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How I learned to stop worrying and love the Design System | Build on what you are given
Number one fear, when starting to work with a design system is: does this mean I no longer get to be creative? Will my work be just drag and drop ready made elements from now on? Well, yes and no.
Design systems are often compared to Lego blocks — and for a good reason. They are simple elements that fit well together and can be arranged in a multitude of ways: six pieces of Lego can be joined in 915,103,765 ways and the same is with a design system — you will never run out of new possibilities.
When you are given a set of ready components, you can focus on designing the product on the higher level.
Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
The aesthetic choices were made for you so you can focus on a bigger picture but also… on subtle details.
While working with Elemental design system I found it is surprisingly flexible and solutions built from it can vary — just like from Lego blocks. Working with a foundation of a design system allows me to tackle the big picture in a shorter period of time, leaving enough to polish my designs on a level of subtle details, that will aid the users, instead of redrawing the whole page over and over.
Learn from your colleagues
Sharing design system’s library with other designers can be educational on a technical level but it is also a lesson of empathy. I learn to retrace their steps and form my own conclusions. To use properly what has already been designed, I need to have an in-depth understanding of it. Why this component looks like this? How does this tie to other components from the system? I am asking and answering these questions, learning to form arguments for and against in a safe space of my own mind.
I am working together with other designers at Fortum on new additions to Elemental, presenting our work within our small circle. And this is the time, when the skill to defend design decision comes really handy. There are no smoke and mirrors here — presenting work to fellow designers is different than pitching to a client. I am listening and observing how they justify their choices — and learning from them. Work on a design system is a unique opportunity because conversation is about Design, not about conversion or some product-specific tasks. There is no business perspective here.
Not to mention, that working on Elemental brings us closer together, which is a rare opportunity, since we are all usually working on our own separate projects.
Keep improving
Design system is a work never finished. Creating additions to Elemental taught me a lot — first learning about constraints that I have and then to move within them.
Making informed decisions influenced greatly my confidence.
Although I wasn’t there to make all the design choices for all components, I get to learn from them.
Before I began working at Fortum I did have a thought at the back of my head: “Will the design system limit my creativity? Won’t this become boring?” It’s been eight months and it still hasn’t. Our system helped me grow in ways I haven’t expected and proved to be more of an aid rather than an obstacle when designing usable products. | https://medium.com/fortum-design/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-design-system-7d542eb26ed1 | ['Marta Chodorowska'] | 2020-11-20 09:38:35.031000+00:00 | ['Fortum', 'UI Design', 'Visual Design', 'Design Systems'] |
The Last Guide to Social Media You Will Ever Need — in a 3-Minute Read | The Last Guide to Social Media You Will Ever Need — in a 3-Minute Read
Follow these brutally honest 22 tips to get followers, money, and fame
Photo by Modern Affliction on Unsplash
As the resident douchebag that is asked to give social media advice to every man/woman and their dog — because of a tiny bit of success online that was mostly an accident — it literally kills me to have the conversation.
Dudes in suits want to know the secret to social media so they can make money from it. Their intention is selfish, which is part of the problem.
They call me in and ask the following:
How do we do content?
Do we build a brand?
What’s the strategy?
How do we get customers?
What’s our story?
These questions make my eyes bleed and my tongue slide to the back of my throat, blocking my airway and causing a resuscitation event to occur.
First of all, strategy kills social media.
Second, the word content takes a beautiful piece of art and turns it into a lifeless, soulless, dry, cold, heartless act that blocks the world from ever hearing what you’re trying to say. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/the-last-guide-to-social-media-you-will-ever-need-in-a-3-minute-read-2c7c2723a66d | ['Tim Denning'] | 2019-11-19 23:58:24.863000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Marketing', 'Creativity', 'Content Marketing', 'Writing'] |
AYS Special: Frontex and Human Rights — How did we arrive here? Part 3 (2020-Present) | 2020
Budget: €420.6m (approved in August 2019)
Staff: 1000 (estimate in 2020–2022 programming document)
Frontex own’s standing corps, as provided by the 2019 Regulation: as of September 30, a total of 433 people have been recruited and are undertaking a six-month training. The first 265 recruits should finish training in December 2020.
December 22: A new article by Der Spiegel shows the reluctance of German Interior Minister Seehofer to provide detailed information regarding the pushback off Samos island witnessed by a German federal police vessel on August 10, despite an internal document of the ministry proving that he had full knowledge of the events of that day.
December 18: Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) releases the ‘Black Book of Pushbacks’, two volumes (for a total of 1,500 pages), compiled by the BVMN thanks to the contributions of 15 organisations, which exposes in detail the illegal practice of violent pushbacks of migrants which have been taking place over many months at the EU’s external borders — with full impunity. The book, made in collaboration with the United Left (GUE/NGL) block of the European Parliament, brings the voices of 12,654 victims to European institutions as well as governments, and it aims to hold them accountable for the torture, the inhumane and degrading treatment, and the violation of the right to life that people seeking safety in the European Union are faced with.
December 15: Danish media report about indications that the Danish coastguard patrols deployed within Frontex operations in the Aegean sea will be moved away from the most ‘active’ zones to less ‘controversial’ areas, “because they refuse to use the violent push-back method to force migrant boats away.”
December 10: Josoor, a member of BVMN, report of an exchange with Frontex regarding a group of 70 people, who were pushed back onto an islet in the Evros river on November 11. Situated between Greece and Turkey, the islet “became a site of improvised detention, with neither authority allowing the transit group to leave … Josoor led calls on behalf of BVMN for the EU agency to act. Josoor requested timely intervention from Frontex”, alerting the authorities with specific information. A first letter directed to the Frontex Executive Director and several other emails were ignored. For 48 hours the group was forced to stay on the islet.
On the evening of 13th November, a day after the group was finally able to leave the island to Turkish territory, Leggeri finally sent a reply to Josoor’s urgent letter. The letter outlined that the location given did not fall under the Frontex operational area but that a Frontex team was deployed 32km away. He further stated that Frontex had transmitted the message to the responsible Greek authorities. According to the letter, the Greek authorities had informed Frontex that “there was a group of people spotted in the Turkish territory during the day of 11.11.2020, but they did not cross the border to the Greece territory”, failing to recognise that it was Greek authorities who had placed the group in this dangerous position on the island in the first place. This statement raises more questions than it answers, and represents an abdication of all responsibility on the part of Frontex.
Given the recent revelations of Frontex complicity, and even contribution, in pushbacks from Greece, /Josoor is/ deeply concerned by this latest reply. While the agency states that it places fundamental rights at the core of its approach, this image is significantly undercut by its daily practice at borders such as Evros.
December 9: The composition of the sub-group of Frontex’s Management Board that will inquire into the agency’s involvement in pushbacks is announced by journalist Giorgos Christides. A representative of Germany will act as chair, with representatives of France, the EU Commission, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Romania, Sweden & Switzerland.
December 8: The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) publishes “Migration: Fundamental Rights issues at land borders”, a report which looks at fundamental rights compliance and the correct application of the human rights safeguards in the European asylum acquis and the provisions of the Schengen Borders Code at the EU external land borders, including rivers and lakes. It was requested by the European Parliament on January 30. Regarding Frontex SIR and individual complaint mechanisms, it states:
In 2019, eight of the nine Serious Incidents Reports that reached the Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer related to land border surveillance activities. These are reports submitted by participants in Frontex activities or working in Frontex operations who come across fundamental rights violations during their work. In 2020, by 1 October, the Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer coordinated three such Serious Incidents Reports, two of which concerned land border surveillance. As regards the Frontex complaints mechanism, between January and August 2020, Frontex received 20 complaints (not all admissible) under Article 111 of the EBCG Regulation, six relating to land borders.
December 7: A Spanish media outlet publishes an article in which it claims to have had access to an 18-page report written by Frontex which details 33 possible pushbacks in the Aegean, 11 of which were witnessed by the agency. These possible pushbacks, which are reportedly described as ‘prevention of departures’ are different cases to the ones reported by the media. The report is to be analysed at the next Management Board meeting.
December 2: Arne Semsrott and Luiza Izuzquiza, freedom of information activists, reveal that Frontex has filed a case against them “before the General Court of the European Union in order to force” them to pay over €23,000 of legal fees, after they lost a lawsuit for information about Frontex ships in the Mediterranean. Already on January 31, Frontex had asked them to pay the legal fees.
December 1: Frontex Executive Director is called for questions in front of the LIBE Committee at the European Parliament, discussing ‘Recent allegations on pushbacks during Frontex operations in the Eastern Mediterranean’. He reiterates the defence that the agency expressed previously: that Frontex has no information regarding the pushbacks reported by media; that no Serious Incident Report (SIR) has been filed regarding those events; that the SIR mechanism is activated, national authorities are alerted and asked to investigate every time a suspected violation of human rights is witnessed; that not all interceptions are to be considered SAR events, meaning that they do not require rescue and therefore ‘returns’ cannot be considered pushbacks; that the agency needs to consider hybrid threats in the stretch of Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey.
He also goes into details regarding the reported pushback of the night between April 28 and 29, stating that Frontex surveillance aircraft G-WKTH did not fly that night.
Two days later, Der Spiegel publishes an article in which it cites an internal report to Frontex’s Management Board containing details about the flight of the aircraft on the night in question:
Less than 48 hours after the meeting, it is clear that Leggeri was not telling the truth. Either the Frontex boss deliberately lied to the European Parliament or misled it due to a mistake that was difficult to explain
Following the meeting, several Members of the European Parliament call for his resignation.
November 28: Der Spiegel publishes details of Frontex’s internal communication regarding the pushback of August 10. This also feeds into the concerns regarding the effectiveness of Frontex’s SIR mechanism.
November 26: The Romanian interior minister denies any wrongdoing in the case of the Romanian vessel MAI 113 implicated in the pushback off Lesvos of June 8.
November 23: In a letter addressed to the LIBE committee, Frontex Executive Director does not exclude that Frontex vessels or aircraft were in the vicinity of pushbacks. He minimises the documentation provided by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi and confirms that no SIR was filed following these events.
On the same day, Der Spiegel publishes details on the pushback off the coast of Lesvos that was carried out by the Greek coast guard on April 18. As shown in the article, an internal Frontex Serious Incident Report revealsthat it was followed minute-by-minute by a Frontex aircraft.
November 19: Following a visit to Greece in March, The Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) publishes a report on the situation of the immigration detention system, in which it calls for a reform to the system and for an end to pushbacks. It questions Frontex’s role in supporting Greek authorities at the countries’ borders, especially regarding the lack of monitoring officers within Joint Operation POSEIDON and “about the precise terms of engagement of FRONTEX vessels with boats carrying migrants that have been agreed between FRONTEX and Greece.”
November 10: European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly opens an inquiry as a follow-up of her 2013 Special Report and Recommendations regarding the functioning of Frontex’s complaints mechanism. She writes:
Seven years on from my Special Report, and aware of concerns having been expressed, I believe it is timely to assess how the Complaints Mechanism is functioning and have therefore decided to launch an inquiry on my own initiative.
She asks Frontex to reply to her questions by 15 January 2021 and “to organise an electronic inspection of documents relating to the Complaints Mechanism, including those setting out how Frontex followed up on reports sent to the Fundamental Rights Officer, either by Frontex or by national authorities”. She also asks the Fundamental Rights Officer to reply on “how Frontex ensures respect for fundamental rights in joint return operations”.
On the same day, an extraordinary meeting of the Frontex Management Board is held. At this meeting, Frontex is presented with a series of questions to be answered by the end of the month. As reported in a letterfrom Frontex Executive Director to the President of the European Parliament dated November 11:
As I informed the participants of the [Management Board] meeting, the preliminary findings of the inquiry conclude that there is no evidence of a direct or indirect participation of Frontex staff or officers deployed by Member States under Frontex operations in alleged “pushbacks” in the Aegean Sea.
The Management Board asks the Executive Director to ensure that the internal reporting system is solid and effective in order to allow for an immediate follow-up in case of incidents. It is decided to “set up a sub-group to the Management Board to further investigate the accusations of involvement in pushbacks in the Aegean. Frontex Executive Director releases a statement in which no attention is paid to such accusations. Instead he calls “for the creation of an evaluation committee to consider legal questions related to the Agency’s surveillance of external sea borders and accommodating the concerns raised by Member States about ‘hybrid threats’ affecting their national security at external borders where the European Border and Coast Guard Agency will deploy its standing corps”. Reading between the lines, this call will set the tone of Frontex’s refusal of pushback accusations to date, which will be repeated and reinforced in the following weeks. It is based on four main points:
◆ Frontex has no information regarding the cases reported by media on October 23, because no Serious Incident Report (SIR) has been filed;
◆ where suspected violations of human rights are witnessed, the SIR mechanism is activated, national authorities are alerted and asked to investigate;
◆ not all interceptions are to be considered SAR events, meaning that they do not require rescue and therefore ‘returns’ can not be considered pushbacks. Only emergency situations and distress calls communicated through official channels (MRCCs) fall into this restrictive interpretation of SAR;
◆ Greece, and Frontex with it, considers itself to be a target of hybrid threats, meaning that people on the move are used and ‘weaponised’ by Turkey, turning situations that appear to be SAR events into quasi-military actions, to be dealt with through different frameworks.
November 4: Seven Frontex officers are deployed in the Canary Islands to support Spanish authorities with the increased number of arrivals. Talks and negotiations start today to define the limits and details of further deployment in the area, which could mean resuming Joint Operation HERA II.
October 28: As a result of the joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi, EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson requests “an urgent extraordinary Frontex Management Board meeting on November 10, to discuss alleged pushback incidents in Greece and fundamental rights protection.”
October 27: Frontex launches an internal inquiry into the alleged involvement in pushbacks in the Aegean sea documented by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi. In the same press release, it announces that “so far, no documents or other materials have been found to substantiate any accusations of violations of the law”. The release carries on:
Earlier this year, […] Frontex Executive Director had already asked [Greek]authorities to investigate two events near its islands in the eastern Aegean Sea. They found no proof of any illegal acts in one incident and are still looking into another one.
[He] also alerted the members of the European Parliament of an incident earlier this year when a crew of the Danish vessels deployed by the agency was given incorrect instructions by the officers of the Hellenic Coast Guard. Following the incident Frontex contacted the Greek authorities and the misunderstanding was clarified with the Hellenic Coast Guard.
At this point of time, the still ongoing inquiry has not identified other suspicious cases than those already reported by the Executive Director to Greek authorities.
October 23: The joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi is published. The details of the pushbacks in the Aegean sea of April 28–29, June 4–8, August 15, and August 19 are made public on this date, revealing that Frontex was aware of this illegal practice being carried out by the Greek authorities, and that the agency actively participated in a number of illegal pushbacks.
October 14: Second operation in Montenegro, focused on the country’s sea border. Frontex will deploy aerial support, specialised officers and will provide technical and operational assistance in carrying out coast guard functions in international waters
October 10: Frontex awards €100m to Airbus and Elbit for drone surveillance services in the eastern and central Mediterranean.
October 2: Annual Report published by Frontex Consultative Forum. The Forum remains highly concerned about:
◆ the functioning of the Frontex Serious Incident Reporting mechanism, which has demonstrated its shortcomings more than once;
◆ the continued postponement in the revision of the agency’s Fundamental Rights Strategy;
◆ the impact of aerial surveillance in the central Mediterranean and the subsequent provision of information to the Libyan authorities, leading to increased numbers of people returned to the country to face indiscriminate detention and degrading conditions;
◆ the impact of the agency’s Multipurpose Aerial Surveillance on the Bosnian/Croatian borders, given the documentation of the violent and abusive behaviour of Croatian authorities;
◆ persistent allegations of pushbacks at the Greek-Turkish border in Evros and the low number of serious incidents reported through the Agency’s mechanism, “which Frontex attributed to the fact that officers deployed by the Agency were not deployed on the frontline where pushbacks have been reported”;
◆ the agency’s support to Hungarian authorities at the country’s border with Serbia and with return operations. The request to suspend the operations in the country, already stated in previous years, has become more urgent given the EU Commission’s infringement procedure against Hungary. “Against the Consultative Forum’s repeated advice, the Agency maintained its operational support to Hungary, suggesting that its presence on the ground could improve the situation. The Consultative Forum noted, however, that even though the situation did not improve, the Agency increased the number of staff deployed at the Serbia-Hungary border.
◆ The Report includes and external evaluation of the Forum itself. It “identified some existing challenges such as the high dependency of the Consultative Forum on the Agency’s willingness to seek its advice and to act upon recommendations, and the limitation posed to its work by an understaffed Consultative Forum Secretariat.”
September 23: The EU Commission proposes “The New Pact on Migration and Asylum”: a series of legislative measures that provide the framework of the EU migration and asylum policies for the years to come.
According to the Commission:
It provides a comprehensive approach, bringing together policy in the areas of migration, asylum, integration and border management … It aims to create faster, seamless migration processes and stronger governance of migration and border policies, supported by modern IT systems and more effective agencies. It aims to reduce unsafe and irregular routes and promote sustainable and safe legal pathways for those in need of protection … This common response also needs to include the EU’s relationship with third countries.
It is presented alongside a roadmap for its implementation which covers the end of 2020 and the whole of 2021.
The Pact foresees the recast of the 2008 Return Directive (which has been in negotiation since 2018), a full integration of the EU Return policy with its Readmission and Voluntary return policies and further effective operational support by Frontex:
Frontex must play a leading role in the common EU system for returns, making returns work well in practice. It should be a priority for Frontex to become the operational arm of EU return policy, with the appointment of a dedicated Deputy Executive Director and integrating more return expertise into the Management Board. The deployment of the new standing corps will also assist return. Frontex will also support the introduction of a return case management system at EU and national level, covering all steps of the procedure from the detection of an irregular stay to readmission and reintegration in third countries. In this way the Agency can realise its full potential to support return, linking up operational cooperation with Member States and effective readmission cooperation with third countries. (2.5)
It also intends to boost “Frontex’s access to naval and aerial capacity”. (4.3)
Frontex’s enhanced mandate should now be used to make cooperation with partners operational:
Cooperation with the Western Balkans, including through EU status agreements with the Western Balkan partners, will enable Frontex border guards to work together with national border guards on the territory of a partner country. Frontex can also now provide practical support to develop partners’ border management capacity and to cooperate with partners to optimise voluntary return. The Commission will continue encouraging agreements with its neighbours (6.4)
The Pact has been analysed and commented on by countless individuals, groups, media, and NGOs. Mainly it has been described as a missed opportunity to provide real change in policy direction and in addressing the concerns related to the mistreatment of people on the move.
Here are the analyses of BVMN and HRW.
August 15–19: Two more pushbacks at sea off the coast of Lesvos are uncovered by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Report, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi. ◆ On August 15, the Greek coast guard approached a boat that was close to the northern shore of Lesvos. They tried to push the boat away, then “masked Greek border guards boarded the boat, destroyed the engine, threatened the passengers at gun point and forced them to tie the boat to a speed-boat.” They were then towed into Turkish waters. The Turkish coast guard witnessed the scene but did not intervene for hours. The MAI 1102was located only a few hundred meters away from the refugee boat. The boat can be clearly identified in a photo. A German navy ship on a NATO mission that observed the incident reported it to the German government.
◆ On August 19, “a dinghy was reported to have been pushed back from Northern Lesvos. The Portuguese vessel Molivos was five km away and appears to have changed course and headed towards the pushback before its transponder either lost the signal or was turned off.”
August 10: A pushback off the coast of Samos island takes place with the involvement of a German Federal Police vessel deployed with Frontex. The pushback is detailed in a Frontex internal report and published by Der Spiegel:
◆ At 6am, the Greek observation post “Praso” spot a rubber dinghy “clearly already in Greek waters.”
◆ 15 minutes later, the crew of the German ship BP62, Taufnahme “Uckermark”, arrived at the reported location. “The federal police found an overcrowded rubber dinghy with 40 people on board and stopped it. But they did not save the occupants from the sea, did not take them on board … The “Uckermark” blocked their journey until the Greeks ‘took over’ the incident” and then left.
◆ Two hours later, the Turkish Coast Guard is recorded intercepting the same dinghy in Turkish waters and dragging it back to shore.
◆ The document carries on, showing that the German authorities “sent an e-mail to the Maritime Coordination Center in Piraeus, responsible for the units at sea [asking] what had happened to the refugees.”
◆ In response, the Greek authorities stated that: “The rubber dinghy with migrants on board changed course when it saw the ship of the Greek coast guard and drove back towards Turkey,” and that the Greek Coast Guard used “border protection measures taken to prevent the arrival on Samos”.
◆ In an internal document of the German federal ministry of the interior reported by The Spiegel (article published on December 22), the version of the Greek authorities is contradicted: the federal police observed “that the (…) Greek forces physically took migrants on board” and moved them onto a Greek coast guard vessel.
July 24: Frontex Executive Director tells the LIBE Committee at the European Parliament that the agency had observed and recorded just a single incident which may have been a pushback in the Aegean.
July 15: Frontex launches a deployment in Montengro. It is the second operation of the agency in a non-EU country. Several officers are deployed to support Montenegro’s border guards at the border with Croatia. Operational plans include the expansion of the agency’s presence to border control activities at sea, including support in search and rescue.
June: First ‘voluntary’ return organised by Frontex, from Cyprus to Georgia, via scheduled flight. In July, Frontex will support France with a return operation via charter flights, returning 209 people to Albania. In September, Frontex will support Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands in the agency’s first joint ‘voluntary’ return operation, returning 50 people to Iraq.
June 10: In line with the 2019 Regulation, Frontex and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) sign an agreement to “work together to establish fundamental rights monitors, design their training programme and integrate them into Frontex activities.” The agencies aim to establish as many as 40 monitors by the end of the year and to integrate them within the Frontex Fundamental Rights Office. In reality, the first selection notices for these roles (1, 2) will be published on November 20 (first appointments expected for April/May 2021).
June 4–8: As reported in a joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi, between June 4 and June 8, four pushbacks are documented near Lesvos. In all cases, a Frontex vessel or aircraft is present and witnesses or participates in the illegal action. In particular, on June 8, a Romanian vessel MAI 1103, deployed within Frontex Operation Poseidon, actively participates in a pushback in the Aegean sea near Lesvos, directly blocking a boat with people on the move on board without proceeding with the rescue operation. Instead the vessel MAI 1103moves away and leaves the Greek coast guard to carry out the pushback. The actions are recorded in a video by the Turkish coast guard.
May 29-June 1: BVMN publish three testimonies of abuses and pushbacks from Albania to Greece which took place over 72 hours.
◆ In the first, on May 29, a group of nine people was stopped by Slovenian and Albanian officers after having crossed the border from Greece, threatened with guns and then pushed back to Greece. The testimony indicates the presence of Frontex patrol cars on the scene.
◆ One day later, the group crossed the border a second time and was apprehended again in Albanian territory, by three officers: “one from Albania, one from Poland and one from Romania.” They were taken to Bilshit police station and “they were detained in this station for around five hours. At approximately 06:00, the authorities drove the group to the border in a 4×4 vehicle and ordered them back onto Greek territory.”
◆ On May 31, after having crossed the border from Greece into Albania, a group of 7 people is apprehended in the Albanian town of Miras, just two km from the Greek border. The ‘respondents’ recognised the distinctive armbands worn by the agency’s officers.
According to the respondent, those who stopped the group were equipped with night vision goggles. The respondent said that when the group were captured, the treatment was very “racist”. The authorities kept them waiting on the ground while laughing among each other, which “makes them feel without dignity”. The respondent claims that the Albanian police treated them well, that those who made them feel badly treated were Frontex officers.
… Of the seven who were captured, some tried to flee. However, these people were beaten by officers, with the use of a “kind of truncheon but like metal”.
The group was taken to the police station in Bilshit, denied food, fingerprinted, questioned, strip-searched and detained for the night. At 7.00 h on June 1st, “two Albanian and two Frontex police officers took them to the border area” with Greece.
May 28: In a written answer to the European Parliament, Frontex confirmsthat “sometimes due to tactical reasons for missions, law enforcement assets are not made visible. Making them visible might, especially if combined with other information, disclose sensitive operational information and thus undermine the operational objectives”. This feeds into many reports on the cooperation between Frontex and the Libyan coast guard and the lack of cooperation of the Agency with civil rescue vessels in the central Mediterranean (1, 2, 3).
May 13: Status Agreements with Montenegro and Serbia signed in 2019 are now operative after having been approved by the European Parliament
March-April: Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN), Amnesty and HRW report on the situation at the Evros border. HRW testimonies “describe 38 deportation incidents involving almost 4,000 people, although some of these could be double counts.”
April 28–29: As part of the joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Report, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi, the presence of a Frontex aircraft is revealed during a push-back initiated after a group of people landed on Samos. Greek authorities dragged them back to sea on a life-raft and pushed them towards Turkish waters. Frontex’s surveillance plane flew over the area twice while this pushback took place.
April 27: Statewatch releases an internal report circulated by Frontex to EU government delegations entitled ‘State-of-play report on the implementation of the 2019 regulation’. As Statewatch note:
The state-of-play-report acknowledges a number of legal ambiguities surrounding some of the more controversial powers outlined in Frontex’s 2019 Regulation, highlighting perhaps that political ambition, rather than serious consideration and assessment, propelled the legislation, overtaking adequate procedure and oversight. The incentive to enact the legislation within a short timeframe is cited as a reason that no impact assessment was carried out on the proposed recast to the agency’s mandate. This draft was rushed through negotiations and approved in an unprecedented six-month period, and the details lost in its wake are now coming to light.
The major legal ambiguities are:
◆ Regarding service weapons and “non-lethal equipment” (Art. 82), the Agency saught legal analysis, which confirmed that the 2019 Regulation does “not provide sufficient legal basis for the Agency to acquire, register, store and transport firearms in Poland. None of the Polish legal acts either directly or indirectly mentions the Agency as an entity which is entitled to acquire (possess) firearms or ammunition for the purpose of fulfilment of its statutory tasks and duties, without a permit issued by the Polish authorities.”
◆ Regarding the establishment of a new supervisory mechanism on the use of force (Art. 55), the agency found that such provisions are inconsistent with the standard rules on administrative enquiries and disciplinary measures concerned, lacking due independency and secrecy from the Agency. Frontex add that the “Standing corps being the first uniformed service of the EU will require different treatment in comparison to the regular officials working in the EU Institutions”.
◆ Frontex seek special treatment regarding immunities and privileges. “Protocol No 7 on the Privileges and Immunities of the European Union annexed to the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and to the TFEU” applies to the agency and its statutory staff. However, Frontex is not satisfied because the Protocol does not apply to non-EU states, nor does it “offer a full protection, or take into account a need for the inviolability of assets owned by Frontex (service vehicles, vessels, aircraft)”.
◆ Frontex lacks legal basis for conducting ‘voluntary returns’, since the 2019 Regulation refers to the ‘return’ definition set by the 2008 Return Directiveand this does not cover ‘voluntary returns.’
April 18: A pushback of a boat carrying 30 people is carried out by the Greek coast guard off the coast of Lesvos during the night. Frontex internal documents reveal that a Serious Incident Report was filed on May 8 and the pushback was followed minute-by-minute by a Frontex surveillance aircraft. The internal document is published by Der Spiegel.
April 10: According to Amnesty’s report “Malta: Waves of impunity”, Frontex is implicated in the ‘Easter Monday pushback’. Amnesty concludes that the European Commission and Frontex propose a restrictive position of Frontex competence regarding search and rescue. According to this interpretation, search and rescue is the responsibility of member states and the Frontex mandate only requires the agency to promptly communicate relevant information to the competent maritime authorities (interpretation stated in writing by the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs and by Frontex Executive Director to the LIBE Committee and reiterated by Frontex Executive Director in a written reply to Amnesty).
April 2: In a meeting of the LIBE committee, Frontex Executive director describes the events of March 3, when a Danish vessel refused to execute a pushback that was ordered by the Greek Liaison officer, as “apparently a misunderstanding.”
March 14: Alarm Phone reports of a pull-back in the Central Mediterranean carried out by the Libyan coast guard and organised and coordinated by Frontex and MRCC Malta:
◆ At 15:33h CET, Alarm Phone received a distress call from 49 people … They shared their GPS position with us, which clearly showed them within the Maltese SAR zone … We immediately informed RCC Malta and the Italian coastguard via email.
◆ At 17:42h, RCC Malta confirmed via phone that they had sent two patrol boats …
◆ At 17:45h, we talked to the 49 people on the boat who told us that they could see a boat heading in their direction. Unfortunately, the conversation broke off and we were not able to clarify further details. This was our last contact to the people in distress after which we could not reach them any longer. Since then, we have tried to obtain further details from RCC Malta, but they claim not to have any information.
However, confidential sources have informed us that a Frontex aerial asset had spotted the migrant boat already at 6:00h when it was still in the contested Libyan SAR zone.
◆ At 18.04h, the Libyan coastguard vessel Ras Al Jadar intercepted the boat in the Maltese SAR zone
This means that the European border agency Frontex, MRCC Rome as well as RCC Malta were all aware of this boat in distress and colluded with the Libyan authorities to enter Maltese SAR and intercept the migrant boat.
March 13: Human Rights Watch informs Frontex about alleged abuse by non-Greek forces and asked about its deployments along the border:
All those interviewed said that within hours after they crossed in boats or waded through the river, armed men wearing various law enforcement uniforms or in civilian clothes, including all in black with balaclavas, intercepted everyone in their group. All said the men detained them in official or informal detention centers, or on the roadside, and stole their money, mobile phones, and bags before summarily pushing them back to Turkey. Seventeen described how the men assaulted them and others, including women and children, through electric shocks, beating with wooden or metal rods, prolonged beating of the soles of feet, punching, kicking, and stomping.
The agency replied saying that it did not have the requested information and that it would respond as soon as it did.
March 12: Frontex deploys an additional 100 border guards at the Greek land border with Turkey as part of a rapid border intervention requested by Greece one week earlier. On 3rd April the deployment is extended. At that date, 624 officers are deployed by Frontex at Greek sea and land external borders. Critics argue that this deployment “lacks legal basis”, because the suspension of asylum and the widespread violence documented at the border fail to meet the required Fundamental Rights standards. Among others, Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN), Amnesty and HRWreport extensively on the situation at the Evros border. HRW testimonies “describe 38 deportation incidents involving almost 4,000 people, although some of these could be double counts.”
March 2: A Danish vessel, deployed in the Aegean within Frontex’s operation Poseidon, refuses an order received by Hellenic Coast Guard Liaison Officer at Frontex HQ, to push back to Turkish waters 33 people they had just rescued in Greek waters. Through the efforts of individuals, NGOs and other organisations it is discovered that no Serious Incident Report was filed and that Frontex HQ requested more information about the events only following media coverage, as shown by an internal chain of emails. In less than four hours from the first email the incident was considered ‘isolated’ and the case was closed.
March 1: Greece introduces emergency measures in response to increasing pressure at its land border, among them the “temporary suspension, for one month from of this Decision, of the lodging of asylum by those entering the country illegally”.
February 27: Following statements from the Turkish authorities that the country’s borders with the EU would be opened, thousands of people rush to the border region with Greece.
February 20: The signing of the Status Agreement between the EU and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which would allow Frontex to be deployed in the country, is halted by Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the state presidency of the country. As media report:
At the last session of the three-member Bosnian presidency, Dodik voted against all decisions that were on the agenda. One was the proposal of the Minister of Security, Fahrudin Radoncic, to accept an “Status Agreement between Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Union on Actions Executed by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
January 31: Frontex requests two freedom of information activists of the German platform Frag Der Staat (Ask the State), Luisa Izuzquiza and Arne Semsrott, to pay €23,700 in legal costs, after the Agency won a case at the General Court of the European Union, in which the two activists were seeking access to information related to Joint Operation Triton in 2017. | https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-special-frontex-and-human-rights-how-did-we-arrive-here-part-3-2020-present-3841f1a9e532 | ['Are You Syrious'] | 2020-12-26 16:15:34.433000+00:00 | ['European Union', 'Frontex', 'Pushback', 'Special', 'Human Rights'] |
Black Friday Astrology Brings Transformation: Your Horoscope Today | Thanksgiving is over, and the eclipses are coming
Illustration: Dani Pendergast
As Sagittarius season begins and the upcoming eclipse season looms on the horizon, ZORA’s resident astrologer Ashleigh D. Jay offers specific recommendations and ideas surrounding the astrology of November 27–29 — the weekend directly following Thanksgiving. Black Friday is not only a day of shining capitalism, but today’s skies highlight the issues of secret spending, so keep a lookout for what this could mean for you, yours, and the country. Meanwhile, Friday morning, Mercury (in Scorpio) collaborates with Pluto (in Capricorn), highlighting how you can transform.
Ashleigh goes on to say the following:
Later on that morning, Venus (in Scorpio) opposes Uranus (in Taurus) and gives us a brand new view of our bonds. This is breakup and shake-up energy. What is the other party doing with your love/efforts? This transit can help you see the other parties’ desire/value/resources in a new way based on how they’re (not) being used. This could also bring unexpected money into your world.
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Mercury collaborates with Jupiter, pushing you to think bigger and investigate what it takes for you to actualize your goals and vision. Be mindful of overpromising. This transit can help you sort out the true value of opportunities. This is great for reviewing agreements and invoices. This is also a good time to do a client audit before the end of the year. Is it beneficial to both of you to continue working together? Search through your network to find someone that you think could be a better fit.
And Sunday brings even more news and notes to ponder. You can read more about this week’s ZORAscope in Ashleigh’s weekly column here. Also, this week’s astrology is a good prep for eclipse season, which is returning in December for the last time in 2020.
WRITTEN BY
Data Scientist + Junior Doctor in London, Cambridge medicine grad, striving to improve healthcare through technology and education. | https://medium.com/@lasttime420/black-friday-astrology-brings-transformation-your-horoscope-today-80681811a820 | [] | 2020-12-13 02:20:20.538000+00:00 | ['Bodyfit', 'Medicine', 'Life', 'Health', 'Safety'] |
10 Best M1 MacBook Pro and Air Tips and Tricks | The 13-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models have been in our faces for a while now. Knowing Apple, we expect a new release of a MacBook pro in 2021. But while we await whatever Apple is cooking, let’s get more acquainted with the older versions of what they currently offer. How well do you know your macbook? Check out 10 hacks and tips that you may not have found out about your device just yet.
1. Spotlight as a conversion calculator
Aside from being a calculator, it supports several conversions in currency, area, length, speed, and mass.
Here's how to pull this.
Activate your spotlight
Enter the number and the unit of currency
You get a response that shows you the amount in different currencies
For instance, if I typed $8000 it converts automatically and gives you the result of $8000 in different currencies like euro, pounds, yen, naira, etc.
Similarly, you can convert millimeters to centimeters, feet to meter, and so on.
2. Run Windows on your Mac
To run windows and a MacOS all at once, do it with visualization apps like Vmware, fusion, parallel desktop, or virtual pox. Alternately, create a partition on your MacOS hard drive to install windows and run it entirely on your hardware using boot camp assistant.
3. Screenshotting with your macbook pro
It's easy peasy, with the shortcut of pressing shift + command + 3 at the same time. The screenshot is automatically stored on your desktop.
If you want just a part of the screenshot, press shift + command + 4 at the same time.
With macOS Mojave and Catalina, after screenshotting a preview emerges on the bottom right of your screen. When you click on this preview, the markup window comes up, you can add notes to the image and save them.
4. Adjust keyboard backlight
To set your backlight as you would like it,
Click on the control center icon on the right of the menu bar.
Select the option of keyboard brightness
Adjust the backlight slider to the left or right to set the degree of brightness you want.
5. Optimize storage on MacOS
MacOS Sierra helps you free up storage space on your Mac. It comes with an inbuilt storage optimization feature. To help you optimize storage, upgrade to the latest sierra MacOS version. It would automatically increase your hard disk space on your Mac. To access this
Go to the Apple menu
Select about this mac
Click on the Storage tab, then click the manage option.
Click the optimize storage option. If you need more tips on storage problems read this article.
6. Show battery percentage
Both Macbook Pro and Air do not show battery percentage on the menu bar.
To make the indicator appear, open the Apple menu
Select system preference
Click on the dock and menu bar icon
Switch to the battery tab
Check the box next to show percent.
7. install iPhone and iPad on the new M1 Mack
You can run apps built natively for iOS and iPad OS. That’s because it shares the same architecture with the A-series chips, iPhone, and iPad.
How to do it?
Go to the Mac app store
Click on the search bar
Search for the app you want
switch to the iPhone and iPad apps, tag to see the result of all the iOS/iPad OS apps.
8. Put mac to sleep
To conserve battery, you can put your Mac to sleep by simply closing the lid of your Mac. When you need to use It again, you only need to open the lid to wake it up and it responds fast. Thanks to the processing speed on the M1 Chip.
Another way to go about this is to open the Apple menu in the top left corner of your screen and select sleep from the dropdown menu. but why would you want to take the longer route?
9. Add icons to the menu bar
You can add these icons to the menu bar to access them easily. All you need to do is drag and drop the icons out of the control center to the menu bar.
10. Activating spotlight, dictating, and do-not-disturb mode
The new, Mac model function key rows make keypad shortcuts easy to maximize. To quickly access your spotlight search, press the F4 key and for dictating, press F5.
Activate a do-no-disturb mode on your Mac by pressing F6 on your M1 mac keyboard.
I hope these tips and hacks help you maximize your m1 mac book air and MacBook pro. Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive. Are there tricks and hacks you discovered yourself that you found helpful? do share. Meanwhile, do let me know if you learned something new about these devices from this post. | https://medium.com/@jubileechukwuma/10-best-m1-macbook-pro-and-air-tips-and-tricks-e4e61860a61d | ['Amaka Chukwuma Jubilee'] | 2021-03-14 10:12:24.129000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Macpro', 'Copywriter', 'Technology', 'Contentwriter'] |
The male gaze in the Indian household: a legacy of subliminal oppression | For centuries, men have dictated women’s lives in Indian households and forced them to conform to their notions of the ideal female body. Loud voiced, broad-chested patriarchs have prided themselves in shaping both literally and metaphorically the space that ‘their’ women take up in the household. It’s time to explore how these systems of subliminal oppression have a profound effect on the power dynamics of the family and in subjugating the Indian woman in the larger sphere of society.
In her iconic feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes about how every woman needs her own room: a space to think in and write in. This refers not only to a literal space but also as a metaphor for a larger voice and independence that had been denied to women for centuries before her. Although this essay was written almost a century back, this space is still denied to women in several parts of the world including most of India, where women’s opinions are still controlled by male authorities and their bodies judged by the male gaze even in the intimacy of their own homes.
This idea of oppression in the intimate space of the household is not isolated, it is part of a much larger conversation: the idea that the personal is political, which is perhaps the bedrock of modern feminist discourse. The truth is that most of the oppression against women happens in intimate, personal settings: in marriages, in relationships, in the household, both subliminally and overtly, and how people act in these intimate situations needs to be scrutinised to grapple with the larger societal issues of inequality and patriarchy.
To start a conversation around the perception of women in their personal spaces, we must first reevaluate the words used to describe them. We talk about the representation of Indian women in the media- tall, fair, and skinny with long hair down to the waist; about the twisted beauty campaigns which sell creams with bleach in them to young girls who want to fit into this idea of beauty. But we never talk about the systemic body shaming in every Indian household, the comments on skin colour and our weight and the length of our hair, we never talk about the familial pressure for women to look a certain way- dictated either by men or by older women who either knowingly or unknowingly become gatekeepers of the patriarchy that was forced on them when they were younger.
There is a funny story in my family that I’ve always found rather strange. It’s the story of how a senior male family member called my mother and my aunt “bhoot”, the Bengali word for “ghost” when he saw them, commenting on how these two children (not more than seven or eight years old at the time) would never get married. These two children are now my mother and my aunt, who laugh heartily every time someone brings it up- both strong feminist women who discount the comment as light-hearted fun. Except it isn’t. It’s just one of the countless times they were shamed for being darker skinned because my grandmother was so fair, one of the countless times the idea of skin colour and a marriageable appearance was choked down their throats tens of years before they got married, the same way it is choked down girls’ throats today. Nothing has changed in the way appearance in perceived in the Indian context, either in the media or in common discourse. I don’t think I’ll be mistaken when I say that every girl, sister, mother, wife in India has been a victim in the familial space of the toxic masculine energy that tells women that they are fat or chubby and that it’s unhealthy to look that way even when it isn’t. India has normalized a culture of commenting on a girl’s weight the moment you see her as if nothing else matters apart from the size of her waist, and this is ingrained in every single girl from the youngest possible age, which develops into eating disorders and lowered self-esteem and has lasting traumatic effects on the girl’s relationship with food and her body.
But the larger conversation here is about how men decide which bodies are attractive and which ones aren’t. Men subliminally keep telling women that they need to be smaller and take up lesser space, that they need to be fairer or taller to be married off faster and they use this to hold power over the women in the house: the power that they will never have to conform to the same standard or be judged based on their appearance alone, never feel the need to be fairer or skinnier. The women of India have shrunk themselves smaller and smaller in their homes for generations, conditioned themselves to believe that the ideas of femininity and beauty that men have imposed on them are a natural truth. Urban women even in the generation directly before mine have lived their entire lives in the shadow of their husbands, learning to keep their voices down and their opinions to themselves even at home- something they learned from their grandmothers, who learned it from their grandmothers. The oppression of women is so rooted in global cultural history that it hides from collective memory an experience of not being subjugated by men, not having to dress or look or talk the way men dictate for a woman to. This conversation is more than just power dynamics in households, it is intertwined with toxic masculinity and colourism and the arranged marriage system that treats women like cattle. We have certainly come a long way from how women were treated in the 19th century, when in Bengal women of lower castes were given the surname “dashi” after marriage, directly translating to “slave”. We have come a long way from women being immolated at their husband’s funeral pyre. But these experiences are far from forgotten and have paved the way for imbalances and power inequity in modern 21st-century households.
Nowadays, although my mother discounts her own experiences of familial body-shaming, dismissing them as either “well-intended comments about her health” or “harmless jokes”, she stands up for me whenever somebody in our family comments on my body, which is quite often because of my eating disorder resulting in frequent weight fluctuations. At first, she used to tell me not to think about what other people said- that it is a normal part of growing up in India. But now that she knows the toll these comments have on my mental health, she speaks up for me, telling everyone who comments on my weight when they see me after years that I am now in an excellent college studying my dream course, that I read and sing and am so much more than my body- and I love her all the more for it, even if the fact that she never stands up for herself the same way pains me. I try to remind myself that if I am a victim of the patriarchy, then so is she. And when there is so much silence, one voice becomes a lot more powerful than you’d expect. | https://medium.com/@riddhimukherje/the-male-gaze-in-the-indian-household-a-legacy-of-subliminal-oppression-70e691b0275b | ['Riddhi Mukherjee'] | 2020-12-21 09:14:57.284000+00:00 | ['Body Image', 'Indian Society', 'Gender', 'India', 'Male Gaze'] |
Measuring Visual Complexity with Pixel Approximate Entropy | When designing visualizations, making charts that are straightforward to read and interpret is usually desirable. This becomes especially important in settings where users may have to make fast judgements based on the visualizations, such as in emergency rooms or on financial trading floors. In our recent paper, we introduce a new method for quantifying visual complexity, Pixel Approximate Entropy, that can be used to develop better visualizations in these types of settings.
