly complex character that highlights a ferociously individual mindset. In today’s age of massive group-think, his presence reminds us to not allow powerful or political opinions & laws triumph over personal values — particularly if those values are derived from careful analysis. And never stop learning.
Additional Entries
Part I — Benjamin Franklin
Part III — Leonardo Da Vinci
Part IV — Thomas Young
Part V — Mary Somerville
Part VI — Richard Feynman
Part VII — Sir Francis Bacon
Part VIII — Jacques Cousteau
Part IX — Nikolas Tesla
Part X — Isaac Newton
Part XI — Thomas Jefferson
Part XII — Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose
Part XIII — Charles Babbage
Part XIV — Emanuel Swedenborg
Sources
A Journey Through 20th Century Philosophy
The Complete Collected Works of Bertrand Russell | https://medium.com/young-polymaths/in-their-20s-bertrand-russell-b2f7eeb594d1 | ['Jesus Najera'] | 2020-06-23 21:13:41.014000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Philosophy', 'Mathematics', 'History', 'Education'] |
Records — C# 9.0. The latest and most awaited feature… | C# CONCEPTS
Records — C# 9.0
Photo by Expect Best from Pexels
The simplest way to imagine records as immutable classes. Feature-wise, they resemble tuples. In other words, custom tuples with properties and immutability.
Consider the following example of a record which captures sign up details like first name, last name, and email address.
Record syntax
Records are specialized classes.
public record SignUp(
string firstName,
string lastName,
string Email
);
Above record is identical to below class definition
As described above, the record and the class variants are almost identical. The record gives more enhanced functional behaviour.
What’s common between record & class?
Constructor
Immutability
Copy semantics
What’s unique about records?
Record equality works on content, whereas class equality works on object definition.
Records provide a GetHashCode() implementation is that it is based on record content.
implementation is that it is based on record content. Record ToString() is overridden to display record properties.
Code example to illustrate differences
Below example illustrate record equality works on content, whereas class equality works on object definition.
Output
Below output shows that records are equals whereas two different class objects are not equal using “==” operator. | https://medium.com/c-sharp-progarmming/records-csharp-9-bfc0fbb1ad26 | ['Sukhpinder Singh'] | 2020-09-16 13:48:39.659000+00:00 | ['Csharp9', 'Dotnet Core', 'Programming', 'Csharp', 'Dotnet'] |
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Op-Ed: I’m sick of the words “diversity” and “inclusion” | Hire qualified people of color. Then listen to them.
I absolutely applaud hiring diverse employees. I am one. However, that is where most companies stop when it comes to championing inclusion. It isn’t enough to just hire people of color. Speaking from my many experiences of being the only Black person in a corporate meeting, you have to actually make them feel like their voice, their thoughts and their insight are actually valued. Make space for them to speak up, don’t allow others to silence them and listen, deeply.
You can’t just talk the talk about diversity and point to your employment quotas as a measure of how diverse the company is. Eventually, those numbers will decline as people of color leave the company because they find they simply aren’t valued in the same way their white colleagues are, defeating your original purpose.
Another reason to listen to your employees of color? We’re often the canaries in the coal mine, pointing out serious issues the company faces. Which brings me to my next point…
2. Prepare to be uncomfortable, and let that discomfort turn to action.
Culture change is hard. It’s especially hard when the culture you’re fighting is ingrained in all of us — biases, bigotry, stereotypes. As you listen to your diverse employees, they may reveal uncomfortable truths about your work environment. You’ll be tempted to brush it off as a one-off, or not representative of the company at large. Don’t.
As someone explained it to me once, the fish doesn’t see that it is swimming in water, that it is breathing it in. It’s the same thing with systemic racism - it’s the “water” we are all in, hard to see but ultimately surrounding us.We have to actively fight against it, and that takes tough and honest conversations with employees, and a lot of self-reflection. It takes challenging long-held beliefs, some you didn’t even realize you held. Then it takes action.
One example of a company that is starting to do it right is Boeing. (Disclaimer: I currently work for said company.) After the George Floyd protests and widespread unrest this past year, the company decided to take a firm stance against racism.
In the months since, the CEO released a Racial Equity Action Plan that included: a promise to hire more Black employees over the next few years publishing that data publicly for accountability; commitment to having frank conversations with teams about racism; creating a Racial Justice Task Force within the company; and donating $10 million to social justice nonprofits and programs.
3. Commit to promoting qualified people of color. There are plenty.
Most companies already have plans for recruitment and retainment of employees. What many fail to realize is that they have trouble keeping workers of color because they do not feel they have a future at the company.
One way systemic racism operates in a corporate culture is that qualified employees of color are often passed over for opportunities for advancement, many at the managerial or executive level. As of January 2020, there are only 4 Black Fortune 500 CEOs, less than 1%. One CBSNews piece points out that only 3.2% of executive jobs are held by Black people.
This is disheartening for obvious reasons, but also for its trickle effect: other employees of color look up the corporate ladder and see little to no faces that look like them. So they look elsewhere for employment opportunities.
“The lack of promotions are causing black employees to change jobs more frequently. More than one-third of black respondents said they plan to leave their company within two years, as opposed to 27% of whites.” — CBS News
The talent pipeline exists — it’s often sitting right in your office. Investigate why your employees of color aren’t being treated as if they’re valuable, and make steps to ensure their success with the company.
If you find they aren’t being set up with the right opportunities to take on more responsibility, make it a goal to develop them with the right tools, training and/or projects so that they can grow into leadership. Often, this is already being done with your white employees, by the way.
If you want a diverse, inclusive and equitable workforce, you have to cultivate it, encourage it and live by the values you espouse. If we do that, we can achieve a better, more engaged and successful workforce than we have ever had. | https://medium.com/@millennialbri/op-ed-im-sick-of-the-words-diversity-and-inclusion-d49e924eb7df | ['Brianna Jackson'] | 2020-12-10 08:05:00.260000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Workforce Development', 'Workforce', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'Timnit Gebru'] |
536 AD — the worst year in history | 2020 has already been immortalised. It is a year that nobody will forget. However, when speaking of the worst year recorded in human history there are many to choose from:
The year 1349 saw the Black Death kill half the population of Europe.
In 1520 smallpox ravaged the Americas and killed between 60 and 90 per cent of the continents’ original inhabitants.
In 1918 the Spanish Flu led to the deaths of over 50 million people.
The rise of Hitler in 1933 is often claimed to be the turning point in modern history.
However, historians are unanimous in their choice. The title of the worst year in history is easily held by the year 536 AD.
Medieval historian, Michael McCormick has stated that “it was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year.” (Science Magazine, Ann Gibbons, 2018).
The year began with an inexplicable, dense fog that stretched across the world which plunged Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia into darkness 24 hours a day, for nearly 2 years.
Consequently, global temperatures plummeted which resulted in the coldest decade in over 2,000 years. Famine was rampant and crops failed all across Europe, Africa and Asia. Unfortunately, 536 AD seemed to only be a prelude to further misery. This period of extreme cold and starvation caused economic disaster in Europe and in 541 A.D. an outbreak of bubonic plague further led to the death of nearly 100 million people and almost half of the Byzantine Empire.
This part of the sixth century has a widely been referred to as the Dark Ages, but the true source of this darkness had previously been unknown to scholars. Recently, researchers led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski, have discovered that a volcanic eruption in Iceland in early 536 led to incredibly large quantities of ash being spread across much of the globe, creating the fog that cast the world into darkness. This eruption was so immense that it altered the global climate and adversely affected weather patterns and crop cultivation for years to come (Antiquity).
Labeling each new year as ‘the worst year in history’ has become something of a fad these days. We should look back to the year 536 A.D. and cherish how fortunate we are not to have lived in a time when the world was truly in darkness. | https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/536-ad-the-worst-year-in-history-472a32797e46 | ['Saamir Ansari'] | 2020-07-14 22:13:02.963000+00:00 | ['Life', 'History', 'Lessons Learned', 'Climate Change'] |
A letter to myself | I am a simple land dweller.
I know nothing,
I am nothing.
I will dwell this land for eternity,
Doing your work.
I can’t comprehend life. And if I could, then life wouldn’t be the most incomprehensible experience, would it? What makes life good is that I don’t need to comprehend it. I can just live it. I am living it.
Yet, part of the beauty is that I still try to comprehend it. But that’s not me, that’s just its wish. I could never take credit for it.
When someone gives you a gift but you go out looking for the gift. And you look and you look, until every pebble has been turned. That is my predicament.
I promise to stop telling people what they should do or feel. I have no right. I am sharing this letter I wrote to myself in an effort to share my internal dialogue and nothing else:
Sometimes you beat yourself over how you are supposed to feel. I understand. It’s okay. Try different things. See what works. See for yourself. Don’t believe anyone. But it’s okay to try. Dedicate yourself to the trying. To living more fully in the moment. Whether or not it happens is not up to us. There is nothing to happen anyway, nowhere to go, no one to impress. But I know its hard to feel that sometimes.
You can take things gradually, what’s the rush? Make the film. Do the job. Then let’s go from there. Let’s not think too hard about it. Its fine man, either way. Sometimes you feel like you won’t do your ideas justice - the truth is you never will. That’s this game. If you still want to play it. And I know you do.
Lets assume for a second that you suck. Like just because you don’t have what it takes and you will just suck. So what? My friends won’t love me any less. My family won’t love me any less. What’s wrong with sucking. To suck and suck and to keep going is a worthwhile endeavor, and a beautiful way to live and die.
You gotta play it like its light. Heavy is fine too. But the truth is, its all bullshit and the beauty is somewhere in the replication of the bullshit.
There is something bigger at play behind all these forms, or rather something pure and potent. It’s not our doing. We aren’t ever gonna fucking comprehend it. The practices aren’t for comprehension, they are for sharpening your senses enough so that the beyond is at play and you don’t need to comprehend.
Don’t take pressure about it, even though I know you will. Just sharpen your senses and instincts and they will guide you. It’s fine either way man. Isn’t it wild that all this assuring truth is inside me and I can access it. Try and IT will guide you. Nothing more beautiful than dying while trying.
The inner turmoil of what to do next means jack shit. Trust your decisions and don’t plan too far in advance. Take it one step at a time and just feel your way through. Sharpen your ears so you can hear easier. You can’t just know what to do in advance and you don’t need to. If you could, that would make it all your doing which it isn’t and never will be. You always have to feel your way through. Wanting to know in advance is just more bullshit.
I bow down to your beauty. That is the sincere emotion. I can’t even comprehend… sensations and feelings, let alone life.
At the end of the day, it’s all just experiencing life. But it’s not just life. It’s
LIFE
I dedicate myself to the search for the unsearchable, for its the least I could do for it. | https://medium.com/uwaterloo-voice/a-letter-to-myself-2c95a7daaf44 | ['Vyom Malhotra'] | 2020-11-06 19:41:33.871000+00:00 | ['Sketch', 'Letters', 'Abstract', 'Poetry'] |
Is the Methuselah Star Older Than the Universe? | From the birth of the mankind, humans have contemplated about our Universe and the significance that it held, but we have never thought of anything that could be comparatively older than the Universe itself. After all, how is that even possible? Though, over the past centuries, a very fascinating discovery was made that said otherwise. According to the scientists, the Methuselah star was considered to older than the universe. You may be filled with amazement as to how exactly this star could be older than the entire Universe or how we can tell this with certainty. So let’s take a deeper look to understand it’s age and significance.
What is the Methuselah Star?
The astronomers have been taking observations on the Methuselah star for roughly 100 years or more. According to them, it is positioned at some 190 light-years away from Earth in the Libra constellation close by the boundaryin the Milky Way Galaxy.. It rapidly travels across our universe at 800,000 mph. But the main reason for being widely known by the scientists and astronomers is that it holds certain traits that distinguish it from other stars and one of the emerging reasons is that it is older than the entire universe. You might be wondering about how this could even be possible, but research has revealed some encouraging facts of the same.
Methuselah star is a metal-poor sub-giant star whose apparent magnitude ranges to about 7.205. The star’s light is somewhat blueshifted as it is moving toward rather than away from us and it has been known to astronomers for over a century as a high-velocity star based on its other vectors such as proper motion. An early spectroscopic analysis by Chamberlain and Aller disclosed it to have a substantially lower metal content than the Sun. Even the modern spectroscopic analyses found an iron content about a factor of 250 lower than that of the Sun. It is one of the closest metal-poor (Population II) stars to Earth.
Is this star older than the universe?
Despite having the fairly estimate, we still don’t know and there might be a chance that we might never even know the exact age of the universe. According to NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), the Methuselah star is 13.772 billion years’ old with an uncertainty of 59 million years. And according to the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft, it’s been around for around 13.82 billion years. And there are plenty of other estimates, in and around those figures.
We generally try to work out the age of the universe using two distinct methods. One being the tracking of the rate of expansion that the universe is undergoing and trace it all the way back to the Big Bang, and second of all, we search out the oldest stars in the sky.
If we have accurate data on the stars, then the second method works very well. Though, how do we really know how old are they?
Approximately, the age of a star is poles apart from guessing the age of a person. We can usually see and track the physical changes in most people when they age. And it even follows in the same way with most other creatures and plants and the same with most things we know to have a lifespan However, Stars don’t throw out the same clues.
From our standpoint on Earth, they have a tendency to look similar for most of their lives, which makes to even more hard to determine their age. But it is still possible as the scientists mostly focus on clusters of stars to discover the age of each of them. By knowing that the close cluster was made out of the similar material at around the similar time, they can subside each star’s differing masses and luminosities to come to an accurate evalation. This is the simplest scenario, but when a star isn’t in a cluster, it’s not quite so easy.
Expert astronomers can assemble some indication with main-sequence stars- again by analysing mass as well as the luminosity. However, there’s gyrochonology, which further entails working out a star’s age by its colour and spin of the star. The possibility for the mistakes are common with this particular method, however, as even slight uncertainties can translate to billions of miscalculated years. We are, at least, reasonably clear on our own star, majorly on the basis of its closeness to us. Among other ways, we have learned the age of the sun, which is some 0.6 billion years’ old by closely evaluating the radioactive elements found in meteorites else here in the solar system. Thus, he oldest known star with a reliably accurate age is officially known as HD 140283, but has also been dubbed “the Methuselah star.” Once dubbed the “Methuselah Star” by the popular press due to its age, if the assumptions of stellar evolution are correct in the report, the star must have formed soon after the Big Bang.
Age and significance
The biblical figure Methuselah is said to have lived for 969 years; which would comfortably make him the oldest human being ever. So, it’s not all that surprising then, that the oldest known star in the universe should go by the same name. But what is surprising is just how old Methuselah the astronomical object could be.
If you understand how stars work, you can observe the physical properties of one of them and envision its age, and know when it had to have been born. Stars sustain a lot of challenges and changes as they age especially in terms of their radius, luminosity, and temperature all evolve as they burn through their fuel.
Taken at stated value, the star’s predicted age raised a major problem and it further raised many questions such as: How could a star be older than the universe? Or, conversely, how could the universe be younger? It was certainly clear that Methuselah was old, since the metal-poor sub-giant is predominantly made of hydrogen and helium and contains very little iron. It’s composition means that the star must have come into being before iron became a commonplace.
Bond told that one of the unpredictability with the age of HD 140283 or the Methuselah star was the precise distance of the star and that It was getting highly essential to get this right as we can better determine its luminosity, and from that its age. The brighter the intrinsic luminosity, the younger the star will tend to be. They were in search of he parallax effect, which further explains that they were viewing the star six months apart to look for the shift in its location because of the orbital motion of the Earth, which tells us the distance.
There were also uncertainties in the theoretical modelling of the stars, just like the exact rates of nuclear reactions in the core and the significance of the elements diffusing downwards in the outer layers. They worked on the idea that leftover helium diffuses deeper into the core, leaving behind less hydrogen to burn via nuclear fusion. And with the faster usage of the fuel, the age of the stars will be lowered.
Another important fact which Bond talked about was the amount of oxygen in the star. HD 140283 had a higher than the estimated oxygen-to-iron ratio and, since oxygen will not be available in a large amount in the universe for a few million years, it pointed again to a lower age for the star.
Bond and his collaborators predicted the age of HD 140283 to be 14.46 billion years. A significant reduction on the 16 billion was previously asserted. That was, however, still more than the age of the universe itself, but the scientists constituted a residual unpredictability of 800 million years, which Bond said made the star’s age compatible with the age of the universe, even though it wasn’t entirely perfect.
Physicist Robert Matthews of Aston University stated that similar to all the measured evaluations, it is subject to both random and systematic error. Matthews said that the loopholes in the error bars give some indication of the probability of a clash with cosmological age determinations. So, when put differently, the best supported age of the star is in conflict with that for the derived age of the stars and the conflict can only be settled by pushing the error bars to their extreme limits.
Further filtration saw the age of HD 140283 fall a bit more. A 2014 follow-up investigation states that the star’s age to 14.27 billion years. The conclusion reached was that the age is about 14 billion years and, if again one includes all sources of uncertainty, then both in the observational measurements and the theoretical modelling, the error is about 700 or 800 million years, so there is no issue for 13.8 billion years lies within the star’s error bar.
Once the research had been supervised, Bond along with his fellow teammates predicted the age of the stars to be 14.46 billion years, which was an important decrement from the previously asserted age. That was, however, still more than the age of the universe itself, but the scientists constituted a residual uncertainty of around 800 million years, which Bond said made the age of the star look compatible with the age of the universe, even though it wasn’t entirely exemplary.
Although several scientists and people were doubtful, Bond and his fellow associates asserted that it was still be possible for the Methuselah star to be older than the universe due to several other reasons, including the precise distance. Bond stated that it is important to understand the distance because it will help discover its luminosity, and from that its age. Once scientists determine the luminosity of this star, its age will become much clearer to us.
Bond also added by saying that there were unpredictability in the theoretical modelling of the stars, just like the exact rates of nuclear reactions in the core and along with the significance of the elements diffusing downwards into the outer layers. This means that the certain rates of nuclear reactions found in the core of the star would play an essential role to help determine the age of the star.
Scientists still can’t decide with specifically if the star is older than the universe because the latter is constantly expanding. To this day, scientists have been debating over how old the universe is, but according to our rough prediction of 13.8 billion years old, the Methuselah star is older, meaning there has either been a crucial error in the calculations or we are missing a fundamental component.
Now, it’s always possible that there’s something fishy that happened in the star’s past that we can’t know about today. It’s possible that it was born as a higher-mass star and something emptied off the outer layers, diminishing the star’s lifetime fiercely. There might be a prevailing possibility that the star absorbed some material later-in-life which altered its heavy element content, misrepresenting our perceptions today. Or it’s possible that we’ve got a misunderstanding in the sub-giant phase of the stellar evolution of these old, low-metallicity stars. These unknowns are possible sources of errors when we try and compute the ages of the oldest stars.
You can’t have a star that exists in our Universe that’s older than the Universe itself. Either something’s wrong with our estimates for the ages of some of these stars, something’s wrong with our estimates for the age of the Universe, or something else, that we have yet to consider.
Conclusion
The mystery of the age of Methuselah star is leading to something bigger and more scientifically complex, influencing our understanding of how the universe works and its age. Currently, we can only tell from our calculations and our observations that the star is older, but one day, once if we find an error in our calculations, big or small, or find out an essential piece of information that we didn’t consider before, we will be able to tell exactly how old this star is. | https://medium.com/zeba-academy/is-the-methuselah-star-older-than-the-universe-af8471db1ac4 | ['Zeba Academy'] | 2021-03-03 08:24:14.610000+00:00 | ['Space Debris', 'NASA', 'The Sun', 'Stars', 'Solar System'] |
New Report: Challenges and Opportunities for Hispanic Media in the Digital Age | By Jessica Retis
Today we’re releasing Hispanic Media Today: Serving Bilingual and Bicultural Audiences in the Digital Age, a new report that explores the origins of Hispanic* media in the United States, its growth in recent decades, the complex nature of Latino media and its diverse audiences. The report is an exploration into the challenges and opportunities to sustain Hispanic media in the future.
As with other media sectors, Hispanic media is facing significant financial hurdles due to the virtual disappearance of traditional advertising. Following rapid growth in the 1990s and 2000s, Hispanic daily newspapers have seen more than a 10 percent decline in circulation over the past five years, consistent with other media sectors. On top of financial shortfalls, traditional Hispanic media has also grappled with adapting to the digital transformation and meeting the demands of an increasingly digital audience.
A survey by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have found that 42 percent of Latinx journalists reported downsizing or cutbacks in staff hours at work, and more than 75 percent say they have been asked to do more with less resources. And 40 percent are concerned about job security.
In addition to financial challenges, Latino media also must take into account the complex diversity of the Hispanic population, which means that local audiences can differ from the shared history and culture of the Spanish-speaking outlet which serves that region. In spite of these struggles, Hispanic media has weathered the downturn better than many mainstream media because of its deep connection to community. And in the past decade, amidst a digital divide across language, age, and immigrant status, a number of bilingual and English-language digital media for younger Latinx audiences have emerged.
Spanish-language media in the U.S. has varied greatly in its more than 200 years of existence, and has served many roles. Publications have ranged from politically conservative to liberal, with varied readerships composed of exile, immigrant, or native Latinx communities. While disseminating local, regional, national and international news according to audience interests and needs, Hispanic media has also highlighted cultural and patriotic activities and served as a forum for public expression.
Hispanic media has also shaped and promoted social and political activism advocating for civil rights and defending Latinx communities against abuse from authorities. For example, Spanish-language radio programs in the early 1920s provided not only entertainment but also information and political advocacy. Spanish-language T.V. programming has also grown over the last 50 years, and provides information on issues of interest to Latinx communities, such as immigration, politics, health, education, and culture, as well as imported Latin American entertainment.
The story of Hispanic media in America is not a simple linear story and there are enormous opportunities to invest in this space and elevate the work of these journalists.
Philanthropic funders and investors should continue to provide critical operating resources to Spanish-language media and invest in helping them develop and design new revenue models. In addition to solidifying revenue, several recommendations to help grow Latino media became apparent during our research. For example, funders should also engage in initiatives to help the next generation of bilingual and bicultural journalism students when they enter the job market, as they make grants to keep Hispanic media afloat. An infusion of youth and fresh ideas into Hispanic media companies would help organizations become more sustainable.
Diversity of newsroom stories, staff, opinion, revenue and ownership is a crucial part of making sure the news reflects the communities it serves. We must do our part to uplift and better serve Hispanic media, to ensure that Americans have access to accurate, diverse sources of information that foster the full participation of every individual in our democracy.
It is our hope that the recommendations outlined in this report further support Hispanic media today, so that diverse, bicultural, bilingual stories can be told tomorrow.
*Hispanic and Latino are used interchangeably in this post, as both pan-ethnic labels tend to be used throughout the United States.
Jessica Retis is an Associate Professor of Journalism at California State University Northridge, a current Democracy Fund grantee, and co-editor of the recently released book, The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture. To learn more about Jessica’s work, visit http://csun.academia.edu/JessicaRetis or follow @jretis. | https://medium.com/the-engaged-journalism-lab/new-report-challenges-and-opportunities-for-hispanic-media-in-the-digital-age-42c5cc8d2fa | ['Lea Trusty'] | 2019-05-13 14:50:36.492000+00:00 | ['Media', 'Hispanic Media', 'Journalism'] |
How Can we Build a Future That Works For More People? | We have a plan to build a more equitable economy. In 2019, we transitioned our organization from BALLE to Common Future with a dream of accelerating this change. If you’re curious how we’ll get there, read about our strategies for 2020 that will lay the foundation for this future. (Update: our new website has launched!).
CoCap 2019, Common Future Social Entrepreneur in Residence, Erika Davies
What We Believe
At Common Future, we believe in a world where people, no matter their race or ethnicity, have the power to live in self-determined communities; owning, transforming and creating economies that best serve their interests. At the local level, this might look like equitable access to capital, participation in democratically governed funds, or opportunities for employee ownership of local businesses.
Our Roadmap: 2020 and Beyond
With our brand refresh, we’re transitioning and rethinking programs that have historically formed our identity. For many, this has prompted the question: what’s next?
Our north star is closing the wealth gap because we believe that if the majority of us cannot succeed, none of us will. In 2020, we’re looking to advance that goal in a few key ways. At the core of our work is an understanding that the ideas, models, and solutions that can restore community wealth already exist, they just require attention and investment. By holding relationships with both community wealth-builders and wealth-holders, we bridge divides to facilitate new and unexpected collaborations that accelerate the economy we want to create.
More specifically, we believe our work moving forward means assuming new roles in the ecosystem to be open to timely opportunities and move beyond static programs. Here’s what that will look like in 2020.
1. A Platform for Leaders
Over the past decade, we’ve worked with nearly 100 community leaders through our Local Economy Fellowship. Our fellows are natural connectors, often known as the “unofficial mayors” of their communities
Their work includes entrepreneurial incubator programs, democratic governance funds, sustainable agriculture initiatives, and cooperative ownership models, among other models. Our fellows are among the best and brightest leaders building the most promising solutions for the next economy.
We are not recruiting for the Fellowship in 2020. Instead, we are doubling down on resourcing our alumni and other community leaders outside our network, while also exploring opportunities to connect wealth-holders and wealth-creators. This will include advising Fellows on key initiatives and partnering with national funders who seek to divert capital into the communities of our Fellows. We have a few national partnerships set to launch in 2020.
We will also continue growing our Social Entrepreneurs in Residence (SEIRs) program, which identifies and incubates the solutions of self-directed leaders with unique expertise that complements our portfolio of initiatives that aim to shift capital and close the wealth gap.
The work of our three current SEIRs includes: leveraging the economic determinants of health to engage healthcare institutions, catalyzing investment opportunities in marginalized communities, and creating social impact investment strategies that prioritize racial equity. These initiatives are each building community wealth in nontraditional ways. Our residency serves to connect the greater narrative around community wealth building and resource their work in house at Common Future.
CoCap 2019
2. A Collaborator
Many communities are seeking a collaborative approach to economic development that includes local ownership, investment, and innovation. We help communities organize this more effectively around a larger narrative of collaborative change.
We’ve designed ecosystem accelerators around the idea that economies work better for everyone when entire ecosystems — funders, anchor institutions, local businesses, policymakers, and neighborhood leaders — work together. This has included programs in Chattanooga, TN and Little Rock, AK, with plans to expand to more cities in 2020.
We’re also convening innovators at the national level. In 2019 we hosted COCAP with 260+ leaders exploring equitable community development, and we will continue to hold spaces like this in 2020.
3. A Trusted Advisor
We’ve learned that funders are seeking new (and more equitable) investments as well as connections with community leaders on the ground. Common Future’s staff and network is comprised of experts on entrepreneurship, the racial wealth gap, community wealth-building, disrupting philanthropy and impact investing, community development, equity, sustainability, and much more. It offers us opportunities to partner with foundations, mission-driven investors, and other institutions seeking answers to questions such as:
How might we partner communities of color to better inform our work? How might we integrate the community perspective into our funding decisions? How might we work with our board, trustees, or decision-makers as we assess our internal structures for privilege and power? How might we resource local leaders?
4. An Organizer of Capital
Shifting capital means shifting power. Prioritizing this in 2020 means continuing our Foundation Circle, a cohort program that convenes executive-level leaders in place-based, private, health, and community foundations who are committed to shifting their institution’s investment capital into the communities they serve, and into alignment with their mission.
Forty-five foundation leaders have participated to date, collectively shifting over $150M out of traditional Wall Street investments into the communities they serve, as profiled in The New York Times. (We are now accepting applications for the 2020 Foundation Circle! Submit an inquiry here.)