Examples of visually simple and complex charts.
For an example of visual complexity, look at the chart on right. Intuitively, it is more difficult to read than the chart on the left. To improve readability, a visualization program could enhance different important aspects of the data to make it easier to read. However, current visualization programs have no way to identify which charts are difficult to read. Pixel Approximate Entropy solves this problem by providing a “visual complexity score” that can be used to identify difficult charts.
This collaborative research was between Gabriel Ryan and Eugene Wu of the WuLab, and Abby Mosca and Remco Chang at Tufts. We will present this work at the IEEE VIS 2018 conference in Berlin, Germany during the week of Oct 21, 2018 — Oct 26, 2018. Come by and say hi if you will be attending!
Pixel Approximate Entropy scores for charts.
What is Pixel Approximate Entropy?
Pixel Approximate Entropy adapts Approximate Entropy for use as a quantitative visualization complexity measure. Approximate Entropy was originally developed for low dimensional systems such as time series [1]. Approximate Entropy works by running a sliding window over the data and then comparing the two furthest points between each window and counting how many are under a given threshold.
The following image shows a snapshot of the comparison of two windows in the Approximate Entropy calculation. The two windows are lined up and the distance between each pair of points is calculated. The maximum distance between a pair of points (the leftmost points in this example) is taken as the overall distance score for the two points, and added to the count of close windows if it is under the threshold.
Windowing comparison process for Approximate Entropy.
Intuitively, more random or “noisy” data will have more windows that are under the distance threshold as window size increases, resulting in a higher Approximate Entropy.
In Pixel Approximate Entropy, we first scale the data so that each point represents a pixel, then calculate the Approximate Entropy score of the scaled data. This ensures the resulting complexity score reflects the chart the user sees, and not the underlying data.
How do we know it works?
To determine whether or not Pixel Approximate Entropy is a useful visual complexity measure, we conducted a series of user studies to see how well it predicted user performance on visual tasks. Specifically, we used two visual tasks:
Chart Matching: Identifying which of two charts was identical to a previously seen chart Chart Classification: Identifying what type of shape a chart was showing.
Screenshots of Chart Classification task.
Our studies found a clear correlation between the Pixel Approximate Entropy of the charts and user performance on every task, showing that Pixel Approximate Entropy works as a visual complexity measure.
Correlation between entropy and performance on Chart Classification task. Both user accuracy and confidence decrease to minimal values as Pixel Approximate Entropy increases!
What are some use cases?
We foresee several potential uses for Pixel Approximate Entropy, including highlighting changes in visualizations, approximate visualizations of large datasets, parameter selection for visualization, and guided chart simplification techniques.
If you want to try out Pixel Approximate Entropy, its available in both Python and Javascript. Check out the project at https://github.com/cudbg/pae, or install the package with pip install pae or npm i pae .
[1] S. M. Pincus. Approximate entropy as a measure of system complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1991.
[2] “turned on flat screen monitor” by Chris Liverani on Unsplash | https://medium.com/thewulab/measuring-visual-complexity-with-pixel-approximate-entropy-996d6f5ab3b0 | ['Gabriel Ryan'] | 2018-09-06 00:41:27.623000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Visualization'] |
South China Sea Dispute. South China Sea Dispute Overview | South China Sea Dispute Overview
The South China Sea covers an area of 3.5 million square kilometers. The sea is considered a strategic area militarily and economically. According to various measurements and assessments, there are huge oil and gas deposits below the sea.
Beyond the energy reserves, about 30 percent of the world’s maritime transport passes through the South China Sea and carries about $5 trillion worth of goods.
South China Sea map
In addition to all this, there is a large amount of commercial fishing in the sea. Therefore, it is clear that those who have the strongest presence in the sea will take over a strategic sea route and enormous energy reserves.
The South China Sea claims map by Voice of America.
It can be said that control of the South China Sea will ensure control of Southeast Asia.
Several countries lie on the South China Seashores, including Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, and Taiwan (where China is not recognized as an independent state but a Chinese province).
There are more than 250 small islands in the South China Sea, most of which are largely uninhabited, but the main points of disagreement are Spratly islands, Paracel islands, and the Gulf of Tonkin. When all this data is taken into account, the South China Sea dispute takes on a different meaning.
This is not a negligible or insignificant area, but rather an area that is key to military and economic control throughout Southeast Asia.
The beginning of the South China Sea Dispute
In the 1970s, China and Vietnam confronted Paracel islands in the South China Sea. Vietnam lost, and China managed to take over the islands and affirm a base there.
However, the South China Sea conflict was significantly boosted in 1992 when China passed a law that the entire South China Sea belonged to China. Since then, China has been strengthening its hold on the sea by constantly exploiting its growing economic power, military capabilities, political status, and no less important, the superpowers' weakness.
Over the past decade, China has completed dozens of military bases on islands and reefs scattered across the South China Sea.
At first, China claimed that the buildings were completely civilian. Today it is clear that the bases are military in nature, and the main inhabitants of the islands are Chinese soldiers.
Yongxing Island, part of Paracel Islands (credit: Paul Spijkers)
At the same time, China became more aggressive in its claims to the sea ownership and began to prevent entry into the islands' territorial waters.
In recent years there has been a series of events in and outside the region that continues to lead to a worsening of the situation and the level of statements, threats, and actions taken by all parties involved.
One of the most significant events was a lawsuit filed by the Philippines against China at the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2013 for violating their sovereignty in the South China Sea in the Philippines' vicinity.
In 2016 the court accepted the Philippines’ claim and ruled against China. However, China announced that it does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction, and of course, its rulings.
Simultaneously, the rise of the Trump administration led to a change in the Obama administration’s feeble approach to the region. The US military began sending military patrols into areas claimed by China.
The patrols were conducted by US destroyers and planes and have become the main cause of friction in the South China Sea. Currently, the US is the only country that is not afraid to confront China and challenge China’s takeover of the region.
Will China Launch A War Against the USA over the South China Sea Dispute?
In 1996, Professor Samuel Huntington published his book “Collision of Civilizations.” The book dealt with the world after the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the book’s main prediction was that a clash of civilizations would replace the conflict between the two major powers.
World’s civilizations map, by Prof. Huntington
One of the major civilizations is China. Professor Huntington predicted then that the South China Sea could become a focus of confrontation that would ignite a war between China and the United States.
Professor Huntington’s prediction was very accurate, although there has still been no war. The region has become a constant focus of tension between the United States and China's armies, and friction seems to be rising.
A war between the United States and China over their territorial rights dispute seems like a natural and unavoidable development.
It can be assumed that the Americans will not intentionally start a war but will continue to sail warships in areas that China claims to own. But what can we assume about the Chinese? Will they start a war?
There is, of course, no way to predict the future accurately, but it is possible to try to evaluate.
The relevant considerations for assessing the likelihood of a confrontation
What are the chances of success of a Chinese military move against the United States?
The Chinese success criteria for such a move is the cessation of American shipping in the South China Sea and the adoption of China’s claims of sovereignty over the South China Sea.
If the United States actually stops the flights and the destroyers’ patrols in areas that China claims to own, it can be assumed that no other country will dare to confront China militarily to prevent them from completely taking over the sea.
China, armed with missiles capable of hitting an American aircraft carrier, openly declares that its missiles can sink an aircraft carrier.
Suppose China prepares the US Pearl Harbor of the South China Sea, launches a devastating missile attack, and manages to destroy an entire American Armada.
What will happen next? Will the United States retreat, raise their hands, and give up?
History should teach us one thing: The United States will embark on a full-scale war against China.
A Comparison Between USA & China’s army
For the sake of a very detailed comparison between the two armies, you can click here, but since we would like to take a high-level view, we will focus on several key things:
Army’s Budget
The US military budget is more than $ 600 billion, about 2.5 times the Chinese military budget, which is reflected in a huge gap in naval and air power. The United States holds 20 aircraft carriers compared to China’s 2. The number of the United States’ attack aircraft and helicopters incomparably exceeds that of the Chinese. The fact that the Chinese have a much larger reservist army seems almost meaningless in this context.
Other significant capabilities such as logistics, communications, electronic warfare, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are much more developed in the American military.
Army allies
China’s most significant ally in the region is Pakistan, which has no outlet to the South China Sea. The Americans, on the other hand, have the Philippines, Taiwan, India, and Singapore. Each of these countries could serve as an important logistical rear for the US military.
This is not just a logistical hinterland, but rather the ability to strangle the Chinese economy and impose a naval blockade on China. Much of China’s energy consumption comes from Africa.
The excess American power at sea can relatively easily block the maritime route and paralyze the Chinese economy's energy consumption and the export of its goods, much of which operates in the South China Sea.
History of China’s Confrontation
What is the potential damage to China?
Suppose China decided to take military action against the Americans. What are the options at its disposal? At least according to Chinese statements themselves (https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/10/asia/china-missiles-south-china-sea-intl/index.html), they would choose to launch missiles and sink an aircraft carrier.
There is no doubt that this is a serious military attack that will bring down thousands of American soldiers, fighter planes, missiles, and the aircraft carrier itself.
Apart from this, the Chinese have no other military options. It is possible, of course, to imagine a ballistic missile attack on the United States. Still, this possibility seems completely unrealistic and will only be realistic in a full-scale war between the two countries.
Suppose China actually sunk an American aircraft carrier. What results can China expect from such a move?
From the Chinese point of view, the goal of such a move would be to deter the Americans from repeatedly infiltrating what the Chinese see as their territory and finally eliminating any military challenge to China’s claims in the South China Sea. If the United States were to no longer position more challenges, the Philippines or Vietnam would not do so either.
But is it really likely that the American aircraft carrier ring will cause the Americans to tuck their tail and leave the South China Sea?
Maybe.
But if we look at history, the likelihood of an unacceptable military coup for China, leading to economic disaster and perhaps the fall of the communist regime, is more likely.
Unlike Europe, the United States has never been passive or submissive in defending what it saw as its most important interests. Examples are abundant.
Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq invasion, and the latest examples are the disproportionate response to the big terror attack on the Twin Towers.
The United States destroyed two states, Iraq and Afghanistan, out of a desire for revenge against those who harmed it.
In other words, China would actually risk a disproportionate response, for example:
The elimination of its naval force
Destruction of main ports and airports
Destruction of government buildings and symbols of the Communist Party
The imposition of a prolonged naval blockade and its economic paralysis
Destruction of all naval bases China has built in the South China Sea, removing Chinese presence in the South China Sea (This is a possible US response in consideration of the logic of a Chinese assault against the USA)
Infrastructure destruction (energy, water, military, government)
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Chinese were very wrong in assessing their power and underestimating Britain's power and then Japan.
China paid for these mistakes in full. It can be said that it was only after World War II that China began to experience full independence again.
Can China make the same mistake again and underestimate the USA's excess of power?
We shall assume carefully that the answer to this question is not rhetorical. Since the death of Mao Zedong, the Chinese have proved one thing: they have a vision and a clear strategy updated every five years through the five-year plans. They are rational, goal-oriented, and they are very determined.
So what is China’s strategy?
China’s Strategy — Walking On the Threshold
To understand China’s strategy, it is important to understand how China views itself and what is perceived by China and its citizens as the essential thing for China.
What is the ethos of the Chinese people (most of them — except for small minorities)?
One Emperor Under The Sky
If we were to look at Chinese history and choose one point as the most significant landmark in Chinese history, we would choose 221 BC as the most important year in China's history.
In that year, Emperor Qin, after whom China was called, succeeded in uniting the countries that had made up China and fought for centuries into one state (not in the modern sense, of course) under one imperial rule.
The reign of the Emperor of China lasted only a short time, 14 years, and during those years, Emperor Qin acted to unite China.
Chinese unity and the need for one emperor to rule under the sky in China were then burned into the Chinese national consciousness and continued to this day.
Thus, one can understand how Taiwan and China see each other as original China. They do not challenge the unity of China, but only the representation of this unity.
Since 221 BC, during periods when there was one powerful dynasty that ruled and during transitional periods of dying dynasties and new dynasties, the ethos of one emperor under the sky was always dominant in China.
Middle Earth
China has always perceived itself as a central power. It saw itself as the center of the world and the other peoples as culturally, politically, administratively, and intellectually subordinate.
Middle earth, an ancient world map, was drawn by Jesuit missioners.
Thus, China maintained its political relations with many countries in East Asia. The connection was based on delegates who came to visit the emperor’s court (after receiving approval, of course), brought gifts with them, received gifts from the Chinese emperor, and was allowed to stay in China for a while to learn what China had to offer.
It was also how the Chinese treated Britain without understanding the risk and irrelevance of this perception and approach when dealing with the Western powers.
In the Chinese language, China is called Zhong Guo (中国), the middle earth. China is in the center of the world and other countries around it.
The values of Confucianism — Harmony, and Hierarchy
During the Mao Zedong period, China suppressed the Chinese. An all-out war against Chinese culture was declared. The war ended after the death of Mao Zedong, and since then, China has been returning to the values of Confucianism that have characterized it for thousands of years.
Over 500 Confucius Institutes have been established around the world to spread the culture of China.
What are the basic values of Confucianism?
If you summarize them, then it is about hierarchy and harmony.
The hierarchy is based on five relationships defined by Confucius, and in each relationship, there is a senior and junior.
There are no two equals. For example, the older man is senior to the young man. The father is senior to the son. The husband is a senior to his wife.
If human relations are to be cast into international relations, then it is clear that China is more important than Vietnam or the Philippines, or any other country in the region because of its size, its antiquity, and its strength.
Harmony — When each person knows his role, a harmonious society is created. When people do not know their role and try to be what they are not supposed to be, social disorder begins to form.
Confucius spoke of relationships between people, but this idea also applies to international relations. A junior state that tries to be a senior and refuses to accept the larger and stronger country's prestige will cause an international disorder.
Therefore, every person and every company or country must recognize their role and their place to achieve harmony.
The Prospect of a Confrontation in the South China Sea
Now that we have briefly reviewed the military issue, potential damage, and some of China’s major ethos, is it possibly better to understand China’s strategy in the South China Sea?
We assume the answer is yes, but this is, of course, only an estimation. Reality has its own rules, and one incident that spins out of control can completely change the game. Assuming that both sides will manage the South China Sea's territorial struggle, we shall assume that China will continue to walk on the threshold while the threshold rises slightly each time.
They will not dare to make any dramatic war moves, such as the aircraft carrier ring from rational thinking. They might engage in warning fire or maybe light exchanges of fire, but not the aircraft carrier ring.
The price that China might pay in such a case would set its economy back by decades, undermine Communist Party control, encourage social unrest within China, and dismantle strategic alliances that China has built with great effort in the last twenty years in Asia and South America.
But the more ironic part of such an operation could be an American attack that would destroy all the naval bases China had built in the South China Sea with great effort.
In other words, rationally, China has so much to lose in the event of wartime action against the United States that this alone is sufficient to decide the scale of the assessment.
Also, China, by nature, is not a war-seeker. Its past includes many internal wars even before it was founded (the warring stated some 2,500 years ago). Since then, especially during the periods of decline of the dynasties, it includes very few external wars.
The Mongol Yuan Dynasty led two attempts to invade Japan in the 13th century. Other wars (opium wars with Britain) broke out in the nineteenth century against Britain due to the opium import into China Britain to improve its trade balance with China.
China was dragged into a war with Japan following the Japanese provocations in Korea. During the 20th century, China was involved in World War II and war with India on Arunachal Pradesh in the Himalayas, an area claimed by China.
If China’s history is compared to any other Western country's history, there is no doubt that China is essentially a peace-seeking nation. Yet, it has great ambitions to return to its status as Middle-earth, the great empire, and the world's greatest power to which everyone aspires.
In this context, China views itself as a Confucian. From China’s standpoint, its size, economic, military, and political power make it a more important country than others. So, the other countries must recognize this and respect China.
As Confucius said, when everyone knows his place, there will be harmony. When each country knows its place (senior or junior), there will be harmony, that is, peace. | https://eastasiancultures.medium.com/south-china-sea-dispute-2019-ab198205d887 | ['East Asian Cultures'] | 2020-11-25 13:48:24.662000+00:00 | ['South China Sea Dispute', 'China', 'South China Sea', 'China Us Trade War', 'China Trends'] |
Mythbusting 5G | “All lies and jest, still the man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” — Paul Simon
The wildest 5G network conspiracies circulate the internet. I will not take your valuable time by addressing them.
Most news articles, expert reviews focus on a specific area of the 5G society. The idea is to persuade you of their vision of the 5G world. If you take time to do a few Google searches, you will know that science isn’t conclusive on the potential risks of 5G.
To give you an overview of the wide variety of ideas on what 5G implies for humanity, I have grouped several expert views from different areas, under three seemingly ungrounded statements that circulate the internet.
This blogpost has to be read as a teaser for self-inquiry about the 5G topic. I am well aware that its difficult to say anything meaningful if I include multiple perspectives. But in a globalized world, someone has to put the puzzle together.
In between the myth-busting, I will challenge you to reflect on your position. Because the implementation of the 5G network will transform the way, we think as a species about what it means to be human in a digital world.
Eventually, you will need to position yourself in this ongoing debate. So I recommend you — educate yourself.
Myth#1. — 5G radiation is dangerous for the body
Founding Father
Bill.P. Curry, a consultant, and physicist, published in 2000 this graph to show that tissue damage increases with the rising frequency of radio waves.
Sadly, he failed to account for the shielding effect of human skin.
According to science journalist and senior writer at the New York Times, William J. Broad, fearmongering websites picked up Curry’s research and assumed the correlation between cancer and cellphones. Besides all the conspiracies that sprung, even some lawsuits used this graph to make insubstantial claims.
Bouncing Off
To elaborate, why 5G isn’t so dangerous for the body, we have to make a stop at physics to explain frequency.
If you jump on a trampoline, you get bounced back up. Your mass is denser than the trampoline mat. Else you would fall on the ground.
Now imagine that your skin is the trampoline’s mat, and the sunlight is the jumper. When the light of the sun touches your arms skin, it bounces back into your eyes. If the light would get absorbed, you couldn’t see your body parts. Hence no sunlight can reach through your skin to reach the bones. Take a good look at the next image.
According to David Robert Grimes, a cancer researcher and physicist, we should not fall prey to 5G scaremongering. To put 5g in perspective compared to ionizing radiation, which is detrimental to our health, capable of damaging DNA and killing;
The weakest visible light is more than 17,000 times more energetic than the highest-energy 5G photon possible.
In other words, 5G rays are not ionizing, so rationalists would argue that 5G does not pose any risks.
But this technology is still relatively new. We have no idea about the long term physical effects of exposing skin to frequencies of the 4G and 5G networks.
Mental Aftermath
Whereas most activists focus on potential health and environmental risks, I think people should focus on the information overload caused by the internet.
With faster upload speeds of the 5G and the ongoing globalization process, I assume people will be bombarded with even more information very day. Nowadays, I find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between opinion, fact, and lies by omission.
Does humanity drown in the abundance of knowledge?
Balance
I believe technology isn’t bad or good. I speculate that without the 4G network, we wouldn’t have had the Arabic Spring, Me Too, and Black Lives Matter movement. Also, digital nomadism, online freelancing, dropshipping, growth hacking, and digital marketing wouldn’t have evolved. On average, the world would be worse off.
Of course, there are pitfalls of this digitalization process, like the-always-available -mentality, FOMO, cyberbullying, burnouts, fake news, and remote hacking. Light doesn’t exist without its shade and vice versa.
Likewise, the 5G network will have fantastic potential and dark undertones.
Conclusion
The myth that 5G Radiation is dangerous for health is partially plausible. According to the common sense of science, the potential physical risk of 5G is often exaggerated. However, we lack research on the long term effects of low-frequency radiation exposure to the skin.
I don’t have a clear image of how a 5G civilization operates. Thus I can only hypothesize that humanity can’t cope with an information overload.
Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash
Myth #2–5G makes 4G obsolete.
Network features
The efficiency of a network depends on speed, latency, and coverage.
Speed is the number of milliseconds it takes to download information from a server to your cellphone. On average, the download speed is 10 to 50 Mbps(megabits per second) on a 4G network.
Netflix recommends 25 Mbps for Ulta HD, but it only needs 5 Mbps for HD streaming. 5G aims to hit 50Mbps as an average minimum. If you use your phone network to Chromecast a Netflix Or Amazone Prime tv show, you know that 4G is already excellent at streaming HD.
The internet of things
The internet of things is a network where every object communicates with each other for optimal efficiency.
In our current 4G world, the latency or upload speed of a network is 50 milliseconds. 5G has the potential to drop that latency to 1 ms.
For context, the brain processes images in at least 10 ms. To realize the world of the internet of things, which includes self-driving traffic, cloud gaming, and immersive virtual reality — low latency is vital.
Coverage
The price of a high latency network is that the bandwidth is much shorter than the 4g network. In layman terms, every hundred meters, you need a new antenna. The signal doesn’t travel far.
According to RCR Wireless News, South Korean KT, provider of the network of the 2018 Winter Olympic games in Peyeong Chang, needed 46 antennas for the 4G infrastructure and 212 for the 5G network.
Disadvantage
Because the frequency of the 5G network is slightly higher compared to 4G, it cannot penetrate solid objects easily, like cars, trees, and walls.
One valid argument against the 5G network posed by a British MP, Geraint Davies:
It is ridiculous to clear away the trees for better efficiency of the 5G network, when you have ambitions for zero carbon emissions to slow down climate change.
Integration
Because both networks have their strengths, the 5G network functions as an extension of the already existing 4G infrastructure. Large 4G antennae are connected to smaller 5G antenna’s to get the best of both worlds.
Conclusion
The myth that 5G makes 4G obsolete is busted. Both the 4G and 5G networks will continue to exist as they compliment each other.
Myth#3–5G makes internet surveillance easier
Before we dive into politics, there are three different aspects of internet security: privacy laws, encryption of data, vulnerability to hacking.
Privacy Regulation
Most privacy legislature is normative. The basic idea is protection against corporate interests to abuse the insights after the analysis of your data. But some laws give governments the ability to spy on other countries.
I find it hypocritical when you agree as a society that spying on your civilians is unethical. Still, under the motto of self-defense of the nation, a government may spy on foreign people.
China
According to Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay, a data consultant at Deloitte with a Ph.D. in comparative law,
China data privacy laws follow allong the lines of the European GDPR, and diverges from the U.S., which does not afford the same level of protection and for example allows internet providers to sell users’ data without their consent to this purpose.
Although the Chinese are strengthening the protection of the digital identity against private entities and they also increase of government’s access to personal data, as there is still no significant privacy protection against government intrusion.
China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which says organizations must “support, co-operate with and collaborate in national intelligence work,” means that Beijing could force any company like Huawei to do its bidding.
USA
Laura Hautala, a staff reporter at Cnet, thinks that the PRISM and Upstream spy programs were renewed when Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Ac passed both houses of Congress and President Donald Trump in 2018.
Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize the targeting of persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States but is limited to targeting non-U.S. persons.
The PRISM and Upstream programs exist to collect online communications of foreigners outside the US. Prism takes the communications directly from internet services like email providers and video chat programs, and Upstream taps into the infrastructure of the internet to pull in the communications while they’re in transit.
Both China and the USA like to point fingers to the lack of privacy. Both are guilty of the crime exploiting digital identities by wiretapping the internet.
Encryption
Forbes Technology Council Member, Andy Pury, argues that the 5G network 256 bits roaming encryption will be better than the current standard of 128 bits of the 4G network.
Blurring the lines
One concern is that the boundary between the radio access network (RAN) and the network core will start to vanish as enhanced computing power moves closer to the network edge.
The core is the network’s brain, which controls authentication, encryption to sensitive customer data. Alternatively, the RAN is the network’s arms and legs.
It is the place at the network’s outer edge, where it receives signals from smartphones and other devices and transmits them back to the core, using cell phone towers or base stations.
Source = Oreilly
According to Heavy Reading, the research division of B2B digital media platform Light Reading “to deliver services over a 5G RAN, requires a system architecture and core network.” Hence any mobile technology that doesn’t include this separation would not be compatible with our internet network.
Hacker proof
Rest assured that most telecommunications operators are advised to use multiple vendors for encryption.
A friend of mine who is a cloud engineer ensured me that most companies minimize the danger of a hack by storing personal data in multiple cloud databases — each uses a different entree key and another authentication system. Even if a hacker collective would succeed, they can’t link the dataset to the users or vise versa.
Vulnerability
There are a lot of different perspectives on the vulnerability of the 5G network. So I will address three controversial views.
Loopholes
Senator Mark Warner says:
” Any supposedly safe Chinese product is one firmware update away from being an insecure Chinese product.
Foreign companies seem more challenging to trust because they don’t get the same annual audits as the tech giants Facebook, Google, and Apple.
Worst case scenario
The government of China could force Huawei to make a small backdoor in their next framework update and use it to steal sensitive data, hiding the breach in the plain sight, buried under thousands of lines of code.
Then before some ethical hacker group can spot the hole in security, they remove the breach in the next update. In Niclas Weaver’s words, a researcher at the international computer science institute — sabotage, can be very subtle.
The race
Yuval Noah Harari, the writer of the bestseller Homo Sapiens, says in the Tim Ferris podcast, that Google is racing to crack the code on how to predict human behavior consistently.
The 5G network would be a goldmine for all growth hackers, digital marketers, psychologists, governments, and machine learning companies because they could better analyze large quantities of data.
Self-reflection
Some disturbing questions to ask yourself. Are we the sum of all our life experiences? If so, is life experience quantifiable? If you agree, are we then our data? | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/mythbusting-5g-818338afd55 | ['Jasper Ruijs'] | 2020-07-27 08:17:02.154000+00:00 | ['5g', 'Opinion Piece', 'Internet of Things', '5g Technology', 'Futurism'] |
CI/CD/CF? — The DevOps toolchain’s “missing-link” | CI/CD/CF? — The DevOps toolchain’s “missing-link”
These last two decades have been formative to a monumental degree for the Software Development craft. I feel fortunate to have been at the heart of Engineering organizations throughout that period, working side by side with smart people excited by the prospect of trying out new ideas and technologies.
Usually, the significance of such transformative periods is clear only in hindsight. In my case, I was deeply appreciative of the fact that we were all pioneers and that the industry was changing. So much was happening! Ideas, technologies, processes, and practices: BDD, TDD, DDD, Event Sourcing CQRS, CI, CD were all new concepts. The air was abuzz with new ideas that everyone wanted to embrace and explore.
I am not here to talk about all of these great things that happened to the Software Industry, though. I’m sure that many books were written and will yet be written on the topic. I have nothing much to add except maybe my own personal sense of awe at the scope and reach of these changes.
I’m here to talk about something that didn’t happen. A gap in the infinite DevOps loop left incomplete.
To understand what is missing I ask that you look at the below diagrams, captured from two different websites. Can you tell which segment in the DevOps process has no real tools attached to it?
Countless platforms were created to solve everything related to building software, continuously testing it, deploying, and operating it. But taking in this map of the ecosystem, it’s hard not to notice a glaring omission. Whatever happened to Continuous Feedback?
CI and CD are on everyone’s lips these days, but when was the last time you heard someone throwing the term CF around? Does anyone use a Continuos Feedback platform? What type of information really flows back from production into the hands of developers to make the next code changes easier, more correct, smarter?
Having most of my background in .NET and Java, the concept of REPL blew my mind in the early 2010s. I was getting into dynamically typed languages like Ruby and Python and beginning to challenge some of my previous assumptions about coding. Removing the tedious build step, which was extremely slow in my 2010 enterprise app, seemed like a big upgrade. Instant feedback from code to console — that was just Science Fiction.
REPL, for anyone less familiar with the term, or Read-Eval-Print-Loop, is an interactive Shell that lets you try out and evaluate commands in real-time. For me, it meant fewer “waiting for the build” coffee breaks. It shortened the time from code conception to the inevitable reality check of runtime errors. [Before anyone interprets this to be a criticism on Java or .Net — bear in mind, that this was over ten years ago. Today builds are faster, and there are many ways to test your code much more rapidly].
There is still a big gap, however, between that local run, and what actually happens when the code runs in production. Everyone knows the phrase ‘works on my machine’. It's a true statement. When the developer tests the code in the sterile lab of their IDE, it does (almost) always work.
The reasons are obvious. Factors such as concurrency conditions, timing and delays, request parameters, 3rd party services behaviors, and data will often determine how the code will behave. These conditions can be simulated to a very limited extent in testing, but are completely absent when we are designing code. None of the feedback mirrors in our development cockpit is adjusted to cover this huge blind spot in our view.
Here’s the thing that struck me: These super fancy feedback side-view mirrors already exist.
After all, Your code, the one you’ve been writing and modifying today, is already running in production. Observability, logging, tracing and metric gathering platforms are probably even now collecting a gazillion terabytes of data about it. The code in production is performing badly or magnificently, it is throwing runtime errors that are predictable or not, scaling in and out, servicing different use cases, exhibiting all sorts of behaviors. It's just that no insights or learnings based on that collected information are currently integrated into the code design cycles.
I am thinking of Google Analytics, Hubspot, and other feedback platforms for Product Managers, and contrasting that with the meager selection of options available to a developer seeking to garner actionable insights from the test and prod environment. There is no reason this part of the loop does not exist, except that we have not yet built it.
From opservablity to devservability
For some reason, the observability platforms we are using today all went for the usual-suspect use cases — detection, troubleshooting, and production ops. Perhaps because many of these tools originally targetted Ops and IT teams, or that’s just where the impact seemed more obvious.
Everything is ‘shifting left’: testing, security, operations, etc. More and more aspects of the release process are now owned by the team which is ultimately accountable for them. For observability tools, it seems like they are ‘pushing left’ instead of doing any type of shifting.
What I’d like to see is how can we make data more relevant not in the day or even minutes after something went wrong, but when the code is still being designed. How can we make important code design decisions more informed and leverage some of the data we are already collecting.
It is all about Context
Context is the key to make it work. Most of the data is already being emitted and can be collected and analyzed, we just need a few more threads to tie it all together. To connect the dots, we need to triangulate traces, logs, and metrics with commit identifiers, pointers to code locations, and released binaries.
With this context, we can start generating meaningful analytics and inspect interesting trends that can make our changes more informed and improve our understanding of the system runtime.
I should emphasize that this is not about raw data. Connecting your code directly with your ELK stack, for example, would be far from useful. Production data is too massive and sensitive, and would just overload the developers who would not able to see the forest from the trees. Trends, analytics, and predictions are the key to making this new backward propagation of information useful.
Coding with production feedback
Here’s a glimpse: Imagine editing a function in your IDE with full awareness of the data workflows that actually pass through it. Visibly seeing where people are reaching your code from, all the way back to the browser pages. Conversely, it might be interesting to learn the function was never hit in any production flow in months.
It's almost like color being suddenly applied to a black and white movie scene. What parameters values are coming into this function, how are they different between different flows of origin? What types of runtime exceptions are being encountered and at what rate? We’ll be able to right-click into the runtime contextual data and analytics at will.
Next, we can correlate all of that data to detect trends. Is my function performing badly when the response JSON is large? Perhaps the size of a specific table directly affects response times, something we should be worrying about sooner rather than later. Is there an upward tick in test or prod after a specific commit?
We will probably get questions to answers we never thought to ask. We’ll be able to think twice about sending an array of identifiers received as an input to a query, now that we know it is thousands of members long in some production workflows. We’ll be able to view the possible affected components of any given change in a PR to ensure testing coverage vs. actual usage. We’ll be able to iteratively evaluate the impact of code changes as they are rolled out to extend the definition of done.
Finally, its turtles all the way down. The same type of analytics that is available to me in the function that I am editing will equally as useful to understand in other functions, packages, and microservices I’m consuming. The runtime behavior data would allow me to understand what to expect, and how to leverage other people’s code in a smarter way.
We have the technology
Technology and process advances are sometimes tied together.
Containers, fast and immutable, made it possible to accelerate testing and made continuous deployment pipelines feasible. Similarly, I believe the state of observability standards and technologies today (OpenTelemetrics, infrastructure APIs, Machine Learning ) allows us to advance toward real Continuous Feedback.
I started this blog post with a nostalgic spree about innovation in Software over the past two decades. That same sense of pioneering and unexplored potential is what draws me to this topic now. For developers, continuous feedback could be as revolutionary as the introduction of IntelliSense in modern IDEs. This ‘runtime IntelliSense’ can change how we write code to the extent it would be hard to imagine how we ever got by without it. | https://medium.com/@roni-dover/ci-cd-cf-the-devops-toolchains-missing-link-b5c88caf6282 | ['Roni Dover'] | 2021-09-16 18:07:29.579000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Ci Cd Pipeline', 'DevOps', 'Agile', 'Code'] |
Monday, December 14, 2020 | Woke up 4:00 am
I had what I believe was a ground-breaking thought yesterday.
A person on Quora asked me yesterday if I have worries about not being able to cover some significant (both important and high) expense in my old age, or if all of a sudden something bad happens.
She asked “what if something out of the ordinary happens that the money and stability I would have gotten from my miserable career would have helped. For example if tomorrow you needed to pay some huge bill (or the day after tomorrow in your old age you can’t work) how would you afford it.”
And I surprised myself, I must admit, with the clarity with which I responded to that.
I wrote
“I deal with it with ease. That’s always a gamble, and I gamble. What if war breaks out tomorrow? What if I die at 45? Plus I’m aware if the fact that shit happens and people who always picked “the more reasonable thing” and who have been saving their entire lives can suddenly lose it all because someone duped them, or there was a financial crisis (the stock market crashed) or some other shit. And what? They too might need to cover some huge bill tomorrow. And? The fact that you’ve been cautious your entire life and you did the “safe thing” doesn’t mean you’re actually safe. You aren’t 100% safe. Just as there is not 100% chance that I will need to cover some huge bill in my 80s. You see my point?”
Life’s a gamble. I will paste the last two sentences here again so that they reverberate.
The fact that you’ve been cautious your entire life and you did the “safe thing” (I especially mean that you picked the “stable” and “reasonable” career so that you can save up for your old age or so that you have some savings in case they’re needed in case something happens) doesn’t mean you’re actually safe. You aren’t 100% safe. Just as there is not 100% chance that I will need to cover some huge bill in my 80s (or that I’ll actually need more cash / that something for which I’ll need this money will actually happen). There’s some chance, but it’s never 100%. So we need to gamble.
Those who don’t want to gamble can end up going through life with enough savings on their bank accounts which they will then pass on to their family (nothing extraordinary will happen that would justify having such fund just in case). Besides, if you absolutely need this kind of “security” buy an extra insurance. And I don’t mean life insurance. Life insurance means that you need to earn quite a lot each year (which in turn means that you need to have this “reasonable career”). I mean such insurance which you buy for a real estate — something akin to that. They’re not expensive. They cost reasonable money per year. And when real shit happens (and you suddenly need a lot of cash) they could cover that. I think you could do that, but most people would rather pick life insurance, because they want the money back — they want it as a special fund for their retirement. Because they already know that they will retire (because they can’t imagine not retiring). | https://medium.com/my-author-journey/monday-december-14-2020-1fbad2d5e23e | ['Lukasz Laniecki'] | 2021-01-06 16:48:12.041000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Passion', 'Career Advice', 'Life', 'Careers'] |
Scaling the magic: How to hold on to a great company culture as you grow. | At some point we faced a tradeoff: The more time we spent on communicating, connecting and coordinating our work, the less time we had to actually do the work. This kind of tradeoff is a kind of organizational paradox:
The more you coordinate and communicate about the work, the less you get done.
That’s the thing about growth. Every stage of growth produces new tradeoffs, and every tradeoff you make will impact the magic in some way. So how do you keep the magic as you scale?
For the last 20 years or so I have been thinking about this problem. It’s a tricky one. In 2007 XPLANE created a map of the culture we wanted to maintain as we grew, and that map became an incredibly helpful tool for us. Here it is:
(Read the story of the first Culture Map).
That Culture Map was so valuable that I asked my friend Alex Osterwalder, the designer of the Business Model Canvas (a thinking tool for designing new business models) if he would help me create a similar tool for designing culture. Happily, he answered yes, and the Culture Mapping project was born.
The Culture Map is a great tool for understanding culture as a way to de-risk large-scale organizational change projects, but it’s also a great tool to help you scale the magic as your company grows.
Can culture be designed?
People typically don’t think of organizational culture as something that can be intentionally designed. Culture is something that happens naturally and organically when people work together, right? I think that the answer to “Can culture be designed?” is “yes and no.”
Culture is like a garden. A garden can be intentionally designed, but at the same time, it is natural and grows organically. Some gardens are more “tame” while others are more “wild.” Some grow vegetables and others grow flowers. There is a difference, for example, between an English garden and a Japanese garden, a community garden and a backyard garden.
A good culture, like a good garden, reflects both the intentions of the designers and natural, organic growth. A good culture doesn’t happen by accident. It is what happens when there are one or more good “culture gardeners.”
Culture will not scale naturally along with the company.
Every stage of a company’s growth creates new dangers that will shift the culture, whether you like it or not. If you are the founder or a leader in a fast-growing company, scaling the magic requires you to be a good culture gardener, a keeper of the culture. And since the culture is literally how we do things around here, as you scale — especially if you are scaling rapidly — culture needs to be a top priority.
The Culture Map is a tool that you can use to intentionally design those things that can be designed. It will help you think through the most critical parameters that will shape and mold your organization’s culture as you grow. The Culture Map itself is deceptively simple, although applying it in your organization is much harder than you would think.
The map is divided into three categories: Outcomes, Behaviors, and Enablers/Blockers.
Download the PDF version.
Outcomes are like the fruits of the garden. They are the results. Just like a good garden will bear good fruits, so a good culture will deliver good outcomes. To begin with the end in mind, think about the impact that your culture needs to deliver, for the company, for customers, and for the world.
Behaviors are the things that people say and do every day. Collectively, the behaviors are how we do things around here. Behaviors are concrete, tangible, observable. They are like the plants that grow in the garden. To unpack behaviors we like to ask questions like “What was your best day here? What made it great?” and “What was your worst day? Why was it bad?”
Enablers and blockers are the areas where the most design is possible. This is the area that’s most important to the culture gardener. Enablers are the sun, water, and fertilizers of culture. Blockers are the weeds. Together, they create the environment that allows a healthy culture to grow — or not. Enablers include both written and unwritten rules, as well as leadership behaviors, which demonstrate the values in action — or not. If leaders walk their talk, that’s an enabler. If they say one thing and do another, that’s a blocker.
The Culture Map is a design tool, not a communication tool. It will help you do the design thinking, but by itself it is not enough. That’s why when we created the XPLANE Culture Map, we made something engaging and visual. Here it is again:
We created this visual map to not only highlight the characteristics that we want, but to visualize them, demonstrate how they worked in action, show what they mean and how they relate to each other. Creating and using the map confirmed my faith that by creating a vision and making it explicit, you can make it come true.
If you have a picture of an ideal place that you want to be, you’re not necessarily going to be there day one, but you can be constantly moving towards it, and having that map as a compass will keep you focused. It will help you hire the right people and support the right things. It’s something you can point to that describes who you are and who you are not. It will help you make important decisions with greater wisdom and foresight.
Culture, like a garden, is not something you create once and then forget about. It is an ongoing activity. It requires constant attention, patience, and care, and it grows slowly. But the hardest work is at the beginning. With consistent care and patience, over a period of time, you can create and maintain a company culture that is as beautiful as any garden in the world.
I know, because I’ve seen it happen. And it can happen for you too.
For more information about Culture Mapping, contact XPLANE or check out the additional resources below.
More about the Culture Map.
Sign up for the Culture Mapping email update list.
Join the Culture Mapping Community on LinkedIn. | https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/scaling-the-magic-e21c4b2f4783 | ['Dave Gray'] | 2016-01-14 18:58:01.110000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Startup'] |
Senior Product Manager — Billy Gast | What’s your current role?
I’m a Senior Product Manager within a Fintech company MX.
What did you do before you got into Product Management?
I worked as a software engineer within the financial and banking sector.
How did you get your first product role?
Work experience definitely is how I broke into the PM role.
For me, it was a natural progression of the company I was in as we scaled. We switched from custom software development to verticalized solutions meant for larger audiences.
Since I had been very involved in the custom solution consulting side of the business I had a deep understanding of the needs in these specific industries.
What was your biggest challenge when you started in product management?
Definitely the fear of failure. Taking ownership of outcomes and the general success of a product as a whole is a lot of responsibility.
What is the one piece of advice you’d give someone starting out in product?
Take every opportunity to learn. Failure is one of these opportunities.
Also always be increasing your knowledge. The world is constantly changing and if you are not keeping up you will be left behind.
The final piece of advice is to focus on an industry you can be passionate about. Become an asset to that industry build your brand as the “Go To” person for knowledge about that market. Let your passion for it shine.
More from Billy
If you’d like to get in touch with Billy then you can visit him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/billygast/
Get writing like this direct to your inbox
At Getting Started in Product we write about how those who want to get into product can go about doing so, as well as how to do the job when they get there. | https://medium.com/getting-started-in-product/senior-product-manager-billy-gast-c9c1f0981b37 | ['Robert Drury'] | 2020-12-20 12:41:07.822000+00:00 | ['Product Manager', 'Product', 'Careers', 'Product Management', 'Product Owner'] |
I Sculpt my Arms by Using My Sink Every Night | Photo by pan xiaozhen
I have worked in the restaurant business for a very long time. First as a busser, then a waiter, and finally a bartender, the pinnacle. I have logged thousands of hours at ten different restaurants and met thousands of people along the way. I enjoy the service industry. They are my people. The thing I don’t like is the uniforms.
Every restaurant has a uniform code. Things you have to buy before you start your first day. This is something that I dread. I hate buying work clothes because they need to be of good quality to last. More quality means a higher price. So when starting at a new restaurant I just buy one of everything I need. One reason is cost, of course, but the other is anxiety.
What if I don’t like the job or the people that I work with? I don’t want to spend all this money on clothes and then not keep the job. Thankfully, this only happened at two of those ten restaurants. What a joke those two restaurants were.
So here I am. I have just worked my first shift at my new restaurant. I have also decided I would like to attend my next shift. I like the place, I guess. The only problem I have is my work clothes are dirty and I have to work tomorrow. I can easily just throw them in the washer and dryer, but that seems like such a waste. I am very much a hippie and do not like to waste resources if I can find a better way, and running the washer and dryer for just a couple of items is wasteful to me.
Off to the sink!
I throw the shirt, which smells like the restaurant I just worked at, into the sink with a tiny bit of detergent and get to washing. The water immediately turns a disgusting color but I press on.
I wash for a good two minutes. My forearms are already tired and I have just begun. Hmmm, I thought, this could turn out to be a good thing. I am going to get ripped! I flush the dirty water down the sink and work all the dirty water out. Then I add just a drop more detergent and give it a second quick wash and rinse.
The key here is I am exercising my arm muscles by grabbing and working the dirty water out of the shirt until it rinses clean. I focus on all of my arm muscles as I am washing the shirt. This is important. Focus.
I take the now clean shirt and form it into a ball and press all the water out by squeezing it with my hands. Great for the forearms! I don’t use the twist method to get the water out because it seems to stretch and damage the shirt a little. Plus, squeezing the water out between my hands gives me a much better “workout”.
Honestly, that is it. That is my arm workout. I repeat this process every night after work, or the next morning if I had too many drinks with my work family the night before.
I am able to keep this process going by having only one shirt. This way I have to wash it before my next shift. I do eventually, though, add another shirt to the mix as a backup. I will usually do this after I know I am going to be working at this restaurant for the foreseeable future. I still wash them both in the sink. Don’t be silly.
Washing two shirts in the sink at one time is twice the workout. Do this if you like. I usually just stick with the one though. It feels better. Less water dumped on the floor.
Also of note. You may be asking yourself what I do with my pants. Here is a little fact about the restaurant industry, it is a very popular thing not to wash your pants after every shift. This is just what happens. Most of us do it. Just accept it.
I think the reason for me was that I didn’t want to wash my pants in the sink. It was too much work. It is very hard to work the soap in and out of the fabric and rinsing is difficult. So I started throwing my work pants in with my regular clothes and they would go through the washer and dryer when I had enough clothes to do so. What I found though was that the black pants, a restaurant standard, would quickly fade.
Many of the restaurants that I worked at actually cared about how their employees looked. A good thing I think. Since this was the case, faded pants were usually deemed not appropriate. When your pants got too faded you were asked not to wear that pair anymore. So why wash them?
Faded shirts were frowned upon as well, but as a male, I had to wash my shirt every night. I know many of the females didn’t. I witnessed this first hand. Plus washing my shirt in the sink seemed to delay the fading process to a great extent.
There you have it. My little arm secret. Get started as soon as you possibly can. There must be something dirty that needs a good washing. Enjoy.
I have now had a restaurant job for most of the years since 1995. Which means I have washed my work shirt in the sink thousands of times. I have never gone to the gym and lifted weights to work on my arms.
I always get compliments on my arms and forearms.
I wonder why that is? | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/i-sculpt-my-arms-by-washing-my-work-clothes-in-the-sink-every-night-9b4ae196c713 | ['Dan Stout'] | 2020-12-27 20:58:47.191000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Fitness', 'Exercise', 'Arm Workout', 'Life'] |
How to Implement Logistic Regression with TensorFlow | To understand better what we’re going to do next, you can read my previous article about logistic regression:
What’s our plan for implementing Logistic Regression with TensorFlow?
Let’s first think of the underlying math that we want to use.
There are many ways to define a loss function and then find the optimal parameters for it, among them, here we will implement in our LogisticRegression class the following 3 ways for learning the parameters:
We will rewrite the logistic regression equation so that we turn it into a least-squares linear regression problem with different labels and then, we use the closed-form formula to find the weights:
Like above, we turn logistic into least-squares linear regression, but instead of the closed-form formula, we use stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to minimize the following loss function:
which was obtained by substituting the y in the sum of squared errors loss
with the right-hand side of
We use the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method, write the likelihood function, play around with it, restate it as a minimization problem, and apply SGD with the following loss function:
In the above equations, X is the input matrix that contains observations on the row axis and features on the column axis; y is a column vector that contains the classification labels (0 or 1); f is the sum of squared errors loss function; h is the loss function for the MLE method.
If you want to find out more about how we obtained the above equations, please check out the above-linked article.
So now, this is our goal: translate the above equations into code. And we’ll use TensorFlow for that.
We plan to use an object-oriented approach for implementation. We’ll create a LogisticRegression class with 3 public methods: fit() , predict() , and accuracy() .
Among fit’s parameters, one will determine how our model learns. This parameter is named method (not to be confused with a method as a function of a class) and it can take the following strings as values: ‘ols_solve’ (OLS stands for Ordinary Least Squares), ‘ols_sgd’, and ‘mle_sgd’.
To not make the fit() method too long, we would like to split the code into 3 different private methods, each one responsible for one way of finding the parameters.
We will have the __ols_solve() private method for applying the closed-form formula.
In this method and in the other methods that use the OLS approach, we will use the constant EPS to make sure the labels are not exactly 0 or 1, but something in between. That’s to avoid getting plus or minus infinity for the logarithm in the equations above.
In __ols_solve() we first check if X has full column rank so that we can apply this method. Then we force y to be between EPS and 1-EPS. The ols_y variable holds the labels of the ordinary least-squares linear regression problem that’s equivalent to our logistic regression problem. Basically, we transform the labels that we have for logistic regression so that they are compliant with the linear regression equations. After that, we apply the closed-form formula using TensorFlow functions.
For the 2 SGD-based algorithms, it would be redundant to have them as 2 separate methods since they will have almost all the code the same except for the part where we compute the loss value, as we have 2 different loss functions for them.
What we’ll do is to create a generic __sgd() method that does not rely on a particular loss function. Instead, it will expect as a parameter a function responsible for computing the loss value which the __sgd() method will use.
In this method, we first initialize the weights to a random column vector with values drawn from a normal distribution with mean 0 and a standard deviation of 1/(# of features). The intuition for this std dev is that if we have more features, then we need smaller weights to be able to converge (and not blow up our gradients). Then we go through all the dataset for iterations times. At the start of each such iteration, we randomly shuffle our dataset, then for each batch of data, we compute the loss value using the loss_fn function taken as a parameter, then use TensorFlow to take the gradient of this loss value with respect to (w.r.t.) self.weights and update the weights.
The loss needs to be computed inside with tf.GradientTape() as tape: block. This is to tell TensorFlow to keep track of the operations applied so that it knows how to take the gradient.
Then, to take the gradient of the loss w.r.t. weights we use grads = tape.gradient(loss, self.weights) , and to subtract the gradient multiplied with the learning rate we use self.weights.assign_sub(learning_rate*grads) .
For ‘ols_sgd’ and ‘mle_sgd’ we’ll create 2 private methods: __sse_loss() and __mle_loss() that compute and return the loss value for these 2 different techniques.
For these 2 methods, we simply apply the formulas for f and h using TensorFlow’s math functions.
So, when fit() is called with method=‘ols_solve’ we call __ols_solve() , when method=‘ols_sgd’ we call __sgd() with loss_fn=self.__sse_loss , and when method=’mle_sgd’ we call __sgd() with loss_fn=self.__mle_loss .
In predict() we first check if fit() was called previously by looking for the weights attribute (the fit method is the only method that creates it). Then we check if the shapes of the input matrix x and weights vector allow multiplication. Otherwise, return error messages. If everything is OK, we do the multiplication and pass the result through the logistic function.
In accuracy() we make predictions using the above method. Then check if the shape of the predictions matches that of the true labels, otherwise, we show an error message. After that we make sure that both predictions and the true labels have values of either 0 or 1 by a simple rule: if the value is >= 0.5 consider it a 1, otherwise a 0.
To compute the accuracy, we check for equality between y and y_hat. This will return a vector of Boolean values. Then cast these Booleans to float (False becomes 0.0, and True becomes 1.0). Then, the accuracy is simply the mean of these values. | https://medium.com/nabla-squared/how-to-implement-logistic-regression-with-tensorflow-f5bf18416da1 | ['Dorian Lazar'] | 2020-11-28 16:42:24.986000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'TensorFlow', 'Logistic Regression', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Mathematics'] |
CalCPA Daily Clips | Dec. 21, 2020
BUSINESS
How leaders can build a culture of trust — and why they should
The pandemic and remote work have accelerated a paradigm shift from contol to trust — a change that increases employee energy and engagement.
Fast Company
— —
Executive-compensation regulations finalized
The Internal Revenue Service has issued final rules on the $1 million executive-compensation limit enacted by the law known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, finalizing proposed rules with a few changes in response to comments.
Journal of Accountancy
— —
A winning strategy for job references
Ensuring you have a varied list of references is an important part of the job search. Here is a look at different kinds of references, including personal references and character references, and a process for compiling them.
U.S. News & World Report
— —
Why you shouldn’t believe every story about success
Stories are a great way to illustrate a problem and create enthusiasm for projects, but beware of stories that oversimplify things or create a sense that success is always easy.
Harvard Business Review
— —
Strategies for sustainable long-term growth for a small business
Using the balanced scorecard and pursuing mergers helped an accounting practice grow from a three-employee firm to a regional leader.
FM
PERSONAL FINANCE
Year-end strategies to improve retirement savings
The end of the year is a good time to check on retirement accounts to ensure that savings strategies are on track and that your portfolio is still properly balanced. Determine whether you have too much exposure to any one sector, and consider engaging in tax-loss harvesting.
CNBC
— —
It pays to pay attention: Here are 3 big 401(k) mistakes to avoid in 2021
Though not everyone has access to a 401(k) plan through work, those who do have a prime opportunity to sock away funds for retirement. That’s because 401(k)s offer much higher annual contribution limits than IRAs.
USAToday
PROFESSION
The Differences Between Each Type of Bankruptcy
There are several different types of bankruptcy. The right one depends on the specific needs of the client you’re working with.
AccountingWeb
— —
5 Tips for Efficient Accounting Team Management
Within a firm, every department is value-adding. By keeping up with your team and its tasks, nothing falls through the cracks, which results in a more efficient project workflows, cleaner & clear communication with clients, and a better experience for everyone.
CPA Practice Advisor
— —
How Do Auditors Respond To Whistleblowing Allegations Towards Their Clients?
A research study forthcoming in Contemporary Accounting Research examines how financial statement auditors respond to allegations of financial misconduct toward the companies they audit.
Forbes
REGULATORY
Congress likely to vote today on $900 billion relief package
Congressional leaders have agreed on a coronavirus relief package worth about $900 billion, and lawmakers are expected to approve it today. Negotiators were able to resolve a last-minute hitch over the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending facilities.
CNBC
— —
Sustainability groups come together on prototypes of disclosure standards
Five organizations released prototypes Friday of climate-related financial disclosure standards to illustrate how they could work within their various approaches.
AccountingToday
TAX
When to Expect 2021 Income Tax Refunds
2020 has been a rough year. That’s an understatement. But we are inching back to something more like normal, and that means that we still have to file our tax returns. So, when will you get your refund?
CPA Practice Advisor
— —
5 Common Tax Myths About Gifts
Excited about giving or receiving gifts this holiday season? What’s not so exciting are the tax implications that may come with them.
Forbes
TECH
Here’s How Shopping Scams On Facebook Are Ripping Off Thousands of Customers, With The Money Flowing Overseas
Fake ads that rip off real small businesses have been allowed to proliferate on social media. The money from the scams appears to flow to China and other places.
Time | https://medium.com/calcpa-daily-clips/calcpa-daily-clips-94594637c10d | [] | 2020-12-21 15:47:05.022000+00:00 | ['California', 'CPA', 'Tax', 'Irs', 'Business'] |
No More Excuses | (NowFloats Annual Mail, Dec 2016)
Links to the past three annual mails are here: 2013, 2014 & 2015
State of the Nation
In November of 2016, the government announced demonetization leading India towards a more cashless economy. Macroeconomics aside, this is great news for a company like NowFloats and should give us tail-winds towards of enabling a billion Indians meaningfully on the internet (via Making Small Businesses, Bigger). We have certainly seen a short-term slowdown in our revenue and customer acquisition primarily because of the sudden unavailability of cash flow in the market and the FUD around this move. While we tried to leverage this opportunity in the short term, we were unable to find willing partners as they were extremely busy making their own deeper in-roads after the announcement. (Lesson: Be ready & more agile). We should see a positive impact of this move in 2017.
State of the World
2016 kept us busy with the US presidency, Brexit and Middle East crisis (among many other). Some unexpected developments but from my perspective the world seems to be getting more polarized than ever before and that may impact the global economy. But India, with its healthy ~6% growth rate, remains on track and all its clear that most of the global action is here. It’s a great time to be in India!
NowFloats in 2016
Highlights: What we did well
Innovation: We developed an amazing new platform that will make any existing business website more discoverable and easier to manage. In fact, NowFloats is the first customer of this technology! In addition, our regular hackathons throw some earth-shattering ideas. And we ship these ‘ideas’ within in 48 hours, not to mention that many are worthy of being a start-up in itself. Having seen a fair bit of innovation & design, I can easily say we are on par with the best, globally. We must do these more often.
Investment: Many people (including the media, other start-ups, etc) see raising capital as a sign of success. While we do feel proud about it, more so because of the market conditions at the start of 2016, raising money has never been a primary goal at NowFloats. In January of 2016, we raised our Series B of investment. Many of you know this and we will soon announce this externally. Till then please keep this within the family.
Growth: I can say a lot but why don’t the numbers do the talking?
*We focused on the quality of our customers and servicing even more in 2016. We also disabled a bunch on inactive customers.
Data: One of the key things we were able to get a much stronger handle was our MIS and data. We have live MIS, accessible to the entire sales organization and to our investors. Now we are taking data-based decision along with our gut. For e.g. on
Multi-year Customers: The SME business is hard. In India, it is harder! The average small business is extremely ROI focused, is pretty price sensitive and does not trust easily. In spite of this we have not only grown but also have a fair bit of customer who renewed for multi-years. Here are just a few examples — one from Kolkata, Dr. Sita Bhat, Exide Batteries in Hyderabad and even Cannon did it.
Customer Engagement (Technology-based): Our Relationship Intelligence Agent (RIA) continued to evolve and has some rocking customer engagement numbers. For e.g. in Q3 we have seen a 10%+ growth month-on-month in active merchants. And all this, via an automated, personalized message. Our aim for RIA is to act like the human brain (scary!). In October 2016, we had about 1200 tickets. After follow-up emails were introduced, 2600 tickets were generated in November! Basically, businesses replied back to ‘RIA Ji’. We had about ~100% email open rate on these automated follow-up emails and active merchants grew by 10% in November. And 8% of all active users got prompted to update content.
Digital Desh: After a successful Digital Desh 2.0 our report was launched by Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister for IT, Govt. of India. Some of these amazing insights are here and the launch event is captured here. The Digital Desh Drive 3.0 is currently in Karnataka and is focusing on the Cashless Economy and Vinglish (Vernacular + English) Internet. The report will be out by Feb-March of 2017. Also my talk at TEDxHyderabad also went live like yesterday!
Customers Events: We got out existing customers to come us and we made a regular activity of this this. Here is one from April and one in Hyderabad. And some were more successful than others, like the one in Jaipur.
Customer Case Studies: From Dr. Narendra Gupta from Gurugram, to Dr. Thomas Paulose from Kochi, Sajeesh Kalliyath from Surgi Shoppe to name a few.
People: We are more than 580 people today. Are we a start-up? And 28 of us celebrated 2 years at NowFloats. Almost 200 attended our annual offsite in Goa — and what a party! We also put a structure on regular bi-weekly emails, Chat Pe Charcha, The NowFloats Way and other regular communication platforms. Some of our people continued to go far and beyond and it was great to see a lot of ‘unprompted leadership’ while having a lot of fun.
Key Hires: We hired a bunch of senior people in key roles. And many of our people moved into more responsible positions. A few of them got covered in the media as well. Add to this, 88 promotions and NowFloats is a destination for some solid personal growth.
Facilities & Procurement: 2016 also saw us get this department off the ground and into action. It’s not easy running one NowFloats office let alone opening 30-odd new offices in 2016!? Wow. And just take a look at our new Gurugram office. Both quantity & quality.
Readiness: While it’s both a highlight and a low light, we kicked off our internal readiness and trainings in a more structured manner in 2016. We launched NF Inside & the NF Customer Insights portals for all training materials. We will mature this in 2017 as a part of what we are calling NowFloats Shiksha.
Processes, Tools & Audits: Many of you are unaware that we have the very capable EY (Ernst & Young) as our internal and GT Grant Thornton) as our external auditors. Everything that we do (and don’t) is minutely scrutinized and this is what keeps us honest as a company. Whole we have lots to cover (better ERP, processes, tools, workflows, controls, etc) we had two successful audits and we remain one of the best run companies from a corporate governance perspective.
Awards & Recognition
Internal: We rolled out Atlas, Hercules Awards for sales
External: We were in the iSPIRT inTech50, Fantastic 14 in TechInAsia, Senior hires in Economic Times & BW, LookUp Acquisition in TechCrunch, ET, TechInAsia & YourStory, Digital Desh in Inc42 & ET, Nitin Jain in Hindu Business Line, my opinion in Mint, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad talking about Digital Desh on NDTV, CNBC & Twitter.
The Big One: Finally, the Forbes 30 under 30. Of Asia! Ronak floated into this list in 2016. While we are at this see his Tedx talk here.
Low-lights: Scope for Improvement
· Revenue diversification
· Sales efficiency and hiring (Direct)
· Better customer engagement
· Business predictability
· Revenue per local alliance partner
· Readiness content & consumption of Internal Communications
· More diverse customer case studies
· More enterprise business
· Some negative reviews on social media
· Strategic, inorganic growth
· Marketing, internal sales-focused events
Kitsune: Made with Love in India
This is a game changer. Not for our existing and the new customers we acquire but for the entire business internet. Think about this — a full stack programming framework which can make any business website more discoverable (automatically, in minutes) and managed by an app? And we not only innovated on UX/design but also wrote a UX language! This opens a new world for us, which positions us directly with some of the biggest companies & innovators, globally. Even NowFloats is the first customer of Kitsune. And very soon a lot of website developers (globally) will want to Get Kitsune !
LookUp, now floats
This is also the year we made our first acquisition. Acquiring LookUp was one thing, integrating that team and making this a success is quite another. We have already shipped our first joint offering and I think we have done a supper job of bringing in external thinking and churning out innovation from this newly acquired diversity. We wish to continue finding other such inorganic means of growth and have at least 3–4 organizations that we are evaluating at any point in time. Here is my blog on this marriage. Did you know that LookUp was funded by Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter), Vinod Khosla, Kris Gopalakrishnan & Narayan Murthy of Infosys. Here is what TechCrunch has to say.
Footprint
We are now 580+ people in 43 branches across India, over 101 partners (in India) and global partnerships in Singapore, Philippines, Dubai and Turkey.
Give before you take
Across our organization there were people who included the less fortunate into our lives. From someone who felt that the security guard’s daughter needed a geyser to the many people who choose to share their birthdays with the underprivileged to sharing the Christmas cheer. Nothing makes a company a great place to work than this. We all want to hang out with good people; it gives us meaning, a purpose and keeps us energized. If you don’t believe me, listen to this. NowFloats behaves like a family, we have friends at work who are there for us. What an honor it is for me to work at NowFloats!
NowFloats in 2017
Success a Mexican wave
All businesses are a series of Mexican waves. A bunch of people in a stadium raise their arms and then the folks next to them and so on, completing a wave around the stadium (see this). Before this is completely successful you can see multiple failed attempts. (And it’s usually the same set of crazy people who will try this). But once the first, full round of a wave goes around the stadium there is no stopping it! That’s like when the product, the customers, the partners, the employees — all different people come together to make something that is so absolutely in resonance and beautiful. This is the goal for us in NowFloats. That is wave we aspire for. And that’s why we don’t worry when a few of us try to do something and fail. Because once we complete the circle we will never stop. It’s energy with a self-sustaining source of its own.
No More Excuses: In action!
The last time we all met at Goa (Feb 2016) our theme was ‘No More Excuses’. And one of us really took this to heart. The story of Satyarth from our Delhi sales team, has left me the most inspired this year.
This is the guy who in this past week, made it to the India A Cricket Team, after scoring a blistering 502 runs last month. What is really amazing is that he approached us and requested his sales revenue target be increased. Yes, you read that right, higher revenue target than what we allocated to him. We soon realized why: because he wanted a higher incentive/cash flow to take care of his sister’s wedding. And he exceeded this increased target! But why will a 23 year old be responsible for his sister’s wedding? Because he lost both his parents last year in a span of 24 hours.
We all cannot be like Satyarth. But we can take a moment to reflect on his life, his stresses, his responsibilities, her age, his need to remain focussed on the field, his discipline. And perhaps this will make 2017 the year where we all must ask: What is our excuse??
Have a great 2017!
Jasminder Singh Gulati
Dec 2016 | https://medium.com/nowfloats/my-annual-mail-dec-2016-no-more-excuses-1e5810155a41 | ['Jasminder Singh Gulati'] | 2018-07-31 10:32:26.723000+00:00 | ['2016', 'Small Business', 'Startup', 'Annual Report', 'Growth'] |
Learning Wolfram: Interacting With Web Browsers | Learning Wolfram: Interacting With Web Browsers
Automate Your Web Testing and Browsing Workflows
When I worked in Quality Assurance, one of my jobs was to do regression testing on a number of websites. At that time there were only limited automation tools, so my solution involved the Java Robot class to issue mouse and key events. This was of course incredibly fragile.
More recently, automating web browser interactions have become much easier. The WebDriver protocol specifies a really nice set of commands and interactions to talk to a browser. The Wolfram Language (WL) uses this protocol to let you control browsers directly from a notebook session. The interactive nature of a notebook is extremely nice to incrementally develop web automation workflow. In this story, I will show you how to get started with this functionality.
To start a new web browser session, you use the StartWebSession command. Without function arguments, it will start a Chrome browser on your computer. The Firefox browser is also supported.
(image by author)
To open a web page you can use the WebExecute command. This command is the main function you use to control the web browser. You specify the session and you give it a command like “OpenWebPage”, “ClickElement”, or “JavascriptExecute”:
(image by author)
To click, for example, the search icon (the magnifying glass in the top right) you can refer to it by its XPath or CSS selector. You can find these with the developer console of the browser. A well-written web page uses unique IDs for specific elements and in this case, the ID is “_nav-search”. Executing the command brings up the search field in the browser:
(image by author)
Similarly, you can type text in an input field. For example, if I want to search for “dataset” I can specify the element and the search text. Simulating pressing enter is done by adding a “
” (newline) character at the end of the string:
(image by author)
To retrieve and check page content I typically use a small piece of javascript. For example, one way to retrieve the URLs for all the links on a page, I use the following snippet of javascript code:
(image by author)
The result is a list of WL strings which can then be used for a regression test or further navigational steps. In the same way, you can collect the URLs for all images on a web page and then directly import those images in your WL session for further inspection.
When you are done with your browser session you can use the DeleteObject command to end it. This closes down the web browser and ends the connection:
For more information on this useful functionality, check out the guide page for Web Browser Automation. To learn more about getting started with the WL, check out my recent post titled “Learning Wolfram: From Zero to Hero”. A notebook with the full code shown in the images above is available here. Simply click on that link and then download the notebook to your desktop. | https://towardsdatascience.com/learning-wolfram-interacting-with-web-browsers-29900c1a5cea | ['Arnoud Buzing'] | 2020-09-29 18:39:13.856000+00:00 | ['Quality Assurance', 'Wolfram', 'Programming', 'Webdriver', 'Web Testing'] |
Introducing Star in Starting Over | I know how to start over. When I considered what I might write about and remembered the old adage to ‘write what you know,’ this is the first thing that popped into my head.
Some fresh starts have been my own decisions. It took me six years to finish my first degree because I changed programs — twice. I lived in three different countries in five years. More than once, I landed in cities of millions of people where I didn’t know a single person. On average, I changed jobs every year or two, tried on several different career paths, and worked in different sectors from bureaucratic government agencies to charities trying to balance doing good with balancing the books, to private sector start-ups.
Other now-what moments were forced upon me. Shortly after buying a house and finally feeling rooted, my partner of nearly eight years left. I was once again apartment hunting. Navigating the world of dating apps that hadn’t existed the last time I was seeking a partner. Questioning whether to stay in a country I moved to for love, or return to my home country to be closer to family.
Despite all of this change, I know I am happiest when I have roots. Community. Routine. Strong, deep relationships. The feeling of familiarity that comes from knowing all the best shortcuts and from bumping into someone you know on the street.
So I don’t detail the twists and turns of my path to date with pride or to even recommend it. Whilst I’ve always tried to make the best decisions I can at the time, this starting over business is difficult stuff.
This past summer, after a solo travel break, I moved to a new city where I didn’t know a soul to at the same time start a new career path that is one of the most uncertain you can embark on. And there have been times I have stood in IKEA, trying to wheel an over-filled cart to the checkout, lamenting the fact that I couldn’t pick up more in one trip on my own, feeling like I’ve never been so alone and wondering if I can do it again. Set up my fifth home in the past decade. Patch up another broken heart and put myself out there again. Rebuild my community. Face the coming setbacks and failures and small victories as an independent creative.
But if all this starting over has taught me anything, it’s that things rarely work out as you plan them. The future vision in your head can suddenly have a hole in it. What you’re doing might not be working and requires a change. You will encounter times you need to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again, no matter how much you try to control the outcome or prepare for it.
Adaptability and resilience are key to the speed at which things are changing in our lives. This publication will explore what these concepts mean.
How can you be robust against the difficult stuff? When adversity inevitably hits, how do you not only weather the storm, but use it as an opportunity to grow even stronger? What can you learn about the stories of people who have done it?
Star in Starting Over aims to explore these questions. Expect themes to include things like self-awareness, relationships, and purpose. No matter what hits you in life, and whether you’re at a crossroads or want to head one off, these are the ideas and tools that can help when the only way out is through.
If you’re interested in being part of this project and have a story to tell or an idea to share, see our submission guidelines.
To stay up to date, subscribe to the publication or sign up for extras via email. | https://medium.com/star-in-starting-over/introducing-star-in-starting-over-639d23e88255 | ['Carley Centen'] | 2019-10-14 11:32:43.104000+00:00 | ['Growth Mindset', 'Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Starting Over', 'Resilience'] |
Terraform vs CloudFormation- Installation — Part 2 | This is the Part 2 of the series — Terraform vs CloudFormation.
In the Part 1 of the series I have done high level comparison between Terraform and CloudFormation. The same is available at https://amod-kadam.medium.com/terraform-vs-cloudformation-part-1-75d54a999da5
In this blog post I will discuss about installing and setting up Terraform and AWS CLI toolset on Windows.
Setting up Terraform on Windows
The broad steps are outlined below.
Download appropriate package depending on OS and Architecture (32 bit/64 bit) from https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html Unzip it in any folder Terraform is available as a single binary Verify the installation by executing the following command. ( Adjust the PATH variables if you want to use Terraform from any other folder )
terraform version
5. To get help on Terraform
terraform help
If you want see this in action check out the following video.
Demo — Installing Terraform on Windows
If you are setting up Terraform on Linux you will get the appropriate instructions at https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/terraform/install-cli?in=terraform/aws-get-started
Setting up AWS CLI on Windows
The broad steps are outlined below.
Download the AWS Command Line Interface (CLIv2) as MSI https://awscli.amazonaws.com/AWSCLIV2.msi Install using MSI Check the AWS CLI version
aws --version
4. Check AWS CloudFormation help
aws cloudformation help
You can refer the following video to see the installation in action.
Demo — Installing AWS CLI v2 on Windows
If you are using different OS then you will find relevant instructions at
Summary
The installation process is pretty straightforward in both the toolsets.
One key difference you will notice is that Terraform is available as a single binary whereas CloudFormation is having a set of files. If you ever need to move installation files from one location to another doing that in Terraform will be much easier.
Terraform consumes less space as compared to CloudFormation post installation.
AWS CLI can be used to work with other AWS services directly and and not limited to CloudFormation whereas Terraform is used for Infrastructure management.
In the next part of the series we will see how to use these toolsets to create actual resources in the AWS and compare and contrast the same ! | https://medium.com/@amod-kadam/terraform-vs-cloudformation-installation-part-2-3f81f88be8bd | ['Amod Kadam'] | 2020-12-20 07:55:18.705000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Installation', 'Cloudformation', 'Terraform'] |
A pioneering team | PayPal, Google veteran Mike Blandina joins Bakkt as Chief Product Officer
One of the most important aspects of building Bakkt isn’t technological. It’s human. Building an innovative company from the ground up allows us to assemble a team of trailblazers and doers — those who want to deliver on our shared vision for digital assets, and who work tirelessly to execute and deliver.
Last year, we began with several critical hires, including Adam White, our founding COO and who heads up our institutional custody and traded products. We also recruited Balaji Devarasetty, who joined from Worldpay, as our VP of Tech to advance our payments platform and to help build out our engineering team. We’re also establishing a strong culture — one centered on solving for our customers’ challenges and delivering new opportunities. This requires us to collaborate, communicate and to lead with integrity. This will also enable us to continue to attract the best teammates.
Toward that end, I’m pleased to share the news that Mike Blandina has joined as Chief Product Officer. As our CPO, Mike will lead our efforts to converge a trusted ecosystem for digital assets with payments use cases, two elements of Bakkt that help bring real world applications to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We are thrilled to have Mike as a leader on our team as we build an innovative platform for securing and transacting with digital assets.
Mike joins us with more than 25 years of experience in payments across product, engineering, strategy and operations. He was most recently with OneMarket, where he was CTO and led product & engineering. Previously, Mike served as head of payments and credit engineering at PayPal and director of engineering for Google Wallet at Google. Mike joined Google following its acquisition of TxVia, a venture-backed FinTech startup where he was COO and a member of the Board.
Before that, he was CTO of Blackhawk Network, one of the global leaders in gift card and digital payment solutions. A founder of several successful tech startups, Mike began his career writing software in the United States Army. With deep experience in the payments and fintech industry, he also served as a member of the Money2020 advisory board.
As we work through regulatory approvals, we are mindful that the infrastructure we are building has the potential to create more opportunities for digital assets to grow in relevance and trust — by being more secure, investible and useful. As a former marathoner, this point in time recalls the stage in the training regimen when you’re putting in long runs with your training team. Race day is approaching, and there is more work to be done. I’m proud to be going the distance with this growing team and of the culture we are building, while bringing digital assets into the mainstream economy. | https://medium.com/bakkt-blog/a-pioneering-team-a5fe3769a65d | [] | 2019-04-11 12:57:55.979000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Crypto', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Finance'] |
In a Good Relationship, It’s the Third Person That Matters | In a Good Relationship, It’s the Third Person That Matters
Nope, this is not an article on polyamorous relationships. I’m not qualified to even approach that one. Would not know where to start. Although what I’m going to talk about applies to all relationship types.
Six years ago, my wife and I started presenting for Retrouvaille, a program for troubled marriages. We are not qualified counselors. The primary qualification is going through a Retrouvaille program and coming out the other side still married.
Apart from the more structured presenting, we informally talk to a lot of couples. We don’t try to address their problems, but we do listen for parallels to our own issues and talk about what we did to either get past them or what we do to keep working on our relationship challenges today.
After one long conversation that lasted close to an hour, the other couple went back to their room and I turned to my wife and said, ‘What was that woman’s name?’ Neither of us knew. We had to look in the registration list to figure it out. A person in a supposedly committed relationship had referred to his spouse over a dozen times and never mentioned her name.
It seemed like a small thing, but I started to pay attention to it. Through Retrouvaille, and through our everyday social interactions I talk with a lot of couples. I noticed a trend. Couples (gay or straight) in healthy relationships use each other’s names. Or they use pet names that may be a bit syrupy to the rest of us but reflect underlying love and respect for their partners. When things are strained in a relationship the other partner becomes a He or a She or a They. It’s almost as if they are using the third person to distance themselves from the other.
I’m pretty sure it is an unconscious act. But it matters. It’s also easier to criticize in the third person. If you don’t believe me, try not using the third person the next time you and a friend are complaining to each other about your respective partners. You’ll find it severely truncates the duration of the bitch session, and that’s not such a bad thing.
So even though Retrouvaille presenters are not marriage counselors, I do bend the “no marital advice” rule when I hear one spouse constantly refer to the other in the third person. Repairing a broken relationship requires a lot of personal change. I hope I’m giving them one change that isn’t too onerous but has a big payoff.
My Mum was a schoolteacher, and it would always bug me when she corrected my grammar. If I referred to my sister as ‘She’ my Mum would always come back with ‘She is the cat’s mother,’ please use your sister’s name. Little did I know she was giving me solid relationship advice.
Photo credit — Eric Ward | https://medium.com/hello-love/in-a-good-relationship-its-the-third-person-that-matters-a657ca8f5d28 | ['Brian Byrne'] | 2020-11-07 19:26:28.959000+00:00 | ['Grammar', 'Retrouvailles', 'Couples', 'Relationships'] |
What Is The Reason For Wanting Enlightenment | This is a beautiful question, a question that can come out of only a really pragmatic mind. A mind that can question everything, even Enlightenment, with the right intention is ready to reflect the light!
Now, if you analyze the question, the answer is hidden in it. It’s right before your eyes. Try looking at the question again. Can you spot the answer?
Photo by Sam Pearce-Warrilow on Unsplash
The exact reason for “Wanting Enlightenment” is “Wanting”.
One always feels at unease and incomplete within and hence is always chasing one thing or the other.
Desire is just the very nature of human mind.
Initially, the mind is outward (world) focused and wants all the luxuries of the world — super cars, big home(s), money and so on.
Once the vicious circle of wanting and gaining the world is viewed as a cause of misery, a spiritual circle starts. Mind’s focus starts turning inwards.
Now, mind is clever. Outward or Inward, the attitude remains the same — “Wanting”
The common denominator is the Desire. This is the only way Ego can survive the onslaught of Truth. This is a pure survival game.
Now that a new circle has started, Ego lives — this time spiritually!
Photo by RKTKN on Unsplash
However, this wanting is usually supported by the Awakened Ones. This is considered as the last desire — the desire that consumes all other desires.
If Enlightenment becomes the first priority, this one want burns all other wants! And, once all wants have been burnt, this last remaining desire of Enlightenment is seen as misery. As soon as this last desire is seen as a misery, it drops!
Photo by Vo Danh on Unsplash
All that is left is Life — Pure, Pristine and Untouched. This Life is True-Self, this is who you are!
Hence, Enlightenment is depicted by the Lotus. In mud of the world, one remains untouched by the filth of the mind.
Mind just becomes a tool to traverse the world.
The point in being spiritual is very simple — Till you realize True-Self, you will never feel complete and suffering will continue. If you want to cease suffering and experience bliss, then turning this wanting inwards is a good start! :-)
Love! | https://medium.com/soultouch/what-is-the-reason-for-wanting-enlightenment-e1758daf32c4 | ['Ramandeep Singh', 'न र'] | 2020-08-26 19:55:41.991000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Meditation', 'Spirituality', 'Life', 'Enlightenment'] |
Can I make a living with Freelancer.Com? | Freelancer.com is one of the few freelancer sites where people have some trust that they can make a part of their living while working at home.
Before enrolling in any sites as a freelancer, please check your possible earnings per month and see if you can survive with that money. Depending on where you live on this globe, maybe you can. Are you living in India, in Bali?
Although the top paying jobs are very appealing, they are not posted often! Many competitors are bidding for the top paying jobs where you have to make your way among 150 to 60 competitors to be selected. We can approximately calculate your chances as 1,5–1,66% in average for every top paying project.
How much you can earn as an IT consultant, in average?
Let’s assume that you will put all your efforts for a year for giving bids for top paying jobs only. For example, IT top paying jobs can make you earn $5,000 per month and are posted approximately 90 times per month….but since there are 90 bids and 145 freelancers fighting for it…
$5,000 x 90 posts per month x 12 months x being the first among 145 freelancers $5,000 x 90 x 12 x 0.68% = $36,720 per year after proposing 1,080 bids.
There are approximately 3,000 IT job posts per month.
$5,000 per month (3%)
$700 per month (17%)
$500 per month (25%)
$375 per month (65%)
How much you can earn as a Graphic Designer, in average?
In Graphic Logo Design, the graphic design top paying jobs can make you earn $1,700 per month and are posted approximately 18 times a year….but since there are 80 bids and 80 freelancers fighting for it…
$1,700 x number of bids in a year x chances of being the first among 80 $1,700 x 18 bids x 1,25% = $ 382 per year You are most likely to make $382 per year even for bidding only for the highest priced job posts. The only way to differ is to be very very exceptional!
There are approximately 76 job posts for graphic design. Job bids and your possible monthly gains from that project are as follows:
$1700 per month (2%) Job: logo design, 80 bids in average
$700 per month (4%) Job: brochure, logo design, brand guidelines, 50 bids in average
$500 per month (4%) Job: brochure, logo design, brand guidelines, 46 bids in average
$300 per month (24%) Job: logo, business card design, 70 bids in average
$100 per month (65%)
Architectural 3D Modeling and Interior Design?
Approximately 30 job posts per month. Job bids and your possible monthly gains from that project are as follows:
$1700 per month (3%), 60 bids in average
$945 per month (24%), 40 bids in average
$750 per month (3%)
$400 per month (27%)
$200 per month (53%)
ACAD Drafting?
Approximately 2,3 job posts per month. Job bids and your possible monthly gains from that project are as follows:
$964-$500 per month. 44 bids in average
Business Plan Studies?
Approximately 2 job posts per month
$900 per month, 58 bids
$300 per month, 11 bids
CONCLUSION
The most likely sector to make some money through freelancer.com is IT. There is a lot of demand for IT sector freelancers, most of them are driven by entrepreneurs and dreamers. They demand things like build a website like ‘freelancer’, build a dating app, design me a crypto etc.
Being part of freelancer work force and giving bids for projects brings 0 payment for you. However it gives you some experience on dealing with customers, managing your business. If you are not from IT sector, think it like an internship program, from which you may/may not be paid. | https://medium.com/@zey-bahar/can-i-make-a-living-with-freelancer-com-bdc192d188f8 | ['Bahar Yayla'] | 2020-03-03 06:14:52.135000+00:00 | ['Freelancing', 'Freelancers', 'Graphic Design', 'Information Technology'] |
How a Good Night’s Sleep Boosts Productivity | Photo by pixpoetry on Unsplash
As an entrepreneur, you are inclined to be a work-ethic. You have a planned day each day, where every portion of your time is carefully selected for any particular activity, and you try to wrestle with it to fulfill it.
Being an entrepreneur, I can understand why many CEOs and people in business opt to de-emphasize their relationships, personal goals, and well-being to give their all to their projects. As a result, sleep is one of the primary necessities treated like a luxury and gets thrown out the window. Surprisingly, it is more common than you can anticipate.
Reasons for Entrepreneurial Insomnia
The problem with running a business is the complexities that tag along, which require a full-time dedication to tackle. All this process can also increase stress. I have found that to be very true. With stress comes the guilt that if you take some time off or focus on yourself, you might end up lagging behind the competition.
“Successful People Sleep Less”
Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder), Marissa Mayer (former Yahoo CEO), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo CEO) are some of the names thrown around when people talk about entrepreneurs who work more than 16 hours and sleep less than 4 hours. They are hailed as champions, so the younger generation of entrepreneurs look to them for inspiration.
This is where they can be doing more harm to themselves, scientifically speaking than they are willing to consider. It got me thinking about the importance of sleep and finding out what general consensus about sleep was there in the business community.
The Other Side of the Picture
I think this is one of the major hurdles new and upcoming entrepreneurs and businessmen face as soon as they begin focusing on their time. Contrary to popular belief, a good night’s sleep is an essential ingredient for staying healthy. Especially during pandemic times, when our immunities are already at risk, we need to focus on our sleeping schedule.
Finding ways to manage my sleep schedule while quarantining, I stumbled about a fact. The Huffington Post’s founder Arianna Huffington once woke up in her home in a pool of her blood. She had gone without sleep for some time, and it resulted in her blacking out, hitting and rupturing her cheekbone against the desk. She was not suffering from any disease; she just felt exhausted and had no time to sleep.
I was fascinated by Huffington’s realization about entrepreneurs’ struggle with sleep and decided to dig a little further about the world’s most prominent entrepreneurs’ sleeping habits. Top business moguls such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Jeff Bezos all preach a 7 to 8-hour sleep cycle.
In an interview, Musk admitted that he slept at least 6 hours a night (from 1 am to 7 am), although he confessed that he could stay up longer if he wants. Similarly, Bill Gates has disclosed that he sleeps 7 hours per night (from 12 am to 7 am).
I found that Apple’s CEO Tim Cook sleeps 7 hours every night (from 9:30 pm to 4:30 am ). Sheryl Sandberg balances her busy days at Facebook by sleeping 7 hours (9:30 pm to 5 am).
Scientific Basis for Better Sleep
Of course, as I started digging deep, I found many types of research done about entrepreneurs and their circadian rhythm — the body’s biological clock that determines when to release hormones that influence sleep. The most helpful study I found online was of Gish et al. They found out the effects of low sleep habits in 784 entrepreneurs.
The data of the research showed lower sleep cycles continuously result in lower sympathy and friendliness among entrepreneurs. The researchers also added how low sleep cycles lead to heart and kidney diseases, diabetes, stroke, and high blood pressure.
Partial sleep deprivation has undoubtedly affected me personally. A study done at the University of Pennsylvania found that even people with partial sleep deprivation can lead to them facing work irritability and inability to control anger. This change in mood can adversely affect your skill as a leader and an employer.
In all of the research I did online, I found that it is not about increasing sleep time but actually about better-quality sleep.
Photo by Taisiia Stupak on Unsplash
Setting A Healthy Sleeping Routine
Here is how you can fix your sleep cycle to boost business productivity that I tried to implement in my life, based on research and practice:
Purchase the right pillow and mattress
Believe it or not, having a quality pillow and mattress is directly related to sound sleep, and smart entrepreneurs know how to manage their precious resting time by investing in them. If your mattress is too soft or too hard, you will end up tossing and turning all night. You would even bother your partner and wake up cranky and groggy. Similarly, you should purchase pillows that are not too high or low to strain your neck muscles. They should align with your shoulders as you lay. If you have allergies, invest in hypoallergenic pillows.
Change your dietary choices
For managing businesses and for being on top of the game all the time, entrepreneurs consume foods and beverages to increase productivity, e.g., caffeine and alcohol. A general rule of thumb that I have found to be helpful is restricting caffeine consumption after 12 pm, as the substance stays in our systems longer than we think it does, and it is a key factor in disturbing sleep schedules. It goes the same for people who have a high tolerance for caffeine.
Do not take sleeping pills
Do not take sleeping pills right before going to bed. Even though it may seem like an easy fix, studies have shown that sleeping pills make people more tired and irritable. If you have to use a sleeping aid, choose relaxation supplements over sedatives.
Adopt a healthy lifestyle
Since this hack works in general for anyone, especially people facing the challenges of COVID-19, I will highly recommend changing your lifestyle. This includes working out each day for about 20 minutes, eat healthy, drink plenty of water, and try to meditate. Meditation helps in calming us and relieving us of our daily stressors, which can definitely help in falling asleep earlier.