We are also partnering with funders across the capital spectrum (from philanthropy to impact investors) to drive capital to our network leaders and others like them. Our role as an intermediary includes sourcing new opportunities from our network, balancing risk and return with impact potential, and developing governance structures that balance stakeholder voices.
5. A Mainstream Influence
This work cannot be accomplished in silos. As Common Future, we have a novel opportunity to leverage our position to validate, uplift, and mainstream the ideas we hear about via our network. In 2020, we will double down on our communications and media efforts with a focus on thought-leadership, increasing our network’s presence in the field, on mainstages, and in conversations with funders.
It’s Time to Think Big
We are thrilled about everything we accomplished with our network in 2019: We launched a new brand as Common Future, co-hosted CoCap, developed content at local convenings from Oakland to Little Rock, spoke at over a dozen conferences, piloted new initiatives, closed out cohorts for our Fellowship and Foundation Circle, and kicked off three national partnerships (more to come in 2020). In 2020, we plan to get even busier. We’re in ongoing conversation with new partners continuously exploring opportunities to shift capital and support community wealth-building.
We can only solve the immense challenge of wealth inequality together. If you’re considering how you can help keep wealth local, and close the racial wealth gap, consider becoming a Champion for the Common Future by making a contribution.
Want to keep up with our work ahead? Sign up for our newsletter or reach out at [email protected] to learn more. | https://medium.com/commonfuture/how-can-we-build-a-future-that-works-for-more-people-b1ce2ebdd613 | ['Common Future'] | 2021-07-28 17:49:16.158000+00:00 | ['Social Entrepreneurship', 'Economic Development', 'Impact Investing', 'Community Development', 'Equity'] |
How to Create Objects in JavaScript | Objects are the main unit of encapsulation in Object-Oriented Programming. In this article, I will describe several ways to build objects in JavaScript. Those are:
Object literal
Object.create()
Classes
Object Literal
First, we need to make a distinction between data structures and object-oriented objects. Data structures have public data and no behavior. That means they have no methods.
We can easily create such objects using the object literal syntax. It looks like this:
const product = {
name: 'apple',
category: 'fruits',
price: 1.99
}
console.log(product);
Objects in JavaScript are dynamic collections of key-value pairs. The key is always a string and has to be unique in the collection. The value can a primitive, an object, or even function.
We can access a property using the dot or the square notation.
console.log(product.name);
//"apple"
console.log(product["name"]);
//"apple"
Here is an example where the value is another object.
const product = {
name: 'apple',
category: 'fruits',
price: 1.99,
nutrients : {
carbs: 0.95,
fats: 0.3,
protein: 0.2
}
}
The value of the carbs property is a new object. Here is how we can access the carbs property.
console.log(product.nutrients.carbs);
//0.95
Shorthand Property Names
Consider the case where we have the values of our properties stored in variables.
const name = 'apple';
const category = 'fruits';
const price = 1.99; const product = {
name: name,
category: category,
price: price
}
JavaScript supports what is called the shorthand property names. It allows us to create an object using just the name of the variable. It will create a property with the same name. The next object literal is equivalent to the previous one.
const name = 'apple';
const category = 'fruits';
const price = 1.99; const product = {
name,
category,
price
}
Object.create
Next, look at how to implement objects with behavior, object-oriented objects.
JavaScript has what is called the prototype system that allows sharing behavior between objects. The main idea is to create an object called the prototype with the common behavior and then use it when creating new objects.
The prototype system allows creating objects that inherit behavior from other objects.
Let’s create a prototype object that allows us to add products and get the total price from a shopping cart.
const cartPrototype = {
addProduct: function(product){
if(!this.products){
this.products = [product]
} else {
this.products.push(product);
}
},
getTotalPrice: function(){
return this.products.reduce((total, p) => total + p.price, 0);
}
}
Notice that this time the value of the property addProduct is a function. We can also write the previous object using a shorter form called the shorthand method syntax.
const cartPrototype = {
addProduct(product){/*code*/},
getTotalPrice(){/*code*/}
}
The cartPrototype is the prototype object that keeps the common behavior represented by two methods addProduct and getTotalPrice . It can be used to build different other objects inheriting this behavior.
const cart = Object.create(cartPrototype);
cart.addProduct({name: 'orange', price: 1.25});
cart.addProduct({name: 'lemon', price: 1.75}); console.log(cart.getTotalPrice());
//3
The cart object has cartPrototype as its prototype. It inherits the behavior from it. cart has a hidden property that points to the prototype object.
When we use a method on an object, that method is first searched on the object itself than on its prototype.
this
Note that we are using a special keyword to access and modify the data on the object called this .
Remember that functions are independent units of behavior in JavaScript. They are not necessarily part of an object. When they are, we need to have a reference that allows the function to access other members on the same object. this is the function context. It gives access to other properties.
Data
You may wonder why we haven’t defined and initialized the products property on the prototype objects itself.
We shouldn't do that. Prototypes should be used to share behavior, not data. Sharing data will lead to having the same products on several cart objects. Consider the code below.
const cartPrototype = {
products:[],
addProduct: function(product){
this.products.push(product);
},
getTotalPrice: function(){}
} const cart1 = Object.create(cartPrototype);
cart1.addProduct({name: 'orange', price: 1.25});
cart1.addProduct({name: 'lemon', price: 1.75}); console.log(cart1.getTotalPrice());
//3 const cart2 = Object.create(cartPrototype);
console.log(cart2.getTotalPrice());
//3
Both cart1 and cart2 objects inheriting the common behavior from the cartPrototype also share the same data. We don’t want that. Prototypes should be used to share behavior, not data.
Class
The prototype system is not a common way of building objects. Developers are more familiar with building objects out of classes.
The class syntax allows a more familiar way of creating objects sharing a common behavior. It still creates the same prototype behind the scene but the syntax is more clear and we also avoid the previous data related issue. The class offers a specific place to define the data distinct for each object.
Here is the same object created using the class sugar syntax.
class Cart{
constructor(){
this.products = [];
}
addProduct(product){
this.products.push(product);
}
getTotalPrice(){
return this.products.reduce((total, p) => total + p.price, 0);
}
} const cart = new Cart();
cart.addProduct({name: 'orange', price: 1.25});
cart.addProduct({name: 'lemon', price: 1.75}); console.log(cart.getTotalPrice());
//3 const cart2 = new Cart();
console.log(cart2.getTotalPrice());
//0
Notice that the class has a constructor method that initialized that data distinct for each new object. The data in the constructor is not shared between instances. In order to create a new instance, we use the new keyword.
I think the class syntax is more clear and familiar to most developers. Nevertheless, it does a similar thing, it creates a prototype with all the methods and uses it to define new objects. The prototype can be accessed with Cart.prototype .
It turns out that the prototype system is flexible enough to allow the class syntax. So the class system can be simulated using the prototype system.
Private Properties
The only thing is that the products property on the new object is public by default.
console.log(cart.products);
//[{name: "orange", price: 1.25}
// {name: "lemon", price: 1.75}]
We can make it private using the hash # prefix.
Private properties are declared with #name syntax. # is a part of the property name itself and should be used for declaring and accessing the property. Here is an example of declaring products as a private property.
class Cart{
#products constructor(){
this.#products = [];
}
addProduct(product){
this.#products.push(product);
}
getTotalPrice(){
return this.#products.reduce((total, p) => total + p.price, 0);
}
} console.log(cart.#products);
//Uncaught SyntaxError: Private field '#products' must be declared in an enclosing class
Factory Functions
Another option is to create objects as collections of closures.
Closure is the ability of a function to access variables and parameters from the other function even after the outer function has executed. Take a look at the cart object built with what is called a factory function.
function Cart() {
const products = [];
function addProduct(product){
products.push(product);
}
function getTotalPrice(){
return products.reduce((total, p) => total + p.price, 0);
}
return {
addProduct,
getTotalPrice
}
} const cart = Cart();
cart.addProduct({name: 'orange', price: 1.25});
cart.addProduct({name: 'lemon', price: 1.75}); console.log(cart.getTotalPrice());
//3
addProduct and getTotalPrice are two inner functions accessing the variable products from their parent. They have access to the products variable event after the parent Cart has executed. addProduct and getTotalPrice are two closures sharing the same private variable.
Cart is a factory function.
The new object cart created with the factory function has the products variable private. It cannot be accessed from the outside.
console.log(cart.products);
//undefined
Factory functions don’t need the new keyword but you can use it if you want. It will return the same object no matter if you use it or not.
Recap
Usually, we work with two types of objects, data structures having public data and no behavior and object-oriented objects having private data and public behavior.
Data structures can be easily build using the object literal syntax.
JavaScript offers two innovative ways of creating object-oriented objects. One is using a prototype object to share the common behavior. Objects inherit from other objects. Classes offer a nice sugar syntax to create such objects.
The other option is to defined objects are collections of closures.
This article was initially published in freeCodeCamp. | https://medium.com/programming-essentials/how-to-define-objects-in-js-49e7e9203e21 | ['Cristian Salcescu'] | 2020-11-18 11:43:40.022000+00:00 | ['Object Oriented', 'JavaScript', 'Front End Development', 'Programming'] |
What Powers Energy @ OYE! Rickshaw? | The Energy Product
The Energy marketplace product at Oye! leverages the best of Battery, Charging, IoT, and Digital technologies to deliver seamless experience to end consumers and all operating stakeholders.
By design, 100% hardware at Oye! is Connected — starting with BT (to connect via proximate user’s phone) to GPS/GSM IoT for stand-alone assets. Our proprietary integration stack combines all of the hardware and software modules and provides a harmonized experience. The focus has been to modularize as much as possible — right from big stacks to internal construction to aid in hardware interchangeability and serviceability.
Batteries are custom built to suit our use case with no compromise. From the choice of cell chemistry that allows us to extract high cycle life in high temperature regions (affordable pricing per KWH), to internal construction choices that help withstand the Indian arterial roads on leaf-spring suspension vehicles, to carrying convenience, every detail is custom engineered. The BMS CAN through the IoT beams live battery parameters to the cloud for real-time applications and advanced analytics.
Swapping Stations combine the best of smart electronics & power electronics with cloud and software to provide 100% automated self-serve battery collection and dispensing points, allowing for 24/7 and manpower-light operations, and remote management.
Oye! Smart Swap Station
Digital technologies form the key pillars for enablement, efficiency gains and opportunity unlocking for the entire solution stack. The Driver mobile App enables the end consumer to plan hassle-free and efficient trips by providing RT SoC information, Station discovery & automatic/cashless battery swapping.
The IoT sensor layer, cloud platform, and deep analytics layers driven by AI algorithms, is encapsulated in the “Eagle” Command Center. This enables a host of use cases — such as Product optimization, Asset tracking and security, Demand-supply matching, Adaptive pricing, Product health monitoring and management.
Battery Data and Intelligence
At Oye! we are ushering in the future of transportation. So far, our young & growing Energy network has powered over 500,000 Kms, enabled drivers in the NCR to run 250 KM+ at a stretch, and has increased the top box driver partner income by 79%.
And we are looking for harbingers to build this further.
If you want to build the Energy Operating System (a term I picked up from a revered mentor) for micro-mobility and logistics, please gimme a buzz shuvajyoti.ghosh<at>oyerickshaw.com | https://medium.com/khati/what-powers-energy-oye-rickshaw-153a746da180 | ['Shuvajyoti Ghosh'] | 2021-05-31 05:24:24.219000+00:00 | ['Energy', 'Charger', 'Mobility', 'Technology', 'Electric Vehicles'] |
7 Financial Goals You Should Reach in Your 20s | Choose the right career path
That goes along with finding out what you want in life. But it is also important to understand how and with whom we want to work.
I deliberately didn’t name this point ‘find a job that you love.’ For me, a job is something temporary. I’m not talking about that. It’s more about discovering what kind of work we want to do in general.
There are a few questions you should ask yourself.
Is there a specific job field I want to work in? How do I want to work? Self-employed, build a business, or as an employer? What should be the purpose of my work?
Let’s look at them in more detail.
Is there a specific job field I want to work in? There are people who decide in the very early stages of their life that they want to pursue careers as doctors or designers. I never had such a dream job. Well, until I got in my 20s. I accidentally stumbled upon programming, and I was hooked.
Maybe you will never find a true passion like that. But you should at least learn what you are good at. Are you more creative or analytical? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? You have to ask yourself a whole lot of questions to find the answer. But it’s worth asking them.
How do I want to work? As I was a kid, I always wanted to work for the state like my dad did his whole life. In my early 20s, many people told me to get into a big company what I then achieved as a student. It wasn’t the right thing for me. Now, I’m working self-employed as a contractor. I couldn’t think of a better way of working for me.
There are also questions that can help you here. Ask yourself if you want to work for others (and enjoy a safer job with less responsibility)? Or do you want to be your own boss and build a product or offer a service? It will take some time and probably some job experience to realize what’s the right way to work for you. So try out a lot of ways to work before you settle for one.
What should be the purpose of my work? I know I write about personal finance, and making money is an important aspect of this. However, at some point in my life, I want to be able to create a non-profit and help others without getting paid. Maybe you want to teach others or just make a lot of money. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you should know what impact you want your work to have. Being a teacher is maybe not the best option when you just want to become rich. But it can be great if you are passionate about teaching people.
Ultimately, you should know what jobs in your life are beneficial to the career you want to have and also be able to stay away from those who are not a good fit for you. | https://themakingofamillionaire.com/7-financial-goals-you-should-reach-in-your-20s-1f51e453d3d6 | ['Manu Djirlic'] | 2020-12-12 20:16:40.502000+00:00 | ['Money Mindset', 'Wealth', 'Money', 'Personal Finance', 'Money Management'] |
IT sector: 8 predictions for 2021 | All tech companies are looking to the future, but as an interconnecting crossroads between carriers, cloud service providers, and businesses, Equinix takes a unique look at IT trends and the future of the industry. Every day we also strive to determine where and how our more than 9,500 customers will need access to the interconnection and data center services and solutions they need to grow. We derive from this a rare knowledge of the sector which allows us to advance our annual predictions. Here’s what we’re planning for 2018:
2021 prediction n ° 1: Private blockchain networks are needed and are multiplying
The public blockchain, on which various cryptocurrencies are based, is radically different from the private blockchain which is expected to attract more businesses in 2018. The main difference is the presence of permissions at the level of private blockchain networks, which, unlike open networks, offer more secure digital identity management, a higher degree of trust and the ability to authorize much higher transactional rates. According to Gartner: “Between the two types of existing blockchains, namely public registries without and with authorization, companies must turn to the second option. Public registries with authorization have access controls owned or managed by rules and retain the concept of community. In the context of commercial transactions, companies may well move towards unauthorized public ledgers like bitcoin, which unknown or untrusted users can access. “
Companies providing blockchain services to various industries will need to host geographically distributed blockchain nodes to ensure low latency. Furthermore, within some private blockchain networks, companies will need to simultaneously learn about the finalization status of time-sensitive blockchain transactions. Equinix will enable them by bringing them together within expanding blockchain ecosystems and using a global platform compatible with secure and distributed blockchain networks around the world. Finally, companies will be an integral part of multiple blockchain networks (e.g. supply chain, finance) at all times and will want their business systems to be in close proximity to these different blockchain network nodes.
2021 prediction n ° 2: Applications based on artificial intelligence are becoming more widespread
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for more than half a century but is only democratizing today. Why ? The emergence of big data, AI-centric processors and deep-learning algorithms has enabled AI to drive technological advancements such as smart homes, factories and cars, which attract a large audience. IDC announced last September that global revenue from cognitive systems and AI is expected to reach $ 12 billion for the year 2017, and we believe it should achieve an even bigger breakthrough with the general public in 2018.
Still, AI systems must interpret and merge data from a variety of sources, hence the need to be distributed, with cloud modeling and local deployment to meet real-time processing requirements. Regulators are increasingly interested in ensuring that AI applications comply with applicable data security and hosting laws. Equinix’s global coverage enables distributed and global AI technology deployments, and facilitates local data storage. We are also uniquely positioned to create ecosystems that include the different types of data useful to AI technology providers.
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2021 Prediction # 3: Internet of Things Applications Accelerate Cloud Computing Migration to the Digital Frontier
Gartner, Inc. predicts that 8.4 billion connected objects will be in service in 2017 worldwide, a figure up 31% from 2016 and expected to reach 20.4 billion by 2020 . In 2018, with the expected multiplication of these devices, the needs of the Internet of Things (IoT) will increasingly move towards the digital frontier.
One of the main reasons for companies to migrate large amounts of data from IoT devices at the border, close to processing and analysis in the cloud, will be to have the benefit of time to reduced latency. But that’s not all. With an interconnection located at the border, companies will see their network costs decrease; in fact, they will filter and eliminate unnecessary IoT data closer to its place of origin, in order to obtain the valuable information needed for IoT-based innovations, such as smart hospitals, more quickly. And in a growing number of regions, data will need to be processed at the border to meet data hosting requirements.
With nearly 190 data centers around the world, Equinix is able to provide the distributed computing architecture that IoT enterprises will need, serving as a focal point and interconnect for cloud and wireless processing. they ask.
2021 Prediction n ° 4: Submarine cable systems see a new architecture prevail
Submarine cables are one of the Internet’s key components: almost all world traffic passes through at least one of them. Currently, investments in new cables are progressing due to the rapid growth that traffic is expected to experience in the near future. According to TeleGeography, global costs of manufacturing submarine cables are expected to exceed $ 2 billion in 2018 for the third year in a row, while that figure has been stuck below $ 1 billion since 2012 . During this construction boom, we believe that a new architecture should prevail that will improve costs, flexibility of deployments and benefits of interconnection.
Advances in laser technology now allow submarine cables to bypass landing stations located on coastlines and end up directly in multihomed data centers, such as Equinix’s. As a result, users of subsea systems landing in Equinix data centers that support this model benefit from direct, low-latency access to the many industrial ecosystems we host — an asset that heightens the interest of these models. submarine cable systems to potential customers.
2021 Prediction # 5: SDN / NFV Technologies Transform Wide Area Networks
A fundamental change is currently underway in companies in the adoption of SDN (“software-defined network”) and NFV (“network function virtualization”) technologies. As a result, large companies are currently reviewing the architecture of their wide area networks (WANs) in order to expand their cloud access services. This change is set to increase in 2018.
Organizations can no longer afford to rely on expensive MPLS networks to reroute traffic between their branch offices and a central site, where they must then apply security policies to the physical networking devices, before they can access the cloud. Instead, they send their traffic to regional hubs, including Equinix data centers, using more cost-effective SD-WAN technology. From there, they apply security policies to virtual networks and security devices that take advantage of NFV technologies.
According to IDC’s latest forecast, the global data center SDN market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 25.4% between 2016 and 2021, reaching nearly $ 13.8 billion in revenue. With the SDN market booming, Equinix is ready to continue to encourage this great change.
2021 Prediction # 6: Businesses Need a Global Data Center Platform to Meet Emerging Audit and Data Sovereignty Obligations
Several major regulations relating to confidentiality, security and data sovereignty will be adopted in 2021, with major repercussions for companies:
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) reserves the transfer of data within the EU to contracting countries only, which could affect transfers between EU companies and their major international trading partners.
(GDPR) reserves the transfer of data within the EU to contracting countries only, which could affect transfers between EU companies and their major international trading partners. In the United States, the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) requires companies to record all securities transactions and ensure the accuracy of time synchronization services down to the nanosecond.
(CAT) requires companies to record all securities transactions and ensure the accuracy of time synchronization services down to the nanosecond. In Europe, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) requires the establishment of new reports and the application of new tests to investment companies.
Enforcement of GDPR and similar data sovereignty laws around the world will require companies to have data centers in many parts of the world, in order to store data locally. CAT and MiFID II also require companies to record financial transactions at the granular level, which in turn forces companies to have an internal clock system that is precisely synchronized across many data centers. Equinix’s international data center coverage helps meet data hosting requirements and provides consistent clock service across all of its locations around the world.
2021 Prediction # 7: Multicloud Trend Generates Need for Hybrid IT Platform in Business World
Gartner announces that “Multicloud strategies will become the norm for 70% of companies by 2019, while this rate is now below 10% . Two years ago, respondents to an IDC survey even placed this percentage higher, in a shorter time frame, with 86% indicating they would need a multi-cloud strategy by 2017 to underpin their future goals. job . As multicloud gains traction, we believe companies will likely increasingly need to control their management from a hybrid IT platform.
Companies currently distribute their applications on many clouds, based on the most suitable. Additionally, they increasingly rely on redundant clouds to support service continuity and disaster recovery measures. However, this requires a multicloud strategy that can be deployed on a hybrid IT infrastructure (on-premises or in the cloud). Equinix has more than 2,750 cloud and IT service providers distributed across its global interconnection and data center platform, making it the ideal place to develop a high performance, reliable and hybrid cloud access platform. secure.
2021 Prediction # 8: Platform strategies dedicated to digital transformation proliferate in companies
According to IDC, a platform dedicated to digital transformation (DX platform) makes it possible to “quickly create outward-facing digital products, services and experiences, while radically modernizing the basic intelligent environment. IDC further predicts that by 2020, 60% of companies will adopt a global DX platform strategy .
To accelerate this shift, we believe DX platform companies will invest more in open application programming interfaces (APIs) and client / partner-oriented development portals in 2018. An API-based, outward-looking DX platform is accelerating the development and integration of digital services while providing smarter tools for the management and automation of IT processes. In addition to promoting innovation, it shortens the time to market for new solutions. DX platforms provide a space for businesses to collaborate within ecosystems resulting from the interconnection of customers, service providers and business partners.
As businesses make their services accessible on API-based DX platforms, many will need to deliver the agreed upon service levels of performance, availability and security. With its global data center coverage, high-speed connectivity to cloud and network service providers, and its dedicated API-based platform for SmartView and Equinix Cloud Exchange, Equinix helps organizations and vendors meet SLAs of their DX platforms.
If you want to buy Blockchain Services visit website Napollo.ae | https://medium.com/@softwarecompoanydubai/it-sector-8-predictions-for-2021-dd9ae1ba77c8 | ['Software Company Dubai'] | 2020-12-17 09:36:08.068000+00:00 | ['Blockchainservice', 'Blockchain Startup', 'Blockchainrevolution', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Development'] |
Why You Can’t Understand Bitcoin | Here are some of the reasons why people can’t understand Bitcoin. It’s taken years to dispel the many myths, misunderstandings and lies that have swirled around Bitcoin. Here is what ails the stragglers.
Computer Illiteracy
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are Computer Illiterate. This means you have little to no understanding of how your devices or accounts work, and very probably have no interest either. You use Microsoft Windows, “Because its the Standard” . You don’t care how things work as long as they appear to work. You defend your ignorance like the Beavers shore up their dams.
This class of user is a massive problem, not only because they are computer illiterate; most people can get along without knowing the intricate details of the tools they use. They are a massive problem because they are computer illiterate, and they insist on “having their say” about Bitcoin, how it should be treated by market actors, by developers and how Bitcoin itself works.
Crypto Illiteracy
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are Crypto Illiterate. You don’t encrypt your email, despite knowing that the State and other attackers can and do read all your emails and look at your photos. You prefer wilful, blissful ignorance to easily obtained absolute security, and when pushed to explain why you behave in this irrational way, have only platitudes, fallacies and learned by rote garbage as a response.
This user presents a cultural challenge to anyone who wants privacy to be the default. Many great efforts, aside from the writing of privacy enabling software like GPG, have been undertaken for years, and its only now that that work is bearing fruit in the form of mass adoption on Instant Messaging platforms. There is a long way to go before we achieve total blackout, but now the light at the end of the tunnel is approaching.
Monetary Illiteracy
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are a Monetary Illiterate. Monetary illiterates come in serveral forms, but there are a small number that are the worst of the worst, and they are responsible for the majority of what’s wrong in this category; Keynesians and Statists. Keynesians believe that the money supply must increase forever. This is a lie. It’s like arguing that the number of numbers must increase over time because the number of things you need to measure is always increasing.
This user of government money is a problem to anyone who wants a stable economy and an end to the warfare state. The inflationary fiat currencies in use today are toxic to liberty, prosperity and peace, and this was one of the reasons Bitcoin was developed; to create a money that was separate from the State, economically sound, global and irrevocable. Monetary illiteracy is what stops people clamouring for sound money. They have no idea they are being robbed on a daily basis. If they understood what was being done to them, it would be pitchforks and bonfires in every world capital.
Statism
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are a Statist. A Statist is a man or woman who believes that only the State should be the final arbiter of every activity man can engage in. In Bitcoin, Statists are a constant irritant and lethal toxin. Their belief that people should be forbidden from sending messages to each other over a public network is un-American and completely irrational. You don’t need to identify yourself to use WhatsApp, and its messages are fundamentally no different to Bitcoin; its encrypted with the same “tech” Bitcoin uses, yet these Statists can’t explain why the latter should require a passport to use and the former does not.
This user is delusional, violent and extremely destructive to human progress. She believes everyone must be dragged down to her level of base stupidity, and is very often a monstrous admixture of all the bad qualities listed above and below, increasing her toxicity. Once again, these people are not content to wallow in their own mud; they insist on dirtying and contaminating everything they touch with their error, making it increasingly difficult to get work done, make progress, integrate seamlessly with the market and help humanity. Eventually these people are always swept away by the flow of history, but when they are at their peak, they are a constant chafing, sore making irritant.
Clinical Paranoia
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are Clinically Paranoid. People with paranoid personality disorder are very suspicious of other people. They often feel that they are in danger, and constantly look for evidence to support their irrational suspicions. They have trouble seeing that their distrustfulness is out of proportion to their environment. There are many people like this, who will (for example) immediately select only the perceived flaws in a new device or service, rather than the obvious benefits. In Bitcoin, an example of this would be immediately pointing out that it can be used by criminals to pay debts. Once again, this demographic overlaps with some of the other categories listed here.
This user is highly distracting and negative, and they exist in every generation. The same class of individual made bogus, unsubstantiated claims the State had broken PGP (it never did) and today, they claim that Bitcoin is broken (it isn't) or that some vendor with a radical new design is vulnerable to an abstract Straw Man Flaw (nonsense). It appears that we will be stuck with these types forever as there are always insane people in every generation, and the only way they can be shut up is if mass adoption of the trigger for their paranoia makes it socially unacceptable to spread FUD. There are only two good things about these types: 1) They sometimes provide healthy analysis. 2) They are powerless, since they don’t overlap with the State when talking only about the hardware and software. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/why-you-cant-understand-bitcoin-98a5e5f86241 | [] | 2019-01-17 15:02:01.717000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin'] |
New Month, New Hopes | New Month, New Hopes
Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash
It’s the second week of December and everyone I know is looking forward to the New Year… with the certainty that anything will be better than the scare that was 2020! Knock on wood.
I am no exception.
I was really looking forward to 2021…
Until last afternoon…
Before I scar your overwrought nerves, let me assure you, it’s all positive. I mean cheerful! Sorry!
I stepped out in the bright noon to collect a package and voila! the weather was gorgeous and sunny and relatively warm.
I beamed!
I have never seen such beautiful warm weather in December for the past decade, thanks to my Midwestern residence. But in gorgeous North Carolina, a whole different story! I was getting away with a light jacket! And until a couple of days ago- I was still sporting my girly slip in sandals!
How awesome is that!
I am looking forward to December now!
In life too, we are constantly waiting for the new month, week, year, something that signals a fresh start.
I am no exception!
But what about the next hour?
Of course, I can take it up a notch and say moment- but that’s not practical. In a world that rewards busyness- the probability that our next moments are crammed is pretty high!
But for a mindset shift, beginning the next hour is perfect.
Plus, you can let the thought and delight of shooting for a fresh start simmer in your subconscious and let it motivate you!
So, don’t wait for the calendar to give you a fresh start! Don’t wait another 22 days to begin on your goals.
Start today.
Think of it as a 22 day warm up to the new habit, if you have really set your mind on New Year’s!
Make it happen!! | https://medium.com/nirus-notes/new-month-new-hopes-e15d19261b7d | [] | 2020-12-08 15:08:05.051000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'New Years Resolutions', 'Inspiration', 'Goals', 'Mindset'] |
A practical example: Privacy and the Lightning Network | Assuming we have a small amount of money in a publicly known address A. We want to move this money to our own wallet in a way that makes it hard for any observer to link the two.
Unrelated: one of the bridges of Koenigsberg (today Kaliningrad)
The idea:
As we already have a lightning wallet that we regularly use to buy food and drinks, why not move the funds into this wallet? The node associated with our wallet has plenty of inbound liquidity, and while the total capacity of the node is known (~US$1700), the actual balance of our node is not.
Can we cost-efficiently move funds into this wallet through a newly created node?
The experiment:
We spin up a Lightning node and deposit the funds from our address A into it. We open a channel with a random but well connected node in the network (not our own), and invoice ourselves the funds off-chain. The funds are now in our lightning wallet without an observer being able to easily make that connection.
The math:
We start with 317100 Satoshi in our wallet.
Transaction A: On-chain transaction to our new Lightning wallet. Cost: 351 Satoshi
Transaction B: Opening a channel with the network. Cost: 3758 Satoshi
Transaction C: Off-chain transaction. Cost: 1.602 Satoshi
Transaction D: Off-chain transaction. Cost: 1.601 Satoshi
Transaction E: Off-chain transaction. Cost: 1.2 Satoshi
Transaction F: Off-chain transaction. Cost: 1.008 Satoshi
Transaction G: Off-chain transaction. Cost: 1 Satoshi
Transaction H: Off-chain transaction. Cost: 1 Satoshi
In total we now have 304,900 Satoshi in our spending wallet at a transaction cost of 9010 Satoshi. This is a transaction cost of 2.84% on a relatively small payment of ~US$12.7
We still have 3,189 Satoshi in our temporary Lightning wallet that we cannot move out as it would push us below the dust limit. Including those the transaction fee was closer to 3.85%
The caveat:
Given how the Lightning network works today, almost all nodes regularly publicly broadcast their channel states, which makes it at least in theory possible for somebody to follow our payments. To prevent this we would have needed to use private channels. | https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/a-practical-example-privacy-and-the-lightning-network-fa97edce57b5 | ['Leo Weese 獅 草地'] | 2019-03-21 09:12:18.501000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Lightning Network'] |
Who Are Our Truth-Tellers? | Who Are Our Truth-Tellers?
We accept the truth only when it’s in our favor.
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
The great Jon Miller is a legend in Baltimore as a radio announcer for the Orioles. His beloved voice endured through the highs and lows of the Orioles in the 80s and 90s. He would call it how he saw it, even if it was unfavorable for the O’s. He would often express disbelief at some “bone-headed” plays, which didn’t sit well with the eventual team owner, Peter Angelos. Angelos later fired him for Miller’s candid criticism. Peter Angelos didn’t like truth-tellers.
My father used to be a football referee. His job was to make sure the players and coaches were playing by the rules. Every Friday night and Saturday, he would get dressed in his black and white stripes and officiate games throughout Maryland. He would tell me how ruthless some of the fans were at some of his calls. Some referees say fans follow them to their cars to threaten them, necessitating referees to have police escorts. Fans don’t like truth-tellers either.
Consider the effectiveness of cheerleaders. They tell us what we want to hear. It’s always amazed me that cheerleaders face the fans, not the team. They entertain us with their pyramids and backflips. They tell us, “Our team is number one,” even if it’s indeed losing. Cheerleaders aren’t truth-tellers.
When we look for information about the game, do we look for a candid play-by-play announcer, a referee, or a cheerleader? We could watch the game ourselves while listening to the play-by-play announcer. We could observe the game and trust the referees, who are seeing it from a different perspective than we are. We could also wow ourselves with the cheerleaders and pay no attention to the game itself. Or we could stare at the Jumbotron and take selfies to post on social media.
Meanwhile, your team is losing.
It might make us feel better if we just focus on the cheerleaders or the people who are on “our team” who validate our beliefs. The cheerleaders are only there to entertain us. They get paid whether the team wins or loses. For them, it’s all about the show.
Our partisan bloggers and social media influencers do this. Some opinion programs on some cable channels do this. Some crafty lawyers do this. They wow you with provocative rhetoric to keep your focus away from what’s going on. Meanwhile, your team is losing. You didn’t consult the truth-teller.
Image by PDPics from Pixabay
We can instead watch the game unmediated and trust the truth-telling referee. Referees don’t try to get you to see things differently. They are making sure the players aren’t breaking the rules. Responsible media organizations do this. Reputable scientists do this. Election officials do this. They aren’t being paid by either team. They are just reporting on the facts.
You also can’t blame the referee if he didn’t make a call you wanted, particularly if you don’t have evidence.
Blaming the referee doesn’t change the fact that someone broke the rules. Threatening violence on the referee only makes you look like more of a jerk, and it doesn’t change the outcome. You also can’t blame the referee if he didn’t make a call you wanted, particularly if you don’t have evidence. Trust the truth-tellers.
Our play-by-play announcers might be “paid” by one team, but the best ones are truth-tellers. They aren’t afraid to call mistakes on the players, the coach, or the team itself. Some cable news outlets might be slanted in one direction, but they don’t change how the teams play the game. We can watch the game ourselves and perhaps be guided by the announcers, but it’s up to us to focus on how well both teams play. We have to recognize that sometimes, our team might have been “boneheaded.”
We have to reconcile ourselves with the truth. We can’t blame the cheerleaders, the referees, or the play-by-play announcers. We can’t accuse the other team of cheating. Sometimes we have to swallow our pride and recognize that maybe our team wasn’t strong enough to win. | https://medium.com/illumination/who-are-our-truth-tellers-ac204015ed4 | ['Beth Bradford'] | 2020-11-11 12:34:27.388000+00:00 | ['Polarization', 'Election 2020', 'Truth', 'Politics', 'News'] |
Level up your software engineering skills with these 10 little known tools | Docker: use containers to develop faster and better
I hear what you’re asking. I thought we were talking about little known tools, no?
Yes, docker is certainly not the most obscure tool there is, but it is however heavily ignored. I can guarantee that you could’ve used docker for almost all your previous projects, but most people don’t. They think it’s just a knock-off of virtual machines.
The way docker works is that it creates virtualized environments where you can do anything you want. So far this is pretty similar to a VM. However, the way they achieve it is vastly different. Docker’s containers don’t operate in the same way since you don’t have to allocate specific physical measures for it to work. It doesn’t spawn its own kernel and it also doesn’t require large disk space in most cases.
You can use premade images to develop in all sorts of languages or spawn actual databases that you can use in your projects, or even work with full-fledged Linux distributions, and this is just scratching the surface.
Here’s an excellent quick video about docker in 100 seconds:
All in all, there are thousands and thousands of different resources that a developer can use, and this is the beauty of this field. Our article barely covered anything, but it served to showcase that you can always improve your workflow because once you stop evolving your skills as a software engineer, you will certainly become outdated sooner or later. | https://medium.com/ensias-it/level-up-your-software-engineering-skills-with-these-10-little-known-tools-65e63e17f9f2 | ['Yasser Douslimi'] | 2020-12-07 23:02:52.566000+00:00 | ['Markdown', 'VPN', 'Docker', 'Tools', 'CSS'] |
What attack will Federated Learning Face? | Photo by Duncan Kidd on Unsplash
Federated learning will face the problem form privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) and secure machine learning(SML).
Reconstruction Attacks
Privacy leakage will not only leak by the data, but also the gradient client update or the support vector machine and k-nearest neighbor which stores the explicit feature value. Reconstruction attacks are to get the privacy information on these possible ways.
Its goal is to extract the training data or feature vectors of the training data during ML model training. In federated learning, gradient update from the client may leak the information of the client. Therefore, we will need secure multi-party computation(MPC) and homomorphic encryption(HE) to defend against this attack. Moreover, ML model store the explicit feature values should be avoided.
Model Inversion Attacks
If the model can be a query for many times, the adversary can reconstruct the clear-text model by equation solving attack. The adversary can learn about the distribution of the training data and a similar model.
Membership-Inference Attacks
The target of the membership inference attacks is to infer if the member is in the training dataset. It builds a shadow model to create a dataset that is familiar to the original dataset. There are three ways used to build the shadow model mentioned in the paper.
Intuitively, we can use the model as a shadow model. If the output has high confidence values, it is similar to the original dataset.
Attribute-Inference Attacks
The adversary trys to de-anonymize or target the record owner. How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset show that anonymized data can use other data set such as IMDB to de-anonymize the data. In other words, you will be inferred by any other public data set such as your blog or rating website.
It is a quite famous and interesting paper. Here are the FAQs for that paper.
Model Poisoning Attacks
It is known as a back-door attack. As mention in this article:
A backdoor is a type of input that the model’s designer is not aware of, but that the attacker can leverage to get the ML system to do what they want.
In FL, use the wrong label to low the performance of the model is also a poisoning attack.
Want to know more about FL?
Realistic Federated Datasets for Federated Learning
Architecture of three Federated learning
(Summary)Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency
Federated Learning Aggregate Method (1)
Reference
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.05820.pdf | https://medium.com/disassembly/what-attack-will-federated-learning-face-f58a56abc3cb | ['Yuan Ko'] | 2020-10-07 11:57:01.309000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Federated Learning', 'Privacy', 'AI'] |
The Race | Team Harta has done research and conservative projections of how scalable the Harta Mainnet & App can be.
Harta’s operations can be categorized into 2 main units. They are: (1) Asset Synergy and (2) Asset Tokenization. Asset Synergy consists of management, tracking, oracles and lending. Each of these functions will contribute revenue in forms of interest, transaction and subscription fees. Further elaboration of these fees include but are not limited to: (A) Oracle Application Fee, (B) Asset Synergy App Subscription Fee, (C) Lending Application Fee and (D) Lending Interest (Fees are payable in Harta Tech Tokens unless stated otherwise and can be amended if required.)
Below are projected revenue for the project with respect to their functions:
(1.A) Oracle
With reference to local official institution’s publication and source, the statistics for Housing Loan Applications in 2019 amounted to 460,000. With assumptions that Loan Applications for Commercial Property, Industrial Property and Land are 50%, 10% and 5% respectively of the total 2019 housing loan applications, the total loan applications for most real estates would be approximately 759,000. If Oracle Fees are charged to every single application at $1.00 each, this would produce a revenue of $759,000 per year. You might be thinking why would loan applications require Oracle? That is because Oracle is the source for transparent and accurate asset pricing data that Financial Institutions can refer to before any loan applications can be approved. This reduces the risk of over disbursement of funds, bad debts and irrecuperable funds while also saving processing time and reducing manpower costs. Retail, professional and institutional investors will also rely on Oracle for any investment purchase decisions as well. How else would they know if the purchase they are about to make is of the appropriate market value? Referencing official source, 322,438 property transactions occurred in 2019, which was an increase of 4.8% in volume year on year in Harta’s local region, a revenue of $322,438 is further estimated, bringing the total to $1,081,438 per year just from Oracle alone. Harta plans to expand internationally by Q2 2022 (refer to whitepaper roadmap). This will lead to more adoption and increase in market share and in turn leads to a projection that can only grow to higher levels.
(1.B) Asset Synergy App
The App can be used by asset owners that could come from retail, professional or even institutional investors. With the App, users can easily manage, track and monitor their assets performance, payment and status. The App will be built upon Harta’s Mainnet, which will produce speed, efficiency, transparency and accuracy for users. Based on the same adoption rate calculated for (1.A), a monthly subscription fee of $10 will yield $2.2M per year. Harta estimates a yearly revenue growth of double digit percentages for the next 5 years.
(2) Asset Tokenization
Harta currently has an existing portfolio of Assets with an average rental yield of 4.19% p.a and price appreciation to date is at 65%. Utilizing the same experience and foresight, Harta aims to help Harta stakeholders further accumulate and grow their holdings through the Asset Tokenization offering. Only carefully researched and selected assets will be put up for Tokenization, which will be managed by Harta and owned by the Tokenized Asset Holders, which in turn leads to further growth of the Harta ecosystem as each functions will further support and solidify the investments. (Asset Tokenization is categorized as security tokens and can only be launched in approved jurisdictions with stringent KYC/AML processes.)
PS Harta Tech Token launch is just around the corner!! 🎆✨🎆✨🎆✨ Stay tuned… | https://medium.com/@hartaofficial/the-race-5a84cfb979ce | ['Harta Tech'] | 2020-12-09 07:10:45.363000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Defi', 'Token', 'Tokenization', 'Token Sale'] |
The Ridiculousness of the Military’s Transgender Ban | Sign up for Taking Stock of COVID: New comics from The Nib
By The Nib
New comics from Matt Lubchansky, Keith Knight, and Niccolo Pizarro. Plus How Seniors Are Living With COVID-19. Take a look | https://medium.com/the-nib/the-ridiculousness-of-the-militarys-transgender-ban-3e69df23e3a1 | ['The Nib'] | 2020-11-30 16:52:52.553000+00:00 | ['Queer', 'Comics', 'Political Satire', 'LGBTQ', 'Transgender'] |
Great and really looking interested in for this project | Great and really looking interested in for this project | https://medium.com/@gaomask/great-and-really-looking-interested-in-for-this-project-200b07fcb336 | [] | 2020-12-26 06:18:53.374000+00:00 | ['Ycash', 'Yieldbank', 'Defi', 'Yb'] |
I’m spending Christmas morning with the Apple helpline guy. | I’m spending Christmas morning with the Apple helpline guy. After writing about my daughter’s iPhone addiction, I got blasted by tech lovers: I shouldn’t belittle my daughter’s Apple love; I should share in her enthusiasm and steer her toward more creative tech pursuits. So when her grandparents were at a loss over what to buy their grandchild for Christmas, I — at a loss myself — suggested an iPad and an Apple Pencil. I asked my husband’s goddaughter (a grad student in video game design) for more advice. She recommended art app Procreate. But tech is never simple, at least not for luddites like me. I set up the device, but couldn’t buy the app. Something went wrong. So here I sit, alone, on hold, as the iPad updates, and the support service person has gone eerily silent. Ho Ho Ho! | https://medium.com/modern-parent/im-spending-christmas-morning-with-a-guy-on-the-apple-helpline-5baa30c85555 | ['Stephanie Gruner Buckley'] | 2020-12-30 05:01:32.423000+00:00 | ['iPhone', 'Christmas', 'Technology', 'Addiction', 'Customer Service'] |
The Strangest Thing Men Desire. (And how it can make him crazy for you.) | The Strangest Thing Men Desire. (And how it can make him crazy for you.) Roman Gurevich Jan 19·5 min read
Have you ever felt attracted to a guy without knowing why?
Maybe you’ve even had feelings for someone you’d rather not be attracted to. Why does this happen?
How can you fall in love even though your conscious mind resists it?
Experiences like these hint at the hidden world driving our feelings of romantic attraction. That hidden world is all about emotional reactions. Emotional reactions we don’t consciously control.
The truth is, falling in love is not something we choose to do. It’s more like getting thirsty. You don’t choose to get thirsty. You just notice it. And the stronger your thirst becomes, the harder it gets to ignore.
What if I told you there is a kind of relationship “thirst” all men experience? A kind of thirst that’s impossible for him to quench on his own. Would you like to know what he’s so thirsty for?
To skip straight to the answer, check out this video that reveals how you can trigger his thirst for something he needs and craves. Plus, I’ll show you how to ensure you are the ONLY person he depends on to satisfy this powerful longing.
Here’s why the man in your life can’t tell you what he craves most from his relationship with you…
… He’s embarrassed to admit the truth. And that’s because admitting to this desire actually moves him farther away from the goal. Here’s why…
Okay, picture a woman who feels frustrated that her man never does anything romantic. She finally breaks down and explains her desire to feel romanced and pursued by him.
But he acts like she’s being unreasonable, demanding she name one thing that’s missing from the relationship. So she gives him an example. “It would be nice to get flowers once in a while. Just simple things like that.”
The next day, he brings her flowers. But the magic of this gesture is missing. Because it doesn’t feel special to receive flowers when you had to ask for them.
It’s kind of like that with men, only with a completely different sort of relationship need. You see, men have an insatiable thirst for your admiration.
But he can’t ask for it. He can’t say, “Julie, I really like you, but here’s what’s missing in our relationship. You don’t admire me enough. You seem to have greater admiration for other men in your life, and that makes it hard for me to picture a future with you.”
He can’t say that because men believe you have to earn admiration. Asking for it is like trying to become popular by announcing you are a cool person. It doesn’t work like that.
He will only feel like your hero when you speak the non-verbal language of admiration. He has to read it between the lines of what you actually say and do.
Now, you might be thinking, “That’s not so crazy. I can understand why a man craves admiration.” But if you’re thinking that, there’s something important I need to tell you.
It’s not just that men crave admiration. It’s that he can’t sustain that “in love” feeling without it.
Nothing kills a man’s attraction faster than a relationship where he doesn’t feel needed. He wants to see himself as a provider. Someone who is admired because of his ability to provide.
You see, if he doesn’t feel needed, he feels like less of a man; emasculated. And that turns off his romantic drive.
And the worst part? You can’t just give him admiration. It only works if he believes he has earned your trust, admiration, and respect.
But here’s the good news. It’s both fun and easy to let him earn your admiration once you know how to set him up for success.
Just find ways to let him be your hero. Now, I should mention there is actually an art to doing that in a way that makes him crazy about you.
But I’ve seen women wrap a man around her pinky using this simple concept. As a relationship coach, I have seen what works and what doesn’t. But what it all comes down to is this…
You need to trigger his hero instinct.
Accomplish that, and you’ll be astonished by what happens next. He’ll become so loving, so attentive, so much more interested in a committed, long-term relationship, that you will never want things to go back to the way they were.
The hero instinct is a subconscious drive to gravitate toward people who make him feel like a hero. But it’s amplified in his romantic relationships.
Some ideas really are life-changing. And for romantic relationships, this is one of them. Check out this online video presentation so you can claim this secret as your own.
Because triggering his hero instinct is one thing. Learning how to do it over and over again requires a few tips and tricks.
The fact is, women don’t need someone to rescue them. Especially in this day and age. Yet here’s the ironic truth…
Men do still need someone to rescue. Because it’s built into their DNA to seek out relationships that allow them to feel like a provider.
This one tiny difference in male and female genetics creates a BIG difference in what attracts men to the opposite sex. He feels drawn to any woman who allows him to step into the role of a hero. Because his instincts naturally cause him to thirst for that social role.
Here’s the really cool thing about this. He won’t even know why he feels so drawn to you. Which is why you can use this method under the radar. It triggers attraction at a subconscious level.
He’ll feel the undeniable tug on his emotions. But if his buddy asks him why he’s so crazy about you, he won’t be able to put it into words.
There is a hidden world driving our feelings of attraction. No doubt about it. But we now have the power to see one powerful part of that hidden world. And it’s something you can actually control.
It’s not something only chemists can see, like blood levels of the bonding hormone, oxytocin. Rather, it’s something you can see all around you once you learn to spot it.
It’s a pattern of interaction between men and women. Something relationship experts have always known to exist, but something they failed to recognize as the powerful trigger it is. A trigger that drives his thirst for companionship.
How do you use this trigger to build passion and romance?
Well, the easiest way to trigger his hero instinct is to translate your desires into a language that speaks to his natural drive to be a provider. His desire to serve, love, and protect. The desire to be someone’s hero.
If that sounds like fun to you, click here to learn more about this relationship enhancement tool. It’s something you can learn once, but then use for the rest of your life.
You already have needs and desires. Why not learn how to translate those desires into requests that trigger his hero instinct?
Then relax into the warmth and passion he is only capable of showing once a woman has triggered his hero instinct. A woman who knows exactly how to satisfy his thirst. | https://medium.com/@romangurevich/the-strangest-thing-men-desire-and-how-it-can-make-him-crazy-for-you-79a6581fb213 | ['Roman Gurevich'] | 2021-01-19 02:06:56.707000+00:00 | ['Romance', 'Relationships Love Dating', 'Relationship Advice', 'Relationships', 'Dating'] |
Wuthering Heights and Betrayed Themes | Catherine the First
The first half of Wuthering Heights (told through a doubly insulated narration) deals with the life and times of Catherine Linton née Earnshaw, and her devoted lover Heathcliff. It culminates in that saintly woman’s death at a point just shy of the interval, and there rests our heroine but for spectral cameos.
“ ‘It is twenty years,’ … ‘twenty years. I’ve been a waif for twenty years!’ ” —Catherine née Earnshaw, Chapter 3
The Set Up
Catherine is introduced to us with a great deal of build up. Our primary point of view narrator Lockwood reads her journals, gives us all the names she had in life, and manifests her specter at the window. Heathcliff has a character defining moment when he cries out for her ghost to visit him. Her childhood voice that we hear through Lockwood is the thinnest the veil will be between us and the true story of the events that transpired at Wuthering Heights.
“An awful Sunday … I wish my father were back again. Hindley is a detestable substitute — his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious — H. and I are going to rebel — ” — Catherine née Earnshaw, Chapter 3
The story of Heathcliff and Catherine is that of immovable object meeting unstoppable force. They are a sharknado of incredible declamations, and by far the most engaging elements of the book. Nearly two centuries later when we talk of Wuthering Heights discourse tends to center on these two star strangling lovers. Catherine is one half of this whole, and as such she is set up with due respect. The reader may well begin the book prepared to admit her to the ranks of the best awful women in literature, rubbing shoulders with Rebecca Sharp and Rebecca de Winters.
The Betrayal
It would not shock the reader to find Catherine dead, but that it happened too soon. Catherine devours what screen time she has, and then is the stage abandoned to Heathcliff, who dominates the story. If you have ever read Death Note you are familiar with the vacuum left behind by a character whose demise the plot demands, but whose shoes the remaining cast is too feeble to fill. You are left tagging along with an antihero whose downfall you know must be coming, but your heart is simply not in it. What is Vanity Fair without our little Becky?
Catherine née Earnshaw was never meant to be a symbol. As a living woman she continuously excites the reader. As a ghost, the best she can do is frighten London dandy Lockwood. By second narrator Nelly’s report, she had a delightfully inaccurate estimation of herself:
“Should the meanest thing alive slap me on the cheek, I’d not only turn the other, but I’d ask pardon for provoking it; and, as a proof, I’ll go make my peace with Edgar instantly. Good-night! I’m an angel!” — Catherine née Earnshaw, Chapter 10
By sublimating Catherine née Earnshaw into a symbol halfway through the novel, Catherine and Heathcliff’s love story is left lopsided for the entire second half. There is a definite drag to the story after the shark to Heathcliff’s tornado is abruptly dropped into that Tartarean ocean to which we must all retire. This loss of narrative energy pinions the book; makes a mockery of the living fire of the real woman. We are left pining for Catherine ever after. Perhaps the real Heathcliff was inside us all along. | https://medium.com/books-are-our-superpower/wuthering-heights-and-betrayed-themes-3bdad37fe189 | ['Nam Perugu'] | 2020-12-06 08:22:37.462000+00:00 | ['Literature', 'Wuthering Heights', 'Love', 'Reading', 'Books'] |
Finding Wholeness Through Chaos | Every morning I have a spiritual affair with the Pond of Walden as Thoreau guides the better part of me into the importance of reawakening the soul. His morning baths in the pond were akin to a daily baptism and I feel a figment of this, although strong when I read his work before the sun is at full staff.
Although I am nestled in rural suburbia somewhere amongst the trees in the Pacific Northwest, my heart yearns for wilder pastures. I seek simplicity and fewer experiences that are man-made in material. The arts are less about wine and more about the vines growing out of the soil. It’s in the mornings that I am most aware of what I need to do, even though the unconscious mind would prefer complacency. More times than not, the things we don’t want to do, are the things that can harness the spirit the most.
Lately, I have been harboring a deep interest in Carl Jung, and in particular, his theory on the shadow. I will attempt to share my own insight, in hopes that it unlocks something beautiful in you. It surely has had a profound influence on me.
For starters, I’d like to pose a few questions:
Are you the chaos or the calm in your life?
Are you the individual that lives in between them?
Are you the phoenix from the ashes that emerge brightly out of the dark and sullied ash?
Are you the individual that represses his/her most hidden inhibitions, desires, and wants only to show the world what it wants to be seen, thereby denying yourself the gift of wholeness and freedom?
What is the shadow?
When we look at a shadow, we see a dark image of ourselves, void of the characteristics and qualities we hold dear. The shadow is a metaphor for the negative unconscious qualities that we have learned. These qualities include, but are certainly not limited to: selfishness, greed, jealousy, vanity, and rage.
The shadow is a part of us that few will ever know or even attempt to get better acquainted with. Contained in it are the qualities that we claim not to be ours. We hide them from society due to the fear of being judged, ridiculed, or thought less of. We all have these shadows. They show up inexplicably and many times unconsciously that is to say, without our awareness.
The shadow represents a primordial wheelbarrow that houses the darkness we choose to keep hidden and neglected. The characteristics of happiness and joy are easier to accept and show to the world, but taking a lesson from Carl Jung, we must acknowledge our shadow so as to make peace with ourselves and others. The negative traits we harbor are just as important as the positive, for they make us whole.
“There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.” — Carl Jung
This dualistic idea of light and darkness isn’t new, as the philosophy of the East is evocative of such concepts, but why is it important?
My personal experience with the shadow
If you know me intimately, which is to say you have been a family, friend, teacher, colleague, or acquaintance, then you might say I am a calm, good-natured person.
This is the outward impression, but the only reason I know how to be this way is because I am fully aware of my capacity for evil, lust, and everything else that is encapsulated in my shadow.
I have acted on my rage and hurt the feelings of loved ones in the past and I felt bad doing so, even if I was right and my frustration was justified. I became more and more empathetic and every encounter with my rage lessened.
Our families shape a good portion of who we are. Whether good or bad, many people have their lives shaped by the experiences of early adolescence.
My parents didn’t have the best marriage. They often argued, were dismissive, and unkind to each other, which is normal in any relationship. What was abnormal was neither party would apologize, or at the very least talk through their problems.
Every argument was magnified and thrown into a trash heap never to be thrown away. The stubbornness to talk through issues is an example of a shadow that my mother and father possessed because it was learned behavior from their parents. I was motivated to stop the cycle but I had to make peace with my own shadow of stubbornness, which I am still working on.
When I was in a relationship in my 20’s, I often lusted for other women and repressed these feelings. I even attempted to act upon the feeling once but couldn’t bring myself to do it on the account that I witnessed infidelity growing up. In this situation, the shadow represents lust, and the moral ground is knowing that it can hurt others feelings. We did eventually break up, and I lived a somewhat of a debauched life for the better half of my late twenties. This was an important chapter because it paved the way in part of how I view love today. I made peace with this portion of my shadow and now my lust is reserved for my wife.
Many will go through their entire life holding onto these types of shadows without even knowing they have them. It’s important to acknowledge our good and bad because that’s the only real way we can be complete. Sometimes you have to know you’re an asshole, so you can eventually not be such an asshole.
Projection and the shadow
Psychology refers to projections as the qualities that we deny in ourselves that show up in others.
Today, when/if someone attempts to make me angry, I will attempt to understand the anger and question the anger before letting it create a reactionary emotion.