Pay attention to your sleeping environment
To better help you with falling asleep, you can ensure that the place you sleep at is quiet, dark, and a cool room. Optimize the room temperature at around 60 °F — 75 °F (16 °C — 24 °C). These qualities improve the nature of sleep and make it fulfilling. You can also experiment with other soothing products or rituals. Many people recommend candles to help you with sleep. Others recommend a warm bath. Some people prefer reading books or listening to ambient or white noise before bed to help induce sleep.
Establish consistency
You can try to keep a journal to maintain your sleep schedule. There are some researches that consider keeping consistency as mute. Others argue that it might prove useful. This method might help in your case.
The times you go to sleep and wake up are both important, and it helps develop a habit if you stick to it. This might prove to be a little difficult initially, but habit-building does not come easily.
Reduce the use of technology
I had always heard people saying that we should not use blue-light gadgets just before going to bed, but I had never paid attention to its root cause. The way blue-light works is that it hinders the production of melatonin that induces sleep. So, to help me manage my sleep schedule, I stopped my social media and technology use an hour before sleeping, and I found it immensely helped me maintain a fixed sleep cycle.
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
Avoid daytime naps
Although entrepreneurs hardly get any free time to take naps, but if you do, avoid going to sleep. When I searched about this tip, I found out that eliminating multiple circadian cycles results in elevated diabetes levels, damage to the immune system, and your metabolism.
Hack your sleep
This method is a cheat for sleeping for eight hours or so and has a fair share of its own critique. Some entrepreneurs claim that doing a short interval of sleep helps them. They propose a two-part sleep system, where they wake up in the middle of the night to do some tasks. I am not a huge fan of this tip, but if it suits you, then you should experiment with this tip to see if it works in your case.
Bottom Line
Despite what many entrepreneurs claim, a single-phased, uninterrupted sleep of 6 or more hours has been scientifically proven to increase workplace productivity and decision-making abilities. It also keeps us energetic and rejuvenated to help us better grasp at opportunities. I feel that entrepreneurs should definitely start talking more about improving their sleeping patterns and how external factors and stressors influence the circadian rhythm. | https://medium.com/illumination/entrepreneurial-insomnia-how-a-good-nights-sleep-boosts-productivity-5deff483ada9 | ['Changwon C.'] | 2020-12-15 14:24:50.887000+00:00 | ['Sleep', 'Business', 'Insomnia', 'Productivity', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Five New Cryptocurrency Startups You Should Know for 2018 | Image by Pixabay.
There’s no denying that in the world of cryptocurrency, there are four main coins people think of: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin. These are the most visible coins, they are worth the most, and they are the most easily accessible via Coinbase, the most widely used exchange. While these coins are all successful in their respective ways, it is not the coins themselves, but the way these coins can be used that makes them truly successful. Now that there are several established coins, the market is blooming with new startups looking to utilize those coins, as well as the blockchain technology behind them.
In the coming year, we will begin to witness a societal shift towards cryptocurrency, especially with online payments. Right now, many developers realize the great potential for cryptocurrency to help their ideas grow, and want to incorporate cryptocurrency into their startups. As we journey further into the age of information, it seems our new technology is advancing much quicker than our governments can regulate it, and cryptocurrency will widen the gap between technology and regulation even wider. From its ability to provide users with a bank in their pocket, to providing an avenue for those who have lost faith in the federal financial systems, cryptocurrency has many reasons why coins are the next gold rush, and there are several promising startups helping make that a reality.
Here are five knew startups you need to know about for 2018:
Cypherium
Cypherium is a cryptocurrency-based startup run by a team of developers with histories at Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This startup sees many flaws in the current blockchain, and wants to address it, not through patching up the current blockchain, but by creating their own superior version in the hopes that it will be widely adopted. Advised by cryptocurrency industry leaders Emin Gun Sirer and Jeremy Gardner, this project seems to be headed in the right direction. Their new blockchain will be widely scalable and permissionless for users.
Cypherium will become the only blockchain designer to implement a multi-level governance design aims to make this blockchain more secure than any other. They will be separating governance both at the protocol and applications layers. Cypherium shows real promise to compete in the blockchain market, especially as it actively seeks regulation so it can be most easily adopted for mass use, and is certainly a startup to keep an eye on for the coming year.
Rentberry
This decentralized, long-term rental platform has been disrupting the rental industry since 2015, and seems poised to take off in the next year. Rentberry uses the blockchain to automate steps in the renting process, from finalizing contracts to paying monthly rent, saving both the landlord and the tenants time and money, while expediting legal agreements between both parties. Most importantly, Rentberry’s blockchain and enhanced contracts technology allows tenants to save thousands of dollars in security deposits.
Rentberry began with $4 million in investments from 11 international investors, and has since gained another $3 million in crowdfunding. Their initial coin offering is currently live, and they are hoping to raise an additional $10 million during their sale. The platform has over 120 thousand users and growing. As the market for rental properties continues to grow, Rentberry provides a trustworthy solution to potential renters and landlords alike, wishing to make the rental process as seamless as possible. With interest from the likes of Forbes, NBC, Wall Street Journal and almost every major cryptocurrency news source, I see this platform exploding over the next several years.
Loci
Loci is a venture-backed technology startup best known for their patent research tool, InnVenn, is finishing a platform expansion which will allow it to include the ability to buy and sell intellectual property. Users do this via Loci’s native coins, called LOCIcoin. Loci aims to improve and update the patent process by posting creation and disclosure of new claims for IP onto the Ethereum blockchain.
Loci understands that patenting ideas and creations can be a very confusing and expensive roadblock to creating, especially for individual inventors as opposed to large corporations equipped with teams of lawyers. They see blockchain technology as the answer, since it can provide a much quicker, safer and more cost-effective way of procuring a patent. Overall, this could encourage more growth and competition on the global market, which is always healthy, and should be a great startup to watch grow over the next year.
Coinlancer
Coinlancer sees a problem within the existing online freelancing markets, and wants to address the problem through the integration of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Built on the Ethereum platform, Coinlancer addresses the problems currently faced by many online freelancers, such as unexplained account suspension, unaddressed and prolonged disputes, and failure to make payment, with the implementation of a safe, secure and transparent blockchain. Coinlancer will act as the host for job postings and freelancer accounts, as well as a wallet for transactions. For a project to begin, Coinlancer will need the agreed upon payments in escrow with them, offering security to both the client and the freelancer. These projects are paid out in Coinlancer tokens, of which the initial sale is happening now, which can be easily converted to or from over twenty different cryptocurrencies.
Among the technologies used by the Coinlancer platform are distributed ledgers, an open application programming interface, smart contracts, the blockchain and digital signatures. Each of these innovative technologies allow for further growth and optimization of the Coinlancer platform. If you are a freelancer, or in need of a freelancer, this is the platform you should be using, although you’ll have to wait, as full development is expected to finish in October of 2018.
Trippki
Trippki, created in September of 2017, sees a disconnect between hotels and the people that stay in them. They want to bridge that divide in terms of rewards. The Trippki platform is essentially a travel-rewards program that allows hotels to reward guests for staying with them. The platform is decentralized, and offers increased flexibility to hotels when compared with the already offered rewards programs, thanks to its masterful integration of the blockchain. Hotel-stayers can use their earned rewards tokens, called Trip tokens, to pay for hotel stays in the future.
This platform understands that travelers are constantly bombarded with offers for rewards based on their travel, but often these rewards come at a price. With Trippki, travelers will be rewarded for their stay, rather than rewarded because they chose from a list of preferred hotels with deals offered by their travel agent. The Trippki presale is open now, but the technology will not be complete until 2018. When it is ready to be used, I predict it will become a major player in the travel industry.
Are there any other startups you think I need to know about? Let me know in the comments below! | https://medium.com/wespostdotcom/five-new-cryptocurrency-startups-you-should-know-for-2018-b94e7bf8a2fe | ['Luke Roth'] | 2017-12-21 15:26:47.339000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Investing', 'Sentiment', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
The struggles of having strict parents | Pathetic a word that I believe in because of their ridiculous parenting.
It’s tiring to even think about my scenario, but that’s the sad truth of having strict parents. Living under their roof is hard and tough because you get constant pressure to do your best in school works not only that but you are not allowed to do things that they don’t want.
It’s sad to even think that living under their roof means no freedom at all. I feel so helpless and pressured to be with them, isolated with my emotions because of their selfish way of not considering my side of defense on what I want to do in life.
I can possibly say that they are controlling, on how they act towards me is sick and tiring, to be honest. You must do what they want and they must be followed every time and if you disobeyed them a bunch load of punishments will come to your way. All my life I have been living in a prison considering my parents are strict and let me add the school that I attend to is also strict so I rebel against their hysterical rules to escape the sense of them controlling me.
“Control .”
a word that I hate.
We live in the 21st century where people have the rights, all genders, all ages and the universality of everyone, of every living thing we have rights to do what we desire and what we want to achieve. And I believe in that. I believe that I have my rights but considering my state I lose hope but I continue to strive and fight for my freedom even tho it is hard and impossible. But I know too well that giving up is not the answer.
Social media, school and my parent's way of showing their love really have affected my mental state. Anxiety kicks in whenever and wherever.
I’m just a girl who seeks freedom and happiness.
I sometimes think that maybe this is only a phase in my life and that gives me hope that someday I’m free from them. That one day I’ll live my life as I please.
And I can’t wait for that day. | https://medium.com/@mikkioctavo23/the-struggles-of-having-strict-parents-be7f9b3ce10e | ['Just Mikki'] | 2019-10-19 07:23:03.502000+00:00 | ['Struggles In Life', 'Lifestyle', 'Teens', 'Life', 'Parents'] |
SMRT Leiden 2019 Day 2: Evolving Towards Precision Medicine with Longer, Accurate Reads | Euan Ashley (@euanashley, Stanford) began the second day of SMRT Leiden with a keynote presentation on precision medicine.
What is the definition of precision medicine?
Before defining precision medicine (or personalized medicine), the more important question to ask should be: why is precision medicine needed?
The answer could be found in Ashley’s disclosure of personal interest: “I want to help patients”.
Or, if one recalls the next sentence in President Obama’s State of the Union address, “To give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier.”
Delivery of such information must not only be accurate, but also timely. One such case was the diagnosis of a newborn suffering from long QT syndrome, a condition that causes irregular heartbeats, where whole genome sequencing confirmed a pathogenic variant in KCNH2 gene at 10 days post birth. At that time, standard genetic testing would have taken 4 to 16 weeks.
And for many, though urgent delivery of information is not a matter of life or death, the eventual diagnosis means the world to them. The Undiagnosed Disease Network (UDN) was established in 2014 to solve rare, previously undiagnosed diseases. Within a 20-month period, they delivered diagnoses for 132 out of 382 cases, a 35% solve rate. More importantly, 79% of the solved cases had actionability; 1/3 of which led to changes in therapy. Finally, there’s cost! The average cost of patients who received a diagnosis before coming to UDN was ~$300,000, whereas the UDN diagnosis cost was only ~$18,000, or 6% of the previous cost. The value of an accurate genomic diagnosis was not just medical and emotional, but also financial.
So that’s the good news. But the other side of the 35% solve rate is that 2/3 of the patients still have no answer for their illness.
What are we missing?
Precision medicine, Ashely defined, is the treatment or prevention of diseases by more precise measurement. But the human genome is complex. It is filled with repeat sequences, paralogous genes, and mosaicism. For many of the repeat diseases — Fragile X, myotonic dystrophy, Huntington’s, just to name a few — “short reads just are not able to characterize these highly polymorphic regions,” Ashley said. Computationally, these regions also present challenges.
Keynote by Euan Ashley on the progression of precision medicine. Sketch provided by @ATJCagan.
“Precision medicine has to be accurate medicine. If we are not measuring the whole genome, we will fail to find the genetic causes for our patient’s diseases.”
The solution? Better algorithms, graph reference genomes, and long reads.
Ashley presented the instance where PacBio sequencing solved the case of a patient with recurrent myxomas. It was suspected that he had Carney complex, yet prior genetic testing including WES and WGS failed to identify the causal variant. Using low-fold sequencing on the PacBio Sequel System, they identified — using just 4 long reads — a heterozygous 2kb deletion in the PRKAR1A gene. Sequencing of the parents confirmed this to be a de novo variant.
Ashely then shared another case where a causal variant was identified at the FAM177A1 gene, and they are still working to link the variant and the disease phenotype.
For some of the unsolved diseases, RNA may play a role as well. Ashley pointed to a recent project of looking at the MYBPC3 isoform diversity using targeted Iso-Seq (paper to appear in Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine soon) where PacBio long reads enabled accurate haplotyping at the isoform level.
Ashley is optimistic that with improved sequencing technology, better reference genomes, and faster algorithms, we will be able to solve more of the rare diseases. | https://medium.com/pacbio/smrt-leiden-2019-day-2-evolving-towards-precision-medicine-with-longer-accurate-reads-f55c321caa46 | ['Liz T'] | 2019-05-10 08:33:36.889000+00:00 | ['Genetics', 'Biotechnology', 'Dna', 'Science', 'Dna Sequencing'] |
Champions League: who will win it? | The Champions League group stage has ended, and 16 lucky teams have qualified for the Knock-outs. However, only one will lift the CL Trophy. Let’s take a look at which teams could achieve European glory, and write themselves in the history books.
For your reference, here is the list of ties obtained from The Guardian!
16.Porto — 2/10
No offence to Porto fans, but it just doesn’t look like they could possibly win the Trophy, or beat Juventus. Kudos to Porto for qualifying, but they simply lack the squad depth available in all the other competitors. They have many talented players, however, and they should try to become the dark horses of the competition By beating Juventus. One to watch for Porto is Jesus Corona, who is a pacey and skilled winger with a knack of whipping in amazing crosses.
15. Atalanta — 2.5/10
Again, Atalanta are a decent team, but they really do not have the squad depth or the ability to beat more competent opponents. They could also be a dark horse, but I doubt they can handle the likes of Real Madrid. Frankly, after last year’s win against Valencia, I would not be crazy to say that there is chance they could defeat their Round of 16 opponent too. One to watch is Josep Illicic, who may have lost his edge recently due to personal issues, but still remains a credible goal threat due to his elite movement, timing and finishing.
14. Lazio — 3/10
The Italians may be performing well in Italy, but there is no way they could possibly win the whole competition.It seems unlikely they will defeat Bayern and I really doubt they have the ability to defeat bigger teams to reach and then win the CL finals even if they do beat the Germans. One to watch for the Italians has to be Ciro Immobile, Golden Shoe winner, and last season’s top scorer in Serie A.
13.Sevilla — 3.5/10
Sevilla are Europa League legends, but on paper, they just can’t match the levels of Bayern or Juventus. One crucial factor Sevilla have which stands out though, is their elite mentality, unmatched by any team except for last year’s champions Bayern. They are also lucky to have drawn a more manageable team, Borussia Dortmund. One player to watch for is Jules Kounde, who has attracted interest from many big guns after bossing the Europa League with his hard tackling, and solid defending.
12.Borussia Mönchengladbach — 3.5/10
When it comes to beating big teams, M’Gladbach have plenty of experience, defeating the likes of Inter Milan and Real Madrid in the group stage. They have a plethora of skilled players, but I am not quite sure they can actually win the Champions League. However, they are an impressive team, and may surprise many by potentially conquering bigger teams, for example their round of 16 opponent Man City. One to watch in their team is Marcus Thuram, Lillian Thuram’s son, a talented and prolific centre forward who looks set for a move to a bigger team within the next two windows.
11.Borussia Dortmund — 4.5/10
Surprised, aren’t you? This may be an absurd choice, but hear me out. Dortmund have the BEST young talents in the world currently, but i doubt they have the mentality to win such a major trophy. I could be totally wrong, but the way they tend to sizzle out at the end of each Bundesliga season for quite a while now simply highlights my point. Their tie isn’t exactly frightening, but since Lucien Favre has been sacked with the club in a dire state, who knows what could happen?A player to watch from the Dortmund squad is tough to pick , but I will have to go with 16 year old Youssoufa Moukoko. He is so highly rated by the Dortmund staff that he joined the senior squad immediately upon turning 16! He could very well be Dortmund’s X factor of the season, with his classy strikes and great dribbling.
10. Barcelona — 5/10
Barcelona have had an almost perfect start in European football, as they lost only once, that too after qualification. My only doubt is, how long will this streak last? Barcelona have been appalling in La Liga this season despite their recent wins, and my worry is that this slump in league form could return and spread into their cup form too. On top of this, they have a tough tie against PSG! Messi has been dropped on a couple of occasions, which is worrying considering that he is Barca’s best player. Koeman may have turned the likes of Griezmann, Coutinho and Braithwaite into Barca standard players, but they aren’t exactly Messi, are they? Negatives aside, Barca’s One to Watch has to be Phillipe Coutinho. He won the CL last year, and will be hungry for more trophies. With his being close to his prime form, he could possibly lift the trophy again this year, except this time for Barcelona.
9.Leipzig — 5.5/10
Julian Nagelsmann’s men were so close to the trophy last year, and I don’t see why they can’t reach the semis again. The issue, however, is that many clubs who were in a mess last year have returned to their best form. Juventus no longer struggle to break down counter-attacks, Man City have solved their defensive woes satisfactorily (for now) and Real Madrid have regained the form which helped them win La Liga. RB Leipzig remain a team which could challenge for the trophy, but they face tougher opposition, and will only get to do so if they conquer Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool first. One to watch for them is Marcel Sabitizer, the Austrian midfielder of many talents, who also has an amazing work rate.
8.Real Madrid — 6/10
Another controversial choice, the reason I am ranking Los Blancos at 8th is because they are simply too inconsistent of late to keep up any sort of form- good or bad. I am not even sure if they can easily beat Atalanta like the Real of the past would have. Zinedine Zidane’s Real Madrid of 2015–2018 thrived on consistency, the same starting 11 and having a fixed style of play, none of which the current Real have. I admit finishing top of the group was mighty impressive, but can their saviour Benzema remain this prolific throughout the season? One to watch for Real, is Brazilian forward Rodrygo. He is a huge talent, with sensational crossing abilities and great skills. He will be Real’s X factor, and will play a important part in a potential trophy challenge.
7. Atletico Madrid — 6.5/10
You’d probably be perplexed on why I ranked Atletico ahead of Real even after Real’s derby win just yesterday, but I just can’t see why A.Madrid are less likely to win the CL compared to Los Blancos. Diego Simeone’s men have come close to winning the CL multiple times in the past ten years, and now they have the added talent of Luis Suarez and Joao Felix. The only potential issue I can see in Atletico is their tactical rigidity, which was shown when they struggled to break down RB Leipzig in last season’s quarter finals. They also face Chelsea, a top class team who will be tough to beat. One to watch from the Atleti squad is Joao Felix, who is finally showing why he had a price tag of 126 million Euros with his prolificacy, creativity and smooth dribbling.
6.Liverpool — 7/10
Liverpool are only 6th due to their injury woes, but still remain one of the best teams in Europe. Jurgen Klopp has handled their crisis better than many would have thought, rotating academy talents and recently recovered first teamers to prevent further injury. They do, however, face a decently tough tie against Klopp’s fellow germans RB Leipzig. One player to watch from the Scousers is Diogo Jota, who has proved to be a shrewd signing for them after ripping up both Premier League and Champions League opposition.
5. Chelsea — 7/10
Chelsea have been a force to reckon with of late, with new signings and veterans combining to create a formidable team to play against. They may face a defensively solid Atletico, but the likes of Ben Chilwell, Hakim Ziyech and Eduourd Mendy have hit the ground running and have had a huge impact in most games.While players like Timo Werner and Kai Havertz haven’t been in the best of form, they remain vital to the Blues, and hopefully rediscover their form. Frank Lampard has shown he is not tactically blunt like many suggest by playing the right players and formations in the right games, and being unafraid to bench star players for those in better form. One to watch for Chelsea is Ben Chilwell, who has solved Frank Lampard’s left back dilemma by playing exceptionally well offensively and defensively.
4.Manchester City — 7.5/10
As mentioned before, City have solved their defensive woes, which has helped them to improve their league form massively, and their Champions League form has also been quite decent. The only worry now is whether they can keep their nerves in the Knockouts, as they face a tough opponent in M’Gladbach. The Sky Blues have been the regular bottlers alongside Barcelona, and will be praying they don’t bottle it again and actually win the trophy this year. And while many have categorised them as favourites this year, that happens every year, so I don’t really see why they need to be ranked no.1. One to watch from their squad has to be Spaniard wizard Ferran Torres, who has performed exceptionally well for the Sky Blues in the Champions League so far.
3. PSG — 8/10
PSG did reach the finals last year, but I am unsure whether they will go one step further and win the trophy, or get knocked out in the eliminator rounds, as they have received a blockbuster opponent in Barcelona. PSG have blown hot and cold this season, being world class one day and lethargic on another. They have also had one crucial player or another injured, which really harms their chances. On the plus side, however, they have massively improved their squad depth, and will be hoping this factor helps them to win the treble, or at least the CL this season. One to watch for the Parisians is Moise Kean, who has been on fire since joining them on loan in the summer.
2.Bayern — 9/10
This one is certainly surprising, since Bayern have had virtually no faults till now, but the reason they are second is only because of the form and my belief in the first placed team. Bayern have been consistently world class for the past two seasons, and are well placed to win the treble again. However,I fear they may suffer second season blues and become incapable of winning the treble again. It could be possible that I am completely wrong, but we’ll have to see and find out. One to watch for Bayern is Benjamin Pavard, who upon recovery from injury, has made the right back slot his, and looks to be a threat both defensively and offensively to the opposition.
Juventus — 9.1/10
The Italian team may have faltered against Lyon last season, but that was due to the absence of Juve’s superstar Cristiano Ronaldo.This season, however, while the team still relies on Ronaldo for goals, Andrea Pirlo has tweaked the tactics of the team to allow others to chip in with some goals too. Summer loan signings Fedrico Chiesa, Weston McKennie and Alvaro Morata have been proven to be shrewd ones, as they have contributed massively to the team with goals and assists aplenty for all three of them. While last year’s team under Sarri were relatively decent, the only issue was that they lacked quality back up players, one which has been resolved with the signings made this summer.They have to face a limited Porto in the Round of 16s, which will certainly boost their chances in going through to further rounds. If everything goes Juve’s way and no injury crisis or loss of form occurs, this year could very well be the year they (finally) win the CL! One to watch from their Squad has to be Alvaro Morata, who has been surprisingly Prolific since joining on loan from Atletico Madrid.
So, that’s my ranking of each Round of 16 team based on their likeliness to win the CL. My favourites to win it is Juventus, but I would love to know your favourites and why you think they will win too! I hope this was a informative and meaningful read, and I hope to write again soon! | https://medium.com/@aakash-rao/champions-league-who-will-win-it-e90416a960cd | ['Aakash Rao'] | 2020-12-19 01:14:27.888000+00:00 | ['Football', 'Predictions', 'Sports', 'Champions League', 'Soccer'] |
Trends in data science with O’Reilly Media’s Chief Data Scientist | Editor’s note: This is the ninth episode of the Towards Data Science podcast’s “Climbing the Data Science Ladder” series, hosted by Jeremie Harris, Edouard Harris and Russell Pollari. Together, they run a data science mentorship startup called SharpestMinds. You can listen to the podcast below:
When I started grad school, data science was only just becoming a thing. At the time, a couple of jupyter notebook projects with pandas and sklearn were all you needed to land some of the most lucrative jobs in tech. By the time I dropped out in 2016, that wasn’t enough — employers were already asking for more in terms of code quality. Today, companies are looking not only for people who are good at coding, statistics and machine learning, but who are good software engineers as well.
The trend towards model deployment, engineering and just generally building “stuff that works” is just the latest step in the evolution of the now-maturing world of data science. It’s almost guaranteed not to be the last one though, and staying ahead of the data science curve means keeping an eye on what trends might be just around the corner. That’s why we asked Ben Lorica, O’Reilly Media’s Chief Data Scientist, to join us on the podcast.
Not only does Ben have a mile-high view of the data science world (he advises about a dozen startups and organizes multiple world-class conferences), but he also has a perspective that spans two decades of data science evolution. He’s seen how trends come and go, and stayed on top of the field as a whole through all that time. Here were our biggest take-homes from the chat:
The latest shift in the data science scene is an emphasis on putting models into production. Understanding how to work with tools like Docker, Git, AWS/GCP or other cloud compute platforms, and even web frameworks like Flask is becoming increasingly important — and even expected.
Data scientists are professional automators: their entire job is to automate decision-making processes that previously would have been carried out by humans. As a result, data science tasks are some of the first that tend to get automated with each successive wave of innovation in the space, because data scientists are staring at them all the time. That’s why data science roles change so fast: they’re constantly being automated away in pieces, leaving data scientists more time to think at increasingly high levels of abstraction.
It sounds cliché to say this, but one consequence of this last point is that soft skills (communication and empathy) are make-or-break today, and look set to become even more important in the future. As data scientists spend less time on tedious tasks like hyperparameter tuning or model selection, they have more and more time to think in big-picture terms. Figuring out business and product development priorities then become increasingly important, and you can’t do either of those things without having the communication skills you need to talk to users and clients, and advocate for specific courses of action within your own company.
Being well-rounded can be a huge advantage, and promises to become an increasingly decisive edge in the future. We saw in our last episode with George Hayward how even law degrees can be powerfully leveraged in data science roles, and Ben’s position is that this breadth of knowledge is important not only at the individual level, but at the level of teams. As managers and VPs are increasingly looking to pull talent from different backgrounds, the ability to pitch your unique story and perspective will become increasingly critical.
You can follow Ben Lorica on Twitter and Medium via his handle @bigdata, and check out the O’Reilly data science conferences that he helps run and organize. | https://towardsdatascience.com/trends-in-data-science-with-oreilly-media-s-chief-data-scientist-do-n-f89353d6ca17 | ['Jeremie Harris'] | 2019-10-15 19:49:37.117000+00:00 | ['Future Of Work', 'Data Analytics', 'Towards Data Science', 'Tds Podcast', 'Data Science'] |
5 Veteran Owned and Operated Nonprofits | In today’s society, many people are looking to make a difference in their communities. With the ever-growing population of veterans, opportunities are abundant for them to do just that. By becoming involved with one or more of these veteran-run non-profits, your contribution can make a huge difference in someone’s life while allowing you to be proactive about helping others and making change happen.
The following five organizations are all veteran-owned and operated non-profit groups that work hard every day to provide valuable services for those in need:
1) Team Rubicon (TR)
Team Rubicon is a veteran-owned and operated disaster response organization founded by combat medic Jake Wood in October 2010. TR was the first organization to organize teams to respond and assist with Hurricane Sandy relief efforts in 2012. Since then, they have built an international network of volunteers ready to deploy at a moment’s notice to areas affected by natural disasters.
Their operating model is based on “military efficiency, volunteer compassion, and crowdsource collaboration,” where teams of highly trained veterans deploy to disaster zones within 48 hours of an event. TR volunteers have also responded to events in Nepal, Haiti, the Philippines, Indonesia, Texas, and Louisiana, and more. TR’s mission is to provide trained veterans for disaster response and help bring communities together in helping others. Located in: New Orleans, LA
2) The Mission Continues
The Mission Continues is an organization that seeks to help veterans transition back into civilian life by providing them with opportunities to serve their communities and continue building skills they learned while serving in the military.
Since its inception, TMC has connected over 1,400 veterans with service opportunities, engaged in over 1,000 service projects, and helped to create more than 4,500 new jobs through the various businesses that support their cause.
3) The Veterans Leadership Program
The Veterans Leadership Program is a non-profit organization that helps veterans transition from the military to civilian life by providing them with leadership, career, and personal development training.
Since its inception in 2007, TLP has provided over 1,400 veterans with educational resources and helped place 400+ veterans in jobs at companies like LinkedIn, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, United Health Group, and many more. Most importantly, TLP believes that every veteran can become a leader in their community. Because of this belief and others like it, TLP had had a significant impact on veterans’ lives since 2007. Located in: Santa Monica, CA
4) Team Red White & Blue (Team RWB)
Team Red, White, and Blue provide veterans with opportunities to give back to their communities and provide peer support to other transitioning service members. Located in: San Diego, CA
5) Team River Runner
Team River Runner operates programs that bring veterans together to help their communities and help transition from military life. Located in: Washington, DC. | https://medium.com/@jim-mowrer/5-veteran-owned-and-operated-nonprofits-7f2b56c7a0d1 | ['Jim Mowrer'] | 2021-08-16 16:19:42.539000+00:00 | ['Veterans', 'Nonprofit'] |
Dota 亞洲邀請賽 DAC 2018 主賽事 Day 3 | in Both Sides of the Table | https://medium.com/dota-observatory/dota-%E4%BA%9E%E6%B4%B2%E9%82%80%E8%AB%8B%E8%B3%BD-dac-2018-%E4%B8%BB%E8%B3%BD%E4%BA%8B-day-3-1336f60e5a01 | [] | 2018-07-08 16:55:04.329000+00:00 | ['Dac2018', '2018major', 'Dota2 Match Review'] |
What is day trading/ swing trading? | Day trading is the selling and buying financial tools and buying or selling them within the same day. Short-term action and lower timeframes are used to execute strategies based on indicators and trigger signals. Whereas swing trading is the buying and selling of the financial tools executing a strategy focused more on the long-term. The difference lies in how long a trader prefers to stay in a trade.
Five reasons why you should day trade:
Easy to enter — Day trading allows you to do what you like full-time and enables you to learn and see changes in real-time. Learning from real-time is a game-changer. Observing how markets behave and executing trades on a daily basis is perfect for giving you an understanding of the markets you need in order to learn the long-term aspects of trading or investing. You can become independent — Day trading is a business if you think about it. If you manage to trade enough value and your execution is good, day trading might be the key to get you off your job and into a new field. But do not forget, trading is not easy. Take your time learning it. You will only become successful when you practice and stay consistent with your approach. Work from wherever you like — This one sounds too good to be true, but it isn’t. All you need to trade is a stable internet connection, your laptop, and everything else you need to be in the mindset. Trading even got easier through most of the exchanges offering Apps to download onto your mobile phone, enabling you to execute your orders or manage your portfolio on the go. Day trading gets you off the idea “get rich quick” — I know, this one might sting. It is the truth, nonetheless. To become a successful trader, you need consistency, know-how, and the willingness to make mistakes, 90% of new cryptocurrency traders that just started out end up with significant losses and no funds left after a month. Try to avoid being one of them, use a Stop-Loss, and manage your risk. If you need help with that, click here. If you can afford to lose money — The most important lesson to take away here. Be prepared to pay for your experience. Learning is a challenging process, make mistakes but try to learn from them. Take screenshots, review your misjudgments, and don’t do them again.
Five reasons why you should swing trade:
Less time consuming — Since you will not find yourself scanning the market all the time, you will have more time to work, do stuff with the family, or enjoy some time off-screen. Swing trading is perfect for you if you need time off. All you need is a solid strategy and check on your investment once or twice a day. You can stay in the market for longer — Day trading needs you to set your Stop-Loss very close to your entry value, which involves the higher risk of being taken out of the trade too early. Swing traders can average their entry out by opening 3 -5 orders normally. However, by staying longer in the trade, you increase the chance for a negative outcome and the risk. Rewards are usually way higher than day trading — Since swing trading allows you to adjust your Stop-Loss to a level that takes volatility into account too. Day traders normally use trailing Stop-Losses that take them out on the declining top of a candle. Swing traders are fine with giving back if it means that they can get more gains later. Cut out the noise markets are creating — Swing trading helps you to stay away from low timeframe charts. Hunting for news and trends is not necessary. Just sit back and enjoy your strategy. Fit trading around your routine — Day trading is the other way round. To be successful, you need a daily routine. Swing trading offers you the chance to plan your schedule when you check the graphs. You decide whether it is necessary to check the news for valuable information. Swing trading helps you analyze the markets in a much shorter time since you are looking at the chart’s higher timeframes.
What is my recommendation?
Trading daily is fun and very good to get the hang of trading in general. Having daily exposure to the charts and the markets’ movements will make you become a better trader. However, do not get lost in all the buzz out there. Day trading is full of people telling you what you should do and where you should invest. Keep it simple, stick to your strategy, and question everything you hear about trading. Do your due diligence and be sure that you invest in something with value. However, swing trading will help you to cut all that noise out of your trading. Swing trading is the optimal way to test new strategies or perfect the ones that are already existing.
To conclude, I recommend starting with day trading, find the edge. Get yourself into it and learn what makes sense to you. There are many people out there trying to sell you something. First, find out if trading is something for you by using free material. Secondly, if you find yourself at a dead-end, get a mentor, and pay for a course. It is well worth the price if you find the trader that suits you best. I always imagine myself swing trading with 60 when I can’t be bothered looking at the charts anymore. That doesn’t have to be that way. Swing trading is worth trying out as soon as you got your fundamentals right. It might even be perfect for you!
If you want to find more educational material covering trading, investing, and the economics of Bitcoin, check out my blog and subscribe to my email. I will be posting all my knowledge and experience for free on there. | https://medium.com/@yveshofstetter/what-is-day-trading-swing-trading-6b0257906e3a | ['Yves Hofstetter'] | 2020-12-26 14:10:43.194000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Cryptocurrency News', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Bitcoin'] |
Should have said snacks… | Looking to add some funny to your feed? Follow this page for new cartoons every week.
Follow | https://medium.com/andy-anderson-cartoons/pandora-as-an-appetizer-cartoon-7ef4db9990bb | ['Andy Anderson'] | 2020-01-04 16:31:01.060000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Cartoon', 'Pandora', 'Funny', 'Comics'] |
Dividends Explained and why they can be dangerous. | John D Rockefeller the primary billionaire in history was once cited saying, that his lone delight in life was the see his dividends come in. Plainly individuals love their dividends and all things considered. After every one of certain sources guarantee that more than 20 years, dividends establish 60% of the s&p500 despite the fact that restored a major number, that will clarify our risks. Remember things that could rapidly transform an incredible dividend stock into a failure. So before you go pursuing dividends how about we go over the great the terrible and the revolting in the present post.
Capital gratefulness gets all the adoration with regards to venture examples of overcoming adversity. Think about all the occasions you've known about somebody purchasing a venture for a couple of dollars, just to sell it for millions, in the not too distant future. Yet, it's not by any means the only segment of your complete return. All things considered on the off chance that you own give it in paint stocks, some portion of your dividend will come from the pay you get. What's more, there are numerous in the speculation network who live for that additional income. Indeed it's very regular to discover speculators committing their whole portfolio to dividend paying stocks. Also, who can accuse them dividends resemble a stipend for adults with a great deal of advantages. What's more, not normal for a stock's value the return they offer is a smidgen more steady.
Be cautioned. Following a dividend venture technique isn't as simple as pursuing the best returns. There's a long way to go before you pick a dividend stock and what may resemble a stunning wellspring of money, may really be a ticking delayed bomb in camouflage. So today how about we have a thorough gander at dividends. Counting who pays them, why individuals love them so much and what to look out for when chasing them down.
To continue reading visit
https://finozilla.blogspot.com/2020/12/dividends-explained-and-why-they-can-be.html?m=1 | https://medium.com/@rahulkotabagi999/dividends-explained-and-why-they-can-be-dangerous-f44ef90cbf72 | [] | 2020-12-23 06:51:11.595000+00:00 | ['Dividends', 'Personal Finance', 'Passive Income', 'Stock Market', 'Investment Ideas'] |
What’s with the Aggressive LGBTQ agenda? | Iencounter the idea of an “aggressive gay or LGBTQ agenda” all the time.
Like many queer activists, I used to laugh at the idea, dismissing it like this —
Blanche, equality ain’t an agenda, it’s basic human decency.
But then I decided to take another tack. Own it. Wear an agenda with pride, like a flowing rainbow mantle.
So, sure.
I’m a gay man with an aggressive LGBTQ agenda.
It’s a very simple agenda. I don’t want any children to have to live through the pain I lived through as a boy.
That’s worth being aggressive about.
I don’t want another kid like me to have to bolt out of a pew during Sunday services and puke up his pancake breakfast after realizing he was one of those fags the preacher was talking about.
I don’t want other boys and girls — trans, lesbian, gay, or bi — to grow up “knowing” they’re sick and sinful inside.
I don’t want the twisted illogic of homophobic twits to torture more teens.
That’s an agenda for you.
I’m very aggressive about fighting people who teach or assert that there’s anything wrong with being LGBTQ.
Those people cause immeasurable harm. They must be stopped. Their ideas must be stopped.
Did you know that LGBTQ youth attempt suicide at 4 to 5 times the rate of straight youth?
Did you know that over 40 percent of homeless youth in the US identify as LGBTQ?
I know. I relentlessly know. I can’t ever stop knowing.
That’s why we’re so aggressive about our agendas.
Because lots of queer kids desperately need us to be. Because they’re suffering.
Somebody has to fight for them. | https://medium.com/james-finn/whats-with-the-aggressive-lgbtq-agenda-7300ffc79e75 | ['James Finn'] | 2018-03-22 17:50:22.047000+00:00 | ['Transgender', 'LGBTQ', 'Gay', 'Christianity', 'Homophobia'] |
I Took My Dog For a Walk Today and I Got Freaked Out | I Took My Dog For a Walk Today and I Got Freaked Out
My intuition was working again in my favor
My dog is much bigger and scarier than this cute little guy. Photo by Concha Mayo on Unsplash
I love walking my dog in the early mornings when the sun is just starting to rise, and it’s still quiet.
My dog, Willow, is a scary-looking dog when you look at her. She’s a pit bull and mastiff mix; she’s built like a tank, lean and muscular, and her bark can be terrifying if you don’t know her, because she snarls and growls while she’s barking. I know that if something terrible happened to me, she’d protect me with her life. Deep down, she’s just a goofy sweetheart with massive separation anxiety, and maybe a killer instinct, which I kind of like about her.
We walk down to the river about a mile away and take the trail alongside the water. There are other dog walkers, joggers, and bicyclists who take the path, but even then, there isn’t a lot of traffic in the early morning.
When I pass someone on my walks, I always make sure to acknowledge them and say “good morning.” it doesn’t matter if it’s an older lady or a teenage kid; I smile with a cheery “Good morning!” Most people return a ‘morning’ or a nod or even a smile as we pass each other.
This morning was like most other mornings, I walked down to the trail, but today Willow was especially interested in sniffing the ground. She’d stop every few steps to sift her nose through the dried-up leaves on the ground. I figured she was intrigued by the scent of a squirrel or something.
I was standing there, letting her sniff the base of a maple tree. It was a quiet winter morning, and the river was still. There I was, alone, enjoying my solitude, breathing in the fresh air.
Up ahead, in the corner of my eye, I noted a man walking towards me on the trail, a coffee cup in hand — another person enjoying the morning. I thought to myself, a fresh cup of coffee would be so perfect right now.
I didn’t pay much attention to the man. Instead, I looked down and watched my dog sniff and patiently waited for her to become bored with the tree so we could make our way along the river and back home.
As the man approached, I looked up and immediately smiled and said, “Good morning!” Within a microsecond, I felt complete fear. As he said back to me, “Goooood morning,” I felt ice run down my spine.
I suddenly had visions of this man — like he lived in a dark basement and played video games all day, and his pleasure was pursuing young girls by catfishing them on the internet. He gave me the creeeeeps.
Then I had the feeling that I was being contemplated as prey — or that if I was about thirty years younger, he may stop and start trying to make friends with my dog and me in an attempt to wedge himself in. I looked back down at Willow, but she was much too interested in sniffing the damn tree to be aware of my sudden hyperalertness.
“Come on, Willow,” I said as I tugged on her leash and started walking in the opposite direction.
I didn’t get more than two steps when he shouted at me, “I’ve never seen a dog sniff a tree before!” I gave an awkward laugh, like “ah — haha.”
‘He definitely lives in a basement if he’s never seen a dog sniff a tree,’ I thought to myself.
His comment only cemented my urge to walk as fast and as far away as possible. I was so grateful to have Willow with me, even if she was being a bit absentminded this morning.
Once I got out of sight from this man, my feelings dissipated, and I was back to being calm and serene the rest of our walk. Although I felt safe from any harm, I was thankful for my age and intuition, and yes, even that my squirrel-chasing dog was with me this morning.
Others may not be so lucky. | https://medium.com/the-virago/i-took-my-dog-for-a-walk-today-and-i-got-freaked-out-a83c08e254fb | ['Michelle Jaqua'] | 2020-12-07 03:19:32.859000+00:00 | ['Pets', 'Intuition', 'Women', 'Self', 'This Happened To Me'] |
QANON: Cult or collective Mental Illness or both | (picture from NBC article linked below)
Conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen and appeal to those who, confused by the news as it exists and suspecting that they don’t know everything that is going on, decide that there must be some sort of concerted effort to deny the truth to them. This confusion, accompanied by a seemingly inane desire to be “in on the secret” information, is one of the best explanations for the rise of QANON, that I can see.
That this tendency is further aided by the extreme rights intense desire to see “devils” in all those who don’t agree to lock, stock, and barrel, with their convoluted and insane view of the world and human interaction, and you get horrors like Qanon, a conspiracy theory that appeals to the fragile who see it as a “secret knowledge” that they have managed to latch onto, that other brighter and more even-keeled fact-based minds have not managed to accept.
So, we have people showing up in DC, buying into the lies dispensed by the former administration in the White House about a widespread conspiracy to “steal the vote”, who tried to do precisely what they accuse their opponents of trying to do….ie destroy the republic by keeping Congress from following the will of the people in agreement with the Electoral College.
What is so marvelously adaptive about this particular conspiracy theory is how it can morph to fit any objection. The basic theory seems to be that trump was fighting against a bunch of Democratic Pedophiles who were trying to take over the country. But, when a Republican like Kemp in Georgia or even Bill Barr deviated from the text, the members of this conspiracy group, easily amended their theory to include those Republicans. Thusly, they revealed the fact that the lie was the thing. Anybody that saw that widespread cheating on the scale they were suggesting didn’t, in fact, happen as part of this vast plot that they saw behind in the corners all over the place.
The thing is, on the face of this event, we have the Shaman. A young man with more time on his hands, apparently, than anything else, who spent his time in what I would considering bizarrely entertaining clothing advocating for a revolution and marching to prevent the very essence of our Democratic Republic from taking place — the peaceful transition of power. This hardy individual then, upon getting arrested and put in jail for his attempt at insurrection, was unwilling and/or unable to eat ordinary food, because it was not organic. Imagine that, jail doesn’t provide food that meets your high standards. This person would be laughable if he hadn’t engaged in truly dangerous behavior that actually endangered the lives of some of our representation, all based on a convoluted conspiracy theory.
But sadly, as funny as the Shaman and people of his ilk may be to the rank and file and somewhat more sane, citizen, these people walk amongst us. The HuffPost article gives a very poignant example of this. Sam is a young man who has lost his mother to the QANON cult. Now, admittedly, this was a woman prone to paranoia and tends to what some consider overblown reactions. She wouldn’t fly after 9–11, but there were lots of people nervous after that event and some justification for it.