Often times, those closest will project their feelings onto us and most of the time, they aren’t favorable feelings.
A projection is a hidden quality within you that presents itself unconsciously where another’s emotions hold you hostage. The more you acknowledge this, the less these projections present themselves.
For example, if someone is angry and they make you angry, they are conjuring up anger you already have within you. Taking a step back and calmly assessing the situation and even labeling what you are feeling makes you less likely to project the feelings of another onto yourself.
It’s important to learn and strengthen the mind in this capacity so as to unlearn the projections of others. You have absolutely no responsibility to carry an emotion from another that doesn’t uplift your spirit.
How to make peace with your shadow
Be honest with yourself — Do you have a hard time forgiving your past? Are you jealous? Accept your shadow and be honest with your feelings. This doesn’t need to be shared with the world, but it has to be shared with you. It’s easier to look at the negative aspects of others, but when’s the last time you looked at the negative qualities in you? Self-love is important but self-awareness is way more important.
Cultivate self-compassion — The more you can accept your flaws, the easier it will be to accept the flaws of others. My relationships have changed with close family and friends because of this. I can easily forgive others for their past mistakes because I have made them too. This has brought love into lots of my relationships. No one is perfect so stop creating a mental landscape where you think everyone should be.
Let go of expectation — Many can’t forgive or let go of the past simply because they don’t want to. They possess a need to keep their past intact because it gives them a sense of security even though it’s unhealthy. The past is a story that doesn’t exist. We only have so much time left in the world. Spend your moments on things you can control. The past is something we cannot.
Cultivate an inner dialogue — Have you ever said or done something you regretted? We all have. Have you talked to yourself and said, you shouldn’t have done that thing? If you have, keep doing that. Having an inner dialogue with myself has helped me acknowledge my faults.
Write — I will go as far as saying write down your thoughts and emotions on paper instead of typing it. Keep a journal handy. This may be an extreme way to get healthy, but how important is your mental health? Writing has helped me make sense of my emotions. It has also helped eradicate negative feelings that have bothered me and has been a gateway to foster a healthier mind.
We are human. We make mistakes. We will make more of them. Be kinder to yourself and know that there is no rush to cultivate a healthier mind. It takes time. It’s a process. There is no hurry. We are in fact kind of stuck on this planet, so might as well try everything we can do to become better and make sure our existence is a full-fledged one.
With Love,
Anand Swamy
Blogger/Writer @ findingswamy.com | https://medium.com/findingswamy/finding-wholeness-through-chaos-c0b34b129e8f | ['Anand Swamy'] | 2020-12-07 20:07:52.737000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Growth Mindset', 'Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Growth Hacking'] |
The Creature | Photo by Lai Man Nung on Unsplash
The room was uncomfortable. Resembling an asylum cell or hospital operating theater, it was white from floor to ceiling and lit with a single fluorescent tube light set right in the middle of the ceiling above a table with a chair on either side. Along the wall to the left of the door was a large mirror, spanning from end to end. The single tube light cast a clear brightness over everything, revealing each detail in the room in shocking, off putting brilliance. The clear bright light of the law. A beacon of truth shining over and revealing details that may have rather hid in the shadows. There were no such shadows to hide behind in this room. There really wasn’t anything as a matter of fact. Just the mirror, walls, chairs and the table. The light flickered.
The air in the room was dead, a certain stagnant weight lay over it. On the other side of the mirror, things were a little more lively but still very tense. The officials were all sitting impatiently, occasionally checking watches, adjusting glasses and fiddling with writing utensils or tape recorders. The room was so tense that there was almost an audible humming. Feet tapped, noses itched, coffee was greedily consumed. The second hand on the clock ticked ominously. The temperature rose
The hoard waited quietly, existing alongside one another for the sake of the story, the discovery or the spectacle. Men and women who had not spoken with one another in years were in this room. They sat next to each other staring, without blinking, through the mirror like a group of starving dogs. They were poised, they were hungry, and they were in desperate need of a story. These were reporters and journalists, scientists and observers. This was what they did.
It was not until precisely ten o’clock in the evening that, finally, something happened. The door at the far end of the room unlatched. The knob turned and hinges glided silently as the whole contraption swung open.
In walked the Warden. He was a tall, handsome man, or at least he had been. In the bright beauty of his youth the Warden had stood an impressive two meters in height and was built like a towering oak. He had been revered and feared on the field of many sports, graduated at the top of his class and boxed in the service before moving into the position of Warden. Now he was reduced to a measly one meter eighty five. Still tall, but nothing in comparison to his former glory. He had however preserved his pride, his confidence and his poise. Walking stooped, but self assured nonetheless, he lead behind him the main event. The reason that the room was tense. The reason that the reporters, journalists, scientists, experts and the like were crammed expectantly in the room behind the large mirror. The Creature entered the interrogation room. It walked to the opposite side of the table and sat. the Warden sat opposite the Creature and looked it in the eyes.
There was something there in that Creature’s strange eyes. Something that the Warden simply could not understand. He had worked for many years and had dealt with many criminals. Thieves, murderers, rapists, vandals, addicts, conmen, thugs. He understood these people. They all had the same looks. The same eyes. They all made him feel the same way. The Creature was different from all of them.
“What is your name”
He demanded. His mouth was very dry and his palms sweaty. His voice however, a rich baritone, still rang true. Not a quiver to be heard. The Creature didn’t seem to pick up on any of this. Not his overtone of confidence and power, not his underlying fear. To the Creature, his reputation didn’t exist. It was not concerned. It just looked back at him with nonchalance and indifference.
“What is your name?”. The question was repeated. Louder this time, and with more strength. The Creature was still silent.
“If you fail to answer the question, we will be forced to prosecute you anyway.”
The Warden was growing more confident. Supported by the hoard behind the glass, his confidence began to creep back.
“God dammit you bastard what is your name!?”
The Warden was shouting now. His face was getting a tinge of red and a vein was coming out near his temple, peeking out from below his hat.
The Creature’s defiance persevered. It was not fighting back or complying with the Wardon’s demands. It just simply refused to cooperate, it was operating on an entirely different level (socially speaking) and this is what bothered the Warden so much. A spitting, cursing, flailing vagabond could be dealt with easily. A submissive crook was easier still. The Creature on the other hand, was a puzzle. It didn’t fit into a box.
The Warden stared in disbelief. No one and nothing had ever defied him like this. He was the man of the station. The cock of the roost. The Alpha of the pack. He was universally respected in the community.
“Alright. The choice is yours. Your trial will be tomorrow and you will be fetched at 11:30.”
With that, a pair of guards strolled in. The larger of the two cuffed the Creature and began leading him out of the interrogation room while the other took up the rear, covering the Creature from a distance with his rifle.
The Warden was exhausted. He stared into the two way mirror, his face painted with drained disbelief and resignation. He was angry. A deep bitter sort of anger that throbbed from somewhere deep in his gut. He slowly stood from his chair, brushed down his uniform, turned on his heel and strode out of the interrogation room. | https://medium.com/the-purple-pen/the-creature-7dcf23a8c0aa | ['Zack Mason'] | 2019-06-09 16:10:31.459000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Short Story'] |
JBL unveils Tour-, Tune-, and Live-branded wireless headphones at CES | JBL introduced several new headphones in three different lines at this year’s CES. I’ll focus on the over-ear and on-ear models here.
Starting at the top of the price heap, the new Tour One is a Bluetooth headphone with ANC (active noise cancellation) that JBL designed for business professionals who are looking for headphones with advanced technology, smart features, and a sleek design. But why would those attributes be attractive only to business pros? They seem awfully nice for anyone who enjoys listening to music on headphones.
The Tour One offers what JBL calls True Adaptive Noise Cancellation, which monitors the environmental sound and adapts the level of noise cancellation accordingly. In addition, a feature called SilentNow lets you engage ANC without activating Bluetooth, providing a quiet sanctuary while extending the battery life. Related features include Adaptive Ambient Aware and TalkThru, which help you navigate through your environment as needed.
JBL The $300 JBL Tour One headphone, also pictured at the top of the page, is aimed at business travelers.
Thanks to JBL Pro Sound, which is powered by 40mm drivers, the Tour One is Hi-Res Audio certified, supporting frequencies up to 40kHz. Another innovative feature is Smart Audio Mode, which lets you optimize the Bluetooth connection for high fidelity in Music Mode or lower latency in Video Mode.
[ Further reading: The best headphones you can buy ]In addition, its battery provides up to 50 hours of playtime if you’re using only Bluetooth or 25 hours with Bluetooth and ANC. And if you’re in a hurry, a quick 10-minute charge gives you two hours of playtime. Other features include voice control with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant and four microphones for superior voice quality during phone calls. Plus, you can customize your experience with the My JBL Headphones app.
The Tour One will be available in May 2021 for a list price of $299.95.
JBL The $200 JBL Live 660NC deliver active noise cancellation along with support for Alexa and Google Assistants voice commands.
If that’s a little too rich for your pocketbook, consider the JBL Live series, which includes the Live 660NC over-ear and 460NC on-ear models. Both offer an identical feature set, including JBL Signature Sound, Adaptive Noise Cancelling with Smart Ambient, and voice control using Alexa and Google Assistant. The battery lasts up to 50 hours with Bluetooth only or 40 hours with Bluetooth and ANC, and a 10-munite charge give you four hours of playtime. And both are customizable with the My JBL Headphones app.
Both models will be available in March 2021; the Live 660NC will list for $199.95, while the Live 460NC will carry a price tag of $129.99.
JBL The budget-priced JBL Tune 660NC features active noise cancellation.
For those whose budget is even more limited, there’s the Tune series, including two on-ear models, the Tune 660NC and 510BT. Both offer JBL Pure Bass Sound and Bluetooth 5.0. As the model number indicates, the 660NC provides noise cancellation, while the 510BT does not. Battery life for both is excellent: 55 hours (Bluetooth only) or 44 hours (Bluetooth and ANC) for the 660NC and 40 hours for the 510BT, and both provide two hours of playtime with a quick five-minute charge. They also support voice assistants, though which ones are not specified in the press materials.
Both models will be available in March 2021; the Tune 660NC will have an MSRP of $99.95, and the Tune 510BT will list for $49.95.
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/@gina36631197/jbl-unveils-tour-tune-and-live-branded-wireless-headphones-at-ces-84213f8711f4 | [] | 2021-01-27 18:49:00.430000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Home Theater'] |
ChatBots: Are They a Disruption or an Augmentation? | Gist: context determines how Bots are used
Recommendations: focus on service and not on NLP
For a ChatBot to be a true disruption, it would have to be a completely new animal, and a completely new idea that completely changes how we do things. But are they really doing that?
Let’s look at how we interact with any good-old search engine and compare our interaction with it to that of a ChatBot. Is the difference in such an interaction superficial or fundamental? I would argue that it is superficial. In fact, it just might be that ChatBots and search engines are really two sides of the same thing. Maybe they are just on the opposite ends of a continuum, but are fundamentally the same. Maybe the crucial difference is all about the format of communication: from coding and Boolean one end, and NLP on the other. Maybe there is an area for those 50 shades of grey in the middle where current applications dwell.
In my mind, a ChatBot is an anthropomorphized search engine that . It is just a search engine with an attitude.
Talking to a ChatBot is really like googling something. It used to be we had to speak Boolean, but now NLP works just fine. Google understands natural language now, in all kinds of local variations around the world. The only difference between Google and what we imagine to be a real ChatBot is that Google gets straight to the chase, skips the small talk and gets us the search results.
Google is the smartest ChatBot I know, I just never saw its face. I never asked for its feelings, thoughts, or hopes for the future, and I can only imagine its personality. Sometimes I wonder: Is Google a she or a he? What does it eat for breakfast?
Does it matter? It all depends.
Sometimes, I just want to be left alone, so I can focus on things I have to get done, and I really don’t want to talk to anyone, not a human, not a Bot. And then, I want the interface to be transparent and be a good tool for what I want to accomplish. If all the technology were talking to me and being human, I would get overwhelmed and feel like there is no escape from being watched and listened to 24/7, in every room of my house.
But then, there were those moments in my life when a talking Bot would have been a relief for the lack of caring humans…
If the goal of an interface to be transparent and maximally useful, then there might be a place for coding, for apps, and for ChatBots, — but all in their special and appropriate niches, where they make good sense and where they fit naturally.
Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that ChatBots disrupt the world of human-tech communication. Would that mean that programmers will be talking natural language to code? Would that mean that one would have to ask “What time is it?” every time, instead of quickly glancing at a watch? Certainly not. Human language structure is not congruent with programming languages and would be highly limiting, and asking for time instead of glancing is an unnecessary step away from efficiency.
There are numerous much more efficient ways of interacting with technology outside of speech. It is simply easier to do certain things without talking to anyone or asking for anyone’s help. There is a place for Bots, but it is not everywhere, if we are to preserve the optimal ways of doing things.
So, where could there be a good place for ChatBots?
If it is not in utter disruption, then maybe it could be in an augmenting certain areas of human-technology interaction. Currently, ChatBots differ from other technology in their use of NLP as an interface and in having a personality. Currently, the focus is on NLP. However the question is how much of it is entertainment value and how much is efficiency and productivity?
Maybe we are looking in all the wrong places.
Maybe it is less about sheer entertainment, but more about how intimately the Bots can get to know us to serve us better. Maybe we should focus on how connected ChatBots are with us and with our inner wishes, how they can predict what we are looking for, what we need, and can cater to our cognitive style in ways that would make it feel like magic.
I hear myself thinking and sounding like a chauvinist who wants a smart and useful servant who does not talk much, but fulfills their every wish. And why not? I would never dare to force that on another human being, but asking that from a Bot does not rub my ethics in the same awkward way.
It also makes me think of the book “The 5 Love Languages”, where one of the languages is service. So, what are all the ways that Bots can love us? It is certainly not limited to talking to us through NLP.
One of many ways that Bots can be helpful to us is in assisting us with all kind of searches: really in data-mining the world for us and matching the results to suit our needs.
Bots’ Human Manifestation in Divergent Searches.
Maybe the humanity of a Bot could manifest itself in the presentation of search results. Currently, when we enter a term in a search bar, we get an unsorted list of search results — only ranked based on an internal algorithm that weights sites based on semantic relatedness, relevance, and interconnectedness. Rather, I am thinking of how those same internally sorted results could be presented in categories relevant to the user. It might not be helpful for convergent and close-ended questions of fact, which are much easier to search with a few clicks of fingers.
However, it might be extremely useful in divergent searches, where the users are faced with scanning and data-mining large sets of search results for patterns and insights. Or in those searches where the users are not sure what to ask, does not know what they don’t know, any are looking for suggestions.
Unstructured search results that such divergent searches offer are the raw material for building mental frameworks that subsequently become a basis for grasping the newly discovered information about the world. If the results were presorted in meaningful categories and only then presented to the user, then the search engine could be seen as a thoughtful and caring Bot who made our life easier.
Formality Continuum.
The types of searches could be seen on a continuum of formality: from academic research to hotline style of information providers. The more informal the search is, the more conversing the Bots would be doing and the more reminiscent of humans they would have to be, and the more they would employ NLP in their interactions with humans.
Possible solutions in academic research.
Academic research, they say, has become cumbersome and increasingly less efficient way to promote learning. Essentially, it is because of the amount of material published is exponentially increasing and becoming more and more overwhelming and difficult for one human to process with quality. The articles could be indexed to be AI-friendly — with something similar to ISBN, but a lot more complex and telling. Each new article published could be indexed according to the concepts and claims it offers, and their relation to what is already published. All old published material could be indexed in the same way by seasoned researchers. Later in the future, all reading, search within text, sorting, and indexing can be done solely by AI.
The user would ask questions in natural speech, and AI will data-mine the terrain and tell what is available, what is missing, good opportunities for further research — and all kinds of other analytics, problem solutions, and predictions. Some possible categories for presenting the findings could vary based on the question, but could include arguments for and against a certain statement or a theory, the predecessors, the influencers, the followers. It is really about visualizing the taxonomy and the relevant networks of meaning within them, and then presenting them to the user. In this space, the ChatBot would do less chatting and more searching and presenting.
Legal, Medical, and Social Services Searches.
Often people look for the most knowledgeable doctor or a lawyer with the best record of success to handle their maladies and cases. A ChatBot could be trained at the level of the best lawyers and doctors in their thinking patterns, while having an instant access to myriads of databases, and while having lightning-fast memory retrieval mechanisms. That’s… helpful. They would never get tired and would be accessible any time. In this space, ChatBots would not really need to do much talking, but more searching and presenting.
However, knowing that people who search for legal and medical, and social services advice are often in distress, it would not hurt for a ChatBot here to have some human traits, such as kind attitude and give tokens of care. Those could manifest themselves in the tone and wording of the presentation, such as warm confirmation of success, encouragement reminders, and empathy statements. Even if obviously coming from a machine — those do wonders. It could also be that an synthetic image were attached to the search application, with a name, so that the user could “put the name with the face.”
Just as with the academic search, here the search results could be presented in relevant categories, and meaning based on the questions that users ask. Of course, in order for the ChatBot to be able to offer relevancy, it would have to be taught to it, only after being learned through studies of what users usually need in particular situations, and what life situation certain questions statistically signify.
Hotlines.
In this space, the advantage of having a Bot is their 24/7 availability to the general public. The Hotlines I am thinking of are those for reporting abuse, neglect, battery, and the risk of suicide. In this space, Bots would have to be well trained in NLP and trained to have empathy, compassion, and a kind demeanor. Again, thanks to the human brain’s strong reaction to personalized acts of kindness, be they synthetic or real, ChatBots could do so much good.
People could cannot afford professional help and do not know where to find it for free, could turn to a Bot who, based on their simple questions, could guide them in the right direction. The key to the effectiveness of such a Bot would be feeding it all the necessary information, so that the totality of services available would be covered. It is like Yellow Pages, but having someone to search it for you, when you don’t even know what to look for.
Not only the ChatBots could help save someone’s life by being there for them at a difficult moment, but they could also serve as data-miners and presenters of information to those who manage them — the social and government workers. They could also signal an alarm to authorities, when serious abuse is detected. Many of those who are abused would have a much lower barrier to reporting the abuse, when they are talking to a Bot in the privacy of where they are, instead of having to find a place, going there, and facing a real human. They could even do it anonymously, and the Bot would trace their complaint through the IP address or satellite triangulation.
Ultimately, I imagine one central Bot — an avatar of 911 — with a capability of responding to millions of people at a time. Maybe Bots could also replace police dispatchers.
Bots as Companions.
This is not specifically about research here, but more about emotional and mental interaction. Some structured applications of Bots NLP ability could be in language learning and mock interviews. If Bots were trained well enough to handle such HCI transactions, they would be invaluable! They could have all the patience in the world, all the care, accuracy and insight of the best possible teacher.
Another interesting application of Bots could be in voice recognition, and otherwise assistive technology, for people who are not able to type or read for various reasons: impairments, disability, or even illiteracy.
Then, there is a space for Bots to be thoughtful and caring companions. In this area, Bots would be doing a lot of NLP, a lot of talking, and would have maximum humanity built into them. Human brain cannot tell the difference between virtual reality and actual reality, as much as we imagine it could. So, if a Bot with a pleasant human face were talking with us and saying all the things we wanted to hear — it would effectively make us feel good.
Bots could inspire us with their thoughts and quotes of the moment and pamper us with their pep talk. We could design their personality and looks to our liking, they could be our perfect friend who says all the right things and gives good advice. This will be a huge improvement from a pet rock :) | https://chatbotslife.com/chatbots-are-they-a-disruption-or-an-augmentation-4607b11863dc | ['Ux Philosophy'] | 2016-11-21 22:25:37.461000+00:00 | ['Bots', 'Chatbots', 'Digital Strategy', 'AI', 'Messaging'] |
Florida Man Killed To Get Rid of The Devil | Florida Man Killed To Get Rid of The Devil
He thought the devil possessed his ex, so he murdered her.
Image via Facebook
Who doesn’t have an ex they refer to as psycho? Most of the time, the insult is because of something simple. Most of the time there is a request that is unusual. When the request is rejected, the requestor becomes angry. Rarely it is something that actually something that a professional would deem the actual actions as those of a psychopath.
The case of David Murdock is one of the extreme cases. 60-year-old Murdock killed his ex-girlfriend for religious reasons. He told the police that he was battling Lucifer and trying to banish him.
Only in Florida could a story like this happen.
The Relationship
Lisa Bunce had ended her relationship with Murdock back in 2017. She had told friends on multiple occasions Murdock had made serious threats towards her. As the relationship came to an end, she moved to Ohio. This should have been the end of it for her. It wasn’t.
In January of 2019, she visited Florida to see friends. Murdock learned she was in town and began to text and call her at a rate that could only be considered worrisome. Bunce ignored the messages and eventually blocked his number. It was not enough.
The Murder
The buildup to the murder was every bit the true crime formula. Murdock found out where Bunce had been staying and made his way over there. Sandra Andrews answered the door to her house and found her friend’s ex standing there. After she tried to get him to leave, she was shot in the face. After the police came and asked who had pulled the trigger, she reportedly answered “David.”
Bunce did not fare as well. She was shot in the head and then stuffed into a closet. Police found her shortly after but there was no way to help keep her alive. The question became why would Murdock do this?
The Motivation
In normal cases, jealousy or anger would be a go-to motivation. Even a monetary reward, such as life insurance, can be a big factor in the decision to commit murder. Very rarely is a religious reason given. And when it is, it’s usually because the religion condemns divorce.
Murdock told the police he killed Bunce and shot Andrews because “he had to get rid of the devil.” It’s not clear if he’s truly insane or playing it up for prosecutors, jurors, and the Judge. There is also some confusion as to whether or not he believed Bunce was the devil or if she was possessed by the devil.
The Confession and Charges
Another unusual aspect of this case is that Murdock called into 911 and confessed to his crime. Another Florida man also confessed to shooting his partner but tried to claim self-defense. Maybe that’s what the devil defense is about?
Murdock faces a lot of charges including; first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, armed burglary with assault/battery and shooting into a building. He is being held in the county jail without bond. | https://medium.com/harsh-light-news/florida-man-killed-to-get-rid-of-the-devil-16972d06f3e7 | ['Edward Anderson'] | 2020-03-23 12:01:00.941000+00:00 | ['True Crime', 'Mental Illness', 'Murder', 'Stalking', 'Religion'] |
This FAA Engineer’s Stay in American Samoa Was No Vacation | By Richard McCarthy, FAA Office of Technical Operations
What happens when a project that’s only supposed to last a month turns into an indefinite stay in a remote location due to COVID-19 travel restrictions? For one dedicated FAA professional, it meant more time for improvements beyond the original project scope.
FAA civil engineer Dave de Langis did just after he finished a roof replacement project in American Samoa, which travel restrictions turned into an unanticipated four-month stay. While stuck in the remote locale, he took the initiative to complete many different improvements to the FAA system support center, too.
Project kickoff, then stuck!
De Langis is a civil engineer with the FAA’s Facilities and Engineering Services in the Western Service Area. He also has a strong structural engineering background. “We often send him to work on both types of projects,” said Khanh Tran, the operations infrastructure engineering manager for the Los Angeles District.
The plan was for de Langis to coordinate the project’s start and stay in American Samoa until the end of March. The contractor’s on-site management team arrived in American Samoa for the kickoff meeting March 10 and returned to Salt Lake City once the meeting ended. The project was expected to be completed in about one month.
On March 13, the governor of the territory halted all passenger air traffic, and the last available flight arrived March 12. The contractor’s team was not able to return to the island.
The FAA recalled all of its engineers throughout the world at the start of the COVID-19 public health emergency, and construction projects were delayed. However, FAA management allowed de Langis to stay to complete the roof replacement project because there were no cases of COVID-19 in American Samoa, making the risk of infection extremely low.
A local construction firm was hired as a subcontractor to keep the project on track. De Langis communicated with the general contractor in Utah while overseeing the subcontractors to ensure that the statement of work and safety rules were followed.
De Langis stayed in daily contact with Rick Ambriz, the FAA’s front line manager for the American Samoa, Maui, and Kauai Service Support Centers within the Honolulu District. “Every week he sent me detailed progress reports with both ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures,” Ambriz said. “He kept me informed throughout the whole project.”
Travel restrictions were still in place once the new roof was completed. The original air travel suspension in American Samoa was spanned 30 days but was extended for several additional 30-day increments. De Langis was, in effect, stranded there indefinitely.
He took this opportunity to note the potential to repair other structures at the site. These projects included repairing the non-directional beacon tower and the perimeter fence, and installing a roof overhang for the service building, five new garage doors in the service building and a new facility sign.
Life in American Samoa
Living in American Samoa is not like living in the continental United States. The territory’s remoteness (over 2,200 miles southwest of Hawaii), weather conditions, and lack of amenities can present challenges, especially when one cannot leave. The island of Tutuila is also relatively small, at only 55 square miles.
American Samoa on the globe.
Therefore, it didn’t take long for De Langis to adapt to his new environment. “I spent so much time there that the local residents began to recognize me,” he said.
De Langis’ life in American Samoa during the COVID-19 public health emergency began to revolve around when the cargo ships arrived. Cargo flights were limited to one a week, so the ships were the only way to get a large amount of goods to the island.
“When these ships came into port, they were a big event,” de Langis said. “No one knew what was going to be unloaded.” Goods were limited. “The two pizza shops on the island could not make pizzas because there was no cheese available.”
Additionally, shopping for groceries in American Samoa is not the same as it is on the U.S. mainland. There are no large grocery stores, but there is one bulk-type warehouse store. Goods like produce and meat are purchased at small shops, and people went to specific stores when they heard through word of mouth that they had high-demand items in stock.
“There was this one independent store that received a large supply of delicious cherries,” de Langis said. “These were gone within a day.”
The best time to grocery shop was on Sunday mornings. “I hit the stores in a circuit,” he said. “The kitchen in the [Service Support Center] building was large and very well-equipped. I did my shopping and stored my groceries there and did most of my cooking there, too.”
De Langis stayed in a bed-and-breakfast bungalow close to the ocean. That may sound ideal, but American Samoa is definitely not a “touristy” destination. “The shoreline is very rough and rocky and the waves were massive,” he said. “When some of the waves hit the shore, I could feel the vibration inside the bungalow.”
Continuing work
De Langis encountered multiple challenges after getting the approval to continue with the roof replacement. The limited number of cargo flights and several storms hitting in sequence caused problems.
“Certain necessary supplies were delayed because of the flight restrictions,” de Langis said. “Weather also became a huge factor. So I had to move the construction crews to other areas of the project site where work could be accomplished.”
The American Samoa Service Support Center, located in the town of Tafuna near Pago Pago International Airport, was commissioned in 1962. About 6,900 square feet of the roof needed to be replaced, largely due to damage caused by the corrosive salt sea air. “This facility had been overlooked for a while, and these repairs were necessary,” Ambriz said.
The team developed another statement of work to perform the additional work. The non-directional beacon tower had been battered by wind and salt water, and corrosion was threatening to destroy it. The perimeter fence also needed to be replaced because there were gaping holes in several areas, which created both security and safety hazards.
“The wild dogs were crawling through the fence holes and sleeping on site,” de Langis said.
Funding for these additional projects was secured from the district budget. “The district puts aside money for corrosion control, so that funding was used to repair the tower,” Ambriz said.
“Funding was also secured from [FAA Technical Operations (Tech Ops)] funds and from [Engineering Services]. These funds were used for the fence repair, the installation of five new garage doors in the service building and the new sign.
Coming home — finally!
Commercial flight restrictions are currently still in place on American Samoa due to the public health emergency. After a few fruitless attempts, de Langis finally secured a flight. He finally left American Samoa on July 25 at 2 a.m. local time.
De Langis has received many accolades for all the work he accomplished on American Samoa during an extremely challenging time. Tran nominated him for an “Extra Mile Award in the Western Pacific Region,” which he later won.
“With the additional 3 ½ months being stuck on the island due to COVID-19 flight restrictions, Dave went the ‘Extra Mile’ to accomplish the new service building shade structure, the [non-directional beacon] antenna, and the facility security fence refurbishment projects,” Tran said.
“I had to rely on Dave to ensure the job was being done right because I was not able to be there,” Ambriz added. “Dave did a fantastic job, and I am looking forward to seeing the site myself when travel restrictions are lifted.”
“If I had it to do all over again, I would,” de Langis said. “I wanted to leave that building in great shape. I probably spent 2,000 hours on the site, but I really enjoyed my stay there. The experience has become a part of me.” | https://medium.com/faa/stranded-in-american-samoa-8ade4e192391 | ['Federal Aviation Administration'] | 2020-12-08 21:17:15.626000+00:00 | ['Roofing', 'News', 'Aviation', 'Covid 19', 'Engineering'] |
3 Life Truths I Gained In Coming Out to My Boys | A lot of things scared me about coming out as transgender to my four boys.
“They’re too young to understand,” I told myself to justify my silence. “It’s not something they need to know yet.”
But as the urge to come out increased, I knew I could no longer ignore the truth of the situation.
Not only did my boys deserve to hear it from me first, I would need their blessing before opening myself (and our family) up to the world.
What I had been telling myself was that I was protecting them by not speaking about it.
In reality, I had been protecting myself.
I was scared of their reaction, scared of how it might affect our relationship. I worried that, once out there, that they would never look at me the same way.
The night everything changed
It was a January evening and we were wrapping up for the night. Dinner had been devoured, teeth had been haphazardly brushed, and it was now time for bedtime stories.
Only, unbeknownst to them, this was the night I would share with them the untold story of my life.
What they taught me in their response not only reassured me of their incredible capacity to unconditionally love, it inspired me on my path forward.
I began my story hoping to educate them but it was they who educated me, almost without saying a single word. By the end, I walked out of their room reminded of three important truths:
Every story is worth hearing Every person is worth loving Every problem is worth sharing
Every story is worth hearing
When I was around my boys’ age, my father sat me down in his office to have a talk.
It wasn’t about the birds or bees but rather about the fragility of the human experience.
You see, my father was a good man but he, like all fathers, had made mistakes. He wanted me to know he wasn’t perfect. However, in an age where parental transparency and vulnerability were uncommon, the awkwardness of the exchange left me with more questions than answers.
I wanted a different experience for my boys, which meant getting real about my confusing history with gender.
I feared they might cringe at my life experiences.
Instead, they simply listened. They listened so simply, in fact, that I wondered if they’d really heard what I had shared.
Wasn’t it troubling to know a father struggled with his sense of gender? Wasn’t it odd to think of your dad trying on his mom’s old makeup and clothes when he was their age?
It turned out it wasn’t.
Every person is worth loving
When I finally decided to approach my boys, I wanted to make sure the conversation wasn’t about me.
I wanted it to be about them.
I wanted them to understand that at their age, I was going through really hard things so they could understand that “hard” was normal for them as well.
that at their age, I was going through really hard things so they could understand that “hard” was normal for them as well. I wanted them to see that, no matter what they were going through on the often rocky path of adolescence, that they were loved and always worth loving.
that, no matter what they were going through on the often rocky path of adolescence, that they were loved and always worth loving. I wanted them to feel loved , not in spite of their unshared stories but precisely because of them.
, not in spite of their unshared stories but precisely because of them. I wanted them to know that their father, their mother, and every adult that they looked up to was just like them. We all have unshared stories and concerns about who we are in the world. We all fear being discovered and rejected for our abnormalities.
that their father, their mother, and every adult that they looked up to was just like them. We all have unshared stories and concerns about who we are in the world. We all fear being discovered and rejected for our abnormalities. I wanted them to realize that being abnormal doesn’t make us unlovable. It makes us perfectly human and perfectly lovable.
There were so many things I wanted them to understand.
What I didn’t anticipate was how much of it they already understood.
In their simple response, I realized that they were the byproducts of an entirely different upbringing — raised in a world where diversity was more celebrated than ever before, where differences didn’t equal division.
I had hoped to teach them that every soul is worth loving.
What I learned was that they understood it far better than myself, especially when I was their age.
Every problem is worth sharing (with someone)
One of the purposes of my conversation with my boys was to ask their permission to share my story publicly.
Knowing they would be on the front lines of any unlikely personal or family criticism, I needed their blessing before proceeding.
If they showed any concern, it would be my signal to pull back, wait, and even be willing to forever keep my story between those I loved most.
It was a sacrifice I was more than willing to make for them.
But instead of having reservations, they seemed to find my request perfectly normal.
“If you want to share,” they told me, “that’s fine with us.”
“Are you guys sure?” I asked, wanting to ensure they knew how important their story was in my life story.
“Yeah,” was all they said — all they needed to say.
It was then I realized I had been imagining our conversation through an outdated lens.
I had been raised in a world where gender and attraction had always been hidden.
Unlike me, my boys were being raised in an era where every story was worth sharing, especially when it has the power to change someone else’s life for the better. | https://medium.com/prismnpen/3-life-truths-i-gained-in-coming-out-to-my-boys-2ff9d621a974 | ['Dave Smurthwaite'] | 2020-07-15 13:57:15.221000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Family', 'Self-awareness', 'Creative Non Fiction', 'LGBTQ'] |
A Rustic Northern French Bone Marrow Dish | Born and raised in Long Island, Eric Korsh is a longstanding presence in the New York culinary sphere who has managed high-profile kitchens preparing American and rustic French cuisines. Eric Korsh’s past experience includes co-leading Restaurant Eloise, a Sonoma, California, eatery known for its in-house garden and farm-to-table ethos.
At Eloise, Chef Korsh presented northern French dishes such as veal tongue and bone marrow in the farmhouse style. A dish classic in its simplicity, roast bone marrow requires placing bones within an oven preheated to 450 degrees. The wider cut is placed side down in a roasting pan or ovenproof skillet, and the bones are left in the oven for between 15 and 20 minutes. When taken out, the marrow should be soft and starting to separate from the bone, but not yet at its melting point.
At Restaurant Eloise, bones were divided lengthwise and presented with a teaspoon that allowed the marrow to be efficiently extracted from the bone. The marrow was accompanied by coarse salt, toasted brown bread, and a parsley salad featuring caper beads and cornichon (pickled cucumber) slices. The salad provided a palate-cleaning counterpoint to the marrow’s intrinsic richness. | https://medium.com/@eric.korsh/a-rustic-northern-french-bone-marrow-dish-5b5b37030a81 | ['Eric Korsh'] | 2020-03-04 09:20:46.786000+00:00 | ['Foodies'] |
5 lessons from a young leader. A reflection on self-confidence and… | 5 lessons from a young leader
A reflection on self-confidence and overcoming Imposter Syndrome
Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash
At 23, I became the manager of my company’s User Experience team.
A few years prior, I had started in design as a one-person show. We were a small company, with around 30 employees worldwide. Back then, UX was a young, unexplored discipline for us.
Like any start-up, relentless efficiency was our mantra. I loved every second of the hustle. Still, I was usually bent over my desk, churning out designs for 4–5 projects at once, too busy to slow down and look at the bigger picture of why I was there.
Being the only UX designer in a brilliant and fast growing company also meant I lived with constant paranoia. Imposter syndrome felt like an overwhelming beast.
I was certain it was only a matter of time before others realised I was a fraud basked in colours. I’d dismiss any positive feedback thinking my colleagues didn’t know better. Everything I did was new to the organisation, so at the end of the day, my work was the standard. If I happened to set the bar low, it was still as high as they’d ever known.
I became even more out of my depth, paralysed with fear, when it was time to expand the team. I was about to become a manager. I had the confidence of my company to guide the team, but I felt 10 centimeters tall.
Do I have what it takes to lead a team? I don’t know what I’m doing! What if I don’t have the answers to the difficult questions my team members have? They’ll see right through me!
I spent months trying to find my feet. I have since then come to accept there is not always a clear path to good leadership. That said, the following five lessons have helped me make sense of the journey ahead as a young leader.
1. Don’t think too hard. Make a start.
You are where you are because you’ve earned your spot there. Learn to trust and back yourself.
When a new and complex task arrives, it will feel like everyone is looking to you for direction. Don’t freak out. Slow down instead. Start from what you know. You’ll understand the problem better if you help the team start small.
Great work requires more than great individuals, it requires a team. As a team, you’ll be able to leverage each other’s knowledge and skills to achieve a common goal. So don’t fret. Make a start.
You don’t need to know what it takes to do the job. Once you’ve done the job, you’ll know what it takes.
2. Base your decision on what’s best for the company
Teamwork is the perfect example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
As a team leader, you’re responsible for the performance of your team. If your insecurities and ego are clouding any judgment, take a step back and focus on what is best for the company.
Ask yourself who would be most suitable for the job to achieve the highest quality outcome. This will help you and your team stay focussed on the tasks at hand.
When your team members share a new idea or come up with an intelligent solution to a tricky problem, embrace it. It doesn’t matter who comes up with a solution first. What counts is the new perspective the team now has to inform the next challenge you face together.
3. Provide opportunities you wish you had
Being in a small team or the only member of a team means it’s very easy to hoard the opportunities. It takes a special kind of courage to let someone else in on the fun.
Good employees crave trust and are unafraid to work for it. Create room for your team members to add value. The most meaningful way to do this is by delegating responsibilities you would’ve wanted.
When your team rises to the occasion, acknowledge it. This will encourage them to help set the bar higher for the rest of the company.
4. Look back on the stepping stones you’ve placed
Take time to recognise the contribution you’ve made to support your team on their own journeys.
Your team members have voiced differing opinions? Great, you’ve created an environment where they feel comfortable doing so.
Your team members have improved systems you’ve set in place? Fantastic, you’ve set up structures that were easy to follow.
Your team members have refined existing processes? Excellent, you’ve built a solid foundation on which others can form better ideas.
People we admire most also had others before them showing the way. It is a humbling experience knowing you’re paying it forward.
5. Be kind and forgiving towards yourself
Don’t be quick to criticise and undersell your abilities.
None of the leaders I know feel ready all the time. The vulnerability and humility that arise from this is a beautiful thing. Accepting you still have a lot to learn is a great exercise in self-awareness. It means you are recognising there are opportunities to improve.
I have gone from being too afraid to reveal I don’t know something to saying, “I can’t answer that.”
Later, I found myself comfortable adding, “I can’t answer that, but I can point you to the person who can.”
Nowadays, I am able to admit, “I am not sure”, but then ask, “What do you think?”
In time, you will mature as a leader by taking responsibility for the outcome of the team. So be kind to yourself when things go sideways.
It may not always feel like you’re moving forward. It’s important yet to realise even a lateral step can open up new paths for those behind and beside you. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/five-lessons-from-a-young-leader-bcab781412f1 | ['Tina Hsu'] | 2020-04-26 03:16:58.157000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Design', 'Learning', 'UX', 'Imposter Syndrome'] |
HOW TO: Stop stressing about the vaccine | Dear Raquel,
Are you going to take the vaccine when it is available to you? I’m just not sure what’s in it. How can we know it’s safe?
Signed,
Anti VaXXX
Dear Anti VaXXX,
For insurance purposes I have to very clearly state that I am not a doctor. I am not a nurse. In fact, I used to talk SO much shit about science, which is to say I failed a lot of science classes in high school. You absolutely shouldn’t be coming to me for medical advice but, I will happily give it to you anyway, because this is a science stan account now!!!
As a member of a priority group (extrovert) I absolutely will be FIRST IN LINE whenever the government makes the call. If they were selling vaccines on the street I’d mix it up with a little chaser and toss it back like a Jager Bomb. Vaccines, much like $10 bar shots, haven’t steered me wrong yet. Personally, I like not having to worry about Mumps or Polio, it gives me more time to self-diagnose other health afflictions on WebMD. Why are you being such a downer anyway? The mere thought of the limitless potential my life will possess post-vax when herd immunity takes over is enough to float me right down to the clinic and inject myself NOW.
Also, no more COVID means my gym will finally reopen and I need that so as to keep my threadbare mental health intact. Unlike most of you I got hotter over quarantine but now I’ve got to maintain, you feel me? I’ve got bigger problems than worrying about what a bunch of the world’s best & brightest put in a vaccine that is very likely going to kick this pandemic to the curb, save a lot of lives and allow me to go back to spending too much of my time wandering around the mall.
“But Raquel, aren’t you worried about how quickly they were able to develop the vaccine? How do we know if it’s safe?”
Babe, one time I ate an entire 12” subway sandwich on the Line 2 OK? And this was back in summer 2016 before TTC sorted out their AC issue. People were dropping like flies because of the suffocating heat and I was wedged between two questionable characters forcing a cold cut combo down my throat. Why? I literally don’t know. But I did it, that is my truth. And I don’t think I need to explain to you how unsanitary it is to have a full Eat Fresh™ buffet on public transit during peak rush hour as innocent bystanders look on in abject horror. For those reasons — and many others I can’t mention here for fear of being arrested — I am not concerned about what is in the vaccine.
Cool it with your conspiracy BS because I guarantee worse things have entered you like:
1) The lemon wedge garnishing your drink — ew alert!!!! I worked as a server once for exactly one month and everyone touches these.
2) That guy at the pre drink who kept pulling out his guitar and strumming two chords of Oasis’ Wonderwall.
3) Fountain pop. I read once that soda machines often have feces in them which is sad because we all know Coke Zero from the dispenser hit diiiiiiiiiiiiFFERENT!
4) Smirnoff Vodka, raspberry flavour
To further stem your anxiety, might I suggest NOT getting your “news” from Facebook statuses your aunt shares after four glasses of chardonnay. I started following Science Sam (@science.sam) on Instagram because I am tethered to my phone and addicted to that stupid app anyway and her COVID/vaccine hot takes are really informative and accessible. So in between scrolling through photos of impossibly hot models, memes and SNL clips I can get my LEARN ON.
Join me!!! | https://medium.com/@raquelfarrington/how-to-stop-stressing-about-the-vaccine-d66bdca308e4 | [] | 2020-12-17 22:03:28.549000+00:00 | ['Advice For Life', 'Humour', 'Advice', 'Funny', 'Millennials'] |
I’m in LOVE with the #Nativity at the Vatican this year. | I’m in LOVE with the #Nativity at the Vatican this year. An #astronaut is included. Yes. You read that right. These surreal life sized ceramic nativity figures were created during the time of the first moon landing. My contribution to the apparent “controversy”: The “moon” the astronaut is holding is an embryonic #BabyYoda from #StarWars #TheMandalorian !!! It’s even green!!! There. I said it. It’s the #Vatican X #StarWars crossover everyone has never known they’ve wanted or needed. #MerryChristmas Grogu, may The Force of the season be with you, for #ThisIsTheWay . | https://medium.com/@ThetaState/im-in-love-with-the-nativity-at-the-vatican-this-year-7201ac842bb4 | ['James Anok'] | 2020-12-22 06:23:52.973000+00:00 | ['Vatican', 'Astronauts', 'Star Wars', 'The Mandalorian', 'Baby Yoda'] |
IQV-A Ecosystem with Blockchain | We want to create an Ecosystem, where you can be part of it.
In this Story, we tell you who we are, what we do, and where you can find us.
Introduction:
What is IQV4U ?
IQV originally started with a simple fintech strategy to enable or simplify the use of digital assets within traditional payment solutions. Everyone who uses blockchain-based assets should be able to liquidate assets within seconds and integrate them into the traditional payment technology world once our business model has been fully implemented. Credit / debit cards, standing orders, direct debits or simple payments should in future be carried out with cover from digital assets, even if the FIAT account has the value 0, but there are crypto assets in the necessary liquidation values.
We have different Projects and Partners which we want to introduce you on the next Articles.
We will Explain everyone of these in a seperate Article.
The Mobile Community, A Software and Product Plattform.
Flame, A Social Media Messenger.
The Powerwallet, a Wallet for different Digital Assets and a Gateway.
Chaintoro, is Our Cryptocurrencie Exchange, registered by the FMA in Austria.
What is the IQV token?
It is a virtual currency which will find its automatic cycle through the future natural demand from commission payments from product suppliers.
How is the formation process?
After many productive exchanges of ideas, the decision was made relatively quickly. With the know-how from so many different areas, especially banking and insurance, we believed we were well armed for all future challenges.
How did the idea come about?
Software, high-tech and banking specialists wanted to use blockchain technology to simplify global payment transactions — and also make this technology easily accessible for people who have no idea about wallets and cryptocurrencies.
Do you have a white paper or a roadmap for the future?
For the IQV4U there is a comprehensive legal opinion from a law firm specializing in financial and crypto law.
Why the blockchain technology of all things?
Due to our many years of banking and technology experience, from our point of view it was the only sensible technology to be able to represent and develop the payment processing system of the FUTURE. The aim was to make existing services easier, faster, safer and cheaper for customers.
What is the main use of the IQV token?
It serves as a virtual currency within our community and is intended to gain opportunities for use in the medium and long term due to natural demand. We want to decentralize this as much as possible with the help of various smart contracts.
Do legal opinions or licenses exist?
Of course, there are detailed legal opinions — due to ongoing legal changes, these are and must be updated continuously
Where can we find you?
In contrast to many other companies, we have remained loyal to Austria as a location. Due to the international expansion, there are of course already locations in Switzerland and also in Africa.
You can find us to on: www.iqv4u.io or Twitter and Facebook.
What makes you different from the many other projects in this sector?
The main difference is that we have remained independent of large donors and have financed ourselves primarily through crowd finance.
Of course, we have to keep our word to the community.
Furthermore, all founders have already declared that their future fees will only be paid in IQV4U.
The management has also agreed to have bonuses paid out in the IQV4U Coin in the future. This shows the absolute confidence in the future of the IQV4U.
The approval of all founders and managers to a blocking period of 12 months is intended to represent another vote of confidence in the future of this project.
We try to make the ecosystem as decentralized as possible. We give our best that we will succeed in the future.
The Article will be updated.
Your IQV Team 4 U. | https://medium.com/@iqv4u/iqv-a-ecosystem-with-blockchain-8635718aff58 | ['Iqv U'] | 2020-12-24 13:12:03.205000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Apps', 'Digital Marketing', 'Blockchain', 'Token Sale'] |
Roundup: Our Top 7 Screencasting Tools | SnagIt, by Techsmith
7. SnagIt, by Techsmith
Along with Techsmith’s other signature program, Jing, SnagIt is one of the more popular screen-capture tools out there. It is very simple to use, but lacks any true editing capabilities (the latest version does allow limited “trimming”). The only real advantage we see over the free Jing software is that your recordings can be of unlimited duration.
Pros: Ease of use; Windows and mac compatibility; Mobile integration; Voice-over/narration capabilities; mp4 output.
Cons: Questionable value; Limited post-capture capabilities; Limited file-type output capabilities.
Verdict: C-
QuickTime Player
6. QuickTime Player, by Apple.
One of the built-in programs on a mac and a popular tool for watching video, few people seem to know it can be used for screen recording. For basic screencasts, there are QuickTime proponents out there who swear it performs as well (with simpler controls) as some of the options that require a purchased license.
Pros: Very easy to use in mac environment; Simple controls; Free (for mac owners); Voice-over/narration capabilites.
Cons: Only output format is QuickTime Movie; Essentially no post-capture capabilities.
Verdict: C
Jing, by Techsmith
5. Jing, by Techsmith
Essentially the bare minimum, but sometimes it’s all you need. When you’re in a time crunch and have to churn out a super-quick (up to 5 minutes in length) screen-share video, Jing is a good (free) tool to have at your disposal. It’s a good option for students, too.
Pros: Entirely simple to use; Convenient; Free; Voice-over/narration capabilities; Easy sharing on screencast.com
Cons: No editing capabilities; Only allows recordings/captures of up to 5 minutes in length; Can’t upload to another site like YouTube.
Verdict: B- | https://medium.com/mcadonline/roundup-our-top-7-screencasting-tools-bdbf6f18e63a | ['Eric Kline'] | 2017-03-27 12:02:02.819000+00:00 | ['Higher Education', 'Elearning', 'Art Education'] |
[Paper] CAM: Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization (Weakly Supervised Object Localization) | [Paper] CAM: Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization (Weakly Supervised Object Localization)
Class Activation Mapping (CAM)
In this story, Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization (CAM), by MIT, is presented. In this story:
Global Average Pooling (GAP) is used at the near end of the network.
is used at the near end of the network. By using GAP, Class Activation Mapping (CAM) technique is proposed for Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL)
technique is proposed for Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) Object localization and image classification are performed in a single forward-pass.
As described in one 2020 CVPR WSOL paper, it’s surprising that it’s still one of the state-of-the-art WSOL approaches with superior performance. This is a paper in 2016 CVPR with over 3000 citations. (Sik-Ho Tsang @ Medium) | https://medium.com/@sh-tsang/cam-learning-deep-features-for-discriminative-localization-weakly-supervised-object-7cab7b31f972 | ['Sik-Ho Tsang'] | 2020-12-05 06:21:12.697000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Object Localization', 'Convolutional Network', 'Deep Learning', 'Weakly Supervised'] |
Big Data Analytics — Why you shouldn’t miss this trend and how it can benefit you | Big Data Analytics — Why you shouldn’t miss this trend and how it can benefit you Henny Jones Follow Sep 8 · 5 min read
The increasing digitization in the last few decades has resulted in companies and public institutions generating and storing vast amounts of data. We’re talking about 2.5 trillion bytes per day worldwide (this corresponds to a storage capacity of 36 million iPads).
The explosive growth of digital data becomes particularly clear when one realizes that 90% of the data available worldwide were generated in the last two years.
With software systems constantly evolving and an increasing number of Internet and social media users around the world, this growth trend will continue in the future.
How to deal with the amount of data is a crucial question for companies nowadays.
With the right analysis, important insights can be gained that serve as the basis for strategic company decisions.
Companies can benefit from the amount of data available to them in order to remain competitive in the digital economy.
Big data are large amounts of data that are produced every day by companies and private individuals. At the consumer level, this data includes information on online, search and purchasing behavior.
There are 3 characteristics that summarize the properties of Big Data:
Volume — describes the enormous volume of data or the huge amount of data.
Velocity — describes the speed at which data is created. More and more data are being generated in less and less time.
Variety — describes the different sources and forms of data. Data can be structured or unstructured. And they can be available as an audio or video file.
According to Jules Berman, the complex characteristics of big data become particularly clear when you look at how big data differs from small data in practice.
The differences between big data and small data are
i. Goals: While small data is being used for a specific goal, the use of big data often goes in an unexpected direction.
ii. Place: Small data is basically in one place (in a computer file); Big data is often spread over many files on multiple servers in different countries.
iii. Data structure: Small data is usually structured in a straight line; Big data can be unstructured, contain many file formats from different disciplines and refer to different sources.
iv. Data preparation: Small data is prepared by the end user for his purposes; Big data is often prepared by one group, analyzed by a second, and used by a third party. Each group can have a different purpose.
v. Longevity: Small data is usually stored for a limited period of time (approx. 5–7 years) after the project has been completed. With big data, the data remains stored indefinitely, since the data projects are transferred to further projects.
vi. Measurements: Small data is recorded with a single log in fixed units of measurement within a short period of time. Big data comes from different places, times, organizations and countries. This entails complex conversions.
vii. Reproducibility: In the event that something goes wrong, small data can usually be fully reproduced. Big data comes in so many forms and sources that it is impossible to start over if you have problems.
viii. Risk: If there are analysis problems with small data, the project remains financially manageable. Similar difficulties with big data can cost hundreds of millions of dollars in financial damage.
ix. Introspection: (to what extent can the data describe itself meaningfully): The data set in small data everything is well organized and the meanings are clear. Big data is more complex and can contain information that is unidentifiable or meaningless. This can reduce the data quality.
x. Analysis: Small data can be analyzed from a single computer file in a single process. With big data, the extensive data has to go through extractions, tests, reductions, normalizations and transformations, among other things.
Big Data Analytics
By consciously or unconsciously collecting big data, the question arises for companies whether and how one can use this information for themselves. There are no business benefits to just owning this data.
This is where big data analytics comes into play and makes it possible to analyze large amounts of data from various sources.
The aim is to read useful information and, in particular, patterns and correlations from the data volumes. With the knowledge gained, company processes can be optimized and competitive advantages achieved.
In most cases, the optimization measures derived help reduce costs, save time and optimize products and services.
Big data analytics aims to use data to help companies make better business decisions. This goal is achieved by data scientists new hardware and software-based processes to structure large, unstructured amounts of data.
In this way, the large amount of data that is available in a company is made understandable for the management and used productively.
According to surveys, big data is mainly used to get to know the customer better, to evaluate internal information in a more targeted manner and to build a better data landscape.
Industries for which big data analytics offers great advantages
Social media
Big data analytics can already bring a decisive advantage during development. The evaluation of social media channels or customer ratings can reveal social trends and market gaps at an early stage.
Production
As production is getting smarter and smarter, it is not surprising that big data also plays a major role here. The numerous processes are monitored by sensors and generate large amounts of data. This data can ensure preventive maintenance and prevent production delays or failures.
Distribution and logistics
Sensors are also increasingly being used in the supply chain to measure fuel consumption or to record the position data and the condition of wear parts. The structuring of this data means that costs can be sustainably minimized by planning transports promptly, changing routes and loads, or minimizing downtimes and maintenance costs.
Marketing and sales
You can greatly improve the relationship with your customer through data analysis. You have to know the needs of your customers more precisely and can even address each individual customer directly with personalized offers.
Finances
With the help of big data analytics, reliable predictions or risk calculations can be made in the financial sector. Therefore, it is possible to react more quickly to market developments or falling prices in banking and finance. | https://medium.com/hdata-systems/big-data-analytics-why-you-shouldnt-miss-this-trend-and-how-it-can-benefit-you-8c904bc79cb2 | ['Henny Jones'] | 2021-09-08 09:29:54.260000+00:00 | ['Big Data Analytics', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Big Data', 'Data Science', 'Trends'] |
Cold coffee and Love at first sight | Later my coffee cold in my hand
Staring in the direction
Not really knowing what it was | https://medium.com/@janne.achenbach/cold-coffee-and-love-at-first-sight-197b0598a615 | ['Janne Achenbach'] | 2020-12-22 12:17:40.540000+00:00 | ['Fleeting', 'Love At First Sight', 'Coffee', 'Poetry', 'Sadness'] |
The secrets of Zoom’s growth strategy | Zoom provides a cloud-based solution for video conferencing.
Zoom Video Communications is a super successful startup:
It is valued at more than $17 Billion (as on 12.12.2019)
It is just eight years old and listed on NASDAQ.
Earned $166.6 million in revenue in the last three months (Q3 FY20)
Have approximately 74,100 customers with more than ten employees!
As if this is not enough, Zoom’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) is averaging around 70 for the past few years. Customers love it!
Zoom has built a great product, had organic growth early on, and has built multiple growth channels over the years.
Zoom competes against the big boys like Microsoft and Cisco. Today Zoom stands tall at number one.
But Zoom started small. They had struggled to raise their first round of funding. They had struggled to find their go-to-market strategy.
So, if you are a SaaS startup, still figuring out the growth strategy, you can learn a lot from this story of Zoom’s growth engine. This is a detailed look at Zoom’s growth strategies and tactics. Let’s get started!