But, as mildly annoying as her nervous reactions to other occurrences might have been, he has lost her now. She is, he reports “eat up” with QANON outrageousness. She has bought into this conspiracy theory wholeheartedly and seeings danger around every turn and is ANGRY about it to the point of nearly being violent in day-to-day life. Apparently, she now believes that only two people can be trusted, this unknown supposed member of the government called Q and trump, a man who, on Jan 6, actually threw his own supporters to the curb after claiming he would “go with them” to the Capitol. Even some of the other QANON believers have realized that he, himself, couldn’t or shouldn’t have been trusted to follow through.
So, is QANON a cult or a form of infectious mental illness? I don’t know why it has to be seen as one or the other. It can, and probably is, both. | https://medium.com/@jwgarman2/qanon-cult-or-collective-mental-illness-or-both-3eaaf03bb996 | ['Left Wisdom'] | 2021-02-20 00:43:22.954000+00:00 | ['Insanity', 'Politics', 'Insurrection', 'Conspiracy Theories', 'Trump'] |
Ayurvedic Herbs for Diabetes — A Purely Natural Way to Control Sugar Levels | Ayurvedic Herbs for Diabetes — A Purely Natural Way to Control Sugar Levels
YOU CAN HAVE IT!!!!New Cookbook Reveals 60 Delicious Diabetic Friendly Recipes
Diabetes has almost become an epidemic in today’s world. Diabetes is a disorder that affects the way your body uses food for energy. Whatever sugar we take is generally broken down into simple sugar called ‘glucose’ in our body.
This glucose circulates within the blood and enter into the cells with the help of insulin. Insulin is a hormone, made within the Beta-cells of Pancreas. Due to sedentary life style and genetic predisposition, the beta cells are not able to make enough insulin, which is a key for glucose to enter into the cells. The key is not there and the glucose keeps on circulating within the blood.
This is called Diabetes.
There are two main types. Type I & Type II .
There is another condition known as Pre-Diabetes.
There are two main types of full-blown diabetes. People with Type 1 diabetes are completely unable to produce insulin.
People with Type 2 diabetes can produce insulin, but their cells have become resistant to it. In either case, the glucose can’t move into the cells and blood glucose levels can become high. When these levels remain high for long time, they can cause serious complications.
Pre-Diabetes:
Pre-diabetes is a condition in which the cells in your body are becoming resistant to insulin or your pancreas is not producing as much insulin as required. Your blood glucose levels are higher than normal, but not high enough to be called diabetes. This is also known as “impaired fasting glucose” or “impaired glucose tolerance”. Every individual who has a Diabetic father or mother must go for glucose tolerance test or GTT. This can help in diagnosing pre-diabetic condition. A diagnosis of pre-diabetes is a warning sign that diabetes will develop later.
You can prevent the development of Type 2 diabetes by losing weight, making changes in your diet and exercising.
Type 1 Diabetes
In case of Type I (Insulin Dependent Diabetes) the person can’t make any insulin. Type 1 most often occurs before age 30, but may strike at any age. This is typically caused by genetic disorder. The pancreas produces very little or no insulin anymore. Frequent insulin injections are needed for Type 1. However there are certain herbs like Salacia oblonga and Pterocarpus marsupium which are found to be useful even in Type I diabetes.
Type 2 Diabetes
People suffering from Type II diabetes are having enough insulin but the cells have become resistant to it. This type of Diabetes has become very common and is spreading like an epidemic everywhere around the world. The most important reason for the cells to become resistant to insulin is sedentary life style which is being followed by modern age people.
95 percent of all diabetes cases are Type 2. What can be the reason? It’s a lifestyle disease, triggered by obesity, a lack of exercise, increased age and to some degree, genetic predisposition.
So the only way to prevent diabetes is to change the life style, which is the basic theory of Ayurveda to fight any disease. According to Ayurveda, Stress and life style is the reason for most of the illnesses including Type II diabetes.
Factors for developing Type II diabetes and herbs for them
As we know that there is no problem with the insulin production. It is there in the body in enough quantity, but the only problem is that it is not able to open the cells to make the glucose enter into them. All the glucose keep circulating within the blood. The cells become resistant to insulin. The reasons for Insulin resistance are -
1. Obesity
The number one risk factor for Type 2 diabetes is obesity. Nearly 40 % of the patients suffering from Type II diabetes are obese.
Excessive fat interferes with body’s ability to use insulin properly. According to Ayurveda this is called “ Stroto-avarodh” i.e. blocked channels. This blockage in the channels of passage of Insulin is reason for greater insulin resistance.
Food and life style which cause blockage in the channels or “ Stroto-avarodh “ are curd, banana, heavy greasy diet, overeating, excess daytime sleep.
There are herbs which are useful in clearing the blockages and opening up the micro channels. These remove excessive fat from within the body. Herbs like Katuki (Picrorrhiza kurro), Vidang (Embelia ribes), Amalvetas (Garcinia cambogia), Triphala are useful in Type II diabetes because they open up the channels and helps in reducing the insulin resistance.
2. Sedentary Lifestyle
According to Charaka- an ancient Ayurvedic healer, lifestyle is damaging to health and bears responsibility for the growing obesity and diabetes. Inactivity and being overweight go hand in hand towards a diagnosis of Type 2. Muscle cells have more insulin receptors than fat cells, so a person can decrease insulin resistance by exercising. Sushruta another ancient Ayurveda surgeon explains by giving an analogy that who suffers from diabetes should walk at least 100 kilometers a day to keep his sugar level under control.
This indicates that one must walking and being more active also lowers blood sugar levels by helping insulin to be more effective.
ONLY FOR YOU!! New Cookbook Reveals 60 Delicious Diabetic Friendly Recipes
3. Unhealthy Eating Habits
90% of people who have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes are overweight. Unhealthy eating contributes largely to obesity. Too much fat, not enough fiber, and too many simple carbohydrates all contribute to a diagnosis of diabetes. Eating right is can turn the diagnosis around and reverse or prevent Type 2.
4. Family History and Genetics
It appears that people who have family members who have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes are at a greater risk for developing it themselves. Indians have a higher than normal rate of Type 2 diabetes. Having a genetic disposition towards Type 2 is not a guarantee of a diagnosis. Lifestyle plays an important part in determining who gets diabetes. So it can be prevented if we go for changed life style to avoid diabetes.
5. Increased Age
It’s a very sad but true fact. The older we get, the risk of Type 2 diabetes is increased. Even if an elderly person is thin, he/she still may be predisposed to getting diabetes. As we age, the pancreas ages right along with us. It doesn’t make enough insulin it did when we were younger. Also, as our cells age, they become more resistant to insulin as well.
6. Stress, High Blood Pressure and High Cholesterol
The hormones are under the control of our thought and our attitude towards events in life. The stress hormone immediately releases pool of glucose, corticosteroid hormones in our blood. There is immediate release of adrenal hormones, causing blood pressure and constriction of arteries.
Not only do they damage your heart vessels but they are two key components in Metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms including obesity, a high fat diet, and lack of exercise. Having metabolic syndrome increases your risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
HERBS FOR DIABETES-
Following are the herbs, which have been extensively researched by modern parameters by various research scholars. They have also been described in ancient Ayurvedic texts as herbal solution for diabetes. These are -
1. Saptrangi — Salacia oblonga
2. Vizaysaar — Pterocarpus marsupium
3. Gurmaar — Gymnema sylvestrae
4. Jamun — Syzigium cumini
5. Bilva Leaves- Leaves of Aegle marmelos
6. Karela — Momordica charanatia
7. Methi — Trigonella foenum graecum
8. Neem — Azadirachta indica
9. Tulsi — Ocimum sanctum
10. Daruhaldi — Berberis aristata
11. Haridra — Curcuma longa
12. Sadabahar- Vinca rosea
13. Amla — Emblica officinalis
1. Saptrangi — Salacia oblonga
This is a wonderful remedy for diabetes. It is a tree whose bark is effective in controlling diabetes. It is extensively studied in the western herbal schools, but in Ayurveda it is being used since ages. The herb have been found to have diabetes controlling properties.
2. Vizaysaar — Pterocarpus marsupium
This is a big tree whose bark is very useful for diabetes. The bark of the tree is made into a wooden glass and the glass is termed as “The miracle cure for diabetes”. Some water is kept in the wooden glass overnight and is consumed early morning by diabetes patients. The color of the water changes to brown and glass is changed after around 1 month when the water color does not change. Diabetes support contains extract of bark of this miracle tree.
3. Gurmaar- Gymnema sylvestrae-
In Hindi language, ‘Gur’ means Sugar and ‘Maar’ mean Kill. Gurmaar means “The sugar killer”. It is a twine that is known since ages in Ayurveda for its sugar controlling properties. Recent studies show that it contains Gymnemic acid molecules responsible for its anti-diabetic action. They bind with glucose molecules in the intestines and inhibit their entry into the blood stream. Thus it is effective in controlling sugar levels.
4. Jamun — Syzigium cumini-
It is a popular fruit tree growing wild in plains of India. The seeds of this tree are dried up and then a powder is made of them. The powder of the seeds of Jamun fruit is very effective in controlling sugar levels. It is astringent in taste which is opposite to sweet. Anything astringent in taste is useful for diseases caused by excessive sweetness like obesity and diabetes.
5. Bilva — Aegle marmelos-
This tree has three leaves together on its branches. Any tree who has combination of three leaves is considered in Ayurveda as divine and seat of Lord Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh. The leaves are offered every Mondays in Shiva temples. This fruit of this tree is useful in irritable bowel syndrome. The leaves of Bilva are excellent for diabetes. The leaves are dried and powder is made and mixed with other herbs for better results.
6. Karela — Momordica charanatia-
The juice of this fruit is a miracle in treating and preventing diabetes and its complications. 30 ml of Karela juice every morning empty stomach is recommended for best results. It can be taken along with Amla juice for better results, as Amla is rich in natural vitamin C and is also effective in diabetes. Karela contains natural chromium and other micronutrients, whereas Amla is also rich in natural anti-oxidants like vitamin C and others.
7. Methi- Trigonella-foenum-graecum-
Since ages Fenugreek is being used as a medicine in India, Egypt, Middle east and other ancient civilizations. Fenugreek has excellent properties to bring sugar levels as well as cholesterol levels under control. The seed powder of Methi is used to lower down sugar levels. It can be mixed with herbs described above.
8. Neem — Azadirachta indica-
Azadirachtin, Nimbin and Nimbidin are effective alkaloids found in neem. They act not only as blood purifiers but also controls sugar level very effectively. Neem is also useful in many skin diseases like eczema, psoriasis, rashes. The skin diseases associated with diabetes also respond to this herb quickly. It also helps in clearing away the blocked channels and maintains the flow of bile from within the liver and improves liver function.
9.Tulsi — Ocimum sanctum-
It is popularly known as ‘The Holy Basil’ is a sacred plant according to Hindu mythology. People in India worship this plant as it has tremendous medicinal properties. Regular use of leaves of this plant controls blood sugar levels very effectively. It is also useful in many types of cancers, viral and bacterial infections, sore throat, cough and cold etc.
10.Daruhaldi — Berberis aristata-
This is a rhizome growing mainly in South India. The roots of this herb are taken out and grinded well. The herb powder stimulates pancreas to pump more insulin into blood. It also helps in preventing insulin resistance among cells. It acts as a channel opener for glucose into the cells. This also purifies the blood.
11.Haridra- Curcuma longa-
This is very popular herb and is commonly called Turmeric. Turmeric powder is an effective anti-allergic, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory and one of the best natural anti-diabetic. It works in the same way as Berberis aristata. It helps in purifying the blood, channel opener, helps in reducing the insulin resistance and thus making the way for glucose into the cells.
12.Sadabahar- Vinca rosea-
It is always flowering plant, growing almost in every house in India. It is known as periwinkle in English. The plant contains very precious alkaloids ‘ vincristine’ and ‘vinblastine’ which are used in allopathic medicine as anti-cancer injections. The herb leaves are very useful in controlling the diabetes. The herb leaves are mixed with other herbs described above to get good results.
13. Amla — Emblica officinalis -
Amla is world’s richest natural source of vitamin C and is nature’s super anti-oxidant. One amla contains 30 times more vitamin C than an orange. It prevents ageing and therefore delayes the onset of complications of diabetes. Amla powder, Amla juice can be consumed regularly to get the benefits in diabetes and other diseases. | https://medium.com/@gerardocasella82/ayurvedic-herbs-for-diabetes-a-purely-natural-way-to-control-sugar-levels-d84cccb8b6aa | ['Gerardo Casella'] | 2020-04-23 14:12:17.146000+00:00 | ['Diabetes', 'Diabetes Solutions', 'Diabetes Prevention'] |
Sports and event tech on the fast track | Aussies sports innovation on point
The startups demonstrated just how diverse the sports and event tech landscape really is here in Melbourne, which is not surprising given the city’s self-appointed title as the sporting capital of Australia and indeed the world.
Here are the startups we heard from on the day:
Blinxel is a democratized augmented reality content and creation platform where anyone can record, distribute and view realistic 3d content.
Fantasy Esports is a non-wagering fantasy esports platform for the global gaming community.
Friends of Mr Ed is a new racing app designed by owners for owners. A personalised way to see all your horses in one view, chat with other owners and share the fun of ownership.
Signmee is an online forms platform that provides signing solutions through response data, summary report, and authentication.
Sportspass powers the platform behind loyalty, rewards, and sponsorship activation programs for sporting clubs and associations.
Weyoume is a decentralized social media platform, based on blockchain technology. It enables freedom, transparency and community to flourish at a global scale.
Humense is a volumetric video company solving the capture and display of humans for augmented reality and virtual reality.
LetsTrainMe matches the right trainer with the right pupil, bringing personal trainers and customers together.
TidyHQ is a membership management software used by groups, organsations of all sizes that makes membership administration simple for the entire board or committee.
Treiner is a football coaching marketplace service providing players of all skill levels the opportunity to increase their abilities, learn new skills and become better players both on and off the field.
Ultra Sync Sports is an app that connects all fans all around the world, so the team can see the huge support which extends far beyond the sport arena.
Intix is a ticketing technology solution business for the event, entertainment and sports industries that allows anyone to create, share and attend events of any kind including music festivals, exhibitions, sports events and local club functions.
Changing the game plan
Despite the massive disruptions caused by the coronavirus, Ollie and the rest of the SBC team were able to complete their global scouting tour. Applications for the program closed on 27 March, and with the program starting on 25 May, Ollie and his colleagues at SBC have the unenviable task of selecting 20 startups from around the world to pitch at a Selection Days event for the final 10 spots in the accelerator program.
In the words of the great India batsman, Sachin Tendulkar “Success is a process. During that journey sometimes there are stones thrown at you, and you convert them into milestones.”
Normally the SBC Selection Days event would be held in Melbourne but of course, in these times, it swiftly — and seamlessly — pivoted to a virtual event being held in May.
If you’re interested in talking to us about our work with startups or the Startupbootcamp Sports and Event Tech Accelerator Program, please get in touch. | https://medium.com/@dius-au/sports-and-event-tech-on-the-fast-track-d4403cbc54e7 | [] | 2020-06-23 08:40:27.911000+00:00 | ['Sports Tech', 'Event Technology', 'Startup Accelerators', 'Innovation', 'Startup'] |
Mapping Large Areas: Drones Create High-Resolution Map of 1,300-Acre Urban Park | Mapping Large Areas: Drones Create High-Resolution Map of 1,300-Acre Urban Park
CAVU Media Uses Drones to Map New Orleans City Park
The challenge: map a 1,300-acre urban park, deliver it to your client in a poster-sized format, and do it all without sacrificing quality and resolution. This is what Ian Cotita of CAVU Media faced when he was hired to create a map of New Orleans City Park, a sprawling space that is one of the ten largest urban parks in the country.
Mapping large areas like this park requires the right equipment, software and plenty of planning. But Ian was up to the challenge. With this project, he produced one of the largest DroneDeploy maps to date, and illustrated that drone mapping can create high-resolution visual overviews of even the largest spaces.
When DJI rolled out the Phantom 1 in early 2013, Ian Cotita was running a successful web design and marketing company. This work included photography and videography services, so with the emergence of the commercial drone industry, he saw the potential for a new market. His company was one of the first in Louisiana to receive an FAA 333 exemption to fly commercially, and after a few of his clients let him experiment with drone photography and videography at their events, “It took on a life of its own,” says Ian. “Fifteen drones later, here we are.”
Ian now runs CAVU Media, which provides mapping services, aerial videography, design services, and post production media content in the greater New Orleans area. CAVU’s client list includes big names like Jaguar, Red Bull, and Live Nation. Ian was hired this January to map New Orleans City Park. It is the second time he’s mapped the park, and to date it remains the largest mapping project he has taken on. He spoke to us about the process of mapping the park and some of the lessons he learned along the way.
Orthomosaic map of 1,300-acre New Orleans City Park — Explore the map
Drone Map Delivers Higher Resolution at Half the Cost of Aerial Photography
On a wall in their conference room, New Orleans City Park’s improvement division has mounted a large-scale printout of the park from an aerial view. The printout is updated annually and used as a visual reference in planning meetings, when discussing construction progress and new projects. In years past, the department relied on aerial photographs, hiring a pilot to provide them with three pictures taken from an altitude of 1,500 feet. But hiring a pilot is costly, and the resulting product doesn’t translate well into a poster-sized format. There is only so much resolution that can be achieved from 1,500 feet. It is also difficult to align three aerial photographs into one seamless composite.
Last March, looking for a more complete picture with higher resolution, they hired Ian to fly the entire 1,300-acre grounds.Not only was Ian confident he could make a higher quality map using DroneDeploy, but he offered a package that cost 50% less than aerial photography.
After capturing thousands of images, Ian used DroneDeploy to stitch them together into a high-resolution orthomosaic map, which he then exported as a PDF and printed in large scale. The result was a poster that measures four feet tall and over seven and a half feet long. It far exceeded any expectations for the project.
“For aerial photographs, they were paying twice as much. We came in and just kind of blew their minds with the data and the sheer quality,” -Ian Cotita
Although the park improvement division’s main goal was to obtain an orthomosaic map, they were pleasantly surprised by the additional data Ian provided them, including a 3D model and an elevation map that he created in DroneDeploy. They’re now looking into ways to use the additional data, such as gathering information about drainage from the elevation map, and they are excited about the potential going forward.
New Orleans City Park overlaid with street grid
The orthomosaic map alone was worth every penny for the improvement division. Not only did the map provide a complete composite of the entire park, but the resolution was far greater than anything that could have been achieved with aerial photography. After seeing the value of the high-resolution map, the park’s improvement division has hired Ian to map the park again next January.
Lessons for Mapping a Large Area
“The first map was quite the learning experience,” Ian admits of his initial flight in March. Mapping such a large area is no small feat. He felt it went well the first time, but knew he could make adjustments to improve his results for the second map. Thanks to a few changes he made to his process and hardware, he says the second time around was smoother, and the resulting map was better quality than the first.
Here are some of the changes Ian made for his second map:
Reducing altitude and increasing overlap
“This time, we really pushed the envelope by going lower and doing a higher overlap,” Ian says. For his March flight, he stayed at 398 feet. This time, he flew 25 feet lower and increased the overlap to 70/60. The result was an additional 3,500 images, bringing the total number of images for the second flight to over 6,000. He does admit that increasing the number of images required additional time to complete the stitching process, but the DroneDeploy map engine was able to handle it. In the end, he says it was worth the additional processing time for the increased resolution.
Flight plan of the park from second flight (left) compared to first flight (right)
Revising your flight plan
To a drone service provider looking to fly a large area for the first time, Ian advises scouting the area ahead of time to determine any potential issues and then planning flights accordingly. For his first map in March, he few three large flights, starting on one side and making runs back and forth across the one-mile wide park.
“Needless to say, it was pretty tricky,” Ian says. If he was lucky, he could get across and back on one battery. The middle section of the park is also heavily wooded, so signal loss was an issue. For the second map, he broke the park into seven smaller flights. He also centered up in the middle of each section, cutting the drone’s range in half. This made for easier battery swaps by reducing the distance between each waypoint and the drone’s return to home.
Upgrading to a more powerful mapping drone
In March, Ian used a DJI Inspire 1 with X3 to fly the park. This time around, he upgraded to the newly released DJI Phantom 4 Pro. “It was the difference maker,” he says of his new drone. “The 4 Pro is very, very solid.” He says the increased range, new video feed technology and added mechanical shutter made a difference in the final product.
He also knows that choosing the right drone mapping software for the project was key. Of DroneDeploy, he says, “The main sell for me is the piloting side of things. It’s so much faster. Other apps restrict the speed of the drone significantly. Some to as little as eleven miles an hour. I flew at thirty plus with DroneDeploy.”
Having a complete visual overview of a large space can be an important tool for management and oversight. As the New Orleans City Park’s improvement division can attest, drone mapping provides a low cost, high-resolution option, even for one of the country’s largest urban parks.
Where to Learn More
If you are interested in picking up more tips for mapping large areas, make sure to read How to Map Large Areas: A Workflow for the Commercial Drone Industry, written by Eric Harkins of Back Forty Aerial Solutions. Also, photographer and DSP Justin Moore recently shared his tips for improving the image quality of drone maps.
And as always, take time to explore our support documentation for more best practices:
Get Started with DroneDeploy
Want to learn how DroneDeploy can help your business? Visit www.dronedeploy.com to start your free trial or request a consultation with one of our team members. The DroneDeploy mobile application is available for free download for both iOS and Android devices. | https://medium.com/aerial-acuity/mapping-large-areas-drones-create-high-resolution-map-of-1-300-acre-urban-park-5637c6f055e1 | [] | 2017-06-06 22:35:06.760000+00:00 | ['Urban Planning', 'Drones', 'Parks And Recreation', 'Mapping', 'How To'] |
New Kafka Adapter: Connect Diffusion 6.6 with Apache Kafka — Push Technology | With the release of Diffusion 6.6 Preview 1, a beta version of the new Kafka adapter is now available for on-premise Diffusion.
The Kafka adapter translates data between Diffusion topics and Apache Kafka events. We’ve designed it to make it quick and easy to integrate Kafka with Diffusion.
Kafka is a widely used event streaming tool with high performance, solid scalability and resilience within the data center. Diffusion is efficient in providing the last mile delivery of data across unreliable networks, using delta streaming and reliable session reconnection. The new Kafka adapter acts as a bridge between these two robust systems and enables you to build a complete real-time data distribution solution.
The earlier standalone Kafka adapter for Diffusion used the Kafka Connect framework and was available via GitHub. The new adapter does not use Kafka Connect, and is instead based on Kafka Producers and Consumers.
A version of this new Kafka adapter has been available on Diffusion Cloud since August.
For the on-prem preview release, the adapter is more refined with additional features and improved configuration options. The adapter is included within the Diffusion server installation and can be stopped and started independently from the main server.
Features:
Pub-sub
With the publisher function of the adapter, messages from different Kafka topics can be aggregated in Diffusion and extracted into separate reference topics using topic views or modified using the new topic view insert clause. The newly transformed data can be published to another Kafka topic (using the subscriber feature of the adapter) or to Diffusion clients.
You can publish updates from a specific Diffusion topic path to Kafka. If you prefer, you can map updates from multiple Diffusion topic paths to a single Kafka topic. This is all configurable in the adapter.
Multiple Kafka cluster support
In this version of adapter, users can connect Diffusion with multiple Kafka clusters and transfer messages across them. With this feature, data from different Kafka clusters can be published to Diffusion topics. The adapter can be configured to consume messages from one Kafka cluster and publish messages to others. Here’s a diagram of an example use case:
Kafka security support
You can configure the adapter to connect securely to a Kafka cluster. SSL connection and SASL authentication mechanisms are supported. In this version, for SASL authentication, SASL/GSSAPI (Kerberos) and SASL/PLAIN are supported.
Configurable Kafka clients
Apache Kafka provides various configuration options to configure Kafka consumer and producers. These can be freely added as key-value pairs in the adapter configuration, so you can fine-tune the capability of consumers and producers.
Time series topics
Publishing and subscribing to Diffusion time series topics are supported by the adapter. To publish to a time series topic, use the “mapToTimeSeriesTopic” flag in the configuration.
Monitoring
The adapter uses Prometheus to expose its metrics. In addition to the default JVM level metrics provided by Prometheus, publisher and subscriber specific counters are added, giving you more insight into the messages processed by adapter.
More information
The 6.6 Preview 1 manual has full documentation about how to configure and use the Kafka adapter.
Remember, you can download and install 6.6 Preview 1 now or create a 6.6 service on Diffusion Cloud.
Please let us know what you think about the new adapter. We plan to expand its capabilities in the full 6.6 release and subsequent releases, so please get in touch with your feedback and feature requests.
The Diffusion® Intelligent Event-Data Platform makes it easy to consume, enrich and deliver event-data in real-time across all network conditions. Push Technology pioneered and is the sole provider of real-time delta data streaming™ technology that powers mission-critical business applications worldwide. Leading brands use Push Technology to bring innovative products to market faster by reducing the software development efforts using the low-code features. The Diffusion® Intelligent Event-Data Platform is available on-premise, in-the-cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. Learn how Push Technology can reduce infrastructure costs, and increase speed, efficiency, and reliability, of your web, mobile, and IoT application.
Learn More: View Blog Posts and Developer Resources | https://medium.com/@pushtechnology/new-kafka-adapter-connect-diffusion-6-6-with-apache-kafka-push-technology-602b248fff20 | ['Sanjai Marimadaiah'] | 2020-12-14 18:59:04.170000+00:00 | ['Apache', 'Apache Kafka', 'Diffusion', 'Kafka'] |
Chronicles of building a startup during a pandemic: 11 lessons learned while applying to the NSF SBIR America’s Seed Fund grant | I came across the National Science Foundations’ Seed Fund through a startup slack group I am a part of. I was curious about it and decided to learn more. Called “America’s Seed Fund”, the NSF had an application process for entrepreneurs to receive a government grant to fund their startups with the goal of boosting entrepreneurship and startup-building in America. I bookmarked the page as I contemplated whether to apply or not.
Fast forward to today, we applied and learned a thing or two that we think might be helpful for other entrepreneurs going through the same deliberation. With a big caveat that we’re still waiting to hear back and these grants are often highly competitive, I think I could share some advice, having gone through what may appear to be a pretty intimidating and daunting application process.
While it was admittedly a lot of work, I would recommend any entrepreneur out there to give it a try for the following reasons:
The hard work that went into filling out all the information as part of the application was a forcing function to get our thoughts down and crystallize our value proposition. It helped us articulate the team’s complementary strengths, and why we are capable of delivering on the vision and business model within the allocated budget. It forced us to think of ourselves as a company with real-world consequences in the product and company building process.
It boosted our confidence as a company to have climbed what seemed like a daunting mountain, well aware that that there was always the chance for rejection. Having originally been designed for academics and research scientists, the application was intimidating and arduous but we managed to complete it, one small step at a time. It felt like a big accomplishment and when we submitted what ended up being a 110-page proposal, the entire team felt immensely accomplished and proud of our work.
We generated collateral that we repurposed time and time again for other pitch competitions, conversation starters, and outreach and marketing efforts. The hard work that we poured into the proposal was certainly not in vain on multiple fronts and being able to repurpose the material for a variety of other opportunities was one of them.
With that said, here we go on all our lessons learned!
Roro Innovation had just been incorporated as an LLC at that point and we had 3 team members; Filipe, our tech lead and architect, Susan, wearing various hats including operations, marketing, and finance, and myself, playing point on product and UX. I was considering funding options and was amassing a list of VCs and angel investors that we could reach out to. But all of the literature I read and the podcasts that I was listening to left me with the impression that for first time, no name entrepreneurs without the stereotypical pedigree, this would be a serious uphill battle. Bootstrapping, working off of savings, and raising a friends and family round would likely be the best way to get our company initially off the ground. Once we had some traction and users to tout, we could start the outreach to the typical VC types.
As a result, our two funding options were government grants like this one or friends and family and this seed fund route felt safer with no emotional baggage of the kind that is on the line with friends and family rounds. (We are keeping ourselves open to revisiting this.)
The process for applying was divided into 2 parts; first, a project pitch followed by the full application once you were invited to formally apply. I’ve said this before but the full proposal is very involved and requires a great amount of work. The project pitch is intended to be more light-weight so an applicant could get feedback quickly about their eligibility and upon approval, devote their resources to the heavier and more demanding proposal. I appreciated this two-step approach. It was a thoughtful way to help save time for those engaged in entrepreneurial endeavors that might not fit the bill.
The project pitch was very simple and required no more than a few hours’ worth of work. Details about it can be found here: https://seedfund.nsf.gov/project-pitch/. The following webinar has helpful information to get started as well.
n.b. Before you apply, check your eligibility which is viewable under number 2 here and screenshot below:
We first submitted the project pitch back in November 2019, pre-pandemic, and heard back a few weeks later that we had been rejected. After letting ourselves be momentarily disappointed, we decided to reapply with a stronger positioning. We did so in May, after we had launched in the Google Play store during the pandemic, and were notified that we were invited to proceed with the fuller proposal process.
This brings us to lesson #1: Do not take the first rejection too hard. You can always reapply and get a different outcome.
I then made sure to review all of the information and resources available about the application process. I found the webinars to be incredibly informative and helpful. If you cannot make the designated time, there are pre-recorded ones available on YouTube like this one:
Here’s a more updated one but they seem to cover pretty much the same content:
It was through these webinars I learned how to prioritize my time on the application.
This leads us to lesson #2: The first thing to get out of the way is to ensure your incorporated business is registered in the required places:
1) Dun and Bradstreet Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS)
2) System for Award Management (SAM)
3) Research.gov
4) Small Business Administration (SBA) Company Registration
(As a reference, this is mentioned around the 4 min and 45-second mark on the June 1 webinar linked above and the 4 min and 30-second mark on the November 23 webinar linked after it.)
The SAM registration activation took us quite a long time. As you can see in the email screenshots below, I filled in our company information on sam.gov on June 8, 2020.
However, the final registration confirmation email didn’t come until July 20, 2020. That took something like 7 weeks.
Lesson #3: I would advise you to get SAM registration out of the way as soon as you can. There’s this pdf link referenced in the June webinar that isn’t mentioned in the November one that I found particularly helpful in registering with sam.gov: https://sam.gov/SAM/transcript/Quick_Guide_for_Grants_Registrations.pdf (All helpful links are summarized far below in the post for convenience.)
The June webinar highlights number 5 on the PDF that provides helpful guidance in filling out your registration:
I found the SAM registration to be the most confusing, and had I not stumbled across that pdf mid webinar, I would’ve struggled.
Additionally, the registrations for these have inter-dependencies, meaning before you can register for sam.gov, you need a DUNS number and before you can register with research.gov, you need to have a sam.gov registration. Keep these interdependencies in mind. The user interfaces of each of these sites are admittedly not modernized but as long as you carefully follow the instructions laid out here, you should be ok.
Next, the important links for the solicitations are as follows:
SBIR Solicitation — NSF 20–527: https://nsf.gov/pubs/2020/nsf20527/nsf20527.htm
— NSF 20–527: https://nsf.gov/pubs/2020/nsf20527/nsf20527.htm STTR Solicitation — NSF 20–528: https://nsf.gov/pubs/2020/nsf20528/nsf20528.htm
Our company applied for SBIR which does not require a partnership, while STTR requires a partnership with an eligible research institution, usually a research university. Our social media aggregator app did not necessarily have to be steeped in hard research so SBIR was the right path for us.
When I first clicked the link above for the SBIR one, I thought to myself, this was entirely too much work, and was ready to give up before starting. The instructions alone were over 27 pages in small font and single spacing. The National Science Foundation Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide is 185 pages long. Given this grant was coming from the NSF, it felt like they retrofitted existing research grant applications for this entrepreneurial seed grant rather than taking a fresh approach to accommodate for less academically rigorous startup initiatives. The application language is steeped in jargon used in an academic setting like “PI (Principal Investigator)”, and the research proposal assumes in many instances that you are a research institution applying, with biosketch templates resembling how a research professor might lay out their work and research experience as opposed to an entrepreneur or working professional’s resume.
Lesson #4: Having gone through the process, I want to encourage you all not to be discouraged. We decided to change our attitude and take things one step at a time and you should too.
As indicated around the 10 min mark for both the June and November webinars, the core of the submission is around the 15-page project description. We decided to dedicate ourselves to working on this section over the course of several weeks. It consists of an elevator pitch (1 page), commercial opportunity (2–4 pages), innovation (1–3 pages), company/team (1–3 pages), and technical discussion and R&D plan (5–7 pages). The entire project description was not to exceed 15 pages.
One thing to note here is that if you submit more than 15 pages, you will be disqualified and your application will not be reviewed. If you have diagrams or images that you need to show to demonstrate the work you are undertaking, that counts in the page count so incorporate them with that in mind.
This is lesson #5: I know this because I reached out to my program officer with questions. And yes, they do write you back. They are listed with their emails on the solicitation and screenshot below as reference. Take advantage of them as resources during the proposal preparation process. It goes without saying to be thoughtful and mindful of their time.
This is also true when you get stuck in the FastLane submission process. Don’t hesitate to contact the helpline. I had trouble with the cover sheet portion of the form preparation section and contacted the helpline number and a real live person walked me through what I needed to do in order to advance to the next step. Take advantage of all these services at your disposal.
Lesson #6: I would also keep track of the America’s Seed Fund events page which hosted helpful webinars about how to submit your full proposal. While the pre-recorded webinars are incredibly helpful at 25 minutes, the full webinar often goes the full hour and includes a Q&A. I’ve reviewed both the pre-recorded webinars on YouTube as well as attended them via Webex when they were held at designated dates and times and found them to be complementary and informative.
Lesson #7: I would recommend working on the letters of support under supplementary documents soon after the project description and bio sketches, or in parallel. Here’s the detail on the solicitation:
While this is not required, I added it to my application to build a stronger case for why our company would make a great investment for the NSF. I reached out to organizations/professionals whose voice I felt would be a value add and ultimately chose the three who believed in our vision the most.
Lesson #8: Follow the rules and use what was provided to you by the NSF. Given the title of the section, “Supplementary Documents”, I thought I could add additional documents like research our team conducted as well as customer validation work but my program officer informed me that if I included additional material that was not listed in the solicitation, I would almost certainly be required to remove it when the proposal went through compliance screening.
As such, I would advise against adding anything that is not part of the application requirement list.
For Biographical Sketches, I found that with the template, I didn’t get to tell my professional story the way I wanted to. I reached out to my program officer who advised me to use the recommended template anyway. I ended up including a link to my professional resume within the template format and have no idea how it benefited or harmed our proposal.
Lesson #9: There are resources available online to assist with the budget section.
I found this template online from the University of Tennessee and used it to build out the budget section while following the instructions provided in the solicitation. I recently checked again on the University of Tennessee Office of Sponsored Programs home page and it appeared they had updated it to be a bit more complex: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gxy21k3r0jrbzw7/NSF-Sample-budget.xlsx?dl=0
Between the two, I think I prefer the simpler template but will leave it up to your preference. Towards the very bottom of the page on this link, there is a sample budget and budget justification you can reference to build out your own.
Once you have those pieces in place, the rest of the application is mostly administrative. The following comprise the big chunks of work.
Lesson #10: I would advise you to closely follow the directions provided in the FastLane guide Form Preparation followed by Form Preparation part 2 and 3. Once you’ve got those parts down, you’re basically at the home stretch.
Lesson #11: One final recommendation I have is to hire an editor for the project description if you can. It’s good to have a fresh, external pair of eyes to help you edit the document down to the essentials. Initially, one would think 15 pages is long but I would venture to guess that most folks would struggle with actually cutting the content down to fit that requirement. Ours was 20 pages long and we had to painstakingly edit it down to 15 with the help of an editor friend. | https://medium.com/@joinroro/chronicles-of-building-a-startup-during-a-pandemic-11-lessons-learned-while-applying-to-the-nsf-e3c5405e5e1c | [] | 2020-12-14 14:32:34.645000+00:00 | ['Seed Funding', 'Startup Lessons', 'Fundraising', 'Government Grant', 'Nsf Sbir Seed Fund'] |
On the True Nature of Choice | Weekly Essay
True choice is always a choice for the best.
A person never chooses the worst of two options if he understands both options in full, and it is only when he fully understands his options that he can be counted as actually choosing between them.
And so, presented with a genuine choice, a person always chooses the better. And if this simple principle is true, then the more genuine choices a person has in his life, the better things he will choose.
But you see, choice is restricted not only by external circumstances: it is also restricted by the internal circumstances of being human. Drives, desires, impulses and instincts — these inner forces are just as constricting as the material circumstances outside us.
The problem with the modern idea of freedom is that it focuses on material emancipation but not inner emancipation. Modern freedom ends with the individual’s desires: a liberation of the individual from all forms of physical slavery so that they may pursue their wants and needs unimpeded.
But this limited notion of freedom has completely forgotten the most ancient form of slavery, the form of slavery which the ancients knew quite well: the slavery of our own passions. If we are to talk about freedom, genuine freedom, we cannot end with external slavery: we must account for the slavery of our inner lives.
To locate genuine freedom — a choice that is truly unrestricted and unconditioned — we must go deeper than the modern notion of freedom. This genuine freedom is freedom from internal as well as external compulsions. And what may seem like slavery to the modern notion of freedom may actually be freedom in this truer, deeper sense: a freedom from our own rampant desires as well as the rampant desires of others.
Once we can secure some degree of freedom from our own instincts and impulses — either by satisfying them, abating them, resisting them, channeling them, disciplining them, or otherwise consciously directing them — then we will have expanded the domain of possible choices available to us. And, having more choices, we will be able to choose even better things.
The word choice itself can be misleading. Nothing is free. The way we act when we are free is predictable; this alone undermines the idea of pure freedom or choice. And the predictable thing that happens when we expand our genuine freedom, freedom from internal demands as well as external demands, is a demand for yet greater things. The more immediate concerns, now fulfilled or transcended, open our minds to greater and more general concerns.
And so, it is far more accurate to say that freedom, genuine freedom, is merely an opening for better things to happen. The freer we become, the better things we consistently choose, and the more that good choices, moral choices, begin to come out spontaneously from us.
Freedom taken to its fullest expression always turns out to be moral. Freed from both external and internal compulsions, we begin to turn towards service to others; we search for significance to our lives beyond our own selfishness; we accumulate power, wealth, and wisdom not merely for ourselves but in order to create structures and systems for the benefit of others.
Freedom in this genuine sense, rather than its liberal modern sense, is equivalent to the good. Freedom is not a prerequisite to the good, as it is classically conceived, a mere preliminary stage in moral action — it is good, if it is genuine freedom.
And so, when we pursue the idea of freedom in full, freedom of choice begins to look less and less like the model of rational self-interest or political libertarianism and more and more like a transcendental ethics. The less conditioned we are, the purer we become, and our purest unconditioned existence is revealed to be, in the final analysis, pure goodwill. | https://medium.com/@misatheus/on-the-true-nature-of-choice-857c2d48a8b6 | ['Misatheus'] | 2021-05-22 14:20:16.675000+00:00 | ['Goodness', 'Essay', 'Morality', 'Choices', 'Freedom'] |
The Good Egg: The Next Chapter | Click here to sign up for this daily newsletter!
Happy Tuesday!
Unlike most Tuesdays, today is not Tasty Tuesday. Today is a final farewell to my wonderful Good Egg readers.
I’ve been thinking for weeks, “how do I end what has been an amazing 262 edition journey over the past year??”
But as I thought about the possible “endings,” I found a quote that was all too fitting for this occasion:
Of course, it’s easy to look at today as the “end” of The Good Egg. But I have one hope for each of you (and for myself).
I hope the past year has merely been one leg in each of our “life journeys.” I hope today marks the beginning of a new chapter… a chapter where we can each apply what we’ve learned to enrich our lives.
It may be sleeping a bit extra, finding five minutes to be mindful, going for a walk, or eating just a bit healthier. Whatever it is, I hope we can all find those little 1% habits (improvements) that make all the difference over time!
And of course, The Good Egg isn’t entirely over! Sure, you won’t see emails every day (I may send a few over the next year as I stumble upon great content), but instead I’ll be focusing my energy on building something for all of you.
The idea, of course, came directly from my experience over the past year and my struggles to apply some of the learnings I shared. In short, I struggled to find high quality, free meditations that suited my changing needs each day. So… my goal is to spend my next few months attempting to solve the problem (for myself and for each of you).
So, on this final Good Egg, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be building and sharing:
“The Good Egg Happiness Hub”
In this Happiness Hub, I’ll be curating Meditations and Health & Wellness Strategies that are:
💵 Totally FREE
💯 High Quality
📚 Organized by length and purpose
Hopefully, this can make all our happiness journeys just a tad easier and allow us to continue The Good Egg tradition, even after the daily emails are over.
Finally — THANK YOU all for making this last year so wonderful. Without you, none of The Good Egg could have been possible.
Love,
The Good Egg 🐣 | https://medium.com/@katherineripple/the-good-egg-the-next-chapter-51e8dbcc93eb | ['The Good Egg'] | 2021-04-27 03:45:29.491000+00:00 | ['Life Goals', 'Wellness', 'Happiness', 'Health', 'Positivity'] |
You Don’t Have to Know Everything; You Just Have to Know Where to Find It | You Don’t Have to Know Everything; You Just Have to Know Where to Find It
“Just-in-time learning” can make your life a whole lot easier. Here’s how to make use of it.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
In 1921, an interviewer asked Albert Einstein about the speed of sound. Einstein replied that he didn’t know because he didn’t carry such information in his mind. Instead, he’d look it up in textbooks where the answer is available anytime.
If Einstein lived today, he’d probably memorize even less because the internet enables us to find answers to most questions within seconds.
Yet, education systems all over the globe still force students to learn information by heart regardless of the relevance.
That’s not only ineffective but also worthless as knowledge itself isn’t worth much. The saying knowledge is power might have been true a few decades ago. Today, only applied knowledge is power.
In the 21st century, you can learn almost any skill for free if you know how to browse the web and take enough time.
That’s a blessing and a curse at the same time because most people don’t know how to find relevant information. Yet, that’s one of the most powerful skills of the 21st century.
If you know how and where to look for information the moment you need it, you can master almost any problem with ease.
Instead of wasting your brainpower on memorizing information, you should try so-called just-in-time learning.
“Just-In-Time means learning something only when/because you actually need to use it.” — Kathy Sierra
Learning on the job is also called embedded learning and becomes increasingly relevant. More and more organizations switch from traditional education systems to just-in-time learning because of several reasons.
In the past, companies invested in random educational programs to equip their employees with additional skills. Today, most businesses don’t want to waste time and money on programs teaching random skills that will never be used anyway.
Typically, if you learn a skill without applying it, you’ll forget what you learned pretty quickly. When you need the skill after a few months or even years, you’ll need to relearn everything and realize that the first time was a waste of time.