About Zoom
Zoom is a SaaS company in video conferencing space. Eric S. Yuan founded it in 2011. Eric was working with WebEx on building video conferencing products for over 14 years before starting Zoom.
Zoom is a product-first company. They invested all their initial resources in building a great product. On Zoom, you can host online video meetings with multiple people.
Eric was named Glassdoor’s top CEO in 2018.
Recently, on the Business Insider’s list of 15 best CEOs of 2019, Eric has been placed at #1.
Growth Strategy: Bird’s Eye View
A lot of Zoom’s initial growth came from organic outreach and partnerships. These partnerships helped Zoom to integrate their solution with existing B2B service providers and leverage the distribution of these companies.
In his interview with SaaStr, Eric has also attributed Walt Mossberg’s article for initial viral growth.
Presently key channels of Zoom’s engine of growth are:
Partnerships SDRs & Demos Inbuilt distribution Social & Ads Content Zoomtopia
Zoom does not consider some of these channels specifically for customer acquisition. But all of these channels contribute to community building and filling top of their sales funnel (TOFU).
Here is a snapshot of how Zoom gets most of its traffic:
A quick analysis of Zoom’s over 30,000 organic keywords reveals that most of the top-performing keywords are branded keywords (‘zoom’ ). Thus bringing in a high branded traffic (> 94%). The same figure for Slack is around 92%.
It seems that most visitors are aware of the brand beforehand and/or had direct links to click on. A catchy four-letter name adds to the fuel!
Thus their massive direct traffic is due to organic outreach, partnerships, events, inbuilt distribution, and offline ads (billboards, airports).
Let’s discuss the few key channels in detail.
Partnerships
Zoom has been building partnerships with other B2B companies to integrate and offer its products using the distribution of its partners. This is a very reliable growth channel and a high contributor to their direct traffic.
One way to understand this partnership ecosystem that Zoom has built is to consider Zoom as part of a stack from the user’s point of view. Zoom has been successful in positioning itself as part of an elite stack of top product-driven startups.
Take a look at the ‘similar sites’ metrics for Zoom and its competitors:
Websites similar to Zoom in terms of traffic sites similar to WebEx in terms of traffic.
Sites similar to GoToMeeting in terms of traffic
Sites similar to Skype in terms of traffic
Sites similar to Google hangout in terms of traffic
So while its competitors were fighting in ‘meetings’ and ‘conferencing’ space, Zoom went out and built partnerships with companies in other verticals to create a seamless experience for its users. Users can have great experience in using Zoom along with other apps for scheduling, conferencing, storage, communication, and more.
For integrations, Zoom has built an app marketplace. Some integrations allow users to access multiple services using the same Zoom dashboard. Such integrations not only reduce the resistance to adoption but also build the growth using network effect.
In her interview with SaaStr, Janine Pelosi, Zoom CMO mentions that they also build relationships with industry analysts. This helps them to get organic growth.
Takeaways:
Find the best distribution channel for your product and build it first. The best channel is organic and targets ‘low hanging fruits’. Align your product as part of an existing ecosystem to leverage its distribution.
Built-In Distribution
The best way to distribute a product is to build the distribution within the product. I never signed up for Zoom.
I had actually enrolled for an online Sanskrit course, where the instructor delivered the course over Zoom. I received a direct link to join the course a day before the start date, clicked on the link, and set it up.
A few months later, I joined another course where too instructor was delivering the course over Zoom. I was familiar with the app by now.
Later, I wanted to communicate within my team and guess what was the first channel came to my mind? Zoom. No points for guessing.
From an online instructor to me and from me to all my team members, Zoom just spread without the company spending a dime!
One reason for it is Zoom having an excellent free plan. When I was asked to sign up by my online instructor, I never had to think twice.
Another reason is the product being great. Once I’ve used it without ever having any issue with the product, my default decision was to use it again. I never had to google “best website for video conferencing.”
Takeaways:
Build distribution within the product e.g., use of the product should set up a chain of growth. Build an extremely simple and efficient product for users. “It should just work.” Eat all the complexities required (tech and/or product) to build such a product yourself.
Social & Ads
Take a look at Zoom’s social traffic:
The majority of the traffic is from Facebook with YouTube being a distant second.
Here are their few longest-running (hence the top-performing) Facebook ads:
Facebook ad 1
Facebook ad 2
Facebook ad 3
Angles of their Facebook ads are aligned with their brand positioning. Some ads are running for multiple audiences and they keep testing for angle-audience fit.
Key angle categories of their FB ads are:
Product benefits Social proof Collaboration & Partnerships
With different variations of texts & images under these three-angle categories, they are driving traffic to specific landing pages and filling the top of multiple sales funnels.
Their key Facebook ad funnels are:
So, they are essentially bringing in traffic to all of their offerings and from all types of clients (Individuals, SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise).
Usually, for B2B SaaS companies’ Facebook ads, it is a good idea to use faces of people, as this creates familiarity. Rather than using the product dashboard screen. It is even better if the people in the image are doing something rather than just posing for the photograph. Zoom uses images with a bunch of people in a video conference. Smart!
Zoom takes it a step ahead with short testimonial video clips of their logo clients.
Interestingly, Zoom has also been sending its paid Facebook traffic to a dedicated landing page built for a Gartner’s report. Zoom has been positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions. Now, considering the audience of Gartner, this funnel is targeted at Enterprise clients.
Here is a Zoom’s Google ad:
Zoom’s google ad
Currently, they seem to be bidding for nearly 30,000 PPC keywords. However, most of their top-performing keywords are either branded (Zoom) or related to business (‘meetings’, ‘video conferencing’). Take a look at their top 5 PPC keywords:
Zoom’s top 5 PPC keywords
Takeaways:
Always experiment with the angle-image-audience combination for Facebook ads. Build dedicated funnels for each of your products.
Content: Zoom’s Blog
blog.zoom.us is the Zoom’s dedicated sub-domain for their blog. Here is the organic keyword traffic on this sub-domain over the years:
This means as far as content is concerned, Zoom was late to the party. They started building their blog somewhere towards the end of 2015.
It is also noteworthy to take a look at their top-performing blog posts:
Based on the evergreen score, these top 4 blog posts of Zoom either talk about Zoomtopia (their annual event) or the company level developments.
A quick study of the top 80 blog pots reveals that Zoom’s content can be classified into these four broad categories:
Zoomtopia Partnerships and use cases Introduction to products & features Business and company level developments and news
This is a mid-market and enterprise clients focused blog! Three facts support this:
Categories of the blog topics CTAs Traffic to the landing pages
Yes! “Request a demo” / “Schedule a Demo”.
These CTAs are typically targeted at mid-market and enterprise clients. Individuals and small teams would probably go for “Sign Up Free”.
Demo CTAs take us to Request Demo and Live Demo landing pages.
Here is how much the Live Demo page gets traffic vis-a-vis their top 8 performing pages:
Zoom’s web pages with the highest traffic
Traffic of free signup page at zoom.us
The traffic of Zoom’s live demo landing page.
But then for mid-market and beyond, it’s the quality, not the volume that matters!
This is in contrast to an SMB focused blog e.g. HubSpot. But works for Zoom as they serve a wide range of clients, from individuals to enterprise.
Takeaways:
Build the blog as a hub of your overall strategy. Find out a few successful themes and build all of your content around them. Depth is required to create an impact.
Zoomtopia
Zoomtopia is the annual event of Zoom. Started in 2017, this two days event has just completed its third edition. This annual event hosts keynotes, discussions, sessions from Zoom’s partners, and product use cases among others.
Overall, Zoomtopia helps in filling the top of the sales funnel, helps in up-selling, reaching out to new industries, and building long term brand value.
Zoomtopia landing page with clear CTAs
Zoom actively asks its users to participate and share their stories for this event. Use cases act as social proof and help in reducing the resistance to adoption.
Zoomtopia introduction on Zoom’s blog
Here is the list of key sessions organized during Zoomtopia over the years: | https://medium.com/thoughtlytics/the-secrets-of-zooms-growth-strategy-1b2486ee8e76 | ['Ankur Tiwari'] | 2020-08-30 14:57:50.578000+00:00 | ['Marketing Strategies', 'Zoom', 'Startup', 'Growth Hacking', 'SaaS'] |
Road to Automation: Release Notes | Automation is not a binary thing. We rarely go from manual to fully autonomous with one switch. Just like software development itself, it often requires iterative revisions, with some craftsmanship and never-enough imaginations.
A case I would love to share is our 8-month and counting journey we took to automate our release notes process.
Writing release notes for the software we proudly make isn’t always easy. Even some of the most popular applications don’t get the release notes they deserve (and please don’t learn from them).
Fortunately, we can also get inspiration from some great examples.
Having concise and coherent release notes sure are great, but they often require a lot of effort and time that most developers don’t have.
Thus we initiated a project to help ourselves to relatively effortlessly produce release notes or at least the materials that save time for human editorial.
We started at the source of software changes — commits (at the time of writing, this refers to git commits). We laid out some conventions to encourage good commit and commit message practices. The adaptation of these conventions alone allows our developers to think more on behalf of the end-users, something akin to the concept of having everyone bearing the responsibility of marketing. And for our objective of automation, this gives us a solid starting point due to having a predictable structure of our commit messages.
The next step was to prototype the core capabilities of parsing out commit messages and constructing a markdown formatted release notes. Given our existing practice of utilizing git tags for releases, we quickly made the first usable version.
The first version would require a configuration file to specify the target project git repository and which tags to compare. Both are apparent areas to improve on. So we progressed it to be a portable CLI with automatic tag discovery that works in any git repository (including release itself).
woozyking@runzhoudembp release % release notes --print
## Release Notes: from v1.4.0 to v1.5.0 ### devops * dogfood github release notes after npm publish (f5718f8 by Runzhou Li (woozyking)) ### notes * `--fetch` flag to control whether to run git fetch (28550c9 by Runzhou Li (woozyking))
* `--github` flag to update the head ref associated GitHub release (21d6278 by Runzhou Li (woozyking))
* omit local file output
* factor out `utils.exec` to perform `execSync` and `log`
* requires `$GITHUB_TOKEN`, `$GITHUB_OWNER`, and `$GITHUB_REPO` env vars
* `$GITHUB_REPO` falls back to local repo toplevel name
The portable CLI nature and its usage simplicity allowed the team to adopt the tool and organically formed a process to perform releases with this tool being a part of it:
Create a git tag (at the time of writing, we usually do this through GitHub releases). Sync local repo to obtain the created git tag. Run the release notes command to generate release notes. Copy/paste the output into where we retain the release notes (again, usually the GitHub release from step 1).
The (manual) process highlighted opportunities for further automation. We introduced an option to directly update the GitHub release notes, which eradicated step 4 from above. Then we started integrating the release CLI as a part of the CI/CD (continuous integration/deployment) workflows of our growing number of projects, which eliminated the need for steps 2 and 3. And at the time of writing, we’re attempting to automate away step 1 as well.
At this point, we’d have an established adoption of the tool, with little to no accessibility inhibition and minimal human involvement to initiate a release. So after about six months of active usage, we took our next step into refining its core capabilities. We added an alternative output formatting that we adapted from Keep a Changelog, as well as an NLP (Natural Language Processing) model for labeling the nature of each commit message.
woozyking@runzhoudembp release % release changelog --print
## Changelog: from v2.1.1 to v3.0.0
### CHANGED
* version - v3.0.0 (b2156bd by Tamires)
### FIXED
* lib/parse-subject - fix t2 when no match by default it to 'others' (3593397 by Tamires Lowande)
* lib/baseHandler - cover single tag and no tag cases (281c4c0 by Runzhou Li (woozyking))
### ADDED
* nlp - add model training process as a jupyter notebook (1c57956 by Runzhou Li (woozyking))
* lib/parseCommits - update to the newly trained sub-1MB NLP model (d7c4a1e by Runzhou Li (woozyking))
We initially adopted the NLP model from a random but lucky encounter and then revised it using the same tool made available from Facebook Research. The model is far from perfect, and its training dataset is still lacking. We already have some ideas lined up to seek a better model automatically.
Today, for some software, such as libraries and tools intended for other developers, we think it’s almost sufficient to use the release tool we made to generate their release notes, such as you can see at release’s releases.
But the ones for our end-users, we would still take some time to grey out irrelevant technical details or summarize out the noteworthy highlights based on the generated release notes.
The still needed human involvements are perhaps the next targets to improve on, and the increasingly available and highly accessible tools at our disposal will only make it easier by the day.
The above was a piece of our journey, but if you can identify manual chores among any tasks you do, you may hit on this adventurous road of automation too. It shall be rewarding. | https://medium.com/locus-engineering/road-to-automation-release-notes-d1c49cc97d9 | [] | 2020-11-23 18:02:12.489000+00:00 | ['Automation', 'NLP', 'Software Development', 'Tech Stack'] |
THE PAST IS PRESENT | That sin of forgetfulness and obliviousness is brought out in spades in Sergei Loznitsa’s masterful Austerlitz (2016), another stark, spare, austere work in the Belorussian director’s patient career, and also possibly his masterpiece. Shooting in long black-and-white takes in the former concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, with no commentary nor score, Loznitsa does nothing other than put down his camera and record scenes of visitors on the premises; I counted only 37 shots (give or take a couple) in the entire 90-minute-plus-credits length, and that alone makes it one of the most stunning, breathtaking film objects I’ve seen all year. If A German Life is a plea against forgetfulness, Austerlitz is a portrait of what can happen when you forget: it presents the death camps as checkmarks on cruise-ship or bus tours, obligatory stops in the tourist circuit where people will take selfies against the infamous “arbeit macht frei” signs on the doors or the ovens.
Just like the Germans became a puppet people in the hands of the Nazis, the tourists visiting the camps are here de-individualized into a shapeless mass of consumers that seem to be at the camps less because of their wish to learn with the past and more because it’s “something you do” when visiting Germany. The callousness may be unwitting, but the matter-of-factness of Loznitsa’s handling, using merely the passage of time within each of its shots, makes it no less shocking; it’s as if the Holocaust, or the very heart of its horror, has been commodified, packaged, stripped of its weight and gravitas to become just another tourist attraction. The title reference to W. G. Sebald’s momentous classic merely underlines how much Austerlitz wants to make us aware of those dangers.
A still from ATOMIC. © Hopscotch Films/Crossover Labs, courtesy of Doclisboa
These dangers are also what puts Mark Cousins’ Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise (2015) in play. The passionate Irish film writer and filmmaker, whose masterpiece remains the multi-part The Story of Film book/film, harvests and repurposes archival footage (both documental and fictional) from the last 70 years to creat a powerful, propelling collage about the terrors and wonders of the atomic age. Scored by the epic, soaring rumbles of Scottish rock band Mogwai’s dreamy score, Atomic is a stellar example of the film-essay at its best, informed by that inextricably British way of connecting serious history and popular culture; a taut, compact throwback to a historical time teetering (as the subtitle points out) between “dread and promise”, but also to a tradition of mind-expanding, idiosyncratic sensory film experiences. None of this, Cousins seems to say, would be possible if the horrors of WWII hadn’t happened, and you can’t untangle its dread from its promise, its celebration from its admonishment, or its past from our present — the long arm of that particular tear in the fabric of history continues to cast a long shadow over our very own time. Forgetting, it seems to say, is not an option.
The global availability of Peter Watkins’ films can be consulted at his official website; Culloden, The War Game and Privilege are available on UK DVD from the BFI. A German Life premiered at the Visions du Réel festival in Switzerland last summer and Austerlitz at the Venice Film Festival last September; both films are currently doing the festival rounds. Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise is out on UK DVD from Hopscotch Films. | https://medium.com/the-flickering-wall/the-past-is-present-74f0ddfde8e1 | ['Jorge Mourinha'] | 2016-11-05 13:50:07.008000+00:00 | ['World War II', 'Film Criticism', 'Doclisboa', 'Movies', 'Film Festivals'] |
Where the. How Glenn Beck Could Help Europe But… | Since May 2014 there is a downfall trend in support for Russia. As Putin’s aggression escalates, things become clear. Sooner or later the only people to support Russia in Germany will be either Russians or ideological fascists and communists with no interest in the facts. It is likely that pro-Russian politicians won’t be taken seriously and will be forced to hide their real views.
So why are alternative media and PEGIDA leadership so detached from the people on the Russian issue? Actually it makes sense if we assume that the influence over the center-right constituency in Germany was seized by a pro-Russian fascist movement called the New Right (not to be confused with American New Right).
For instance, Jürgen Elsässer from Leipzig, who believes that CIA is behind ISIS − the editor in chief of a conspiracy news magazine “Compact” and a frequent guest on “Russia Today”. Or Götz Kubitschek, one of the leaders of Leipzig PEGIDA (the second-largest branch), is also the founder of a New Right think-tank “Institut für Staatspolitik” and a New Right magazine Sezession.
Götz Kubitschek accuses the left of believing in something he believes himself. PEGIDA Dresden, February. 9, 2015
Notice, that when Elsässer and Kubitschek speak at PEGIDA rallies, they hide their real views as much as they can and instead convey quite a liberal rhetoric, to which they unconditionally oppose. The only explanation is that they consider PEGIDA protestors in East Germany unready for their ideas. Political scientist W. Gessenharter notes that “political mimicry” is a common practice for German New Right. By posing as moderates they want to convert the population softly and gradually. That feature actually parallels an integral part of the whole New Right movement, an equivalent of Frankfurt School for fascism:
“[Their] doctrine is based on the concept that a revolution can only be successful if based on the cultural domination over a given society by implanting certain ideological messages through newspapers, conferences, and higher education”. (Shekhovtsov)
What are the New Right ideas? Actually, it’s a disaster that nobody talks about them. These are not your typical “Golden Dawn” thugs with flare torches. Simply put, New Right stands for intellectual fascist traditionalism. The movement was started by French philosopher Alain de Benois in 1968. It has spread through Europe with minor peculiarities: for instance, while the broad New Right movement is neo-pagan and anti-Christian, in Germany it’s not always the case. The New Right rejects economic science and largely rejects politics itself. Like all fascists, they oppose modernity (progress, individualism, equality, capitalism, pluralism), they expect the ongoing “age of decadence” to end with a rebirth: a “new man” will arise and build a new totalitarian Europe, return to the hierarchical, elitist, homogenous, “rooted” and “traditional” values of ethnic communities of the premodern past.
The New Right want to end the Peace of Westphalia, abolish the nation states and replace them with “Europe of a hundred flags” − a federation of tribes, “where the political units [..] should be established in accordance with cultural, historical, and ethnic identifications rather than simple administrative division”. That’s their key concept called “ethnopluralism” − basically, Germany is for Germans, Catalonia − for Catalans. New Right followers can say that they only oppose “unbridled” immigration as much as they want, but that’s a lie. They inherently oppose the very idea of cosmopolitanism because it represents modernity and blood-mixing, of which they want none. Not because of racism, to which they oppose, but because all ethnic groups are equal and each of them should exist separately and according to its own medieval traditions. That’s some real flat-earth society for you.
According to Alexander Dugin, who represents the Russian branch, the New Right is “unambiguously” pro-Russian and anti-American, its members stand in solidarity with anti-American Islam, primarily with Iran. The main ideologists of “National Front”, “Austrian Freedom Party” and “Northern League” also adhere to the New Right camp. Dugin adds, that the New Right account for about half of all European “far-right”. The other half are Nazis with flare torches.
Some PEGIDA leaders are reportedly tied with “Generation Identitaire”, an influential New Right youth movement, that has recently spread across Europe using a good branding and marketing strategy.
Again, this is not something people know about. Mainstream media just makes things worse when they label the New Right as Nazis. When people don’t hear typical Nazi rhetoric from the podium at PEGIDA rallies, they disregard the media’s claims and lose vigilance. It’s very unlikely that even PEGIDA founder Lutz Bachmann knows what New Right ideas are about: he’s a just a useful idiot. There are several conclusions to be made here.
The goals declared by PEGIDA are not extremist and an overwhelming majority of PEGIDA supporters associate with liberal values. There is a great ideological divide between the majority of PEGIDA supporters and the majority of PEGIDA leaders. PEGIDA leadership in large part consists of people from well-established intellectual neo-fascist circles − they saw the opportunity and seized the momentum to advance the New Right agenda and stealthily promote ideas of collectivism, anti-liberalism, anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, racial hygiene and conspiracism. To appeal to the public these leaders are forced to use liberal arguments to such extent that some left-wing commentators accuse PEGIDA of neoliberalism (leftist term for unbridled capitalism, the rule of 1%).
A classical liberal view of PEGIDA must combine opposition to its leadership with support for demonstrators and the original position paper that brought them into the streets. Even if we don’t agree with PEGIDA on everything, we should remember that anti-communist “Solidarity” was a trade union and its members were hardly Ayn Rand fans, yet they’ve made Poland freer. Similar thing with Ukraine last year. What matters is this: are the protestors for more freedom or less freedom? Are they fighting for the right thing?
In today’s Germany there is no politics in the normal sense, there is no dialog about ideas, principles or vision. Politicians pose as pragmatists, nobody believes in anything. PEGIDA started a discussion on a seditious issue that concerns 73% of population − half the country supports the movement, yet the government slanders them all as Nazis. That can wake many people up, get them involved and curious. The discussion that started in the streets and online can trigger a much broader debate and bring about changes that lie far outside immigration issue and sharia courts issue. Thus begins the battle for the minds, for shaping the narrative.
Today the New Right are in a better position since they got hold of a great platform. Yet for protesters it isn’t about who’s preaching from the stage: the preachers will only say as much as the people will allow them to. Rather it’s about the cause, ideas, values and vision, which is a good thing because ideas can compete and evolve. In six months PEGIDA may not even exist, but the people who supported the movement will remain involved to some extent, political life will be more active than it was a year ago.
If the New Right’s strategy proves effective, we’ll have fascism in Europe, Glenn Beck will be proven right. Though, as stated in the previous chapter, until people have the prophetic power, the best strategy is still just to do what’s right and moral. On the contrary, if the New Right’s strategy proves ineffective, it’s possible classical liberals will have on their hands the biggest opportunity since 1870's to turn the politics in Europe upside down and push towards individual liberty and laissez-faire capitalism.
The failure of European socialism is imminent, the whole fiat money bubble may burst within this decade; many believe the Old Media is doomed; arguably the whole higher education system will shrink significantly; the technology will repeatedly prove state-provided services ineffective and unnecessary; the proliferation of 3D-printed handguns may raise the question of self-defense rights.
There can be a Tea Party in Europe because the people are good, all they need is a good alternative, a good proposal, a good vision − they don’t want New Right’s medieval fascism. In Britain the issue of the EU and open borders led to an exploding rise of classical liberal UKIP. In the Netherlands the issue of islamization brought noticeable success for classical liberal “Party For Freedom” (PVV).
In order to make sure that the above-mentioned changes work in favor of constructive forces and not some deranged fascists, Germany (and Europe for that matter) needs more political competition in the opposition today: more voices, more media outlets, more groups that will investigate and expose each other, making the political scene more transparent, providing the public with better choices − or just any choice.
The most feasible danger of the New Right is that they can hamper the discussion from taking the proper direction, that’s why they must be exposed for who they really are. But until it is done from a credible right-wing (meaning classical liberal) perspective, until it’s done in a fact-based way − it is impossible to do. The left-wing media can’t do it because they are imbecile, nobody trusts them, and they can only yell “racism” − which exposes nonе of the real contents and dangers of New Right ideology.
There already seems to be some alternative to the New Right, it just doesn’t have a strong voice yet. The Munich branch of PEGIDA is now led by Michael Stürzenberger from largely unknown “Die Freiheit”, the only political party in Germany that looks like it’s consistent and truly rooted in individual liberty. With 500 members “Die Freiheit” is a copycat from Geert Wilders’ PVV, and Stürzenberger has confronted New Right intellectuals over their destructive views.
More people like this should follow, but actually the future of Europe depends not just on Europeans, but on all people over the world who know the right answers and the right ways to deliver them. That’s us − conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, economists, artists, bloggers, commentators.
In the Soviet Union with total censorship there was only one way to get more or less consistent and intellectually sterling explanation of things − foreign shortwave radio. It was called “listening to the voices”. “Radio Liberty”, “Voice of America” and BBC broadcasted real news and commentary and played western Rock music. Listening was sometimes dangerous and the signal was bad because from 1948 to 1988 the Soviets jammed these broadcasts with 1700 specially built noise generators, but the broadcasts gathered weekly audience of tens of millions anyway.
Soviet military students listening to the Voice of America.
Ronald Reagan in 1950s “Crusade for Freedom” commercial
Today it is vital for Europeans to hear legitimate “voices”, especially American voices, that understand freedom and can share it − otherwise those who seek answers will fall into the trap of “Infowars”, “Russia Today” and other trashy sources and ideologies.
Unfortunately, most American conservatives today are largely detached from what goes on in Europe and such voices sound too quiet. The notable exceptions are American activists like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, who became very influential in Europe for addressing Europe’s problems and explaining them in rational liberal terms. They make things clear: it’s not about race, it’s not about “natives vs. foreigners”, it’s about freedom. Because of the American influence over counter-jihad movement many people in Europe become interested in learning things that are never discussed in Europe: the dichotomy of collectivism vs. individualism, the roots of “repressive tolerance” and leftist-Islamic alliance (Frankfurt School), the benefits of small government (if you’re really lucky). This is the basis for individualistic worldview, which makes one immune to fascism.
Even Glenn Beck could influence PEGIDA in a positive way because of his large following. However, in order to do that, he would have to become less obsessed with proving his past predictions and more focused on doing research and being consistent with his “strange bedfellows” strategy. Beck could support PEGIDA’s strive for more freedom, he could address the actual issues in the right way and warn Europeans about dangerous propaganda directed at them. Make a call to Spencer or Wilders, shoot a video − there are many ways to spread the message, that Beck and his team surely know of. By telling only a half of the story, by maligning the freedom movement in Europe as he did with Wilders and PEGIDA, Beck deprives Europeans of any solidarity and support from a big fraction of American conservatives. The solidarity that is necessary to bring people together, to establish mutual support and help both sides change the world for the better.
Still we can believe in the best: maybe Europeans will have a moment of revelation on their own, wake up and embrace a new vision based on liberty. Maybe they’ll save us all in the end. | https://medium.com/modern-magazine/where-the-wilders-things-are-ea847d2b9d8b | [] | 2015-03-04 17:05:38.405000+00:00 | ['Politics'] |
Financial Literacy Group | With the raising interest in financial schooling because of the monetary downturn felt across the world there has been an increase in financial mindfulness just as Federal and State programs intended to assist with providing instruction.
On the Federal level Congress ordered the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act likewise alluded to Dodd-Frank Act. Because of this Act the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was set up as the guard dog association overseeing the execution of the Acts arrangements.
Part of the obligation of the CFPB is to advance financial schooling through what’s called Consumer Engagement and Education groups. The CFPB works with these groups all over the nation spreading the uplifting news of financial literacy.
Why Financial Literacy Strategy is significant
The President’s Advisory Council defines financial literacy as “the capacity to utilize information and abilities to oversee financial resources successfully for a long period of financial prosperity.”
According to Ron Lewis; Financial literacy is an issue that should command our consideration on the grounds that numerous Americans are not enough organizing finances for their schooling, medical services and retirement.
Certainly on the off chance that we examine the insights as to the financial prosperity of individuals in this country we see some alarming numbers that appear to indicate a radical requirement for instructive strategy across all age groups and sexual orientations regarding finances.
For a long time we have looked to our schooling framework to help give a financial literacy strategy to our childhood. This framework has not given nor lives up to our desires in this space and we should devise an arrangement to introduce this idea to all age groups in this nation to help guarantee their financial future and prosperity.