And as time is our most valuable resource, we shouldn’t waste it on learning skills and memorizing information if we don’t need it.
Instead, leading organizations encourage their members to apply just-in-time learning. That way, employees can educate themselves in real-time when they actually need a skill. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/you-dont-have-to-know-everything-you-just-have-to-know-where-to-find-it-af3545b11832 | ['Sinem Günel'] | 2020-11-24 16:03:30.184000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Knowledge', 'Education', 'Innovation', 'Learning'] |
Kotlin on a Raspberry Pi. There are a bunch of articles and… | There are a bunch of articles and videos on how to use Kotlin on a Raspberry Pi, but they all are focused on using Kotlin/Native to compile code directly to the Pi. What if you want to use Kotlin on the Raspberry Pi, while not worrying about cross-compiling? Kotlin on the good old JVM is your answer!
TLDR: All of my code has been uploaded to this github repository.
Why JVM?
The JVM is a great piece of engineering, it’s fast, battle tested, and it runs pretty much everywhere. You also get the benefit of a huge ecosystem of tools and libraries.
That all sounds pretty great, now how do we do it?
Setting up the Raspberry Pi Itself
If you’ve already got a Raspberry Pi setup, you can skip to Adding Java, otherwise, let’s start at the very beginning.
Downloading the OS
The first step is download the OS from the Raspberry Pi website. There are a bunch of options, but the easiest way is to use the Raspberry Pi Imager tool that is linked at the top of that page. If you’d rather, you can download OS image directly, and flash it onto your SD card with your tool of choice.
Setting up Wifi on the Raspberry Pi
Once you have the OS flashed onto your SD card, the next step will be to get your Raspberry Pi connected to your local network. This is really easy if you have a monitor with a keyboard and mouse connected it (you can just set it up using it’s GUI like any other computer), but what if you don’t have either of those, or what if you flashed the “lite” version of the OS that doesn’t include a GUI by default? Luckily for us, there’s a way to get the Raspberry Pi connected to wifi without any of those things.
Plug your Raspberry Pi’s SD card into your computer Create a wpa_supplicant.conf file in the Raspberry Pi’s boot folder, it’s contents should be the same as below:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=<Insert 2 letter country code here>
network={
ssid="<Name of your wireless LAN>"
psk="<Password for your wireless LAN>"
}
Remember to set the name of your network, its password, and your 2 letter country code.
The next time your Raspberry Pi boots, it’ll connect to your wifi! Now since you have the Pi’s SD plugged into your computer already, let’s enable SSH too.
Enabling SSH
Enabling SSH will allow us to control the Raspberry Pi remotely. It allows us to easily deploy files and debug our code, without needing direct access to the Raspberry Pi itself. It’s super important to enable.
There are a few ways of enabling SSH, but the easiest is by creating a blank file in the root of the Raspberry Pi’s SD card named SSH (note the file doesn’t have an extension). If you are using Linux, or a Mac, the easiest way to do this is by typing the following command into your terminal: touch /PATH_TO_RASPBERRY_PIS_SD_CARD/SSH . The touch command will create a blank file for you. If you’re using Windows, you can open the SD card in Explorer, right click and choose New, then choose text file, enter the name SSH, and finally delete the .txt file extension.
Connecting to the Raspberry Pi for the first time
At this point, your Raspberry Pi should be setup and ready for its first boot. You can take your SD card out of your computer and plug it into your Raspberry Pi. Plug in your power cable and give it a few minutes to start up, some of the lights onboard should start to light up and blink. After waiting a few minutes, it’s now time to test out and see if everything you did so far worked. We are going to try and remotely connect to the Raspberry Pi for the first time.
To connect to the Raspberry Pi, we need to first figure out its name on our local network. The easiest test is by typing the following command into your terminal: ping raspberrypi.local . If it’s successful, it’ll result in something like this filling your terminal:
$ ping raspberrypi.local
PING raspberrypi.local (192.168.1.131): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.131: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=2.618 ms
If the results look like this instead:
$ ping raspberrypi.local
ping: cannot resolve raspberrypi.local: Unknown host
You’ll need to do a little more work to figure out what the Raspberry Pi is called. There are a few more suggestions here to help. Most likely you’ll need to call the Pi by its IP address, rather than raspberrypi.local.
The ping command will keep repeating until you stop it. Pressing CTRL + c on your keyboard will put an end to it. Now that we know the Raspberry Pi’s name, we can connect to it.
Still in your terminal, type: ssh [email protected] or ssh [email protected] (if you’re using its IP address). Your computer will now connect and “SSH into” your Raspberry Pi. It should prompt you to enter in a password, which by default is raspberry . If it asks you a yes/no question about “finger prints”, you can just type out “yes”, and you’ll see that it’s connected. You can now use your terminal to move around your Raspberry Pi, as if it was your personal computer.
Changing the root Password
While not needed, it’s good practice to change your Raspberry Pi’s root password away from the default. While not likely, this will make it more difficult to hack.
While logged into your Raspberry Pi’s pi account, type the command passwd . This will ask you to enter in the current password, then your new password, then to confirm your new password.
Adding Java
We have one final thing to set up on the Raspberry Pi itself: making sure Java is installed. If you have the standard “full” version of Raspberry OS, Java is probably already installed. To test, in the terminal where you’ve SSH’d into your Raspberry Pi, type java -version . If it outputs something like the following, you’re good to go and can skip to the next section:
$ java -version
java version "11.0.1" 2018-10-16 LTS
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 18.9 (build 11.0.1+13-LTS)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 18.9 (build 11.0.1+13-LTS, mixed mode)
Otherwise, you’ll need to install Java. Luckily for you, this is actually pretty easy. All you need to do is run the following two commands to install it:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install default-jdk
Once this is finished, you can check that Java was install properly by running the java -version command again, it should now output something similar to what I outlined above.
Awesome! That takes care of setting up the Raspberry Pi, now onto the good stuff! You can now log out of your SSH session by entering the command exit into your terminal, we are going to focus on your host computer for a bit.
Getting Your Environment Ready
You can write Kotlin using pretty much any text editor, but IntelliJ is an awesome IDE (and it’s free) and a great tool for Kotlin development. Both IntelliJ and Kotlin were created by the same company, so its Kotlin support is first rate.
Installing IntelliJ
You can download and install IntelliJ directly from their website. We will only need the free Community edition, and not the Ultimate one. Once it’s downloaded and installed, open it up and work through the “first time setup wizard”. You should eventually come IntelliJ’s start screen, where you can choose to start a new project/open an existing one.
Installing the Embedded Linux JVM Debugger Plugin
Now that we have IntelliJ all setup, we are going to install a plugin that will make running and testing our Kotlin code on our actually Raspberry Pi way easier. It’s called the Embedded Linux JVM Debugger plugin and it allows you to run, deploy and debug Kotlin code directly on your Raspberry Pi via IntelliJ’s UI. It’s a really time saver and makes the overall development experience substantially nicer.
From the IntelliJ welcome screen, click on the Configure in the bottom right corner. This should open a drop down menu, from that menu, click on Plugins. Select the Marketplace tab at the top of the window and start typing Embedded Linux JVM Debugger, and click the Install button. The plugin should start downloading and installing, once finished, click the Okay button to finish up and return the welcome screen.
Now that we have our environment set up, let’s get programming!
The Programming Part
Before we get into the code, we have to step through the project wizard, to set everything up.
Project Setup
Click on the + New Project button to get started. You’ll be greeted with a huge amount of options to choose from. For our use case, it’s pretty easy, we will choose Kotlin from the list on the left. Then set the options from the top:
Choose a Name for your Raspberry Pi project, and a Location to save it (any name you want and any where you want)
for your Raspberry Pi project, and a to save it (any name you want and any where you want) Choose the Console Application under Project Template
under Choose Gradle Kotlin for the Build System
for the Choose a Project JDK that matches what you installed on the Raspberry Pi earlier, if you don’t already have a JDK installed, click on the Download JDK option, and choose one from the list. OpenJDK is a great choice here, but you really can’t go wrong.
that matches what you installed on the Raspberry Pi earlier, if you don’t already have a JDK installed, click on the option, and choose one from the list. OpenJDK is a great choice here, but you really can’t go wrong. Click Next
On this next screen, you can leave everything default:
Default options here, feel free to change the Test Framework, if you want.
Click Finish and it’s time to get started!
Initial Test Run
This will open up a new window that looks like: | https://medium.com/@pete32/kotlin-or-java-on-a-raspberry-pi-de092d318df9 | [] | 2020-11-27 20:17:42.642000+00:00 | ['Kotlin', 'Raspberry Pi', 'Software Development', 'Java', 'Programming'] |
Qyto | PlayOjo is a great site for new players in the UK. It is licensed in Malta and the UK and has the same selection of games as its online counterpart. Players in the UK will also find that the casino is very user-friendly. The interface is colorful and easy to use. You can also access a number of exclusive competitions and guides to games at PlayOjo. The gaming industry is booming in Malta, and the casino is doing very well in the country.
You can contact the support team via live chat or email. Live chat is usually quick, but you should check the FAQ first to see if there is an answer to your question. You can also check their blog or FAQ section for any related questions. Once you have registered with the casino, you can begin playing. The site will even give you a free trial of the games. Besides that, the customer service team is very friendly and will be happy to assist you.
The support team at Play OJO login UK is friendly and will answer any questions you have about the games. They are available 24 hours a day, and are willing to help you if you have any issues. You can play slot games for free without signing up. If you have a friend or loved one who wants to try out the games, the support team will help you with your query. If you have any questions or concerns, you can contact them through the Help section. | https://medium.com/@shmidt03/qyto-fe6037b76057 | ['Shmidt Michael'] | 2021-11-29 02:03:13.812000+00:00 | ['Gambling'] |
Multiplayer, IRL | Earlier this year, we hit the road to meet Figma users in person at our Design System Meetups. In 8 cities across 4 continents, our community came out in force to share lessons and stories with one another. Conversations ran the gamut and covered topics far deeper than basic tips ‘n tricks. People debated the most effective ways to run design critiques, talked through the pros and cons of open design culture and forged new partnerships with each other for work.
We learned a lot during these gatherings, and others felt the same. That made us wonder: How do we empower our community to connect in person more often?
We spent the last few months figuring out what that could look like, and today we’re excited to introduce the first step: Figma Local Communities around the globe. We’re launching with groups in 20+ cities (and adding new ones every day). A sampling — Accra, Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Copenhagen, Lagos, London, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Tel Aviv. You can see the full-list here.
What do you want to see in your city?
We picked these cities through a combination of art and science. Some places have evangelists already throwing Figma-related meetups. Others have a particularly concentrated Figma user base. We’re excited to launch with such a wide array of geographies covered, and this is only the beginning.
Some of our new Local Communities: Accra, Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Copenhagen, Lagos, London, New York
We envision these groups being a supportive place where people can connect, learn and share. Sure, that may include Figma best practices and workflows, but also the challenges and successes designers face every day.
If you want to get involved, fill out this form to:
Start a Figma group in your city
Share what you want to see with your Local Community
Pitch specific meetups or other events in your area
The Designer Advocate team:
To make sure your ideas are heard, we created the Designer Advocate role at Figma. We have 3 people in different time zones and geographies to support these Local Communities.
Tom Lowry — North America
Many of you may know Tom’s work already. While working as a Senior UX Designer at the enterprise company OpenText, he practically moonlighted as a Figma instructor. He wrote many blog posts teaching fellow designers how to get started in Figma and structure their components for flexibility. He even built our Material Design resource kit for our Styles launch. He kept the trend going in his first weeks at Figma, producing an online Skillshare class on building design portfolios.
Zach Grosser — Europe
Zach was an early communications designer at Square, where he crafted the slides for Jack Dorsey’s big talks, and even designed the company’s IPO roadshow pitch deck. He brought Figma to the Square design team in 2013, making him one of our earliest adopters. After we met him in person (at Figma’s first ever Shindigma!) Zach became a valuable source of feedback on the product, gamely jumping on calls whenever we were testing a new feature. His passion for design education — and a move to Amsterdam — brought him to Figma full-time.
Namnso Ukpanah — Africa
Namnso first came to our attention when he drafted a 7-page proposal for a Figma design systems meetup in his home town of Lagos. Thanks to his promotion of the event, over 300 local designers and developers showed up to connect with each other and Figma. In the 6 months we’ve worked with him, he’s already onboarded 21 Figma ambassadors across 11 cities and 7 countries (while still working as the Lead Designer at hotel booking site Hotels.ng).
We’re still nailing down the particulars of how this will work, but consider these Advocates your boots on the ground. | https://medium.com/figma-design/multiplayer-irl-fa7e19368776 | ['Claire Butler'] | 2018-09-27 17:48:19.540000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Business', 'UI', 'Technology', 'UX'] |
Case study: how I would design Twitter’s Edit Button | So I hope everyone has a mask on because that might encourage twitter to add on an edit button. That being said, here’s a case study(case essay? redesign?) that shows how I’d implement the infamous ‘edit’ button on twitter.
Target Use Case:
Giving a chance for users to fix their tweets while retaining accountability.
Giving people the chance to fix a spelling error, misquoted tweet, or as a way to rectify false information, would be greatly beneficial to the platform as a whole.
Just think about the number of times you’ve been wrong or you’ve seen tweets that were wrong, a couple of outcomes may occur such as;
People begin to correct and pile onto the original poster to let them know that they’re wrong
and pile onto the original poster to let them know that they’re wrong A tweet becomes a thread — with the correct response (kinda like social proofing)
— with the correct response (kinda like social proofing) It gets deleted which holds 0 accountability to the poster.
Design Analysis:
Mockups for how the edit button would
The design process for me was to be as authentic and realistic as possible to what Twitter would do themselves.
Hence why I decided that instead of adding another action button to a tweet, it was implemented as another option similarly to ‘delete tweet’ and ‘pin to profile’.
Afterward, the tweet with being treated just like a regular retweet except at the bottom of tweet there will be a tag stating that the tweet is edited & it essentially is threaded to the original tweet.
This tag acts as a similar function to Twitter’s already existing tag regarding violations to their rules
An example of what kind of tag when you violate twitter’s rules.
The language I chose for the tag does a few things;
Holds the user accountable
Has notified any viewer that the tweet is NOT the original tweet & has been edited
the original tweet & has been edited Anytime someone comments or retweets the edited or original tweet the tag will appear and notify users that it has been edited.
The ability to gain optional knowledge on twitter’s guidelines
Langauge used for the tag
The feature would also hypothetically not allow the author to delete the original tweet unless they delete the edited version as well — effectively deleting the thread of tweets altogether. The edit function would only be able to be used once on one tweet. This way it’ll ‘foolproof’ any kind of misleading tweets that may be allowed.
A terrible recording of the mockup I made for the interaction
Final Thoughts
I believe having an edit button would be beneficial in twitter’s interactions as long as there is some form of accountability between users and a way for the original tweet to still exist alongside the edited version. This would help deter any misleading or offensive styled tweets because of the role the interaction would play. The edit button action would also help educate people on what is an error and what is a mistake — effectively creating a way to redeem oneself if need be.
We’ve seen the power of social media has on the ‘real’ world. From affecting our mental health to taking over entire elections it’s not a surprise it’s gotten to a point where we question if the pros outweigh the cons that platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, do to us. Is it worth it? And if it is, how can we make it better for everyone to interact with? What steps can we take to prevent the spread of misinformation, propaganda, and inappropriate opinions?
It’s a question that we have to continually ask ourselves, because with the advent of ‘deep fakes’, and people claiming your source is wrong, my source is right (what are we? children?) it seems like understanding what is true and what is not is becoming more and more difficult than we’d like to admit.
I believe the edit button on twitter will help aid in the fight against all of these factors, as long as there are accountability and education, Twitter can make their platform a little less toxic by implementing this.
TL;DR: | https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/twitters-edit-button-how-i-would-do-it-e39458168a2b | ['Anik Ahmed'] | 2020-10-16 03:08:19.994000+00:00 | ['User Interface', 'Case Study', 'Design', 'Twitter', 'UX'] |
What Have You Been Putting Off Around Goal Achievement? | How as your goal achievement gone? Did you accomplish everything you set out to do this year?
It’s been a wild one, so maybe not.
I’m not trying to shame you, promise! The reason I’m asking is that, as we start to gear up for 2021, you’re probably setting some new goals for yourself.
This is the exciting part! You get to think about all you’re going to tackle in 2021!!
But there’s something just as essential as goal-setting… and that’s acknowledging what’s tripped you up in the past so you can correct it for the future.
The truth is… we all put stuff off (myself included at times!) We’ve all had a goal we’ve set out to achieve, only to find ourselves procrastinating by doing anything and everything else.
Holding yourself accountable to your goal achievement — consistently — is tricky to master.
But even though it takes hard work to maintain accountability, I have some good news. It’s not all your fault.
See, as you start to approach a new level in life and with your goal achievement, your subconscious plays a mind trick on you.
It steps in with all types of distractions, making you see other responsibilities as more important than going after your goal.
But here’s the thing: you don’t have to listen to it.
This is where you can choose how you respond. There are two routes.
Option A: You can focus on what your subconscious is telling you to prioritize. You can go after all these secondary objectives… and put your goal on the backburner.
Your goal won’t be front and center in your mind anymore. Whenever you start to think about it again, you’ll probably feel a tinge of guilt… but your subconscious will eventually come up with (totally legit-sounding) justifications for why you’re concentrating on something else.
Eventually, when things start to calm down with whatever fire you were tending to, you realize: I haven’t made any progress towards my goal in six weeks! (or months, or years!)
Cue the shame spiral.
Yikes. Want to hear Option B?
You can choose not to let your thoughts control you.
You can acknowledge them, and you can even accept that they exist. But you don’t have to act on them.
How you respond to these thoughts is entirely up to you.
This is pivotal. Look at this as a source of power. | https://medium.com/@amiraalvarez/what-have-you-been-putting-off-around-goal-achievement-1895bdcf69b8 | ['Amira Alvarez'] | 2020-12-15 19:26:04.584000+00:00 | ['Small Business', 'Women In Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Goals', 'Accountability'] |
Stone By Stone, I Fall | Stone by stone, I fall,
bound by weighty grievances
held against me by
a multitude of forces —
originating from me.
But I will not roll
with the thunder even when
the end is nearer,
yet I have to ask myself
if glory is just deceit.
Perhaps there is no
refuge beyond my narrow
field of sight — for now,
I weigh fleeting desires
and mistake them for freedom. | https://medium.com/song-of-the-lark/stone-by-stone-i-fall-1c4e25f5df12 | ['Lark Morrigan'] | 2020-07-11 03:52:41.383000+00:00 | ['Tanka', 'Spirituality', 'Religion', 'Depression', 'Poetry'] |
How to Learn Data Science when Life does not Give You a Break | How to Learn Data Science when Life does not Give You a Break
I Struggled to Dedicate Time for Data Science. But Finding new Strategies Enables me to Boost my Learning Rate and Accomplish More Khuyen Tran Feb 21, 2020·6 min read
With Every Struggle, there is a Way
With the goal of getting into the data science field, you decide on what sets of skills you want to obtain. Now you just need to have the time to sit down to obtain those skills. Eventually, you will become a competitive candidate and get the job that you want.
But life does not let you sit down. It demands you to keep going and does your normal stuff while still expects you to get 2+ years of experience in your resume. You feel stuck and frustrated. You know that you need to learn and get some projects done but find it so difficult to stick with your commitment. So should you give it up?
Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash
I experienced the same things 2 months ago. As a mathematics student with 5 classes and a job, I found it extremely difficult to find the time for data science. When I was about to give up, I told myself to keep going. It is not about working harder; it is about working smarter. I just needed to switch my learning strategies.
It’s not about Working Harder. It’s about Working the System. - Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat
Now I manage to finish many fun data science projects, publish at least 2 articles per week, have new findings in NLP research while maintaining my 4.0 GPA. As I keep asking myself questions about how I can be more efficient in my work, I find the way. Since new approaches are working for me, I want to share them with the hope that you could adopt some for yourself to get those skills in a short amount of time and make your data science journey more enjoyable.
Finish One Thing Before Moving on to another
What I used to do
Spend one hour every day to work on one project for weeks. By the time I finish, I feel like I haven’t achieved anything much.
My New Approach
Set a small goal of what I want to complete and finish it in a short amount of time. Let’s say when I come back from school, I would tell myself: I want to finish my school work in 2 hours and get my NLP project done for 2 hours. Tomorrow I will write a short article for 2 hours before getting to school.
Knowing that I can complete these things in a short amount of time makes me excited and be in the flow. I can concentrate for hours without getting distracted. Seeing my work accomplished makes me feel motivated and have the momentum to keep going.
Create an Isolated Environment
What I used to Do
Open several browsers for different projects I want to finish and new articles I want to read. I felt distracted knowing that there were still many things that I needed to finish.
My New Approach
Once I get one thing done, I close all the files or browsers related to the previous work and move on to the next one. If the work hasn’t been done yet and I want to go back to the websites later, I just use One Tab to condense multiple browsers into one. Seeing my browsers clear prevents my mind from being distracted and clustered to focus on the work.
Later when I want to come back to my work, I just open One Tab and can quickly access my own work.
Another small secret that I have been adopting: put my phone on the airplane mode and turn off any notifications on my MacBook. I will answer messages at the time of my choice. Any message can wait.
Mange Between Exploration and Exploitation
What I used to do
I knew learning new knowledge and getting updated with new technologies and techniques is important in the data science field. So I would spend a lot of time per day to explore different tools and read many articles without applying them. I felt exhausted and incompetent because I realized there were so many things I needed to learn but I hadn’t learned any of them yet
My New Approach
Whenever I see interesting articles on Medium or from other websites, if I am doing something at that moment, I will skim some worthy articles, save them to Instapaper, and put them in a specific category (data science, programming, math, data viz, etc) so I can easily get access to them later. When I have a small free time (like on the bus, on the line, or in the lunchtime), I will pull out the articles I save in the app to read. Once I finish reading, I either delete them or save them if I want to get access or try out the codes later.
By creating my own reading space and habits, I am able to get myself updated with new knowledge while still get the work done.
Share what I’ve Learned
What I used to do
Silently did the work every day. When it was time for me to show my work on my resume, I had nothing to show because I never shared or published my work after finishing it.
My New Approach
Break a big project into smaller projects. Push my small accomplishments on Github or share my shortcodes on Medium. Then I will share my projects and articles on LinkedIn, Twitter, or my website. I never leave any of my projects and small accomplishments unnoticed.
If you are hesitant to share your work because you think your work is not good enough, you will never be good enough. Once you share and receive the positive (or negative) feedback from others, you will feel more motivated to improve your skills to share better content.
Switch “I Need to Do” to “I Want to Do”
What I used to do
“Can I skip my project for today? No, I should not make an excuse because I have promised myself that I need to dedicate the time to data science, for one hour every day, no matter what”. That thought gave me the feeling of obligation and the project became like homework or a job. I did not look forward to tackling the project.
My New Approach
Tell myself I could skip my project, skip writing the article, skip my research if I want to. Nobody forces me to do it. That thought surprisingly switches my mindset about the work. I have the freedom to choose what I want to do and I still choose to work on my project. That means I really like this project! This will be fun. I immediately feel a boost in energy and enthusiasm to get my hands on the project.
Conclusion
Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right Henry Ford
There are still many skills that I need to obtain to become a data scientist. But as I see my experiment with new approaches help me to obtain new skills efficiently and get more work done, I know that if I do not give up and have the courage to change the approaches that are not working, I will eventually achieve my vision.
Thank you for reading my article. I will be happy to hear your opinions on any of these strategies and what strategies are working for you.
I like to write about basic data science concepts and play with different algorithms and data science tools. You could connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Star this repo if you want to check out the codes for all of the articles I have written. Follow me on Medium to stay informed with my latest data science articles like these: | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-learn-data-science-when-life-does-not-give-you-a-break-a26a6ea328fd | ['Khuyen Tran'] | 2020-11-27 21:33:14.289000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Efficiency', 'Skills', 'Learning', 'Data Science'] |
Toxic Positivity Is Killing Us | Image from Kat Jayne on Pexels
If I had a nickel for every time I was emotionally and spiritually bypassed this year — I’d be richer than J.K. Rowling. And don’t even get me started on her behavior of late. That’s not what this essay is about.
You know you’ve been spiritually bypassed when you hear something like, “It’s all in God’s plan” or “Choose light.” (Tell someone you had a miscarriage and count how many people tell you, “It was meant to be.”) It’s essentially using religion or any sort of pseudo-spiritual dogma (many yogis are experts at this) to scrub away any feelings that are deemed “negative” and replace them with a smile. Even if that smile is fake.
Here’s a basic definition of spiritual bypassing from the man who coined the term: “In his classic book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening…[John Welwood] defined spiritual bypassing as using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.” The goal of such practices, he claimed, was enlightenment.” [source]
Emotional bypassing is the same idea. It’s when someone encourages you to sidestep or ignore valid but uncomfortable emotions like sadness, pain, or frustration and “take the high road” or “look on the bright side.”
The thing is, we do this to ourselves too.
We choose to sidestep our valid and uncomfortable emotions because they’re “bad,” “negative,” or, mostly, because they make us uncomfortable. Many of us, myself included, weren’t taught how to lean into those emotions, to feel them, to self-soothe and console ourselves, and then work through the sadness, anger, or frustration in order to fully release and understand our pain.
We can learn a lot from these emotions. But more importantly, we are meant to feel them. Not dwell in them forever, not define ourselves by them, but feel them.
I might never have realized just how many of us weren’t taught how to feel our painful emotions if it weren’t for 2020. And as things got worse, the “toxic positivity” crew got more aggressive.
Photo by Oleg Magni from Pexels
I had stumbled across these terms before this year. I heard them in passing, maybe in the therapist’s office, but didn’t give them much thought until I saw them in action over and over and over (I could add a few more “overs” here) again this year.
And it hasn’t been enough to simply sidestep and invalidate their and others’ emotions such as fear and sadness, now certain people are claiming it’s “sheepish” to even feel them. It’s “brainwashing” by the “mainstream media.” So, as BLM activists protested the murder of George Floyd, as Americans get sicker and COVID spreads faster, while the election news still carries on and the President refuses to concede a lost election — many people are still trying to urge others to “be grateful” and “Watch this YouTube video.” Forget the insanity of reality! At least you are alive!
Well, that’s not enough for me. Perhaps in some sense, we do need balance. Perhaps we do have a lot to be grateful for. I might agree with that statement. But here’s the kicker — I believe that mindset is what got us into these messes in the first place.
We can be angry when things aren’t going well — when the government doesn’t follow through on its duties, when police officers fail to keep citizens safe but, in fact, put them in danger. We can and will stop looking on the bright side when men are murdered by police officers in the streets or women in their own homes. We can and will feel sad when we actually acknowledge the reality of the 3,000 Americans a day that are dying in hospitals, hospitals which are near full to bursting. We can be disappointed that we are choosing not to spend the holidays traveling because of the pandemic. We are missing our families and loved ones. I am. If we keep pushing those valid emotions away, what kind of world are we going to get in return?
Yes, it’s uncomfortable to let those feelings in. It’s certainly not “positive vibes only.” Those people who urge you to avoid “negative” feelings and the pain of reality do know one thing: it’s a lot easier to avoid. It’s a lot less work to just sidestep painful emotions and situations and pretend that everything is “peace and love,” even if, in a year like this, they are lying to us and lying to themselves. And we see it. I see it. And it’s getting us nowhere.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t beautiful moments.
But — full stop — we do not need to caveat our grief and frustration with silver linings. Perhaps if we begin to acknowledge our own and other’s pain, we can start to do the work of consoling, begin to adjust our lives and our societies for the better, to recognize the hurt others suffer and practice real empathy. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel the full weight of our own grief and disappointment, how could we ever recognize it in others? If we don’t start using those emotions to make a better world, we’ll be stuck in this one forever. Full stop. | https://medium.com/curious/toxic-positivity-is-killing-us-215c74b9125 | ['Misha Lazzara'] | 2020-12-27 21:11:02.236000+00:00 | ['Covid-19', 'Toxic Positivity', 'Psychology', 'Culture', 'Yoga'] |
Closing Out The Year With A Special Thanks To Our Writers | Photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash
Hi everyone!!
This evening I was talking to my partner about how proud I am of this publication. I took it over from a fellow writer friend this past summer and am so grateful to the readers who keep coming back. But I am even more grateful to the writers who are vulnerable in sharing their stories and thoughts with our readers and the world. Thank you all for writing amazing stories!
This year has been tumultuous, to say the least, and I think for so many of us, the screen has been our sanctuary. As the couch became our classrooms, offices, and dinner tables, the TV became even more essential from essential coverage of global news to escapism. Whether you were revisiting old classics, dissecting new themes, or exploring the intersection of justice and film…I would bet good money people watched more TV and movies this year than any year previous.
As we approach the new year, our publication’s goal remains a place for writers to have nuanced, interesting, and fun dialogues about all things Cinema. But I also urge readers and writers to challenge cinema…to seek out film that progresses our society towards justice and explores what makes us human.
But without further ado, here is November’s wrap up and things to look forward to! | https://medium.com/cinemania/closing-out-the-year-with-a-special-thanks-to-our-writers-7d98f53c7dc1 | ['Faith Ann'] | 2020-12-06 04:56:27.051000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'TV Series', 'Culture', 'Justice', 'Film'] |
Classical Left Brain, Quantum Right Brain? | Classical processing in the left brain-Quantum processing in the right brain?
Researchers have found that not only do the left and right cortices of the human brain process sensory information very differently, but they also generate different realities.
Does the Brain Operate as a Computer?
Experiments on split brain patients show that the right and left brains (more specifically the right and left cerebral cortices) process incoming information very differently, and this is reflected in the physical organization of the neurons. The left brain has a greater density of cells than the right, and more importantly, there is more grey matter relative to white. This suggests that the organization of the left brain emphasizes processing within regions while the right brain emphasizes processing across regions.
What we are interested in primarily is the distinct groups of neurons that process incoming information differently, their locations in the brain are secondary. Due to the well-known plasticity of the brain, they could be distributed or configured differently in different individuals in the population. Nevertheless, these descriptions of right and left brains are useful because they do reflect the general architecture and functionalities of most normal human brains in the population.
In this context, we can ask the question: Does the brain operate as a computer. The general consensus today is ‘No’. But this begs the first question — specifically what type of computer are we comparing the brain to? A dumb terminal mechanically executing a programme, a standard computer with machine or deep learning capabilities, a 10-qubit quantum computer, or a 100-qubit quantum computer (the list goes on)? We need to be more precise!
The second question: Which part of the brain are we talking about? While most of the brain may be operating otherwise, is it not possible for certain components of the brain to operate like a standard classical computer? In fact, this is what Professor Randall O’Reilly of the University of Colorado at Boulder and his team discovered.
Left Brain’s ‘Either-Or’ Logic
Standard computers operate by turning electrical signals into binary “on and off states” and using switches to control these states. The same operating principles have now been found in the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia of the human brain. The researchers conclude that there are neurons in the prefrontal cortex that have two states, either active or inactive, and the basal ganglia functions like a switch that the brain uses to turn on or off different regions of the prefrontal cortex — effectively operating as logic gates. This is similar to what Andrew Newberg and the late Dr. Eugene D’Aquili, both of the University of Pennsylvania, had also identified as ‘binary operators’ in the brain.
Using fMRI brain imaging studies, O’ Reilly and his team, also noted that simple mathematical operations like addition and subtraction activated the left inferior parietal lobe, left precentral gyrus, left superior parietal lobe, left supramarginal gyrus, and left middle temporal gyrus. This supports the hypothesis that the left brain was used more for these types of tasks than the right brain. Another study, by a Malaysian medical research team, found that the left frontal lobe also seems to play a critical role in multiplication.
From the perspective of quantum cognition, the left brain would be characterized as using an ‘either-or’ logic — much like the ‘bit’ in a standard classical computer, which can be either ‘1’ or ‘0’ but not both at the same time (unlike a qubit or ‘quantum bit’ in a quantum computer). They comply with the law of non-contradiction and may also be called ‘dualistic’ logic.
(Quantum cognition is an emerging field which applies the mathematical formalism of quantum theory to model cognitive phenomena such as information processing by the human brain, language, decision making, human memory, concepts and conceptual reasoning, human judgment, and perception.)
Left Brain’s Conscious Computations
Consciousness is often associated with the left brain as the verbal areas allow us to put perception into words (within our brains and in communication with others). So, the left brain is also where arithmetical operations are performed consciously.
Right Brain is ‘Unconscious’
The right brain is frequently attributed with intuitive abilities, characterized as ‘unconscious’, and is known to process information differently from the verbal and conscious left brain. Just like the mathematical genius before her, Srinivasa Ramanujan (who lived from 1887 to 1920), even the highly articulate ‘human computer’ Shakuntala Devi could not tell how she processes the answers to complex computations as it is largely unconscious, and both geniuses attribute their gifts to “God”. Michael Persinger, Professor of Psychology at Laurentian University, argues that the left brain frequently interprets the right brain as a separate sensed presence, or sometimes as God, during mystical experiences induced in his laboratory. Were Shakuntala’s and Ramanujan’s “God”, that gave them the solutions to complex computations, in the right brain?
It was discussed in the author’s article Evidence of Quantum Computations in the Human Brain that it was plausible that Shakuntala, and even autistic savants, were using quantum processes in their brains to perform these computations. (Read the article for a fuller discussion.) Not even the savants or geniuses knew where the answers came from, indicating that the deep processing was largely unconscious (to the left brain) — and implying that they were being carried out by the unconscious right brain. Once the gist of the solution appeared, though, there was some conscious processing (possibly in the left brain) to correct errors and put some structure into it.
Right Brain’s ‘Both-And’ Logic
Chilean psychoanalyst Matte Blanco presented a framework for understanding the unconscious with the tools of mathematical logic. His investigation concludes that the unconscious operates with a systematic logical structure of its own, having its own internal logic, different from the dualistic logic used by the conscious verbal left brain. Blanco calls it ‘symmetric logic’.
This is similar to the logic used by a quantum processor. For example, a qubit exhibits symmetric logic when it can be both ‘0’ and ‘1’ at the same time (the order is irrelevant), while in superposition. From a strict logical perspective, this means ‘A’ and ‘Not-A’ exist simultaneously in a superposition. The right unconscious brain operates a ‘both-and’ or symmetric logic.
Giulia Battilotti, from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Padua, has presented a model based on quantum states and shows that its features satisfy the requirements of Blanco’s symmetric logic of the unconscious. Neuroscientist, Petro Gopych agrees:
There is some support for equating unconscious states with quantum superposition. Matte Blanco described the dream world as where ‘paradox reigns and opposites merge to sameness‘, also an apt description of the quantum world. Petro Gopych, Neuroscientist, Kharkiv National University, Ukraine
To summarize, the two characteristics of right brain processing are that they are largely unconscious and use ‘both-and’, symmetric, or quantum logic. This is different from the left brain which uses verbal, conscious processing, with ‘either-or’, dualistic, or classical logic.
This gives us an interesting insight into the nature of unconscious processing [in the brain] — it works like a quantum supercomputer, using a different type of logic. Jay Alfred, 2006
As discussed in the earlier section above, classical binary operators have been identified in the brain. It can be predicted, based on the above discussion, that quantum logic gates, in the form of neural circuits, will be found in the human brain, in future research.
Similarities between the Architecture of the Human Brain and a Quantum Computer
For reliable quantum computations, there are at least 2 conditions that must be fulfilled. Firstly, quantum coherence is required over a sufficient period to maintain superpositions and entanglements. This is provided by Fisher’s model (phosphorus atoms and Posner molecules — which are abundant in the brain). (This is discussed in the author’s article The Quantum Computer in your Brain.)
Secondly, there must be a classical processor in the human brain that reads the output from the quantum processor, and then makes error corrections, if necessary. This classical processor is represented by normal cognitive abilities, but more specifically by the relevant operators, including binary operators, in the brain.
Both conditions are fulfilled in the human brain, just like in quantum computers. Note that the classical processor is primarily in the brain, and not in other parts of the body — hence the results of quantum computations are only intelligible within the brain.
One interesting aspect of Ramanujan’s powers is that he often took hours or even months to laboriously verify and prove what he often received in an instant, and that sometimes his insight turned out to be wrong! Ideas arrived at by unconscious intuition, just as ideas derived from deliberate conscious thinking, can contain errors. It is not infallible and points to an unconscious computational process. Error corrections are subsequently necessary. Similarly, error correction procedures are extremely important and essential in today’s quantum computers.
Conclusion
The observations by researchers suggest that, among other processors and neural circuits, the left brain contains a classical processor(s) and the right brain a quantum processor(s). This is remarkably similar to the architecture of current quantum computers, which contain both classical and quantum processors, functioning similarly. Hence, there is some evidence that a biological quantum computer is embedded in the brain.
It seems that evolution, which gave rise to cerebral cortices at a late stage, has endowed humans with the ability to access and make sense of not only classical reality, but quantum reality (directly). | https://medium.com/@jay-alfred1708/classical-left-brain-quantum-right-brain-547df897fbab | ['Jay Alfred'] | 2021-01-08 10:36:03.233000+00:00 | ['Neuroscience', 'Quantum Computing', 'Brain', 'Logic', 'Reality'] |
Limit Work for Reliable Servers (with examples in Go/gRPC) | One of the leading causes of cascading failures in software systems is trying to do too much work at the same time. Many servers, such as the Go HTTP and gRPC servers, will start working on an unlimited number of requests. Unfortunately, if requests arrive faster than they can be processed, a backlog of messages builds up. This eventually causes the server to be killed because it runs out of memory. To build reliable services, we must limit the amount of work that is in progress. This allows servers to survive overload scenarios by rejecting some of the work, rather than exploding. In this article, I’ll briefly describe why this happens, then discuss how to prevent it, with examples for Go HTTP and gRPC servers.
Why This Happens
One model is to think of the server as a pipe with a flow rate corresponding to the maximum requests per second it can process. If responses arrive slower than the capacity, everything flows through happily, as shown in the figure below.
However, if requests arrive faster than they can be processed, the excess flow has to go somewhere. By default, most servers try to process all the requests, which means they queue requests in memory, as shown below. If the overload persists long enough, the server will run out of memory and will be terminated.
Things get even worse with a replicated service, where there are multiple copies of the server. In an overload scenario, eventually one of the servers exceeds its memory limit and is killed, as shown in the figure below on the left. This causes the requests flowing to that server to be redirected to the remaining servers. The remaining servers get even more load, so they also exceed their memory limits, as shown on the right. This is a classic cascading failure, and causes all the servers to get killed as soon as one is overloaded, usually within a few seconds.
Solution: Limit Work
A server should reject work when it is overloaded. This allows it to serve some requests correctly, which is much better than not processing any requests. In our pipes analogy, this looks like explicitly rejecting some of the flow, as shown below:
To implement this, you need to check the current number of concurrent requests before doing any work, and reject requests if it is above some threshold. This limit will need to be tuned for each different server. If you set it too high, your server will still fail when it is overloaded. If it is too low, the server will not be able to hit its peak throughput and will waste resources.
When the programs sending the requests get a rejected response, they need to wait before retrying, to reduce the request rate rather than increase it. In extreme cases they need to stop sending requests entirely (see: exponential backoff, back pressure, circuit breakers, addressing cascading failures).
Go HTTP and gRPC servers: Unlimited by Default
Unfortunately, the default Go HTTP and gRPC servers accept an unlimited amount of work, so are susceptible to this overload problem. Thankfully, it is easy to implement a limit yourself, using HTTP middleware or a gRPC interceptor (see an example).
For a really robust server, you should also limit the number of connections. Each open connection requires some memory, even if it is doing nothing. In particular, Go gRPC server connections are pretty expensive, using approximately 200 kiB of memory in our tests. This means a large number of idle connections can still cause a server to run out of memory, even with a limit on the number of executing requests. You can use netutil.LimitListener to implement a limit, and consider setting the idle connection timeout on the server to a reasonable value, to ensure that connections don’t stay idle for too long. | https://medium.com/bluecore-engineering/limit-work-for-reliable-servers-with-examples-in-go-grpc-72d2c83fb0f3 | ['Evan Jones'] | 2020-07-10 14:35:46.843000+00:00 | ['Grpc', 'Concurrency', 'Bluecore'] |
5 ways to triple your loan approval’s chances | Do’s
Paying bills and EMIs with punctuality
The wise use of your credit card
A regular glance at your loan report
Do Not’s
Applying irrationally for multiple credit cards at the same time
Maxing out the limit of your credit card
Defaulting on your monthly EMI’s | https://medium.com/@loan4smile-india/5-ways-to-triple-your-loan-approvals-chances-983fc1ac5464 | ['Bhanu Devtalla'] | 2020-12-17 07:39:31.169000+00:00 | ['Financial Planning', 'Loans', 'Online Shopping', 'Instant Loans', 'Fintech'] |
We Must Demand Better Than Privatized “Affordable Housing” | The following is based on the original, longer, collectively written article “Affordable Housing” Is A Scam, by a group of organizers with the LA Tenants Union. This is being co-published with the Law and Political Economy Blog.
You hear it everywhere: we need more “affordable housing.” It’s a seemingly uncontroversial call, and yet we must be far more critical in our analysis and precise in our demands.
Inspired by and learning from struggles of tenants in Los Angeles, a group of members of the LA Tenants Union (LATU) were compelled to document the many and profound problems with the dominant model of privatized “affordable housing” in the United States.
We found that the major “affordable housing” programs serve to co-opt the radical visions of our movement and funnel energy and social wealth into strategies that fail to provide decent and stable housing for the most vulnerable among us, all while supporting, and in many ways bolstering, the rule of landlords and the racist, violent system of capitalist land ownership. We can and must do better, demanding and building tenant-led social housing models that create a future outside of the real estate market.
Our first lesson came from LA’s Chinatown.
Presently, the residents of the Hillside Villa Apartments remain in their homes and are on their way to winning a historic struggle to force the City of LA to use eminent domain to keep their building permanently affordable. Two years ago, however, their future was far more uncertain.
In late 2018, the residents of this 124-unit building learned that in just six months the building’s “affordable” status would expire, and their landlord would increase rents to match market prices in their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Some tenants would see their rents raised from $850 to $2,500 per month — an increase of 200%. Functionally, these were eviction notices.
Hillside Villa’s basic funding structure resembles that of the vast majority of “affordable housing” constructed in the US in the past several decades. The building was constructed with $5.5 million of public funds in the late 1980s, and in return, the developer and future owners would be required to rent the 124 units to tenants with incomes below a certain level, at affordable rates — but only for 30 years. Now, landlord Tom Botz — a wealthy, white resident of Malibu with multiple investment properties across Los Angeles and a history of slumlordism and discriminating against families with children — could cash out and force the displacement of dozens of poor households.
But Hillside Villa organized and fought back. With support from LATU and Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED), the tenants formed the Hillside Villa Tenants Association, meeting every Thursday night with simultaneous interpretation occurring in three different languages at once (Spanish, English, and Mandarin). They’ve engaged in legal strategies, occupied the offices of their city councilmember, held multiple protests at their landlord’s mansion, and energized LA’s entire movement in the process. Now, it looks like they are here to stay.
But the lesson remains: “affordable housing” expires. And other tenants won’t be so lucky.
In the City of Los Angeles alone, there are an estimated 11,771 “affordable housing” units which are expected to convert to market-rate rents within the next five years. Across the entire country, one estimate puts the number of “affordable” units that may be withdrawn from agreements that keep rents restricted over the next 10 years at one million. In LA, 71% of expiring units are owned by for-profit entities; nationally, at least for units produced by Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), the program responsible for the largest number of “affordable” homes, that number is over 80%.
Instead of providing a social good in perpetuity, the dominant models of providing “affordable housing” allow for mass displacements — and mass profits — after just a few decades.
Here’s another problem we saw firsthand, which in policy debates is often acknowledged yet too easily swept aside: “affordable housing” is often not actually affordable, and almost always excludes the poorest tenants.
This lesson came from the struggle of the tenants of the Kingswood Apartments in Hollywood, an “affordable” development where residents were being hit with rent increases of up to hundreds of dollars — but it wasn’t because Kingswood’s affordability covenant was expiring.
Here, like in the vast majority of “affordable” apartments across the country, rents are tied to the “Area Median Income” (AMI), a number set by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD). Since the AMI for LA is adjusted upward every year as the county’s median income increases, the owners of their building, The Michaels Organization, one of the largest owners of “affordable housing” in the entire country, could legally raise rents, regardless of tenants’ abilities to pay.
Fortunately, the Kingswood tenants organized and, with support from LATU, were able to put enough pressure on The Michaels Organization to get the increases substantially reduced. Like Hillside Villa, tenants were able to remain in their homes thanks to their collective willingness to fight.
Crucially, the AMI standards don’t just mean that “affordable housing” can actually be quite expensive for tenants living in these developments. In most instances, AMI calculations effectively guarantee that the poorest tenants are completely excluded from these programs.
In LA, a household of 4 with an income of up to $83,500 absurdly qualifies as “low income.” Recent numbers show that units targeted at this income bracket account for nearly 40% of “affordable” homes created by LA’s Transit Oriented Communities program, a policy that has been widely and uncritically embraced by most mainstream commentators, which allows developers to build with more density in exchange for a certain number of “affordable” units.
The “very low income” bracket in LA includes families making up to $52,200 per year, and even the “extremely low income” bracket includes families earning up to $31,300 — significantly more money than the median household in many gentrifying neighborhoods like Chinatown, Pico-Union, South Central, and East Hollywood. In LA County, over one-fifth of households (699,328 total) have incomes below $25,000, meaning they would very likely not be served by even the most generous “affordable housing,” or, if they do manage to get a unit, they will be devoting far too much of their income to rent.
Housing providers can offer these units at lower rents to tenants with substantially lower incomes, yes, but they have every incentive not to. That’s because at essentially every step, “affordable housing” development and management is tied to the profit motive. The public money only covers a portion of the development costs, so the rest is made up with private financing from for-profit lenders. In order to make a project “pencil out,” developers — even nonprofit ones with the best intentions — tend to plan on setting rent at the maximum levels within each affordability bracket, and increasing them as much as they can each year. The public funding per project is simply not robust enough to provide truly affordable units to those who are most desperate.
Supporters and practitioners justify these programs by arguing they leverage large amounts of private money for social good, and euphemistically call the low levels of public spending “shallow subsidies,” reflecting the idea that something is better than nothing. We call it a scam.
There are many more critiques to be levelled at the dominant programs that have made up “affordable housing” in the last several decades, but I’d like to end by highlighting what is perhaps the most profound shortcoming of “affordable housing,” which is the way it wholly fails to challenge, and even strengthens, the institutions and logics of capitalism, preventing us from building or even imagining different ways of relating to housing and land.
These programs rely on capitalist actors and incentives to provide what ought to be a human right that is socially and democratically produced and controlled. They continue to treat land as a commodity that can only be temporarily and weakly regulated by state action. By relegating subsidized “affordable housing” as something only necessary for a small subset of the population, their means-tested nature suggests this system is broadly acceptable for the vast majority of people. And they perpetuate the fundamentally inequitable and undemocratic relation of landlord-to-tenant, where the owner of the land has far too much power over the people that live there.
It is the job of the left and of our movements to provide alternatives to and critiques of the oppressive systems that rule our lives. We must set our eyes firmly on challenging the system of capitalist land ownership, an institution rooted in settler colonial genocide that has always relied on racial violence to produce value and whose function has been, and still remains, to efficiently allow the (white) ruling class to dominate the poor.
More “affordable housing” simply keeps this system in power. We must make alternative demands, not for “affordable housing,” but for public- and community-owned housing, re-imagining the society we can create that would provide for the needs of all.
We’re always looking for new LA stories. To share yours, reach out to us at: [email protected]
If you have sensitive information to share, email us at [email protected]
KNOCK.LA and its writers unfortunately still live under capitalism — but not for long, if we have anything to say! Thanks to readers like you, KNOCK.LA is able to keep you informed on local politics and uplift marginalized voices in LA. Join us in fighting the good fight and donate to KNOCK.LA’s Patreon | https://medium.com/groundgamela/we-must-demand-better-than-privatized-affordable-housing-c62ff0f73cf8 | ['Jacob Woocher'] | 2020-12-08 17:07:27.973000+00:00 | ['Tenants Unions', 'Affordable Housing', 'Los Angeles', 'Activism', 'Privatization'] |
So you want to use a Linux PC as your primary work computer | How to run Windows applications on Linux PC
Microsoft Windows operating system has its advantages: one of them is the vast selection of open source and commercial applications. Linux fans may argue that there are even more apps for Linux because of servers and Android (which is built on Linux). Either way, someone considering moving to Linux PC may have second thoughts because an important app doesn’t run on Linux. It is possible, and here is our how-to guide for running Windows software on a Linux computer.
Laptops with pre-installed Linux operating system
Before you push that order button on a Linux laptop vendor’s online shop, check these three items (after verifying that the product specifications are something that you like):
Can the laptop be configured with a keyboard that your language requires? For instance, Nordic languages, German and Spanish have special characters that are frequently used, so they should be readily accessible on the keyboard. If you think you might need support from the vendor, see if it is available and which languages support team understands. Does the vendor ship to your country, and how much does the delivery cost?
How to configure a send-only email server on Linux
Many server software applications, like WordPress and Nextcloud can send alerts and notifications to the system admin and to users. Email is the most universal method for sending messages, but you have to run an email server (SMTP server) on the host. Processing incoming email messages is really resource consuming, but for alerts and notification messages the host only needs to send messages, not receive them. Here is a guide for setting up exim4 email server in send-only mode on Debian 10 Linux. Configuration of exim4 on Ubuntu is similar. | https://medium.com/@arihak/so-you-want-to-use-a-linux-pc-as-your-primary-work-computer-f2f353135b29 | [] | 2020-12-17 14:29:48.816000+00:00 | ['How To', 'Windows', 'Email', 'Linux'] |
Sync AWS RDS Postgres to Redshift using AWS DMS | The problem
When we first started to get to know AWS Redshift, we fell in love for the fast aggregated query processing. This strong advantage meant sky-rocketing our productivity and speed when performing statistical studies or simply data-extractions. So, of course, we turned it into our main data warehouse for all the data sources we managed (Adwords, Salesforce, FBAds, Zendesk, etc.) — all of this, using Stitch as our main ETL tool.
RDS Postgres instance vs Redshift on the company’s everyday aggregated query performance time.
Stitch holds a nice subscription plan of $100, offering process capacity for 5M rows and $20 per additional million rows. Stitch logs and billing invoices tell us we barely reached $180 on a very busy month using all the data sources mentioned above. Most of those months were just plain $100 (no additional million rows used).
Our company develops, maintains and sells its core SaaS product, IncreaseCard. Hosted in the AWS Cloud, our production database resides in AWS RDS, storing between 10 and 20 million new rows every month, and considerably growing.
So typically, using Stitch to sync our production database to a Redshift warehouse, would turn out to be painfully expensive for a third-world startup company. Also considering our country’s currency lost a lot of its value against US dollars recently.
Argentina’s Congress — Photo by Sander Crombach on Unsplash
We also had another restriction. The company’s developing its second major product, IncreaseConciliación. This one uses the NoSQL Apache Cassandra database to store and process its huge data. The problem is, both products must be synced in order for Conciliación to use transactions extracted by Card. In other words, we had to build a data-lake accessible for consumption by any service to perform syncing operations on-demand.
Many things to take into account, right?
Testing solutions
Being a small team of 2 people, the mighty “Data Team”, we get it easy to try and test new things, especially architectures.
We started by using AWS Data Pipeline, a UI based service to build ETLs between a bunch of data sources. Although the process of building an ETL was rather easy, there were a bunch of workarounds that we had to take in order for it to be effective — remember that we have to update every change whether it be an insertion, a deletion or an update. Since you can’t use code here, it became unmaintainable quickly. Furthermore, there isn’t much detailed documentation or clear examples for this service IMO.
We tried to set a Lambda to consume every 15 minutes the Wal log of a replication slot of our Postgres database, and send it to a Kinesis Firehose data stream. It seemed to be all safe and sound until a production process updated more rows than usually expected. We found out that, in these cases, the way the records came from the logical decoding were huge rows full of chunks of changes of the tables involved, causing the function to die of lack of memory every time it tried to load it. We solved this by setting true to the property write_in_chunks of the logical decoding plugin, we used (wal2json), enabling us to partition the incoming JSON log. Long story short, the function could still be terminated unsuccessfully due to not enough time to process the huge transaction. No bueno.
What you came here for
Ok so, let’s head to it. | https://towardsdatascience.com/synching-your-rds-postgresql-database-and-your-redshift-warehouse-using-dms-or-really-any-ea8907aa53ca | ['Axel Furlan'] | 2020-02-11 14:54:06.506000+00:00 | ['Postgres', 'Redshift', 'AWS', 'Data', 'Data Engineering'] |
My Mental Health Was Neglected Under The Premise Of Religion | I used to think that my upbringing was normal. I grew up in a very Christian family, where my Dad told us exactly what to believe. I was controlled, manipulated, constantly punished, and a very sad little girl. I attribute much of my upbringing as the reason for my anxiety and depression as an adult.
In recent years I have begun telling people about my upbringing and I am almost always met with the same response.
“You were in a cult.”
At first, I laughed but the more I talked to other people who had been raised up in the Christian faith, the more I realized that my experience was completely different.
I was almost completely isolated
Even though my Dad was a believer in God he didn’t want me to go to any organized church.
Because the bible is open to interpretation my Dad got into a fight with one of our pastors when I was around eight years old. After that, we didn’t go to church and my Dad decided he would teach us everything in the comfort of our house. There were times I wasn’t even allowed to go with my friends and when he actually decided to let me go I got a lecture about all of the lies I was about to hear.
I had to get permission before hanging out with any friends. If there was going to be any secular music he wouldn’t let me go. I remember being at our neighbor's house and him ripping me away from the sleepover because the girls were listening to Britney Spears.
It was us against them
Anyone that wasn’t in our belief system was going to hell. This put me in a panic as I didn’t want to see that happen to the people that I loved. I also couldn’t cultivate a relationship with someone who wasn’t my version of Christian because they could be a “bad influence.” I was certainly not taught about any other religions except that they were wrong. When I was very young I asked my Dad why I got to know the word of God and go to heaven when other kids had parents telling them something else.
He didn’t like that I asked that and couldn’t really answer me.
Parents who encourage their child to ask questions and provide the child with explanations instead of simply saying, “Because God says so,” can help their child learn, grow, and think critically. It is often worth it for a parent to take the time to explain to a child why they chose to follow a particular faith, as this serves to introduce the child to that unique and important aspect of the parent’s life. — Good Therapy
I couldn’t watch a movie that wasn’t rated G or PG
I was never allowed to watch movies with my friends. I remember being humiliated as their parents would call my Dad and he would say I wasn’t allowed to watch it. Usually, they would let me watch things anyway, I think that they felt sorry for me.
It got to a point when I was older when we would just all lie to my Dad but there were still times I got caught. I remember that when he found out that I went to see The Devil Wears Prada when I was sixteen I was grounded for a month.
I was given a purity ring at the age of twelve
What a fantastic birthday present. At the time I was excited at the premise of saving myself for my future husband. It was so romantic, I would give him the ring on our wedding night as well as my body.
It’s not okay to make a twelve-year-old make a commitment when she has no idea what she is committing to. I didn’t know what sex was, and it made finding a husband my goal at a very early age. When I didn’t end up following through on my “purity” because I slept with a serious boyfriend when I was an adult I was told I was going to hell for breaking a sacred covenant.
I was terrified the world would end
The rapture, being left behind, the antichrist. I couldn’t sleep growing up and I genuinely think it’s part of why I have insomnia as an adult. I would try to sleep and the thoughts of terror and dreams about the apocalypse would haunt me.
When you think the world is going to end at any moment you don’t have long-term goals. It made me feel like my life didn’t have meaning, and therefore I struggled to figure out what I wanted to do with my life until I was out of the situation in college.
My depression was ignored
All of these factors led to me being a sad, terrified, confused young woman. I exhibited many signs of depression. I was anorexic for many years, I was moody, I struggled with motivation, and I was given no guidance or help.
Years later my Dad admitted he knew I was depressed but he didn’t think there was anything he could do besides pray.
I have watched several of my family members die because their mental health was neglected under the premise that God would save them. The complete dismissal of mental health and the reality that it is real by some of these religious zealous makes me furious.
God doesn’t cure depression. Depression is real, mental illness is real, and ignoring it can cost someone’s life. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/my-mental-health-was-neglected-under-the-premise-of-religion-deb8ca84b9c2 | ['Carrie Wynn'] | 2019-10-09 19:56:05.495000+00:00 | ['Religious Abuse', 'Life Lessons', 'Mental Illness', 'Religion', 'Depression'] |
The 91st Academy Awards was the Worst Possible Outcome in Nearly Every Way | A Review of the Telecast
The Academy did not quite keep their promise of getting the show down to under 3 hours, but it was still far shorter than any ceremony in recent memory. But the cost was that everything felt rushed and absolutely nothing unexpected happened (save a couple of surprise winners and inspired speeches, which are elements outside of the control of the show’s producers).
Many will surely applaud the lack of the unnecessary clip packages, musical tributes, skits, and other filler that pad most Oscar ceremonies. But it turns out that when the fat is trimmed, things become exceedingly workmanlike. Exhausting and uninspired. The show presented all 24 awards, had a little presenter banter, a few musical numbers, and in the In Memoriam segment. That’s it. Not a lot of room for fun or spontaneous things to happen.
Importantly, the telecast being dull was not due to the show being without a host. Kevin Hart would not have made the night work better — and he certainly would have made it longer.
The show made a few smart choices with regard to on-air talent, including the selection of the legendary Barbra Streisand and Julia Roberts to take the stage during key moments late in the show and giving extended presenter bits to Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph (who essentially served as a 3 minute hosting monologue) and Melissa McCarthy and Bryan Tyree Henry (whose Costume Design shtick was a real highlight).
Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler delivered a brief monologue that injected some life into the show (Copyright: AMPAS/ABC)
But the rest of the presenter selection was a mess. The use of famous people without obvious ties to the film industry was perhaps interesting on paper but it failed in execution. As gifted as they are in their respective crafts, I don’t particularly care what Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, tennis superstar Serena Williams, or Chef Jose Andres have to say about this year’s Best Picture nominees. (One exception was Civil Rights leader/Congressman John Lewis…I did care what he had to say.) And the remaining presenters were either randomly paired (e.g., Dame Helen Mirren and Jason Mamoa, Pharell Williams and Michelle Yeoh) or obvious attempts at appealing to young viewers (e.g., the fact that at least 10 of the presenters are key players in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). What’s wrong with having actual A-list film industry legends in the film industry on stage? Is it that they are invited, but won’t accept? Or are they just not hot and fresh enough to get good ratings?
Barbra Streisand was one of the few true A-listers to make an appearance (Copyright: AMPAS/ABC)
The telecast had 6 musical performances, all of which were fine. Queen (with Adam Lambert in the role of lead vocalist) opened the show with a medley that should have set us up for a big night for Bohemian Rhapsody. It was a solid performance, but the shots of the crowd rocking along looked very forced and I don’t like it when the Academy singles out a single Best Picture nominee for excessive attention. Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic did a lovely job with the “In Memoriam” segment and it was nice not to have the distraction of a singer belting a melancholic song during it.
Four of the five nominated songs were performed. (Kendrick Lamar declined his invitation to perform “All the Stars” from Black Panther.) Jennifer Hudson showed off her impressive set of pipes with “I’ll Fight” from RBG. Gillian Welch and Dan Rawlins did a nice job with the folksy “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings” from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The legendary Bette Midler stepped in for Emily Blunt with a gorgeous performance of “The Place Where Lost Things Go” from Mary Poppins Returns. (And she looks and sounds absolutely wonderful for 73.) Then there was Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s beautiful rendition of “Shallow.” In sharp contrast to her performance of the song at the Grammys a few weeks ago, it was toned down, tender, and beautiful. It was also cleverly staged as the instruments were brought out without introduction and Gaga and Cooper silently walked to the stage from their seats to perform. It was one of the night’s few highlights.
Bette Midler delivered a lovely performance (Copyright: AMPAS/ABC)
Perhaps next year, the show’s producers can stop trying so hard to make things appealing to young viewers and can focus on celebrating the art of movie-making with actual film industry stars and inspired tributes to film history.
Oh, and if the voters could not give half of the awards to a trio of dumpster fires (Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Vice) that would a big help as well. | https://medium.com/rants-and-raves/the-91st-academy-awards-was-the-worst-possible-outcome-in-nearly-every-way-5ccb0a0d5a4b | ['Richard Lebeau'] | 2019-02-25 20:59:09.871000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Culture', 'Media', 'Oscars', 'Film'] |
Taming Service-Oriented Architecture Using A Data-Oriented Service Mesh | At Hasura’s Enterprise GraphQL Conf on October 22, we presented Viaduct, what we’re calling a data-oriented service mesh that we believe will bring a step function improvement in the modularity of our microservices-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this blog post, we describe the philosophy behind Viaduct and provide a rough sketch of how it works. Please watch the presentation for a more detailed look.
Massive SOA Dependency Graphs
For a while, Service-Oriented Architectures have been moving towards ever larger numbers of small microservices. Modern applications can consist of thousands to tens of thousands of microservices connected in unconstrained ways. As a result, it’s not uncommon to see dependency graphs like the following:
This particular dependency graph happens to be from Airbnb, but it’s not uncommon. Amazon, Netflix, and Uber are examples of those that shared similarly tangled dependency graphs.
These dependency graphs are reminiscent of spaghetti code, just at the microservices level. Similar to how spaghetti code becomes harder and harder to modify over time, so does spaghetti SOA. To help manage the larger number of services inherent in a microservices-based architecture, we need organizing principles as well as technical measures to implement those principles. At Airbnb, we undertook an effort to find such principles and measures. Our investigations led us to the concept of a data-oriented service mesh, which we believe brings a new level of modularity to SOA.
Procedure- vs Data-Oriented Design
Organizing large programs into modular units is not a new problem in software engineering. Up until the 1970s, the main paradigm of software organization focused on grouping code into procedures and procedures into modules. In this approach, modules publish a public API to be used by code outside of the module; behind this public API, modules hide their internal, helper procedures and other implementation details. Languages such as Pascal and C are based on this paradigm.
Starting in the ’80s, the paradigm shifted to organizing software primarily around data, not procedures. In this approach, modules define classes of objects that encapsulate an internal representation of an object accessed via a public API of methods on the object. Languages such as Simula and Clu pioneered this form of organization.
SOA is a step back to more procedure-oriented designs. Today’s microservice is a collection of procedural endpoints — a classic, 1970s-style module. We believe that SOA needs to evolve to support data-oriented design, and that this evolution can be enabled by transitioning our service mesh from a procedural orientation to a data orientation.
Viaduct: A Data-Oriented Service Mesh
Central to modern, scalable SOA applications is a service mesh (e.g., Istio, Linkerd), which routes service invocations to instances of microservices that can handle them. The current industry standard for service meshes is to organize exclusively around remote procedure invocations without knowing anything about the data that makes up the application architecture. Our vision is to replace these procedure-oriented service meshes with service meshes organized around data.
At Airbnb, we are using GraphQL™️ to build a data-oriented service mesh called Viaduct. A Viaduct service mesh is defined in terms of a GraphQL schema consisting of:
Types (and interfaces) describing data managed within your service mesh
Queries (and subscriptions) providing means to access that data, which is abstracted from the service entry points that provide the data
Mutations providing ways to update data, again abstracted from service entry points
The types (and interfaces) in the schema define a single graph across all of the data managed within the service mesh. For example, at an eCommerce company, a service mesh’s schema may define a field productById(id: ID) that returns results of type Product . From this starting point, a single query allows a data consumer to navigate to information about the product’s manufacturer, e.g., productById { manufacturer } ; reviews of the product, e.g. productById { reviews } ; and even the authors of those reviews, e.g., productById { reviews { author } } .
The data elements requested by such a query may come from many different microservices. In a procedure-oriented service mesh, the data consumer would need to take these services as explicit dependencies. In our data-oriented service mesh, it is the service mesh, i.e., Viaduct, not the data consumer, that knows which services provide which data element. Viaduct abstracts away the service dependencies from any single consumer.
Putting Schema at the Center
In our talk we discuss how, unlike other distributed GraphQL systems like GraphQL Modules or Apollo Federation, Viaduct deals with the schema as a single artifact and has implemented several primitives that allow us to keep a unified schema while still allowing for many teams to collaborate on that schema productively. As Viaduct replaces more and more of our underlying procedure-oriented service mesh, its schema captures the data managed by our application more and more completely. We have taken advantage of this “central schema,” as we call it, as a place to define the APIs of some of our microservices. In particular, we have started using GraphQL for the API of some microservices. For these microservices, their GraphQL schemas are defined as a subset of the central schema. In the future, we want to take this idea further, using the central schema to define the schema of data stored in our database.
Among other things, using the central schema to define our APIs and database schemas will solve one of the bigger challenges of large-scale SOA applications: data agility. In today’s SOA applications, a change to a database schema often needs to be manually reflected in the APIs of two, three, and sometimes even more layers of microservices before it can be exposed to client code. Such changes can require weeks of coordinating among multiple teams. By deriving service APIs and database schemas from a single, central schema, a database schema change like this can be propagated to client code with a single update.
Going Serverless
Often in large SOA applications, there are many stateless “derived-data” services and “backend-for-frontend” services that take raw data from lower-level services and transform it into data that’s more appropriate for presentation in clients. Stateless logic like this is a good fit for the serverless computing model, which eliminates the operational overhead of microservices altogether and instead hosts logic in a “cloud functions” fabric.
Viaduct has a mechanism for computing what we call “derived fields” using serverless cloud functions that operate on top of the graph without knowledge of the underlying services. These functions allow us to move transformational logic out of the service mesh and into stateless containers, keeping our graph clean and reducing the number and complexity of services we need.
Conclusion
Viaduct is built on graphql-java and supports fine-grained field selection via GraphQL selection sets. It uses modern data-loading techniques, employs reliability techniques such as short-circuiting and soft dependencies, and implements an intra-request cache. Viaduct provides data observability, allowing us to understand, down to the field level, what services consume what data. As a GraphQL interface, Viaduct allows us to take advantage of a large ecosystem of open source tooling, including live IDEs, mock servers, and schema visualizers.
Viaduct started powering production workflows at Airbnb over a year ago. We started from scratch with a clean schema consisting of a handful of entities and have grown it to include 80 core entities that are able to power 75% of our modern API traffic.
As mentioned in the introduction, more details on the motivation and technology behind Viaduct can be found in our presentation. | https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/taming-service-oriented-architecture-using-a-data-oriented-service-mesh-da771a841344 | ['Adam Miskiewicz'] | 2020-11-11 22:25:39.405000+00:00 | ['Microservices', 'Infrastructure', 'Java', 'GraphQL'] |
New Class Naming Rules in Ruby | New Class Naming Rules in Ruby
There were 26 valid characters. Now there are 1,853!
Heads up, we’ve moved! If you’d like to continue keeping up with the latest technical content from Square please visit us at our new home https://developer.squareup.com/blog
In Ruby 2.5 and prior:
It’s been a longstanding rule in Ruby that you must use a capital ASCII letter as the first character of a Class or Module name. This limited you to just these 26 characters:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
New in Ruby 2.6:
In Ruby 2.6, non-ASCII upper case characters are allowed. By my count, that makes a total of 1,853 options! Here are the 1,827 new characters that can start a Class or Module name in Ruby 2.6:
ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞĀĂĄĆĈĊČĎĐĒĔĖĘĚĜĞĠĢĤĦĨĪĬĮİIJĴĶĹĻĽĿŁŃŅŇŊŌŎŐŒŔŖŘŚŜŞŠŢŤŦŨŪŬŮŰŲŴŶŸŹŻŽƁƂƄƆƇƉƊƋƎƏƐƑƓƔƖƗƘƜƝƟƠƢƤƦƧƩƬƮƯƱƲƳƵƷƸƼDŽDžLJLjNJNjǍǏǑǓǕǗǙǛǞǠǢǤǦǨǪǬǮDZDzǴǶǷǸǺǼǾȀȂȄȆȈȊȌȎȐȒȔȖȘȚȜȞȠȢȤȦȨȪȬȮȰȲȺȻȽȾɁɃɄɅɆɈɊɌɎͰͲͶͿΆΈΉΊΌΎΏΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝΞΟΠΡΣΤΥΦΧΨΩΪΫϏϒϓϔϘϚϜϞϠϢϤϦϨϪϬϮϴϷϹϺϽϾϿЀЁЂЃЄЅІЇЈЉЊЋЌЍЎЏАБВГДЕЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯѠѢѤѦѨѪѬѮѰѲѴѶѸѺѼѾҀҊҌҎҐҒҔҖҘҚҜҞҠҢҤҦҨҪҬҮҰҲҴҶҸҺҼҾӀӁӃӅӇӉӋӍӐӒӔӖӘӚӜӞӠӢӤӦӨӪӬӮӰӲӴӶӸӺӼӾԀԂԄԆԈԊԌԎԐԒԔԖԘԚԜԞԠԢԤԦԨԪԬԮԱԲԳԴԵԶԷԸԹԺԻԼԽԾԿՀՁՂՃՄՅՆՇՈՉՊՋՌՍՎՏՐՑՒՓՔՕՖႠႡႢႣႤႥႦႧႨႩႪႫႬႭႮႯႰႱႲႳႴႵႶႷႸႹႺႻႼႽႾႿჀჁჂჃჄჅჇჍᎠᎡᎢᎣᎤᎥᎦᎧᎨᎩᎪᎫᎬᎭᎮᎯᎰᎱᎲᎳᎴᎵᎶᎷᎸᎹᎺᎻᎼᎽᎾᎿᏀᏁᏂᏃᏄᏅᏆᏇᏈᏉᏊᏋᏌᏍᏎᏏᏐᏑᏒᏓᏔᏕᏖᏗᏘᏙᏚᏛᏜᏝᏞᏟᏠᏡᏢᏣᏤᏥᏦᏧᏨᏩᏪᏫᏬᏭᏮᏯᏰᏱᏲᏳᏴᏵḀḂḄḆḈḊḌḎḐḒḔḖḘḚḜḞḠḢḤḦḨḪḬḮḰḲḴḶḸḺḼḾṀṂṄṆṈṊṌṎṐṒṔṖṘṚṜṞṠṢṤṦṨṪṬṮṰṲṴṶṸṺṼṾẀẂẄẆẈẊẌẎẐẒẔẞẠẢẤẦẨẪẬẮẰẲẴẶẸẺẼẾỀỂỄỆỈỊỌỎỐỒỔỖỘỚỜỞỠỢỤỦỨỪỬỮỰỲỴỶỸỺỼỾἈἉἊἋἌἍἎἏἘἙἚἛἜἝἨἩἪἫἬἭἮἯἸἹἺἻἼἽἾἿὈὉὊὋὌὍὙὛὝὟὨὩὪὫὬὭὮὯᾈᾉᾊᾋᾌᾍᾎᾏᾘᾙᾚᾛᾜᾝᾞᾟᾨᾩᾪᾫᾬᾭᾮᾯᾸᾹᾺΆᾼῈΈῊΉῌῘῙῚΊῨῩῪΎῬῸΌῺΏῼℂℇℋℌℍℐℑℒℕℙℚℛℜℝℤΩℨKÅℬℭℰℱℲℳℾℿⅅⅠⅡⅢⅣⅤⅥⅦⅧⅨⅩⅪⅫⅬⅭⅮⅯↃⒶⒷⒸⒹⒺⒻⒼⒽⒾⒿⓀⓁⓂⓃⓄⓅⓆⓇⓈⓉⓊⓋⓌⓍⓎⓏⰀⰁⰂⰃⰄⰅⰆⰇⰈⰉⰊⰋⰌⰍⰎⰏⰐⰑⰒⰓⰔⰕⰖⰗⰘⰙⰚⰛⰜⰝⰞⰟⰠⰡⰢⰣⰤⰥⰦⰧⰨⰩⰪⰫⰬⰭⰮⱠⱢⱣⱤⱧⱩⱫⱭⱮⱯⱰⱲⱵⱾⱿⲀⲂⲄⲆⲈⲊⲌⲎⲐⲒⲔⲖⲘⲚⲜⲞⲠⲢⲤⲦⲨⲪⲬⲮⲰⲲⲴⲶⲸⲺⲼⲾⳀⳂⳄⳆⳈⳊⳌⳎⳐⳒⳔⳖⳘⳚⳜⳞⳠⳢⳫⳭⳲꙀꙂꙄꙆꙈꙊꙌꙎꙐꙒꙔꙖꙘꙚꙜꙞꙠꙢꙤꙦꙨꙪꙬꚀꚂꚄꚆꚈꚊꚌꚎꚐꚒꚔꚖꚘꚚꜢꜤꜦꜨꜪꜬꜮꜲꜴꜶꜸꜺꜼꜾꝀꝂꝄꝆꝈꝊꝌꝎꝐꝒꝔꝖꝘꝚꝜꝞꝠꝢꝤꝦꝨꝪꝬꝮꝹꝻꝽꝾꞀꞂꞄꞆꞋꞍꞐꞒꞖꞘꞚꞜꞞꞠꞢꞤꞦꞨꞪꞫꞬꞭꞮꞰꞱꞲꞳꞴꞶ𐐀𐐁𐐂𐐃𐐄𐐅𐐆𐐇𐐈𐐉𐐊𐐋𐐌𐐍𐐎𐐏𐐐𐐑𐐒𐐓𐐔𐐕𐐖𐐗𐐘𐐙𐐚𐐛𐐜𐐝𐐞𐐟𐐠𐐡𐐢𐐣𐐤𐐥𐐦𐐧𐒰𐒱𐒲𐒳𐒴𐒵𐒶𐒷𐒸𐒹𐒺𐒻𐒼𐒽𐒾𐒿𐓀𐓁𐓂𐓃𐓄𐓅𐓆𐓇𐓈𐓉𐓊𐓋𐓌𐓍𐓎𐓏𐓐𐓑𐓒𐓓𐲀𐲁𐲂𐲃𐲄𐲅𐲆𐲇𐲈𐲉𐲊𐲋𐲌𐲍𐲎𐲏𐲐𐲑𐲒𐲓𐲔𐲕𐲖𐲗𐲘𐲙𐲚𐲛𐲜𐲝𐲞𐲟𐲠𐲡𐲢𐲣𐲤𐲥𐲦𐲧𐲨𐲩𐲪𐲫𐲬𐲭𐲮𐲯𐲰𐲱𐲲𑢠𑢡𑢢𑢣𑢤𑢥𑢦𑢧𑢨𑢩𑢪𑢫𑢬𑢭𑢮𑢯𑢰𑢱𑢲𑢳𑢴𑢵𑢶𑢷𑢸𑢹𑢺𑢻𑢼𑢽𑢾𑢿𝐀𝐁𝐂𝐃𝐄𝐅𝐆𝐇𝐈𝐉𝐊𝐋𝐌𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐐𝐑𝐒𝐓𝐔𝐕𝐖𝐗𝐘𝐙𝐴𝐵𝐶𝐷𝐸𝐹𝐺𝐻𝐼𝐽𝐾𝐿𝑀𝑁𝑂𝑃𝑄𝑅𝑆𝑇𝑈𝑉𝑊𝑋𝑌𝑍𝑨𝑩𝑪𝑫𝑬𝑭𝑮𝑯𝑰𝑱𝑲𝑳𝑴𝑵𝑶𝑷𝑸𝑹𝑺𝑻𝑼𝑽𝑾𝑿𝒀𝒁𝒜𝒞𝒟𝒢𝒥𝒦𝒩𝒪𝒫𝒬𝒮𝒯𝒰𝒱𝒲𝒳𝒴𝒵𝓐𝓑𝓒𝓓𝓔𝓕𝓖𝓗𝓘𝓙𝓚𝓛𝓜𝓝𝓞𝓟𝓠𝓡𝓢𝓣𝓤𝓥𝓦𝓧𝓨𝓩𝔄𝔅𝔇𝔈𝔉𝔊𝔍𝔎𝔏𝔐𝔑𝔒𝔓𝔔𝔖𝔗𝔘𝔙𝔚𝔛𝔜𝔸𝔹𝔻𝔼𝔽𝔾𝕀𝕁𝕂𝕃𝕄𝕆𝕊𝕋𝕌𝕍𝕎𝕏𝕐𝕬𝕭𝕮𝕯𝕰𝕱𝕲𝕳𝕴𝕵𝕶𝕷𝕸𝕹𝕺𝕻𝕼𝕽𝕾𝕿𝖀𝖁𝖂𝖃𝖄𝖅𝖠𝖡𝖢𝖣𝖤𝖥𝖦𝖧𝖨𝖩𝖪𝖫𝖬𝖭𝖮𝖯𝖰𝖱𝖲𝖳𝖴𝖵𝖶𝖷𝖸𝖹𝗔𝗕𝗖𝗗𝗘𝗙𝗚𝗛𝗜𝗝𝗞𝗟𝗠𝗡𝗢𝗣𝗤𝗥𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗩𝗪𝗫𝗬𝗭𝘈𝘉𝘊𝘋𝘌𝘍𝘎𝘏𝘐𝘑𝘒𝘓𝘔𝘕𝘖𝘗𝘘𝘙𝘚𝘛𝘜𝘝𝘞𝘟𝘠𝘡𝘼𝘽𝘾𝘿𝙀𝙁𝙂𝙃𝙄𝙅𝙆𝙇𝙈𝙉𝙊𝙋𝙌𝙍𝙎𝙏𝙐𝙑𝙒𝙓𝙔𝙕𝙰𝙱𝙲𝙳𝙴𝙵𝙶𝙷𝙸𝙹𝙺𝙻𝙼𝙽𝙾𝙿𝚀𝚁𝚂𝚃𝚄𝚅𝚆𝚇𝚈𝚉𝚨𝚩𝚪𝚫𝚬𝚭𝚮𝚯𝚰𝚱𝚲𝚳𝚴𝚵𝚶𝚷𝚸𝚹𝚺𝚻𝚼𝚽𝚾𝚿𝛀𝛢𝛣𝛤𝛥𝛦𝛧𝛨𝛩𝛪𝛫𝛬𝛭𝛮𝛯𝛰𝛱𝛲𝛳𝛴𝛵𝛶𝛷𝛸𝛹𝛺𝜜𝜝𝜞𝜟𝜠𝜡𝜢𝜣𝜤𝜥𝜦𝜧𝜨𝜩𝜪𝜫𝜬𝜭𝜮𝜯𝜰𝜱𝜲𝜳𝜴𝝖𝝗𝝘𝝙𝝚𝝛𝝜𝝝𝝞𝝟𝝠𝝡𝝢𝝣𝝤𝝥𝝦𝝧𝝨𝝩𝝪𝝫𝝬𝝭𝝮𝞐𝞑𝞒𝞓𝞔𝞕𝞖𝞗𝞘𝞙𝞚𝞛𝞜𝞝𝞞𝞟𝞠𝞡𝞢𝞣𝞤𝞥𝞦𝞧𝞨𝟊𞤀𞤁𞤂𞤃𞤄𞤅𞤆𞤇𞤈𞤉𞤊𞤋𞤌𞤍𞤎𞤏𞤐𞤑𞤒𞤓𞤔𞤕𞤖𞤗𞤘𞤙𞤚𞤛𞤜𞤝𞤞𞤟𞤠𞤡🄰🄱🄲🄳🄴🄵🄶🄷🄸🄹🄺🄻🄼🄽🄾🄿🅀🅁🅂🅃🅄🅅🅆🅇🅈🅉🅐🅑🅒🅓🅔🅕🅖🅗🅘🅙🅚🅛🅜🅝🅞🅟🅠🅡🅢🅣🅤🅥🅦🅧🅨🅩🅰🅱🅲🅳🅴🅵🅶🅷🅸🅹🅺🅻🅼🅽🅾🅿🆀🆁🆂🆃🆄🆅🆆🆇🆈🆉ＡＢＣＤＥＦＧＨＩＪＫＬＭＮＯＰＱＲＳＴＵＶＷＸＹＺ (Characters unsupported by this font appear as squares.)
This change supports upper case characters in other languages but doesn’t go so far as to allow emoji as a Class or Module name. These examples are now valid Ruby:
It’s worth noting that local variables in Ruby could begin with these characters in Ruby 2.5 and earlier. (Thanks to Cary Swoveland for pointing this out.) A local variable starting with one of these characters would become a constant in Ruby 2.6.
Why support these additional characters? Sergei Borodanov started an issue ticket asking about support for Cyrillic characters. Matz decided, “maybe it’s time to relax the limitation for Non-ASCII capital letters to start constant names.” Nobuyoshi (“nobu”) Nakada (a.k.a. “patch monster”) wrote and committed the patch to support this new feature.
With the addition of this feature, Rubyists in various languages can use their own alphabet for the first character of a Class or Module. For example, a Greek Rubyist can now have an Ωμέγα class, instead of an Oμέγα class — where the first letter is transliterated. Thanks to the Ruby core team for making this change! It will be shipped on December 25, 2018 with Ruby 2.6.
We use Ruby for lots of things here at Square — including our Square Connect Ruby SDKs and open source Ruby projects. We’re eagerly awaiting the release of Ruby 2.6!
The Ruby logo is Copyright © 2006, Yukihiro Matsumoto, distributed under CC BY-SA 2.5.
Want more? Sign up for your monthly developer newsletter or drop by the Square dev Slack channel and say “hi!” | https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/new-class-naming-rules-in-ruby-bb3b45150c37 | ['Shannon Skipper'] | 2019-04-18 22:18:55.872000+00:00 | ['Ruby', 'Programming Languages', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Engineering'] |
3 Questions for Your Credit Card Debt Plan | Credit card debt is a major issue in America. The convenience of portable credit cannot be overstated, but it’s also a slippery slope to developing a serious debt problem. If you’ve found yourself in debt, you should understand the importance of planning yourself out of it. Formulating a plan for debt freedom is commendable, but once you have planned out your debts and repayments, it’s time to take a step back and ask yourself a few questions about your plan.
Is your Debt Manageable or Unmanageable?
If you’ve got an easy plan in place with just a few years until the final payment, then that’s perfect. A manageable debt repayment plan is what you need for continuing with confidence. However, if your plan has you making payments for decades, then it might be time to look at other options for your debt management plan — debt consolidation, credit counseling (nonprofit options exist!), or even filing for bankruptcy.
When Is Debt Consolidation the Choice?
Debt consolidation can be a difficult process but is sometimes the best choice for your debt. This is when you take several credit cards and condense them into a single payment. This can sometimes be a very good choice but isn’t right for everyone. For starters, it often costs a bit of money to have your debt moved around into a single payment, which can be difficult to manage if you’re already in debt. This also takes the debt off of your cards — which might open them up for more debt. But for convenience and streamlining, consolidation can be a very worthwhile addition to your plan.
What Consolidation Options are Available?
If you think consolidation is a good choice, then you’ll want to consider where to go for consolidation. Essentially, consolidation involves taking out a single larger loan which you use to pay off the multiple smaller loans. A personal loan from friends or family can be very good for this, as there are no fees, kinder interest rates, more flexibility — the benefits are not small. But it’s absolutely understandable if this isn’t something you are comfortable with, as it can impact the relationship.
More officially there are personal loans available through banks and credit unions, or even lenders that are built around credit card debt consolidation. Each of these options will vary wildly, and it’s best to do your due diligence and examine each option. Even peer-to-peer lending options like Lending Tree could be helpful.
Originally published to www.financialfiduciariesllc.net | https://medium.com/@financialfiduciariesllc/3-questions-for-your-credit-card-debt-plan-f5f15a52981e | ['Financial Fiduciaries'] | 2020-10-13 19:30:03.327000+00:00 | ['Finances', 'Debt', 'Financial Fiduciaries Llc'] |
The Bud | Dear My Love,
We’ve only been talking a short while, however, I feel as if you were my soulmate in another life. Somewhere out there we had one epic love story. Everything about you is familiar, yet new. I find myself going aboout my day with you on my mind. The hours we’ve spent in conversation are some of my favorite of all. I see this blooming into a beautiful love. As in every garden, ours will have weeds, thorns, but no matter how many hours in the hot sun we will spend, we will weed them out so our beautiful love flourishes. For our love will be unconditional. | https://medium.com/@aliviabamba/the-bud-682004f3f9dc | ['Alivia Bamba'] | 2020-12-21 04:49:20.976000+00:00 | ['Gardening', 'Love', 'Love Letters', 'Poetry'] |
Let’s talk about losing weight with little effort! Here are eleven simple tips and tricks that you can use to lose major weight on Keto (or most diets, really!) | Let’s talk about losing weight with little effort! Here are eleven simple tips and tricks that you can use to lose major weight on Keto (or most diets, really!)
1 — Focus on meats and vegetables not fat
2 — Eat real whole natural foods avoid supplements
3 — Stick to your routine
4 — Meal plan before shopping
5 — Focus on leaner meats
6 — Invest on a digital kitchen scale
7 — Stay hydrated drink more
8 — Keep in hand easy snack like cheese/cucumber
9 — Sleep early
10 — Differentiate head hunger from stomach hunger
11 — Understand your own needs and how to address them
- Fonte do texto: https://ohweightloss.com/keto-11-simple-tips-for-major-weight-loss/ | https://medium.com/@losebelly/keto-11-simple-tips-for-major-weight-loss-ad177013db87 | ['Elena Meuit'] | 2020-12-27 12:35:14.049000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Health', 'Losebelly', 'Weightloss', 'Fitness'] |
Am I what you thought I would be? | Photo by Julian Myles on Unsplash
Am I what you thought I would be;
Now that you know the real me, even though I am changing constantly?Evolving continuously
Am I what you thought I would be?