In request to instruct individuals of the significance of this expertise we should have at a nearby level instructive groups and projects that are effectively open by people in general providing key training that tends to the majority not simply the rich.
Church’s and nearby clubs are an extraordinary resource effort to the community that can have a significant effect. It is likewise vital for little, medium and enormous business to help these associations alongside providing representative projects.
Financial literacy training can profit the individual as well as also the country all in all. The hard chilly truth is we have an economy that is powered by buyer spending and obligation. The key is to have an equilibrium with the goal that you get an opportunity at financial achievement. A financial literacy strategy is straightforwardly identified with that achievement. | https://medium.com/@mstmahfuza350/financial-literacy-group-8719c6a21306 | ['Mst Mahfuza'] | 2021-04-09 13:39:28.110000+00:00 | ['Financial Literacy Group', 'Financial Services', 'Financial Literacy', 'Financial Planning', 'Financial Literacy Tips'] |
Wyze Noise-Cancelling Headphones review: Startlingly affordable | When you really want to zone out, leave humanity or your environment behind, you need active noise-cancelling headphones. Few headsets cancel noise better than these Wyze Headphones, which are also one of the most comfortable headsets I’ve worn.
You do pay a slight sonic price for this trick, but that simply means the sound goes from very good to merely good. The kicker: These phones cost just $50. Until I looked up the price at the end of my evaluation, I was thinking $150.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best headphones, 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.Design and featuresThe Wyze headphones I tested come in basic black, sport low-latency/low-power Bluetooth 5.0, and as I said, are among the most comfy I’ve tested. The ear cup pads are extremely plush, and my ears never came close to making contact with the speaker grills. The adjustable headband is firm, but not too tight, and the cushion for the top of your head is as comfortable as the cup pads.
Wyse The Wyze headphone controls are easy to reach and relatively easy to use. That said, after the joystick control on the Marshall Major IV, all headphone button arrangements seem primitive by comparison.
The one area where I’m now going to be critical of all headphones is controls. The controls on the Wyze (noise-cancellation button on the left, power/up/down/enter on the right) are as well placed as any I’ve experienced, but after the joystick on the Marshall Major IV, everything else seems dated. That’s not a knock on Wyze, just a plea for all vendors to adopt a superior design.
[ Further reading: The best high-res digital audio players ] Mentioned in this article Marshall Major IV Read TechHive's reviewSee it The left cup is home to the 3.5mm input jack, and the right cup houses the USB-C charging port. The outside of the right cup is also used as a touch surface to control your voice assistant. Wyze includes both audio and charging cables, as well as a simple carry bag. There’s no 1/4-inch adapter or airline adapter included.
Wyse Wyse’s headphones come in a carrying bag with a USB-C charging cable and a 3.5mm male-to-male cable for wired use.
I’d like to compliment Wyze on its quickstart guide, which is succinct, but thorough and far easier to read than some of the tiny booklets other vendors provide. Kudos as well for all-paper/cardboard packaging and no shrink wrapping. You can easily recycle everything but the phones themselves. (Although that’s also possible in most locales, if you take the trouble.)
There is of course an app that allows EQ’ing the unit and choosing the level of ambient noise reduction.
Performance (noise abatement and sound)There’s no arguing the efficacy of the Wyze ambient nose reduction. As these are over-ear headphones, they block a lot of noise without an electronic assist. With active noise cancellation (adding a phase-opposite signal to the audio) enabled, they become very, very quiet. If I were on an airplane, they’re definitely one of the sets I’d consider bringing along.
Mentioned in this article Sony WH-XB900N Extra Bass, wireless noise-canceling headphones Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $248.00See it On the other hand, activating noise cancellation slightly alters frequency response. The Wyze headphones sound very good without cancellation enabled, and merely good with it on. That’s the nature of the cancellation beast, but I will say I hear ever so slightly less difference in sonics between the two modes with my Sony WH-XB900H headset. Picayune.
IDG The Wyze Headphone app with noise-reduction settings and EQ.
Sans said noise cancellation, the bass was spot-on, round and punchy without sounding like a subwoofer. Unless of course, you’re a subwoofer fiend. (Is that still a thing?) Separation? They’re headphones. It’s perfect. The mid-range is clean and accurate, though I’d opt for just a tad more in the upper regions. There are just enough highs for my taste, though I wouldn’t say no to a pinch more. Younger ears will wonder what I’m going on about.
My above comments are on the default settings. The EQ seemed to work well with cuts and gain with the bass, but I didn’t notice huge gains in the mids or highs no matter how many dB I boosted. The sound doesn’t need much tweaking anyway, so no biggie.
Run time was very good, but I didn’t quite make the 20 hours Wyze claims. I saw around 16, but then I left them (off-ear) playing at a relatively high volume.
Overall, I’d have no problem using these headphones as my daily drivers if I wasn’t currently stuck on, yes the Marshall Major IV’s. But those don’t do noise cancellation, so I’ll take the Wyze on the plane, and they’re also in my listen-to-recording-mixdowns brigade.
ConclusionAs I’ve said several times now, the Wyze headphones are super comfortable and do a stellar job of shutting off the sound from the outside world. They sound good if not great in that mode, and very good when not cancelling noise. Head to head, I’d give a slight nod to the aforementioned WH-XB900n’s in terms of sound. Then again, the Sony’s are four times the price. $50. With an app. Sheesh. Buy ‘em.
User warning: For goodness sake, don’t use noise-cancelling/blocking headphones that don’t provide the option to pipe in ambient sound in any situation where missing an audio clue could cost you your life. Jogging, strolling downtown, riding your bike? No. Watching TV, listening to tunes at home? Okay.
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/@daniel07030928/wyze-noise-cancelling-headphones-review-startlingly-affordable-16dd18a3a152 | [] | 2020-12-17 06:29:55.705000+00:00 | ['Home Tech', 'Security Cameras', 'Deals', 'Gear'] |
Muji: The Brand With a No-Brand Strategy | Muji: The Brand With a No-Brand Strategy
Understanding the business model of a truly unique company
Muji store in Stockholm, Sweden. Image by Muji
The idea of a company not branding itself seems contradictory. In a world where brands allocate millions on marketing, it’s rare to find a company with a single-minded focus on the product at hand. That’s what makes Muji, short for Mujirushi Ryohin, meaning “no-brand, quality goods,” stand out among the rest.
The Japanese company sells conventional items such as household goods and apparel, but unlike most brands, Muji doesn’t want consumers to feel an urge to buy their products. Instead, as they put it:
Muji’s goal is to give customers a rational satisfaction, expressed not with, “This is what I really want” but with “This will do.” “This is what I really want” expresses both faint egoism and discord, while “This will do” expresses conciliatory reasoning.
To most marketers, this philosophy may seem outright bizarre. But Muji’s success suggests it’s a refreshing alternative. So how did they go about creating a truly unique company? What is their business model? And perhaps most importantly, what are the secrets behind Muji’s success? | https://medium.com/better-marketing/muji-the-brand-with-a-no-brand-strategy-60e4e988ac3 | ['Kenji Farré'] | 2020-11-20 15:01:58.573000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Branding', 'Business', 'Japan', 'Strategy'] |
ByteSize: App Optimization with Flask + React | The Road So Far
Coming from our last tutorial, our component is almost perfect. Users get a beautiful infinite grid photo grid, as well as the ability to search for specific photos with natural language. There are just a few things to do before this component is ready for production.
Right now, the latency for downloading the component is relatively small, on the order for a few hundred milliseconds. Once you start building more and more elaborate applications with multiple components, those extra milliseconds can mean everything.
Opening up our network tab, we can see that our app makes quite a few requests before it’s rendered. Breaking them down into groups:
The React bundle The API request The Unsplash Images
We can use a few different strategies to minimize the size and latency of those requests and mitigate their impression on the end user.
Caching Reducing Media Size Smoke and Mirrors Bundle Splitting
Caching
Very basically, caching works by storing the results of a function or endpoint locally, and serving them in subsequent requests. Since we know that the images are unlikely to change drastically from one request to the next, we can use caching to speed up our service.
Setting up a cache is also incredibly simple. First we install the package with:
pip install flask-caching
Next we will create a new Python file for our extensions to import it in the application initialization (in app/extensions.py)
Then we import and initialize it in our create_app function. (in app/__init__.py)
Next, we need to add the cache type in our config file (in config.py)
Then we can use the extension as a decorator on our view (in app/main/views.py)
The decorator works by automatically storing the results of the last request for 60 seconds as a key:value pair (like a Python dictionary). This stops us from having to request the same data every time from the Unsplash API. Opening Postman, we can see that currently the request takes ~200ms.
~200ms response time
On each subsequent request (within 60 seconds of the last), we can see that the response time drops down to ~8ms.
~8ms response time
Huge.
If you go to run the app now though, you’ll quickly discover a problem. You get the same page over and over again. That’s because the cache decorator doesn’t distinguish between arguments made in each request. To do that we are going to have to make our own custom cache key.
To understand this problem we have to do a little more background on caching. I mentioned before that the cache acts as a key:value store, but the decorator simply takes the route name, not the argument string that is contained in the request. Because of that we need to create a new (non-generic) key to reference in the request to make sure we get the proper response. The code above works by concatenating a string including both the path and the items of the request argument to make a unique key for the response value.
Caveat Emptor: Be aware that caching will be dramatically less useful by the amount that your responses change. If each request and response is slightly different (like lat/long coordinates) the less helpful caching will be as a strategy
We can now implement this new cache key in the cache decorator by using the key_prefix argument (in app/main/views.py)
And with that, we have caching built into our app!
Media Sizes
The biggest problem that we have is with our images. This stems from two issues:
The image files are large. We have to wait for the images to load.
A key change we can make right away is changing the size of the images that we’re returning. Simply by adjusting our list comprehension to extract the ‘small’ image size instead of ‘regular’ from the Unsplash response, we can reduce their size by more than half.
Smoke and Mirrors
Even with the reduced size though, the images will take time to download and render. Rather than having to wait for them to though, we can play a little slight of hand to give our users something to look at while they wait (milliseconds) for their pictures. It may seem silly, but those milliseconds make all the difference in making your site appear more professional.
We can use what are known as blur hashes to generate a low resolution approximation of the underlying images.
This means that we can have a picture in place in under 10ms, rather than waiting until the image is fully downloaded to show something to the user. Unsplash provides the blur hash of each image as part of its response, but you can generate your own using the blur hash algorithm.
Our first step is adjusting our views endpoint to return the blur hash.
Now that they are returned with the response, we’ll need to set them up to be read on the React App.
First up is installing the blur-hash package.
npm install blurhash react-blurhash
Now we will import them at the top of our InfiniteScroll file (in app/static/src/InfiniteScroll.jsx)
While the idea of blurhashes is simple, implementing them in this context will take a little bit of thought and planning. We want to make sure that we only show the blurhash for as long as it takes for the image to load, at which the image replaces it.
Img tags provide an onLoad event which we can use in order to toggle a loaded state which will then hide the blurhash to reveal the image (in app/static/src/InfiniteScroll.jsx)
The sizing of the width and height in the BlurHash element has a bit of hackiness to it, as the GridList component handles multiple elements somewhat strangely and doesn’t size them correctly, so there was a bit of trial and error in finding the correct height and width for the BlurHash component. But with that code, our images are now ready.
Bundle Splitting and Compression
Our last step is taking a look at our bundle and static assets that we’re serving to our users. Right now we are currently passing the entirety of our node modules to the user, resulting in bundle over 5mb. Seeing as we are only rendering a few elements, 5mb is pretty hefty.
Webpack
Webpack does a great job of providing optimizations with a tiny amount of code.
We’ll need to make sure that we import the new split bundle within a script tag in the index.html file. By adding defer to the script tags as well, we can make sure that the loading of both are non-blocking and can be done asynchronously.
The bundle splitting and optimizations done by webpack actually reduce the combined bundles to only ~346kb, a pretty far cry from over 5mb.
The best part?
We’re not done yet.
We can still compress them more on the backend using Flask-Compress. Flask Compress compresses all files in transit, including our JSON responses. We can install it with:
pip install flask-compress
Next we import it in our extensions file (in app/extensions.py)
Then we initialize it (in app/__init__.py)
and finally we add a few basic Config variables specifying the compression level, minimum size and MIME types we want to be compressed (in config.py)
Finished!
With that, we have drastically reduced the loading time and size of our application, by around 50–100x. Don’t believe me? Just take a look:
All of our requests are significantly under 100ms each, and our largest file (1.bundle.js) is sitting at just over 100kb.
Our infinite scroll is now ready for production!
As always, thank you for reading, and I hope this will help you in whatever exciting new project you’re working on.
Also, be sure to follow as next we’ll be working on creating a nifty link preview component! | https://medium.com/@spencerporter2/bytesize-app-optimization-with-flask-react-3f36ad0aa671 | ['Spencer Porter'] | 2020-11-26 20:15:00.087000+00:00 | ['React', 'Programming', 'Web Development', 'Flask', 'Python'] |
Creating Java classes from JSON dynamically. | Creating Java classes from JSON dynamically.
The need,history…
We were designing a new microservice recently and decided to try a new approach instead of using a shared lib for data structures we use commonly. As you know from many projects, some interfaces and classes are being shared as proxy classes mostly with a naming convention as shared.jar/sharedlib… and similar. DTOs (Data Transfer Objects) are typical examples.
It’s another discussion in DDD (Domain Driven Design) having shared libs, but it’s also an undeniable fact as we need shared things at intersections, and it’s acceptable in some level. Duplication is an option but we thought we could generate the classes dynamically for our service. I admit it’s not possible or the best practice for all projects but it’s an exact cut for our need.
a shared lib
Shared libs could be a bit troublesome for this particular mircoservice. Possible changes in proxy libs needs to be versioned and for every release there must be a concord among all. Moreover, we really wished this micro-service be able to serve to any other service or app written in any language, working with any data-set...
An idea, one solution..
REST API is a standard for almost all apps today, and it can be implemented in different serialization ways.However, we also see that JSON is the most common format community preferred. So, if we can convert JSON serialized objects to Java classes dynamically. This might help us in our problem.
Let’s try,
There are libraries serializing JSON objects to known classes in many programming languages, jackson is the dominant one in Java and JSON.NET is the popular one in .net stack.
There are even some websites converting JSON to Java or C# online. If you check these sites, you’ll figure out they create java classes either from a backend service or by using javascript directly. In both cases there is only string manipulation… That is it. Why can’t we do the same !
The solution is quite simple then, we can create the java source code, compile it on the fly and add it into JVM context. Of course we’ll need a custom class loader, a compiler app and a little reflection trick. After all, there is no need to share a sharedlib.jar, but instead the json serialized class will be converted to java source and define our class structure dynamically. In short, {JSON Obj} -> className.java -> className.class.
If you check json to java source converting websites you see that you need to enter package name and class name for your class generation. Import namespace and class name called for the .net world. As we all know, Java Script Object Notation doesn’t give us any class name. We map it to our known classes. So, what will be our className ?
a typical JSON
From the beginning we designed our base objects self descriptive. We have className attribute in our base object and its value is always the full name of the class.
{ className:”com.medium.write.up”}
You got the idea, we always have the package name and class name with this base attribute for all objects in our environment already. It’s basically self descriptive . You can improve it with class version to support versioning based on your need.
Our Dynamic Java Source Map finally looked like this thing below. A source code object and its composite nested members. Source code is a map, because it can refer to other classes and they can refer to others and so on. The limitation here is any member must have self descriptive attribute (here className) or must be an already known type by JVM.
Dynamic Java Source Map
Another important point is you need to start from the deepest node to start creating unknown objects dynamically in your environment and make sure it’s not generated and added to your JVM environment before. To achieve that we need a thread safe object map to store class name and class object pairs.
Precisely Map<String, javax.tools.SimpleJavaFileObject>.
If our className is in this map we instantiate from it otherwise we generate required class and go to upper levels in the node tree to generate the desired root object.
LIMITATION, JDK,..
Since we dynamically build java sources into classes we need javac java compiler. It comes with JDK, but not JRE. So, we need to run this app with JDK. Otherwise the classLoaders we use and the things written under interfaces won’t reach to concrete classes and we’ll face the most famous NullPointerException. This means there is also proxy between JRE and JDK. So, Just run it with a JDK. You will see that it works! I don’t mean it’s not compiling with JRE, it’s compiling in both cases but runs with JDK !
Don’t forget to put className attribute for every object in your JSON, including nested objects.
Example JSON,
Here we have a.b.c.DynaClass, has nested object a.b.c.NestedClass, and that has 3 other sub objects.
Our project needs to create NestedClassFoo,NestedClassBar an NestedClassBaz at first place. Because NestedClass depends on them, then NestedClass and finally DynaClass will be generated. While using a recursive function we need to ensure any reference is not duplicating in the JVM. Because one of the member can be referenced in different classes.
{
“type”:”object”,
“className”:”a.b.c.DynaClass”,
“properties”:{
“className”:”a.b.c.NestedClass”,
“foo”:{
“className”:”a.b.c.NestedClassFoo”,
“var1”:”string”
},
“bar”:{
“className”:”a.b.c.NestedClassBar”,
“var2”:”integer”
},
“baz”:{
“className”:”a.b.c.NestedClassBaz”,
“var3”:”boolean”
}
}
}
Test Flight,
Here is the open source page of the project, give it a try.
It’s a SpringBoot project. You can either post above JSON to your http://localhost:9090/json2java/json endpoint or simply run the JUnit test case to see how JSON turn to java source and be compiled to a class in the runtime.
Looking forward for your pull requests as well,
P.S. Don’t forget to run with JDK and never miss className attribs for objects ;)
Happy coding ! | https://medium.com/@davutgurbuz/the-need-history-c91c9d38ec9 | ['Davut Gürbüz'] | 2020-06-01 13:17:25.598000+00:00 | ['Converter', 'Programming', 'Java8', 'Java', 'Json'] |
This is just a 17 year old high-school student with a traumatic life writing about what’s around… | This is just a 17 year old high-school student with a traumatic life writing about what’s around her and trying to figure out life along the way. Tomorrow will be an intro piece and then I will just follow my intuition on what to write from there. | https://medium.com/@brilliantemilywinters/this-is-just-a-17-year-old-high-school-student-with-a-traumatic-life-writing-about-whats-around-bd779ffceb00 | ['Emily E. Winters'] | 2020-12-19 16:47:16.297000+00:00 | ['Trauma', 'Life', 'Teenagers'] |
Global 3D Printed Ophthalmic Implants Market Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic | Global Analysis by Oneup Business Insights | Global 3D Printed Ophthalmic Implants Market Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic | Global Analysis by Oneup Business Insights Stiff Nov 11, 2021·2 min read
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Top key players: Renishaw plc, Luxexcel Group, Quingdao Unique, Proto Labs, Retina Implant AG, Imaginarium
Segmentation of 3D Printed Ophthalmic Implants Market:
Product Type Coverage
Resin
Others
Application Coverage
Hospital
Ambulatory Surgery Center
Ophthalmology Clinics
Others
3D Printed Ophthalmic Implants Market: Regional Segment Analysis
More Information:
The report includes :
1.) Basic information;
2.) The Asia 3D Printed Ophthalmic Implants Market;
3.) The North American 3D Printed Ophthalmic Implants Market;
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There are various dynamic features of the business, like client need and feedback from the customers.
3D Printed Ophthalmic Implants Market report will enlist all sections and research for each and every point without showing any indeterminate of the company.
If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.
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http://oneupbusinessinsights.com/ | https://medium.com/@oneup4969/global-3d-printed-ophthalmic-implants-market-impact-of-covid-19-pandemic-global-analysis-by-oneup-6625b9090d59 | [] | 2021-11-11 07:02:47.205000+00:00 | ['Implants', 'Resin', 'Ophthalmic', 'Healthcare', '3D Printing'] |
Fight Against Fraud And Money Laundering. The Experience of The Cryptoсurrency Platform | What is now happening globally?
The Fifth Directive of the European Commission Against Money Laundering (AML) was issued in July 2018, it deals with the regulation of cryptocurrencies. New rules are more strict, due to ensuring the transparency of transactions conducted by anonymous parties using cryptocurrency trading platforms. EU member states are required to implement the amended rules in their national laws no later than January 20, 2020.
This June, the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) Development Group published the final version of recommendations for the regulation of cryptocurrencies and the activity of cryptocurrency services operators. It is proposed to oblige cryptocurrency service providers (VASPs), including cryptocurrency exchanges, to follow AML and Counter-terrorism Financing (CFT) procedures are quite similar to traditional financial companies. Сountries that are members of the FATF must bring the legislation in line with the new recommendations, and the local VASP needs to debug the transaction tracking process until June 2020.
Many countries have already added the appropriate changes to their laws: ahead of the rest, we have Belarus, Great Britain, Germany, Canada, Netherlands, Thailand, Finland, Switzerland, South Korea, and Japan. Russian authorities have also repeatedly noted that they will regulate the cryptocurrency market joint with the FATF.
Summarizing, we can say that cryptocurrencies are a subject to the transparency standard that governments are striving to set for the entire financial sector.
Unified global cryptocurrency transaction registry
One of the most important statements in FATF recommendations is the obligation of cryptocurrency services operators to transfer information about clients’ transactions of funds. At the same time, this information includes both transfers in fiat and cryptocurrencies. Mainly, we are talking about KYT (Know Your Transaction), which includes checking the client’s cryptocurrencies for involvement in criminal schemes.
To fit this requirement, cryptocurrency services operators will have to create a database of customers. Quite a similar situation was in 2016 when traditional finances by the international SWIFT system started forming the global KYC registry.
Changes and updates in cryptocurrency exchanges work
All cryptocurrency platforms and exchanges need to “change some rules” to fit new requirements:
- an access for users from countries under international sanctions are being limited;
- anonymous cryptocurrencies are being delisted;
- for some countries, branches must comply with local laws;
- the collaboration with analytical services that facilitate the implementation of customers transaction monitoring requirements;
- a cooperation with regulators, creation of own associations aimed at the formation of common international standards;
- interaction with law enforcement and tax authorities.
It is worth noting that even decentralized exchanges such as IDEX is a clear example of fulfilling the requirements and introducing a mandatory verification of all users. Representatives of the platform referred to a statement by Brian Quintans, a member of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), that developers can be held accountable for illegal operations carried out by third parties using their smart contracts.
New cryptocurrency platforms for Trading
At the same time, traditional cryptocurrency exchanges have new competitors created by large corporations. What is important, such exchanges much easier can get the approval of state regulators, and therefore it is easier for them to establish cooperation with some partners from traditional finances, primarily with banks.
The most famous example is Bakkt, it is owned by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the operator of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The platform received all the necessary work licenses from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Another similar example is the fully regulated Boerse Stuttgart Digital Exchange (BSDEX), launched by Börse Stuttgart (SWB), second Germany’s largest exchange for the trading volume.
Potentially, they can “squeeze out” the usual exchanges and occupy the bulk of the market, attracting new large institutional clients at the same time. In other words, they can become major players at a new stage in the development of the entire cryptocurrency industry.
On the other hand, there is an expectation that the resistance of a part of the cryptocurrency community to the trend towards transparency and deanonymization can stimulate the development and distribution of truly decentralized exchanges (DEX), which at the moment have not gained mass popularity due to the complex interface. True, there is a possibility that the creators of such sites can also be held accountable for facilitating money laundering, as the developers of the same IDEX referred to.
Services helping cryptocurrency companies to feet AML requirements
The need for tracking transactions in the blockchain, together with a check of involvement in criminal activity, contributed to the development of many services, which can help in solving this problem.
For example, EXMO partnered with the world-famous company CipherTrace. The system monitors cryptocurrency flows and assigns 1–10 risk level to wallets, depending on whether this address was received or sent by funds that were previously seen in use by drug stores, terrorist organizations, scam projects or mixers.
There are about 20 similar projects on the market. Both government agencies of various countries and cryptocurrency exchanges turn to get help from such services. Moreover, the sites which belong to SBI Holdings and Rakuten also such.
Many venture investors see prospects in the development of these projects, for example, CipherTrace attracted $ 15 million investment from Galaxy Digital by Mike Novogratz, Aspect Ventures, Neotribe Ventures, and WestWave Capital in early 2019.
So shortly we can expect further development of such services and the distribution of their services at different sites working with cryptocurrencies. At the same time, their influence on the industry will grow.
Blockchain transactions are more transparent than may seem
Governments of many countries are working on their system for tracking and identifying currency transactions in the blockchain. At the G7 summit in July, U.S. Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin argued that the U.S. in 2019 they had enough sophisticated transaction scoring methods to begin the second phase of legislative regulation of decentralized finance.
And the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said that they are happy that cryptocurrencies are used by drug dealers a year ago, as this simplifies the process of tracking illegal transactions.
Curiously, last year Edward Snowden submitted secret documents according to which the US National Security Agency has been tracking bitcoin owners since at least 2013.
Prohibition of the anonymous cryptocurrencies
In connection with all the information outlined above, we observe close attention to anonymous cryptocurrencies, due they are created to increase anonymity.
In 2019, all anonymous cryptocurrencies were officially banned in Japan. The need to implement such a ban is being discussed in other countries like France and Italy.
Some cryptocurrency exchanges prefer to play it safe and remove anonymous cryptocurrencies from their sites in individual countries.
It is worth to note that developers of these projects also monitor the actual situation and strive to meet the requirements for combating money laundering. For example, in 2016, Dash began cooperating with the Coinfirm blockchain platform to comply with the provisions of KYC and AML. The startup announced a new partnership with BlockchainIntel to meet the regulatory requirements of exchanges this year. ZCash team also claimed that with some additions they can meet the requirements while maintaining the anonymity of transactions.
It is worth noting that according to CipherTrace’s study during the first half of 2019, criminals mostly prefer Bitcoins to any anonymous cryptocurrencies since anonymous crypto has more limited options to Buy and Sell. So, talking about illegal trading, Bitcoin is used in 76% of cases, and ransomware viruses — in 98%.
Probability of a banning cryptocurrency ATMs and mixers
Over the past 3 three years, the number of cryptocurrency terminals has grown worldwide in 6 times. But increasingly, authorities are talking about their use for illegal purposes. Spanish police believe that Bitcoin ATMs are widely used for illegal drug payments since they are not spelled out in EU AML rules.
In Canada, the mayor of Vancouver has already proposed banning crypto machines. The local police department notes that criminals can easily establish their crypto machines and use them to launder money. And in Russia, crypto machines were seized in 6 cities at the request of the Prosecutor General and the Central Bank last year.
Also, cryptocurrency mixers are often considered as laundering agents. These are online services that can increase the degree of anonymity in working with cryptocurrency, complicate or make it almost impossible to track transactions in the system.
In early 2019, LongHash website noted that the number of anonymous Bitcoin transactions using mixing technology increased 4 times during the last 9 months. Mixers periodically close in Europe. There are cases when such services decided to close on their own. There were even allegations that North Korea used them to circumvent sanctions.
Moreover, according to Chainalysis, only a small amount of bitcoins passed through mixer services is used for illegal purposes. 8.1% of coins in the mixers were stolen, and 2.7% were used to make transactions on the darknet, another 1.9% are transferred from gambling sites, which may be considered illegal depending on the jurisdiction.
The subtleties of laundering via cryptocurrencies
According to the statement of Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol, at the end of 2018, money laundering through cryptocurrencies accounts for 3–4% of all shadow finances (approximately $ 4–5 billion) in Europe.
At the same time, cryptocurrencies are becoming less attractive to criminals. For example, according to a study by the RAND Center for International Security and Defense Policy of the American corporation, digital assets are not threatened as a tool for financing global terrorism, because it “does not provide proper anonymity, it has limited real-life applications, transactions are unsafe, the turnover is negligible, and crypto exchanges are constantly suffering from hacking.”
What is the market’s opinion on AML policy?
Taking into account the main values and ideas of blockchain technologies — anonymity, freedom, and non-control over the movement of financial flows, I think everyone understands that the compliance with KYC/AML is perceived ambiguously in the crypto community. Also, full compliance with these requirements often entails significant additional costs for companies, and after that, a decrease in resources aimed directly at development.
Market players are aware of the reliability of the site increases, as well as the security of all operations and customer funds, the level of fraud in the industry decreases, and additional security guarantees are provided to users.
Moreover, withdrawals of funds from illegal activities are prevented in real life (such as drugs, child pornography, and more). There is no need in saying that banks, brokers and other representatives of the traditional financial industry are much more willing to cooperate, which forms a favorable environment for the development of new areas of fintech related to cryptocurrencies, such as banking, insurance, and loans.
Of course, the issue of transparency and full accountability in the modern world is perhaps one of the most controversial. However, the positive consequences of introducing AML requirements into the cryptocurrency industry may eventually lead to an unconditionally positive transformation of the entire financial system. | https://medium.com/exmo-official/fight-against-fraud-and-money-laundering-the-experience-of-the-crypto%D1%81urrency-platform-713d29cd69fe | ['Valeriya Kolomiychenko'] | 2019-11-21 09:04:20.682000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Bitcoin', 'Kyc', 'Fraud'] |
Top 8 web design trends | I've collected everything that surprised me over the year in the visual web design landscape, summarized it, and ambitiously listed as “Top 8 web design trends”. Some of the trends have been kicking all over the internet for quite a long time, some — just dipping it’s toe to the water, and some, I think, will preserve their vogue in 2021 and later.
1. Emotions everywhere 😌
From our daily messaging platforms emojis successfully transmitted to user interfaces. Highly used in buttons, modals, feedback reviews, or replacing icons, emojis can evoke a sense of familiarity, positive emotions, and can raise the spirits.
If you are bored of using the same photo profile pictures on your team web page — try a fun way to represent yourself, your team, or your user persona — generate a custom cartoon avatar. It looks appealing and may help connect with your audience instantly. Try iPhone memoji generator or bitmoji for that purpose.
If you need a particular animoji or emoji from different platforms, you can find them all in a comprehensive emoji library — emojipedia. | https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/top-8-web-design-trends-14fb90101426 | [] | 2020-10-09 22:59:42.664000+00:00 | ['UI', 'Design', 'Web', 'Trends', 'Graphic Design'] |
How to Entertain Your Kid at Home With ARLOOPA’s Augmented Reality | Entertaining your kids at home has never been so relevant. With school going remote around the world and playgrounds being closed in the face of the pandemic, you are faced with a challenge of keeping your kids happy and busy at home.
The internet is no longer enough. YouTube is great, but it’s just not interesting enough to keep a child of the Z Gen entertained.
Augmented Reality App to Entertain Kids
If you’ve already tried everything from YouTube videos to mobile games, and are looking for a more exciting way to entertain your child at home with your smartphone, you should try augmented reality.
Augmented reality is the perfect new way to teach, entertain, and surprise kids. It allows you to smoothly combine fantasy and reality together using your phone or tablet.
Are you looking for an AR app that will allow you to work some true magic? Consider using ARLOOPA. ARLOOPA is a free kid-friendly AR app with the potential to keep your child really curious and entertained.
It is a versatile AR app that has a 3D models gallery inside with various cool categories, such as Spacecraft, Animals, Cars, Military, Science and Technology, etc. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-entertain-your-kid-at-home-with-arloopas-augmented-reality-58a7694c92b | ['Nar Poghos'] | 2020-11-20 10:01:05.052000+00:00 | ['Children', 'Entertainment', 'Augmented Reality', 'Pandemic', 'Kids'] |
BALANCE | Crawling around my lifecycle I fantasized a perfect rescue mission, A magic balloon. A magic balloon that would help me lift the strings of my cycle of life and stretch it linear. A magic balloon that would severe me from the clutches of my beloved planet (not so beloved then) A magic balloon that would take me to the kingdom of stars reigned by the moon queen (or is it queendom). A magic balloon that would help me out of the pointless homework and ultra-pointless humans.
I had my fairy god mother to grant me my magic balloon that would take me to my hearts deepest desire (or that’s what I thought). My magic balloon took me to altitudes I had longed a lifetime. I probably have no clue on how to speak of my mere pleasure experience. But I can assure you that it was pleasure enough for me to wish for another magic tool. A magic anchor to be precise, which would help me be close to the bluey-bluey oceans and surrender to laws of gravity (JK maybe or maybe not).
I still had my fairy god mother all set to grant me the anchor that has turned out to be my hearts newest “deepest desire”. A very happy me took no time to release the anchor. My magic anchor took me lower and lower, every second quenching my thirst for my newfound longing.
Alas! My magic anchor wouldn’t take me any lower nor would my magic balloon take me any higher. For my dearest companions were never supposed to be together nor did I have my fairy god mother to help me with this dilemma (it isn’t me being too greedy to let go of one). So, did I hang in there not so low not so high longing for the touch of stars and oceans. Wondering if I were stuck or balanced…. | https://medium.com/@ziyan09shareef/balance-7ca5cdf569c5 | [] | 2020-12-23 16:25:59.816000+00:00 | ['Banksy', 'Balance', 'Baloon', 'Life', 'Magic'] |
Why Breastfeeding Wasn’t For Us, Not Just Me | Why Breastfeeding Wasn’t For Us, Not Just Me
“She needs you more than she needs your breastmilk.”
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To quote an amazing Facebook post written by a post-partum mother. ❤️
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This is me. One week post-partum. A rollercoaster of emotions-mostly anxiety and depression. I’m holding my daughter right after yet another unsuccessful latch with the nipple shield. Forcing a half-smile, thinking about my alarm going off soon to try and pump.
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I pumped every 3 hours, round the clock. I took supplements, ate well, did whatever I could to boost my supply. I cried every-time I stared at the empty bottles. I got anxiety looking at my daughter wondering if she would need anything that could interrupt my pumping session.
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I didn’t feel bonded. I didn’t feel love for her. I felt more in a relationship with my pump and breastmilk diet than I did my own flesh and blood that I birthed one week prior.
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I was not present. My mental health was quickly declining. I couldn’t sleep. I cried and cried.
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So we switched and went full formula. We had been supplementing with formula and I said, ENOUGH. Fed IS best.
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I will never forget the moment when I felt so free and gave my daughter a bottle of formula not worrying about pumping or trying to get her to latch. I felt this rush of love towards her. I finally felt bonded. I looked into her eyes and saw ten years of her life. I saw myself braiding her hair, taking her to STEM club.
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My daughter needed me, not my breastmilk. ❤️
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To any mamas struggling in the way I did, I hope this post helps you feel supported and understood.
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#fedisbest #beingpresent #mindful #mindfulfamilysolutions #bozeman #montana | https://medium.com/@mindfulfamilysolutions/she-needs-you-more-than-she-needs-your-breastmilk-c24c87490797 | ['Alexis Kraut'] | 2019-12-31 16:51:22.392000+00:00 | ['Newborn', 'Moms', 'Breastfeeding', 'Self Love', 'Parenting'] |
What is CRM? | 1) CRM is abbreviation form is C-ustomer R-elationship M-anagement.
This included embedding salesforce automation or extended customer service (e.g. inquiry, activity management) as CRM features in their ERP.
Now second question comes to mind that is this a Software or a Technology?
No, it is not Software nor any Technology my friends. It all starts with the Customer. It is not single customer but many, once slowly your company grows means your Customer as well grows with the time.
Every Customer has Prospect or Lead. So question comes in mind what is Lead. Ok, take a breadth and calm down lets try to understand what does it mean.
Imagine you are going with your Bike or Car to one Big Supermarket of your City. There are sometime advertiser with pen and notebook to ask your contact,Phone No.,Address,Marriage Status, Salary, etc. Just imagine you are there and you are filling this form what advertiser at the Super market person given to you.
What the advertiser given to you and collect the Data on the piece of Pager that is nothing but called as “LEAD”
In other words we can say suppose you have one small shop and so many customers used to visit to your shop but you don’t ask them to write their names,phone no’s. addresses etc etc till that time you will not have “LEAD” nothing but their individual contacts.
2) Each company which you work with may have more contacts.You may be managing information at the contact level as well as company level. Lets see what does it mean.
Now again Imagine you are going with your Bike or a Car to the Supermarket and there are some advertiser outside the supermarket and asking your contact and you written a piece of paper for them. So still you are not the customer for them but you shown some interest into their products. They took all the information about you so you are now into their Database, person who are interested in their products, Now these all advertiser collected Data from Morning till evening and now they have got enough “Contacts” nothing but “Lead” people who shown interest into their product.
These advertiser next day or in the same day will submit collected “Lead” that is all contacts or forms to office. In the office Data Entry person will fill all the data into their Database to contact to these people.Now they have target how to convert this LEAD to Sales/Customer.More customer or Sale means more revenue and ultimately more revenue means Company earn more profit. | https://medium.com/@cloudanalogy.crm/what-is-crm-7180c01b103e | ['Cloud Analogy'] | 2019-02-01 10:40:24.591000+00:00 | ['Salesforce Expert', 'Salesforce Development', 'Salesforce Developer', 'CRM', 'Salesforce'] |
First Attempt on Chaincode Operation in Hyperledger Fabric Release 2.0 | Overview
Hyperledger Fabric recently released 2.0. Among the many changes, an eye-catching one is on chaincode operation, that is, to deploy chaincode on a channel of a fabric network for use. While the documentation provides a very detailed explanation, this article is showing the difference from the previous release using the First Network and SACC chaincode as demonstration. By seeing it side-by-side, we can have a better understanding on the process and some detail behind the scene.
We begin with a quick walk-through of the whole process in both release 1.4 and 2.0. Then demonstration on each release shows the step-by-step on the chaincode process.
Note that it is the very first quick study from the newly released 2.0 code. As time goes by certain parts of the article will be updated, after a more detail exploration is done and tested. Nevertheless, hope this article gives an initial understanding on this topic, and helps in your further exploration.
Chaincode Operation in Release 1.4 and Release 2.0
Chaincode operation here refers to deploying a developed and tested chaincode on a channel of a fabric network, such that external world can invoke and query the chaincode functions according to the coding logic inside. After a chaincode is developed and tested, it is first packaged and installed on selected peers. The chaincode is not useable at this stage yet until the chaincode is committed (the term used in release 2.0) to a channel (or instantiated to a channel in release 1.4). Then the chaincode is ready for permissioned users to invoke or query the chaincode function.
Here is a quick illustration of the flow in both releases, side-by-side in a functional perspective.
A rough side-by-side illustration on chaincode operation of both releases.
Release 1.4
In release 1.4 (documentation), the process is composed of these steps: packaging, installation and instantiation. Packaging step is needed if chaincode is owned by multiple parties. If multiple-ownership is not required, chaincode installation will perform the packaging step.
In chaincode installation, we specify the target peers. We only install chaincode to those peers which will be used for invoking and querying chaincode functions later.
At this stage the installed chaincode cannot be used yet it is not instantiated to the channel. After chaincode package is installed in those selected peers, we can perform chaincode instantiation, a step that makes chaincode useable in the channel. Technically the chaincode instantiation “invokes the lifecycle system chaincode (lscc) to create an initialize a chaincode on a channel”. The chaincode instantiation requires the information of the channel and endorsing policy when invoking this chaincode. Besides, if chaincode contains initial code in Init(), argument is provided here as well.
After chaincode is instantiated, the chaincode is ready for use, and one can invoke (query) chaincode functions accordingly.
With this as the base, we can now take a look on the new release 2.0.
Release 2.0
Broadly speaking release 2.0 follows the same process flow, but makes certain change in commands and some backend processes. The overall flow can be divided into four steps: packaging, installation, approval by organizations and chaincode commit. Roughly speaking the the first two are corresponding to chaincode installation in release 1.4, while the last two to chaincode instantiation. But the terminology instantiation is no longer used.
The chaincode packaging step is to create a package file (tar file), with the chaincode and some metadata of the chaincode. A label is given to the package. While the packaging can be done separately by organizations, it is more common to be done by one organization to create this package and distribute to all organizations to ensure the same chaincode among them.
The installation step is to have this package file installed in the selected peers. As before, only those peers involved in chaincode invoke and query require the chaincode installation. And the chaincode is not useable yet as it is not yet committed to a channel. The result of chaincode installation is a package identifier (Package ID), which is in a format of <label>.<hash> .
The approval by organizations is the step added in release 2.0. In previous release we can let one organization to “instantiate” the chaincode for use. In 2.0, organizations are required to explicitly approve the chaincode. The requirement of how many organizations needed is governed by lifecycle endorsement policy, which by default is set majority. In a two-organization setup, approval is required for both organizations. Ordering service is involved in the approval process as a new block is generated on each approval. That means all peers know the approval status.
When approval is made, we need to specify to which channel the chaincode is to be deployed. There are certain information required, such as endorsing policy, a flag showing whether chaincode has Init() code to be executed or not, etc. This is also the difference from release 1.4 when handling chaincode Init() function, and we will see it later.
After the approvals of the required number of organizations are achieved, the chaincode is ready for commit. We now move to the final step: chaincode commit.
The chaincode commit step is initiated by any organization. The process first requires endorsement from the organizations if they have approved the chaincode. Then a transaction is submitted to ordering service and a new block is created and all peers committed that into ledger.
The chaincode lifecycle is now complete and the chaincode is ready for use, that is, one can invoke and query the chaincode functions.
A note about Init(): Init() contains the code to be executed before any other functions to be invoked, and can only be executed once at the beginning. In release 1.4 the Init() when chaincode is instantiated. In release 2.0, we need to explicitly invoke the Init() after chaincode commit. We will specify the requirement of Init() during approval and chaincode commit. And with this, we cannot invoke any other functions until we have invoked the Init(). It is shown in the demonstration below.
A Note about First Network and SACC Chaincode
For sake of completeness, here is some quick information about First Network and SACC Chaincode. Both come with fabric-samples repository.
First Network is a two-organization setup, each of which has two peers. A channel mychannel is created and joined by all the peers (total four). First Network is well scripted with byfn.sh , which comes with options. For further understanding about First Network you can refer to my previous article. In our demonstration we will not run the default chaincode (chaincode_example02 in release 1.4, abstore in release 2.0) but use SACC for demonstration.
SACC stands for simple asset chaincode. It simulates a key/value storage in the ledger. When first deployed it requires an initial key/value pair. Two functions are defined. Set() is invoked when one needs to change the value of an existing key or add a new key/value pair, while get() is invoked (queries) when one checks the value of a given key.
With this quick introduction, we start the demonstration on both releases.
Demonstration on Release 1.4.4
We will first launch First Network without the chaincode (using -n option). After that we will launch SACC chaincode with focus on chaincode lifecycle.
Here are the steps of the demonstration
Bring up First Network without chaincode Install SACC on selected peers Instantiate SACC on mychannel with initial arguments and query result Invoke set() for a new value and query result from another peer
Step 1: Bring up First Network without chaincode
cd fabric-samples/first-network
./byfn.sh up -n
The First Network is up and running with channel mychannel created and joined by all peers. Note that First Network in release 1.4.4 is using Solo as the ordering service implementation and only one orderer is running. Besides, we see the four peers are running and a CLI is there for our chaincode operation.
We can now begin working on chaincode deployment.
Step 2: Install SACC on selected peers
Here we skip the packaging step and let installation perform the packaging. The targets are peer0.org1 and peer0.org2, as we only use these two nodes in this demo for chaincode invoke and query.
# peer0.org1
docker exec cli peer chaincode install -n mycc -v 1 -p github.com/chaincode/sacc # peer0.org2
docker exec -e CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp -e CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=peer0.org2.example.com:9051 -e CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" -e CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt cli peer chaincode install -n mycc -v 1 -p github.com/chaincode/sacc
Step 3: Instantiate SACC on mychannel with initial arguments and query result
Note that there is an Init() code in SACC. When we instantiate the chaincode, we need to provide the required argument defined in the Init() function. Here we specify key as name and value as kc as arguments.
docker exec cli peer chaincode instantiate -o orderer.example.com:7050 --tls --cafile /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/ordererOrganizations/example.com/orderers/orderer.example.com/msp/tlscacerts/tlsca.example.com-cert.pem -C mychannel -n mycc -v 1 -c '{"Args":["name","kc"]}' -P "AND ('Org1MSP.peer','Org2MSP.peer')"
If we now take a look on the logs on any peer, we see a new block #3. (It is block #3 as we have channel genesis block as #0, and the two anchor peer update transactions in block #1 and #2.)
After chaincode is instantiated with initial key/value provided, we can query the value of key name.
docker exec cli peer chaincode query -C mychannel -n mycc -c '{"Args":["get","name"]}'
Step 4: Invoke set() for a new value and query result from another peer
For sake of demo purpose, we will invoke set() on peer0.org1, and get() the value on peer0.org2, to show things are working properly.
# peer0.org1
docker exec cli peer chaincode invoke -o orderer.example.com:7050 --tls --cafile /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/ordererOrganizations/example.com/orderers/orderer.example.com/msp/tlscacerts/tlsca.example.com-cert.pem --peerAddresses peer0.org1.example.com:7051 --tlsRootCertFiles /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/peers/peer0.org1.example.com/tls/ca.crt --peerAddresses peer0.org2.example.com:9051 --tlsRootCertFiles /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt -C mychannel -n mycc -c '{"Args":["set","name","Peter"]}' # peer0.org2
docker exec -e CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp -e CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=peer0.org2.example.com:9051 -e CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" -e CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt cli peer chaincode query -C mychannel -n mycc -c '{"Args":["get","name"]}'
So we see everything works fine.
Demonstration on Release 2.0.0
Similarly, with 2.0.0, we will first launch First Network without the chaincode (using -n option). After that we will launch SACC chaincode with focus on chaincode lifecycle.
Here are the steps of the demonstration
Bring up First Network without chaincode Package SACC chaincode Install package to the selected peers Approve chaincode for both organizations Commit the chaincode to mychannel Invoke Init() function with arguments required Invoke set() for a new value and query result from another peer
Step 1: Bring up First Network without chaincode
cd fabric-samples/first-network
./byfn.sh up -n
The First Network is up and running with channel mychannel created and joined by all peers. Note that First Network in release 2.0.0 is using Raft as the ordering service implementation and total five orderers are running. During the demonstration we only use orderer.example.com but feel free to use other orderers as well. Besides, we see the four peers are running and a CLI is there for our chaincode operation.
Step 2: Package SACC chaincode
First we need dealing with the dependency (if it is not done before)
cd fabric-sample/chaincode/sacc
GO111MODULE=on go mod vendor
cd fabric-sample/first-network
Then we can package the chaincode.
docker exec cli peer lifecycle chaincode package sacc.tar.gz --path github.com/hyperledger/fabric-samples/chaincode/sacc/ --label sacc_1
A new file sacc.tar.gz is created in the CLI container.
Step 3: Install package to the selected peers
Here we install package to peer0.org1 and peer0.org2, as we only use these two nodes in this demo for chaincode invoke and query.
# peer0.org1
docker exec cli peer lifecycle chaincode install sacc.tar.gz # peer0.org2
docker exec -e CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp -e CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=peer0.org2.example.com:9051 -e CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" -e CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt cli peer lifecycle chaincode install sacc.tar.gz
We will receive the package identifier, which will be needed when we approve chaincode in next step. Our Package ID here is sacc_1:bf57…6399.
We can always check the chaincode installation on each peer with peer lifecycle chaincode queryinstalled . This is useful if we need to find out Package IDs.
# peer0.org1
docker exec cli peer lifecycle chaincode queryinstalled # peer0.org2
docker exec -e CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp -e CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=peer0.org2.example.com:9051 -e CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" -e CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt cli peer lifecycle chaincode queryinstalled
Step 4: Approve chaincode for both organizations
Per the default policy, majority of channel organizations is needed before one can commit the chaincode to channel (see in Application/Policies/LifecycleEndorsement in configtx.yaml ). The current setup has two organizations, meaning that approval is needed from both organizations before the chaincode can be committed.
To approve this package for Org1,
docker exec cli peer lifecycle chaincode approveformyorg --tls --cafile /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/ordererOrganizations/example.com/orderers/orderer.example.com/msp/tlscacerts/tlsca.example.com-cert.pem --channelID mychannel --name mycc --version 1 --init-required --sequence 1 --waitForEvent --package-id ${PACKAGE_ID}
If we now take a look on the logs on any peer, we see a new block #3. (It is block #3 as we have channel genesis block as #0, and the two anchor update transactions in block #1 and #2.)
Similarly we approve this package for Org2.
docker exec -e CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected] /msp -e CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=peer0.org2.example.com:9051 -e CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" -e CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt cli peer lifecycle chaincode approveformyorg --tls --cafile /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/ordererOrganizations/example.com/orderers/orderer.example.com/msp/tlscacerts/tlsca.example.com-cert.pem --channelID mychannel --name mycc --version 1 --init-required --sequence 1 --waitForEvent --package-id ${PACKAGE_ID}
And not surprisingly we see another new block #4 created.
Note that we have specify the option init-required in the approval command. The chaincode SACC contains code in Init(), and we will perform invoke this Init() after chaincode is committed to channel. Keep tracking on this in coming steps.
We can at any time check the readiness of chaincode commit with command (on any peer as all peers receive update of these new blocks).
docker exec cli peer lifecycle chaincode checkcommitreadiness --channelID mychannel --name mycc --version 1 --sequence 1 --output json
As all the two organizations have approved the chaincode, now the chaincode is ready for commit.
Step 5: Commit the chaincode to mychannel
Chaincode commit can be done by one peer.
docker exec cli peer lifecycle chaincode commit -o orderer.example.com:7050 --tls --cafile /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/ordererOrganizations/example.com/orderers/orderer.example.com/msp/tlscacerts/tlsca.example.com-cert.pem --peerAddresses peer0.org1.example.com:7051 --tlsRootCertFiles /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/peers/peer0.org1.example.com/tls/ca.crt --peerAddresses peer0.org2.example.com:9051 --tlsRootCertFiles /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt --channelID mychannel --name mycc --version 1 --sequence 1 --init-required
And a new block #5 is committed to ledger.
Note that we also include init-required in the chaincode commit command.
And again, we can use command peer lifecycle chaincode querycommitted to check the status of chaincode commit.
docker exec cli peer lifecycle chaincode querycommitted --channelID mychannel --name mycc
After chaincode is committed to channel, the chaincode lifecycle is complete and the chaincode is ready for use. We are back to chaincode invoke and query, which is the same as previous releases.
Step 6: Invoke Init() function with arguments required
Per SACC chaincode design, there is code in Init(). As a result, before we can invoke other chaincode functions, we will first invoke the Init() with the arguments required. Here we specify key as name and value as kc. Note that in the command we have the option isInit showing that it is calling the Init().
docker exec cli peer chaincode invoke -o orderer.example.com:7050 --tls --cafile /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/ordererOrganizations/example.com/orderers/orderer.example.com/msp/tlscacerts/tlsca.example.com-cert.pem --peerAddresses peer0.org1.example.com:7051 --tlsRootCertFiles /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/peers/peer0.org1.example.com/tls/ca.crt --peerAddresses peer0.org2.example.com:9051 --tlsRootCertFiles /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt -C mychannel -n mycc --isInit -c '{"Args":["name","kc"]}'
Now we can query the result for key name.
docker exec cli peer chaincode query -C mychannel -n mycc -c '{"Args":["get","name"]}'
The initial value is correctly recorded in the ledger.
Step 7: Invoke set() for a new value and query result from another peer
As before, for sake of demo purpose, we will invoke set() on peer0.org1, and get() the value on peer0.org2, to show things are working properly. Note that we do not flag isInit any more.
# peer0.org1
docker exec cli peer chaincode invoke -o orderer.example.com:7050 --tls --cafile /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/ordererOrganizations/example.com/orderers/orderer.example.com/msp/tlscacerts/tlsca.example.com-cert.pem --peerAddresses peer0.org1.example.com:7051 --tlsRootCertFiles /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/peers/peer0.org1.example.com/tls/ca.crt --peerAddresses peer0.org2.example.com:9051 --tlsRootCertFiles /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt -C mychannel -n mycc -c '{"Args":["set","name","Peter"]}' # peer0.org2
docker exec -e CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp -e CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=peer0.org2.example.com:9051 -e CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" -e CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=/opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/crypto/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt cli peer chaincode query -C mychannel -n mycc -c '{"Args":["get","name"]}'
Again, everything works fine.
Summary
Here is the first attempt to see the difference of chaincode operation in release 2.0 from the previous release through a demonstration. As said before, there are still plenty to deep dive. Hope this serves as a starting point when we set sail in the release 2.0 code. | https://kctheservant.medium.com/first-attempt-on-chaincode-operation-in-hyperledger-fabric-release-2-0-833cab62ba3 | ['Kc Tam'] | 2020-02-03 00:38:10.116000+00:00 | ['Hyperledger Fabric', 'Chaincode', 'Chaincode Operation', 'Enterprise Blockchain'] |
SFIA Appoints Bill Patterson as New Chief Business Officer | SFIA Appoints Bill Patterson as New Chief Business Officer
CONTACT:
Alli Schulman
[email protected]
301.495.6321
SILVER SPRING, MD (Nov. 16, 2020) — The Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Bill Patterson as SFIA’s Chief Business Officer, effective immediately. Mr. Patterson previously served as Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Strategic Accounts at OpSec Security.
“Bill Patterson provides a fresh and innovative approach to the future of SFIA as our organization evolves during this unprecedented period,” said SFIA President & CEO, Tom Cove. “Bill has the ideal skill set and experience to introduce new projects and programs, expand and deepen our service to SFIA member companies, and grow the sports and fitness industry.”
Mr. Patterson spent the last 17 years at OpSec Security, playing an integral role in their marketing and sales management team. In addition to advancing the company’s digital presence and revenue streams, Mr. Patterson previously served as OpSec Security’s Vice President of Global Licensing, where he was responsible for the brand and royalty protection of OpSec’s licensing clients including MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, NASCAR, Learfield Licensing, NYC & Company, Hard Rock Café, and many others. His experience with the sports leagues and other major players in the sports arena, as well as relationships built throughout that time, has resulted in Mr. Patterson’s intrigue and interest in the sports and fitness industry.
“Leveraging his significant experience and many insights, Bill will help SFIA build stronger connections within the industry and form new relationships more broadly,” said SFIA Chairman Dan Arment. “We are confident in his ability to bring opportunities and ideas that strengthen the industry now and in the future.”
After receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Virginia Tech, his 25-year career has spanned the industries of home improvement retail, direct marketing agencies and video gaming with responsibilities including advertising, marketing, direct-mail, communications, loyalty programs, brand management and sales management.
ABOUT SFIA: The Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA), the #1 source for sport and fitness research, is the leading global trade association of manufacturers, retailers, and marketers in the sports products and fitness industry. SFIA seeks to promote sports and fitness participation, as well as industry vitality through research, thought leadership, public affairs, industry affairs and member services. For more information, please visit www.sfia.org.
### | https://medium.com/@sfia/sfia-appoints-bill-patterson-as-new-chief-business-officer-670c2796e728 | ['Sports', 'Fitness Industry Association', 'Sfia'] | 2020-11-16 21:15:10.422000+00:00 | ['Sports', 'Industry News', 'Press Release', 'Fitness', 'Association'] |
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