Do I feel how you thought I would feel when my hand caresses your face and chin hairs?
Did you know it would feel like that?
When you asked for a kiss, did you know my lips would be that soft?
And once inside, did you know it would feel so welcoming?
Like you had returned home after being gone for too long
Am I everything you thought I would be?
I must admit that in the past I’ve been very disappointed in who people turned out to be. Felt as though I had been deceived.
But you have not deceived me.
You have made me a better me in ways I can’t explain.
But some things make sense to me now, like why the older generation called dating “going steady.”
I needed a steady love. Correction, I need a steady love like the love you give.
Didn’t know such a love existed.
No emotional roller-coasters.
No annoying sudden dives down that leave my stomach all in knots due to the anxiety of not knowing what happens next.
And yet…
I had a bit of anxiety today because I’ve never been here before; and I don’t know what happens next.
But I’m looking forward to it and I’m grateful for you. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/am-i-what-you-thought-i-would-be-537808c5f825 | ['Jyn Lynk'] | 2020-02-23 14:01:01.396000+00:00 | ['Love Letters', 'Poetry', 'Poetry Sunday', 'Love', 'Relationships'] |
TV Picks: 25 February — 3 March 2019 | — MONDAY 25th —
✮ THIS TIME WITH ALAN PARTRIDGE — BBC1, 9.30PM.
Steve Coogan’s alter-ego returns, as Alan Partridge is offered the chance to co-host a One Show-style magazine show on primetime BBC when the male presenter goes sick. Co-starring Susannah Fielding, Felicity Montagu, Tim Key & Cariad Lloyd. (1/6)
Also watch:
Rise of the Continents — BBC2, 3.15pm . New geological series concerning the development of the planet’s major land masses. Presented by Iain Stewart. (1/4)
. New geological series concerning the development of the planet’s major land masses. Presented by Iain Stewart. (1/4) Thailand: Earth’s Tropical Paradise — BBC2, 4.15pm. New wildlife documentary series focusing on the Southeast Asian nation. Narrated by Sophie Okonedo. (1/3)
Child Genius — Channel 4, 8pm . Series 6 of the contest to find the country’s most intelligent child. Presented by Richard Osman. (1/6)
. Series 6 of the contest to find the country’s most intelligent child. Presented by Richard Osman. (1/6) Warren — BBC1, 9pm . New sitcom about a driving instructor (Martin Clunes) who moves to the northern town of Preston with his family. Co-starring Lisa Millett, Tim Preston, Oscar Morgan & Neil Edmund. (1/6)
. New sitcom about a driving instructor (Martin Clunes) who moves to the northern town of Preston with his family. Co-starring Lisa Millett, Tim Preston, Oscar Morgan & Neil Edmund. (1/6) Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace — ITV, 9pm . Special edition of the family reunion show looking at the technology used to help people abandoned as children (“foundlings”) find their biological relatives. Presented by Davina McCall & Nicky Campbell.
. Special edition of the family reunion show looking at the technology used to help people abandoned as children (“foundlings”) find their biological relatives. Presented by Davina McCall & Nicky Campbell. Around the World by Train with Tony Robinson — Channel 5, 9pm . New celebrity travelogue with the actor and presenter on a journey to experience railways around the world, beginning with Europe. (1/6)
. New celebrity travelogue with the actor and presenter on a journey to experience railways around the world, beginning with Europe. (1/6) Oscars 2019 Highlights — Sky1, 9pm . A compilation of the best moments from yesterday’s Academy Awards ceremony.
. A compilation of the best moments from yesterday’s Academy Awards ceremony. Warship — More4, 10pm. Documentary going behind-the-scenes of HMS Ocean during a seven-month active deployment. (1/3)
— TUESDAY 26th —
✮ THE HANGOVER GAMES — E4, 10PM.
New series where five friends participate in a documentary that transforms into a crazy game show. Hosted by Matt Richardson & Ken Cheng. (1/10)
Also watch:
The Miracle — Sky Atlantic, 9pm . New Italian crime drama about a mob raid that reveals a Virgin Mary statue that weeps blood, impacting the lives of the politicians and religious leaders who come under its influence. (1 & 2/8)
. New Italian crime drama about a mob raid that reveals a Virgin Mary statue that weeps blood, impacting the lives of the politicians and religious leaders who come under its influence. (1 & 2/8) Safe at Last: Inside a Women’s Refuge — Channel 4, 10pm . Documentary filmed over a year about women who have left violent partners. Narrated by Julie Walters.
. Documentary filmed over a year about women who have left violent partners. Narrated by Julie Walters. Inside Britain’s Black Market: Who’s Selling Fake Stuff? — BBC1, 10.45pm. Investigative documentary about those who sell fake goods around the country. Presented by Livvy Haydock.
— WEDNESDAY 27th —
✮ THE JUNK FOOD EXPERIMENT — ITV, 9PM.
Special science experiment documentary where six celebrities spend 21 days eating nothing but junk food, with Peter Andre, Shaun Wallace, Nadine Dorries, Hayley Tamaddon, Tessa Sanderson & Hugo Taylor.
Also watch:
The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On — BBC2, 9pm. Documentary about the controversial book The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, published 30 years ago, triggering a culture war.
— THURSDAY 28th —
✮ STRIKE BACK: SILENT WAR — SKY1, 9PM.
Series 7 of the action thriller drama about a special ops team preventing terrorist atrocities. Starring Warren Brown, Daniel MacPherson, Alin Sumarwata, Yasmine Kay Allen & Jamie Bamber. (1/10)
Also watch:
The Parkinson’s Drug Trail: A Miracle Cure? — BBC2, 9pm . New documentary series about a groundbreaking drug trial to cure Parkinson’s disease, which involved the implantation of a device into the brain. (1/2)
. New documentary series about a groundbreaking drug trial to cure Parkinson’s disease, which involved the implantation of a device into the brain. (1/2) In the Line of Fire with Ross Kemp — ITV, 9pm. Documentary following the work of the Armed Police.
— FRIDAY 1st —
✮ MEGHAN AND THE MARKLES: A FAMILY AT WAR — CHANNEL 5, 9PM.
Documentary looking at Meghan Markle’s family, who have reacted with controversial and selfish motives since she married into the Royal Family, with the exception of her mother Doria.
— SATURDAY 2nd —
✮ ALL TOGETHER NOW — BBC1, 7.30PM.
Series 2 of the karaoke talent show where singers must convince 100 judges to sing-along with them in order to win. Hosted by Rob Beckett & Geri Horner. (1/6)
Also watch:
The Jonathan Ross Show — ITV, 9.25pm. Series 14 of the chat show. Guests are Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Hudson, Will.i.am, Seann Walsh & Bryan Adams.
— SUNDAY 3rd —
✮ RACE ACROSS THE WORLD — BBC2, 9PM.
New series where five pairs of travellers leave Greenwich, London and pass through five checkpoints on a journey to Singapore, without using a plane, mobile phone, or credit card. The first to cross the finish line wins a cash prize. (1/6) | https://dansmediadigest.co.uk/tv-picks-25-february-3-march-2019-4c336b01f77d | ['Dan Owen'] | 2019-02-25 17:27:19.618000+00:00 | ['UK', 'TV', 'Listings', 'Tv Picks', 'Television'] |
Guaranteed Execution with Smart Contracts | We have looked at blockchain in two different ways. First as a data structure and second as a protocol to transfer value. For the last article of this chapter about what a blockchain is we want to talk about smart contracts. Besides AI, IoT, and blockchain, smart contracts have been one of the hottest topics over the last two years in the tech world. They are software on the blockchain.
A blockchain can not only host simple data like transactions, but also small programs. We call these programs smart contracts. A contract, in general, is an agreement between parties that binds them to something happening in the future. The “smart” comes from the automatic execution of these digital contracts. Simply speaking they consist of many “if, then” statements that are written in and enforced by code. The contract executes automatically if the contract conditions are met.
The Promise of Smart Contracts
Smart contracts promise to reduce the need for middlemen, such as lawyers or notaries, and thereby reduce the cost of transacting. Disposing of middlemen can also save a lot of time. You don’t have to wait for opening hours or through banking holidays. Smart contracts can not only be used to govern the transfer of digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, but they could govern many other types of value transfer, such as trading of shares and other traditional financial instruments or even transactions involving physical property (like real estate).
A landlord and a tenant could use a smart contract to govern a rental agreement. The smart contract could automatically lock the tenant out of the apartment if the tenant fails to pay rent. The if-then statement, in this case, could look like this:
If the contract address receives amount X by the 3rd of each month from address Y, then grant Y access to the apartment. If payment fails for 2 consecutive months, then revoke the right of Y to unlock the apartment.
Are They Really Trustless?
The promise of smart contracts is to allow trustless execution with automatically enforced rules without the need for middlemen. But can they actually live up to this promise?
All types of assets are subject to the local jurisdiction you are in. This means a contract, no matter if smart or not, requires additional trust in the jurisdiction besides the trust put in the contract itself. Possession in a smart contract does not equal possession in the real world. Just as with regular contracts, the terms can be subject to changing circumstances and interpretation thereof. An illegal contract is not legally binding.
One must consider that writing traditional contracts takes years of studying the legal framework regulating the different areas of contractual law. Writing smart contracts is even more difficult, as one also needs to understand the technical dimension behind them. We will need to see an entirely new generation of tech-savvy lawyers emerge to enable a meaningful adoption of legally binding smart contracts.
There is another major challenge to overcome. The digital world needs to learn about real-world events in order for a smart contract to function and execute. An oracle is an entity submitting data to a smart contract. The trust problem that comes with this role is referred to as the oracle problem. Imagine a smart contract running a betting platform in a trustless environment. The oracle needs to submit the result of a game in order to have the smart contract distribute funds to the winners. Because an oracle determines what a smart contract sees, it also controls what it does.
Centralized oracles are not considered a solution to the oracle problem. No matter what the actual implementation looks like, the incentives to untruthfully submit data might outweigh the benefits of acting honestly in some decisions. And what is the point of having trustless execution on the basis of information provided by a trusted third party?
No matter if centralized or decentralized, an oracle will always come at a cost. Acting honestly must always be the most profitable strategy and therefore strong incentives must be in place. This is another problem that needs game-theoretic evaluation and incentive design, just like the incentives for miners that we talked about in our last article.
As Jimmy Song puts it: “A smart contract that trusts a third party removes the killer feature of trustlessness.” There is a long way to go before we will see the broad use of trustless smart contracts across different domains, but they are most definitely a concept worth exploring.
Read the full article and other great articles like this one on the Horizen Academy. | https://medium.com/horizen/guaranteed-execution-with-smart-contracts-29d975cbf866 | [] | 2020-02-21 21:33:50.725000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Smart Contracts', 'Bitcoin', 'Horizen'] |
5 Steps to Being Traditionally Published | You hear pretty often that publishing is dead. Or that it’s impossible to actually sell a first book anymore. Or that you can’t do it, without a huge platform (or some other equally improbable necessity.)
The truth is, though, that it’s always been hard to have a book traditionally published. And it’s no more impossible today than it ever has been.
It’s really just numbers. There are way more people who want to be published than there are opportunities to be published. High demand equals high difficulty. So, even though the writer hires the agent, and sells to the editor, and the publisher — the agent, editor, publisher have so many opportunities to do their work that they don’t have to really hustle for clients.
People are scrambling, begging them to take most of the proceeds of each book sale. That’s just the way of the world.
That being said, though, if traditional publishing is your goal (and let’s be honest, it’s a goal for a lot of writers), it’s not impossible.
Here’s how you do it:
Write a really good book, all the way through to the end.
If you’re writing fiction, this is a must. No agent will look at you if you don’t have a complete novel, so no traditional publisher will have the chance to consider your work.
With non-fiction you can write a proposal instead of the whole book. If you’re a first time writer, though, it wouldn’t hurt to write your whole book even for non-fiction. Regardless, the work you turn into agents (proposal or finished draft) needs to shine.
While you’re writing, start building an email list.
I wish that someone had given me this advice when I sold my first novel to a traditional publisher.
I had eighteen months between when my book sold and when it was released. My best use of that time would have been building an email list, but I didn’t know that. No one told me.
So, I’m telling you.
You’ll have an easier time appealing to an agent (and a publisher) if you have a solid foundation of readers already. It goes without saying, you’ll have an easier time selling your book if you have people waiting to buy it.
If you can get to 10,000 on your email list, it will make a difference.
If you can get to 100,000 — suddenly you’re not 1 in a million anymore. You’re more rare, which means that agents and publishers will be more anxious to compete for your business.
The truth is, you probably don’t even need an agent or publisher if you build your list to that level. You certainly won’t have trouble attracting one or the other or both if that’s what you want.
Look for an agent.
This requires you to learn how to write a solid query letter. A query letter is a one-page sales letter that tries to entice the agent to request your manuscript or proposal. Most large traditional publishers require you to have an agent before they’ll look at your work.
Write the next book. And so on.
I guess the real truth is that it’s much harder to get your first finished book published than your second, and harder for the second than the third, etc. Writing is a skill that takes practice to master.
If you keep going, you increase your chances exponentially.
And if you quit, you build a block wall that your chances can’t overcome.
You aren’t competing against every single writer trying to get a book published.
I have a friend who used to read an agent’s slush pile. He says that a full 90 percent of the queries that come in are instant rejects — because the writing isn’t there.
You’re only competing against the books that are publish-ready. You need to make sure your book is publish-ready. Do what it takes to get there. That means a lot of practice, a lot of reading, a lot of writing. Maybe hiring an editor. Maybe taking some classes.
It means behaving like a professional writer.
If you stick with it and keep improving, you’ll get there. By time you do, though, you might find that you don’t really want to be there anymore. The world of books is changing way faster than the world of publishing has kept up with. | https://shauntagrimes.medium.com/5-steps-to-being-traditionally-published-415a4996cf38 | ['Shaunta Grimes'] | 2019-05-31 11:41:28.385000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Publishing', 'Writing', 'Self', 'Creativity'] |
And the connected web of open source. | And the connected web of open source.
This isn’t another post talking about how many CVEs are in open source code (a lot), or how hard to use the CVE system is (very). It’s also not about how under-paid and overworked maintainers are (depressingly so), although it does touch on these topics. This is a post about another reason to update dependencies, one that I just realized.
Why not? It’ll only take a minute…
I was playing around with the snyk CLI to see the CVEs present in a few of my codebases. I had some spare time and wanted to see if I could fix a few. I started with Tekton, a project I help maintain. Running snyk showed a high severity vulnerability!
$ snyk test Testing /Users/dlorenc/go/src/github.com/tektoncd/pipeline… ✗ High severity vulnerability found in github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go
I remembered hearing about this one on Twitter somehow, and decided to try fixing it just to see what it would take. I didn’t think JSON Web Tokens were used anywhere in Tekton so this probably wasn’t affecting our code, but it still couldn’t hurt to make the red x go away.
I didn’t really know where this dependency was coming from or how to get started fixing the issue. Go modules comes with a nice tool to explain your dependency tree, so I tried that out and was able to quickly track down where in my code the dependency was coming from.
$ go mod why github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go
# github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go github.com/tektoncd/pipeline/pkg/pod
github.com/google/go-containerregistry/pkg/authn/k8schain
github.com/vdemeester/k8s-pkg-credentialprovider/azure
github.com/Azure/go-autorest/autorest/adal
github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go
In this case, it was an indirect dependency, so I couldn’t fix it just by updating it directly. I needed to update the things using it. I browsed over to the package repo to see what the fix was and if I could just update, and I hit one of the saddest things in open source — an abandoned project. A fix has been pending for awhile, but no one is around to merge it:
This is sad for the maintainer, this is sad for the people depending on the library — it’s sad in general. That’s another larger topic of discussion that I’ll write about some other time though. From reading the discussion on the PR/issues, it looks like there are a few forks of this, but nothing is a clear replacement yet. I saw a reference to an issue in the Azure/go-autorest repository, which was next up on my list:
I jumped up there and saw that they were able to move forward by replacing this dependency with one of the forks. Great news for me! I just need to get the updated Azure/go-autorest library into my tree. Next up is Vincent Demeester ‘s k8s-pkg-credential-provider library. I was pretty familiar with this code, so I was confident I’d be able to get a fix in if he hadn’t already. I should have known better, of course Vincent already addressed this months ago. He’s a machine!
OK, so now we’re getting up to code I maintain. Next on the list is google/go-containerregistry. I was starting to feel a little bad — I hadn’t been paying close enough attention to realize this somewhat widely used library (200+ imports), was flagged with a High Severity vulnerability. Luckily, a kind stranger on the internet (thanks Markus Thömmes!) had already taken care of that, and my co-maintainers Jason Hall and Matt Moore had merged it.
So all I had to do was apply the fix in Tekton. A quick PR (and then a couple days spent debugging and fixing newly failing tests) got me in business. At this point I was really only continuing out of some vague drive to actually fix something, even though I didn’t think the vulnerability really affected Tekton. Any other week and I might have just stopped or gotten sidetracked with something important.
Maybe this was just me coming up with a post-hoc rationalization for spending so much time fixing one probably irrelevant CVE warning, but I convinced myself this wasn’t a waste of time at all. I had just unblocked the next set of projects in the dependency graph (probably even some more I’m responsible for, sorry internet…) from updating and picking up the fix. They might even be using the dependency differently, causing that CVE to affect them!
I’m not pretending I did a huge community service here, but it did make me realize that as soon as you publish code intended for others to reuse, you become part of a larger graph of open source.
Being a responsible citizen in this web requires staying up to date and picking up changes, even if they don’t matter to your code.
I’m thrilled to see all the new automation work taking off across the open source universe to make this easier and faster. Dependabot PRs are awesome. CI services make merging these PRs easier and less risky. Faster, more frequent updates make it easier to update faster.
My colleague David Wheeler recently shared the libyear metric with me, and I really like it. Libyears reflects an almost tangible way to measure how old a dependency tree really is. The exciting part to me is that we could even try to track this over time and see the effect of things like Dependabot and other tools have on lowering the libyears across an entire language ecosystem!
Maybe the real CVE fixes were the friends we made along the way? | https://itnext.io/on-updating-dependencies-d298f2509af5 | ['Dan Lorenc'] | 2020-12-15 16:20:34.203000+00:00 | ['Security', 'Kubernetes', 'Go', 'Github'] |
The Monday Morning Real Estate Update — Monday, December 14th, 2020 | The Monday Morning Real Estate Update — Monday, December 14th, 2020
Podcast Transcript of Never Too Late To The Game’s Monday Morning Real Estate Update, December 14, 2020.
San Francisco Comings and Goings
Rents have plummeted 35%. I don’t think we are anywhere near bottom yet.
Japantown is hanging by a thread. But let’s be clear, Covid-19 is the nail in the coffin and not by any means the sole cause for the impending demise of Japantown. Tenants already had their Common Area Maintenance Fees (CAM Fees) spiked 90% in 2019. It appears that the owners, 3D Investments and Kinokuniya, — have bigger plans.
SF Gate contacted 3D Investments for comment but they were ignored.
Meanwhile businesses in Chinatown are also struggling.
San Francisco’s only Olive Garden has closed permanently.
The Cliff House Restaurant is closed permanently
Oracle has announced that they are moving their headquarters to Austin and mentioned the new employee structure (remote work and office options).
Covid-19 gave companies the answer to two long-standing questions: could employees be trusted to work from home and would there be any change in productivity?
The answer has been a resounding yes and yes productivity has reportedly gone up, releasing employers from a plethora of expensive benefits and ultimately office space.
If there is any hesitation, it is the outstanding question of whether or not productivity will change post Covid-19, as social and recreational options return.
For San Francisco the question remains: has the city (or state) done enough to secure Federal assistance for small business, house the homeless, work with landlords?
The answer is No.
This past week I talked to a friend who manages 600 San Francisco apartments. He said he can’t even count the number of vacancies or of people who have just stopped paying rent. He also mentioned that many landlords (the smaller ones) are severely hurting.
It is interesting to observe how other governments have handled the financial effects of Covid-19 with assistance to citizens.
In San Francisco, as tech companies and other corporations move to avoid dealing with the very income inequality they created, where is the city in negotiating and repurposing office space into residential space?
There are many opportunities being missed.
The NY Times published an article this past week to talk about the notion of converting vacant commercial space to residential. Seems NYC is thinking out of the box…
The “Professionals” are Weighing-in, Bullishly
Real Estate Coach Brian Buffini and Lawrence Yun, a NAR economist, are both bullish on 2021 predictions for the housing market. Here’s a quick summary of what they are predicting (my comments in parentheses):
Remote work will continue to spread out the population; they’re calling it decentralization. (I guess everyone wants to mimic blockchain these days — Duh.)
to spread out the population; they’re calling it decentralization. (I guess everyone wants to mimic blockchain these days — Duh.) The death of open floor plans continue as homeowners scramble for zoom meeting privacy in their homes. (The Pandemic has forced people to use their kitchens and with open floor plans, frying garlic & onions can permeate the entire house.)
continue as homeowners scramble for zoom meeting privacy in their homes. (The Pandemic has forced people to use their kitchens and with open floor plans, frying garlic & onions can permeate the entire house.) The wealthy are upsizing and so is everyone else by moving to suburban and rural areas.
and so is everyone else by moving to suburban and rural areas. The biggest challenge is connectivity. Believe it or not, America has become somewhat of a 3rd world country in terms of connectivity outside of larger cities. (This must be socialism.)
Buffiini is so bullish that he goes as far as to recommend that real estate professions should buy for themselves. (Buying is good, but as always it is about two things: Market Timing and location.)
The San Francisco Market by the Numbers
STAY POSITIVE & KEEP HOPE ALIVE
Together we will get through this time, together we will co-create a better world, a better community and a better economy that we all know in our heart’s is possible.
If you would like to hear my Podcast of this article, please visit Never Too Late To The Game’s Monday Morning Real Estate Update for December 14, 2020.
You can also find me on Spotify, Google, TuneIn, Stitcher and Apple Podcasts.
If you’re a buyer, seller or investor in the Bay Area and looking for an agent, you can contact me on Facebook or leave a message or text at 415–787–7350.
I have a great team with a lot of resources behind me at Keller Williams where I am a broker associate — and this means that you will also have a great team and resources behind you.
CA Broker’s License is #01884928. | https://medium.com/@nevertoolatetothegame/the-monday-morning-real-estate-update-monday-december-14th-2020-78fdb57b7e51 | ['Mykel Ferrantino'] | 2020-12-14 20:12:00.804000+00:00 | ['San Francisco', 'Covid 19', 'Real Estate'] |
A Poem By Melissa Stein | A Poem By Melissa Stein
Polar Vortex
The air pinned us like a two-ton
duvet. We painted all the walls
blue. We sipped icebergs
to cool down. When it got really bad
we imported San Francisco fog
and tethered it over the pool.
Small benevolent wild creatures
joined us, splaying out their bellies
on the tiles, taxidermied by the heat.
At least we were unpelted. And while
we’d extract our own kidneys
with a dull pair of left-handed scissors
before suffering another body within twenty feet
of our parboiled flesh, the stupefaction
cultivated erotic dreams so robust
and depraved we fell to our knees
in gratitude every newly
unbearable morning. | https://medium.com/the-awl/a-poem-by-melissa-stein-e9f8b39221dd | ['The Awl'] | 2017-06-08 15:53:47.958000+00:00 | ['Melissa Stein', 'Poetry', 'The Poetry Section'] |
The good, the bad and the ugly of Scripts in Production | If you can think it — script it
I love scripting. I have been scripting since I started to develop.
I have written scripts in different scripting languages starting from basic, batch, bash, VBScript, JavaScript, phyton, perl, and my personal favorite — PowerShell.
Many “scripting languages”, especially Python and PowerShell until recently were only used for the “gluing work”, but nowadays with cloud technologies more and more scripting languages make it to the “real languages” domain.
I’d like to share my view on what the benefits of using scripting languages and why it is okay to use them even in production environments without hesitation.
Not long ago, when I asked my developer friends: “What do you think about running scripts in a production environment?” 4 out of 5 said that they think it was a bad idea and they couldn’t really explain why. So, I asked more questions. Most of their reasons focused on “it doesn’t feel right” running code that is not compiled, plain text, a code that has not gone through a standard SDLC.
However, if you were to ask IT experts the same question, I believe the answers would be different. My assumption is that 4 out of 5 would say that they do it every day and feel comfortable with it. The fifth would need some time to remember that while he might not have done it, his predecessor likely did. One example that IT experts commonly use are login scripts of users in the corporate domain. I’m sure that would count as a script running in a production environment, don’t you?
Also, DevOps engineers use scripts in their production environments all the time. Serverless development is usually based on non-compiled code.
So why do you avoid using scripts in our production environments? Why doesn’t it “feel right”? What are you afraid of? | https://medium.com/cyberark-engineering/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-scripts-in-production-c271f2d0240c | ['Assaf Miron'] | 2020-06-01 15:33:31.436000+00:00 | ['Lambda', 'Python', 'Script', 'Production', 'DevOps'] |
How Restaurant Management Software Solutions can Help Increase Revenue | How Restaurant Management Software Solutions can Help Increase Revenue Techimply Aug 25·5 min read
Hello everyone, welcome back to TechImply. This time we are here with a post that will help you to increase your business revenue and generate more profit. In this post, we will discuss a few benefits of using restaurant management software that can help to generate more revenue in future.
Without wasting much time, let us move forward to understand the benefits. When correct food and service tools are selected, the revenue increases at a faster pace.
Managing customers
Being a restaurant owner or manager, it becomes your responsibility to manage a long term relationship with your customer for the growth of the business. It becomes crucial to become better than the existing competitors in terms of quality, food, service and after-sales services. When the customer gets appropriate service and after-sales support, they feel satisfied and hence tend to sustain for a longer time. The customers prefer to stick to the same restaurant for a longer time as they feel happier.
One of the major reasons to opt for restaurant management software is to make the customer happy. The software includes a lot of major features and tools that can record the customer data such as customer details, transactions, name, address, preferences, likings and much more. With the data of what customer likes, your restaurant can deliver satisfying services and mainly can increase the revenue and profit.
Manage the price of dishes and other services
Deciding on correct prices for the products and services at the right time is a crucial part of restaurant management. Many other existing industries such as airlines, moto parts and others have stable prices but the hotel industry has variable rates that majorly depend on the availability of stock and demand of customers. One can never increase the prices as per the wish at the restaurant, and hence it is important to keep customers in the centre.
Also, a lot of researches show that the real-time reports generated through the restaurant management software India help to take better pricing decisions at the correct time to beat the competitors and increase the margins of revenue. It becomes important to manage the prices depending on the peak times of business or the festive season sales or specific discounts for special customers.
Easy access to centralized data
Most modern restaurants focus on investing in the restaurant management software that is hosted on the cloud. Such software can easily be accessed from a dedicated browser. Also, the manager can receive real-time data of sales and have a check over the performance of employees. All this can be done without being physically present at the restaurant.
Manage menu and add items
It is important to understand that all the items don’t need to be on the menu all the time. All of the dishes never work the same for all the seasons, hence the menu needs to be customized as per the season, festival or location of your restaurant. It is suggested to categorize the menu items in a better way to make it easy for the people to understand and order quickly. Also, you must look for the upcoming trends to cope up with the industry.
Generation of statements
With the use of automated and digital POS software, one can carry out transactions without manual errors or human errors. Also, the generated reports are protected as they are encrypted and it also becomes easy to generate reports with real-time data stored on the centralized database. Also, the graphs and charts help to understand every point of view easily.
Manage time of working
One of the crucial elements of every restaurant business is the management of time. It is important to manage the time every customer spends at your place. It must neither be in too much hurry nor should not even be too long generating queues of people outside your place. As time is equal to money, you must keep a check that the customers don’t waste their time sitting inside the place even after completing their meals. You must make sure that you politely prevent them from doing so.
Also, it must be checked that the services and delivery are made on time. A lot of modern restaurants are opting for the technology facilities such as automated POS software to have real-time tracking of delivery with the estimated time. When the placed orders are directly informed to the kitchen person, it saves a lot of time.
Reduced expenses and saved money
The correct restaurant management software India helps to manage the employees, schedule their works as well as schedule every other activity of your business. This can help to reduce the losses made on the repetitive tasks of deciding and planning the activities and schedules for the employees. Also, great profits can be earned by minimizing the losses and carrying out the operations smoothly.
Manage physical capacity
Every restaurant needs to manage the physical space and try to plan accordingly to use most of the space. The highest quality output must be served within a given period along with the staff and available resources. Capacity management is not always an issue but is faced by many restaurants when the rush is more and resources are comparatively less. At this point, the Restaurant POS software helps to digitally decide the capacity and products accordingly. Also, it can suggest the maximum use of available space.
Controlling multiple locations and activities
It becomes difficult to manage multiple branches of a single restaurant from a single location. A dedicated restaurant management software can help to check the data of every restaurant and location saving a lot of time and energy. Also, it becomes easy to understand which items are purchased more in which location and hence can help to fulfil the demand of that specific area with an increased stock of specific products.
Conclusion
These were a few points stating how the restaurant management software India can help to manage everything properly and help to increase the revenue of the business along with increasing the profit and efficiency. The software not only increases the revenue but also helps to bring efficiency and accuracy to the activities. | https://medium.com/@ankitdhamsaniya1999/how-restaurant-management-software-solutions-can-help-increase-revenue-5d8529a02c0f | [] | 2021-08-25 05:53:39.854000+00:00 | ['Techimply', 'Restaurant Marketing', 'Software', 'Restaurant', 'Restaurant Business'] |
The Effects of Mass Hysteria | While reading the Crucible I noticed that something felt off about the town of Salem. There was a sense that something was lurking in the background hurting and traumatizing the residents of Salem. In the novel, many accuse the devil, but in reality, it was the mass hysteria that truly caused these problems and the residents and they start to think irrationally. They start refusing to listen to reason and eventually it ends up killing innocent people. The mass hysteria caused them to truly believe that the Devil was attacking Salem. Neighbors started turning on each other and relationships were destroyed.
I connected this to the Red Scare that occurred in the United States of America during the 1950s, which was the fear that communism had infiltrated American society and was spreading, similar to witchcraft. McCarthyism, named after U.S senator Joseph McCarthy, is the practice of accusing others of treason without proper evidence. Many Americans were accused of communism by their neighbors. This is very similar to how the girls were able to accuse women in Salem of witchcraft without any real evidence proving that they communicated with the Devil. However, the mass hysteria had already taken over and many people blindly believed the girls causing the death of many innocent women. Many of the lives of these innocent people were disrupted because of these accusations. The Crucible and Red Scare are examples that prove how mass hysteria can disrupt society and ruin the lives of many people. | https://medium.com/@nddang101/the-effects-of-mass-hysteria-8229fa31472e | ['Rum Ham'] | 2020-01-14 04:20:42.426000+00:00 | ['Communism', 'Politics', 'The Crucible', 'Mass Hysteria', 'Hysteria'] |
Monkeymind | Monkeymind
I am on a roller coaster/ and I cannot get off
Photo by Quinten de Graaf on Unsplash
I cannot
stop
I am on a roller coaster
and I cannot get off
no matter how hard I try
the ride never slows
and I’m whipped in the wind
my mind out the window.
Here it is, monkeymind,
run-on sentences are friends of mine
like the endless marquee strung across
my eyes
they never stop going
just curious motion
that sets in motion
my endless
distraction.
Spinning, spinning
running free
wheeling with no autonomy
I cannot control its currents and eddies
using all my energy
to just keep my head steady.
And so on I go
on the endless ride
the tidal flows of my
monkeymind. | https://sameripley.medium.com/monkeymind-7d5cc84be92 | ['Sam Ripples'] | 2019-08-18 02:30:15.340000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Poetry', 'Self', 'Philosophy', 'Personal Development'] |
Why Video Is The Most Powerful Marketing Tool Of The 21st Century | Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash
Summary: Here’s What You Need To Know.
Is video marketing really worth it?
By 2020, there will be almost A MILLION minutes of video per second on the internet. (Cisco) 82% of all consumer web traffic will be video. (Cisco)
In today’s day and age where our attention spans have reduced from...
10 minutes to less than a GOLDFISH (8 seconds)…
and with massive distrust and scepticism on the internet…
it has become imperative to have a digital footprint as a business.
If your business model or strategy does not include how to merge with an online, digital world, your business is in big trouble.
If you looked closely, our world has begun to shift towards a digital online world. It is not just about mobile, the TV, the Internet, that we have become obsessed about…
It is a NEW REALITY.
We live and consume information from a digital world which is not constrained by TIME. It is not constrained by GEOGRAPHY. Almost all our ATTENTION, the most valuable resource, has been occupied in the online world.
That is why Video is the most powerful business tool. Because it is the BEST MEDIUM to story-tell.
Who’s Using Video? Is It Widespread? (Animoto)
63% of businesses use video for marketing. 55% of small and medium sized business owners have produced or outsourced video production in the last 12 months.
Both B2B and B2C research for 2017 show that:
60% of both B2B and B2C marketers use video for marketing. 30% of B2B marketers say video will be key to content marketing success. 34% of B2C marketers say it’s crucial to success.
Around two-thirds of marketers are using videos for marketing; you can’t afford to be left out.
Video not only allows you to Share Outward to people what you care about, and reflect reality to them, building immediate trust, empathy and likability, it also DRAWS THEM into the world and story that you want them to see.
It can be perfected, replayed indefinitely at anyone’s own pace, and distributed at scale to thousands or millions at the same time, and yet feel as if you are spoken to 1-on-1.
It deploys the power of the visual medium, where to see is to believe, and “a picture paints a thousand words”, and takes it to the extreme.
Most videos are 24 pictures every second, more powerful than any single photo. And they can be combined with the power of story, to achieve an extremely powerful and ground-breaking effect.
Stories have been around since the dawn of our civilisation, EVER SINCE we were cavemen sitting around campfires.
Stories have been evolutionarily evolved to be our means of communication and memory.
That is why we have legends and folklore passed down over generations and they still exist till this day. That is why we as children, gravitate towards books which tell stories, but not just through text, but through images and visual imagery.
What about moving images?
Even in the largest religions that exist in our world today, we find that most religious texts pass down complex messages and learning lessons through the power of a simple story, and are able to capture the imaginations of masses to huge levels of conviction. Whether it was the story of Abraham, Prophet Muhammad, the story of Buddha, they all have something in common which makes them equally evocative, influential and powerful.
Stories create beliefs and we innately identify with them as human beings.
Video is the most powerful and direct tool to tell and create stories.
Now imagine the opportunity you can have for your business if you understood how to utilise this?
And now imagine 10 years from now, in a future where you did not use video, where would your business be? Would it still exist and thrive?
Imagine This.
If a chiropractor closes shop in a few years, and all their patients go back to a hospital to be medicated…
Or a psychologist who can’t communicate themselves digitally and thrive in a new world, and their patients go back to using symptom-suppressing medications from psychiatry…
Or a dog-trainer who isn’t able to have a footprint online…and because of that families are disrupted because their dog isn’t able to be properly trained in the house…
Look around you and you know the answer. Businesses are there to solve real problems for people.
And please understand the gravity of this situation. That it is not just about the business that suffers, but the families and everyone else that depends on them.
If you want to know more about how to strategically position yourself and your business, and have customers flock to you instead of having to chase them, I have a FREE report of 8 ways you can do that.
Click here to get it for free before it gets taken down. | https://medium.com/tape-your-time/why-video-is-the-most-powerful-marketing-tool-of-the-21st-century-9f29d82cc488 | ['Joel Ong'] | 2019-11-10 04:01:01.823000+00:00 | ['Video Marketing', '21st Century', 'Marketing', 'Business', 'Tools'] |
Having a Sick Child Can Mend Your Heart | Having a Sick Child Can Mend Your Heart
Photo credit: iStock
By Bill Gray
It’s easy to take for granted living in Massachusetts. We have here, quite literally, the greatest concentration of medical knowledge in the world. I wish I were exaggerating. But in more than fourteen years being Jacob’s dad, I have met people from across the globe who have sacrificed everything to come to meet with doctors and specialists in the many hospitals and clinics in and around the Boston area. I am reminded of this every time we visit Boston Children’s Hospital. Sit in the lobby for more than a few minutes and you will be amazed by the world of cultures that pass by speaking a myriad of languages.
When we arrived for our first visit at BCH, I learned quickly why Boston is considered among the best, if not the best, in cardiac care. The doctors were able to determine the possibility that Jacob would be born with Down syndrome by spotting ‘markers’, or medical conditions, common in children diagnosed with Trisomy 21: Congenital Heart Defect. They told us Jacob has CHD, including ASD/VSD, Cleft A/V Canal and Tetralogy of Fallot due to having three chromosomes on his twenty-first pair. In layman’s terms, it meant that Jacob’s heart had a humongous hole in the center and was malfunctioning. What that meant for him was the possibility of multiple open-heart surgeries before the age of six months to mend his little heart. The amazing part of all of this was that the cardiac team at BCH could diagnose this at just nineteen weeks gestation. His heart was only the size of one’s pinky fingernail with a hole less than a millimeter wide.
This was plenty of news for new parents to receive of a child who had yet to finish growing in his mother’s womb. The diagnosis, and the extensive surgeries that would result, were enough to drain the blood from our faces. No parent, even the most prepared to bring a new life into this world, is ever ready for this type of experience. I remember holding Charlotte’s hand tightly as we walked through the main doors of Boston Children’s Hospital. I remember thinking, “My son’s heart is broken,” and my heart was breaking as I contemplated an unknown future.
But as we walked through that lobby that morning, we were met with smiles. Yes, the exceptional staff at BCH greeted us warmly as they directed us to the Cardiology department. What caught my attention were the many families with smiles on their faces as they cared for their loved ones. Mothers and fathers smiling. Brothers and sisters laughing and kidding. And children in wheelchairs, or without hair, or with tubes and wires sticking out from under loose-fitting clothes, smiling.
And I realized something at that moment.
I realized the feelings about my son’s health issues were rather selfish. Yes, my wife Charlotte and I had a difficult road ahead with Jacob. But it was how we were going to face that road that would define it. We had a choice. And what I learned from those other parents that day is that the right choice is one of hope.
Hope is not just wishing all will be better. Yes, that is an aspect of hope. But on that day, I recognized quickly many of these parents were not clinging to that type of hope. There was a better chance than not that their child might not survive the illness or affliction they were enduring. There was a truthfulness in their eyes as they cared for their children. No, their hope was to have possibly one more year, one more month, one more day, one more moment with their loved one, and it was to make it the best possible moment it could be.
There is no controlling the circumstances that brought us here. There is no guarantee of a cure that will alleviate the pain, end the suffering, or save the life. But we can choose how we feel now. And the families at BCH that day chose to smile. They chose to make that moment the best it could be for their loved one, because that’s all they could do. I witnessed a hope stronger than any circumstance or outcome. What I saw was a room filled with the strongest, most courageous people I had ever seen.
Who was I to think of my own circumstance with self-pity? That day it wasn’t Jacob’s heart that was mended. It was mine.
So, from that day to today, I will smile. I will smile not for me, but for all those families I saw that day. I will smile for all those families who will see me with Charlotte and Jacob in the lobby of Boston Children’s Hospital. I will make right now the most important moment in life. Because no matter what the circumstance and no matter what is to come, today I will have hope.
—
The story was previously published on The Good Men Project.
—
About Bill Gray
Bill Gray is a teacher and musician working throughout Massachusetts. He is currently an instrumental music director in the Masconomet Regional School District in Boxford, MA. Bill continues to perform in and around the Boston area with various music groups, including The Ipswich River Brass Ensemble. He lives in Haverhill, MA wife his wife Charlotte and their son Jacob. | https://medium.com/a-parent-is-born/having-a-sick-child-can-mend-your-heart-873695b32c0f | ['The Good Men Project'] | 2020-12-16 02:47:22.590000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Love', 'Empathy', 'Childhood', 'Fatherhood'] |
A Beautiful Morning | It was a sunny morning
I watered the colorful flowers and left them in the sun by the window pane
The sweet smell walked with me
After all, fresh flowers have a beautiful smell
And life dripped from the watered leaves | https://medium.com/el-navigator/a-beautiful-morning-997602a150e1 | ['Sebastián González De León'] | 2017-11-22 18:04:29.368000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Literature', 'Life', 'Poem', '52 Week Writing Challenge'] |
Parents in Islam | Parents in Islam
Parents in Islam
Parents in Islam
In Islam Allah has given the status of parents very much. In Islam, it is not lawful for a “Parent” to suffer. If the child is worshiping God with integrity, he is in the service of his “Parent”, in service, and in good deed; But he will have great success in this world and in the Hereafter. And if the “Parent” is dissatisfied with the “Parents” or acts of the child, then hell is for him. Allaah has instructed “Parents” to treat their “Parents” well.
A man asked Rasul Arabi, what is the rights of the “Parents” over the child? In reply the worldly prophet said, “They are both your Paradise or Hell.” That is, those who will perform the proper duties to their parents are the successful ones. And woe to those who disobey.
There is more in the hadeeth — the gates of Paradise will be opened for anyone who obeys his parents for the sake of Allah; And whoever disobeys them, the two gates of hell will be opened. Upon hearing this, a man asked the worldly prophet, ‘O Messenger of Allah! Will the punishment of Hell still remain in force? When the “Parents” oppress this person. Rasool Arabi replied that the provision of this punishment may still apply.
Parents in Islam | https://medium.com/@mdkalam4033/parents-in-islam-cd5e244854ca | ['Sopna Akter'] | 2019-09-24 14:26:08.591000+00:00 | ['Muslim', 'Children', 'Parents', 'Islam', 'Hadith'] |
Can QuantumScape make money from Solid State Batteries? — Market Mad House | The QuantumScape Corporation (QS) could become one of the best electric car stocks.
QuantumScape (QS) claims to have a better lithium battery than the ones automakers presently use. If its claims are true, QuantumScape’s solid-state lithium batteries are smaller, safer, less-complicated, faster, and denser than conventional batteries.
The solid-state lithium batteries will charge faster and offer a longer range, QuantumScape claims. For instance, QuantumScape could the batteries could charge in 15 minutes. They also claim the Solid State batteries will last longer.
Another advantage to QuantumScape’s battery design is that it lacks an organic separator. Organic separators in lithium-ion batteries can catch fire because lithium generates heat. Engineers claim that QuantumScape’s batteries are less prone to fire because they run at lower temperatures.
The hope is that QuantumScape’s battery will be cheaper because it is simpler. A simpler design with fewer parts could reduce battery production costs. Lower prices create higher demand because more people can afford to buy the battery.
Electric Vehicle Production Booms
Investors are buying QuantumScape Corporation (NYSE: QS) because the electric vehicle (EV) market is exploding.
For example, Rivian is marketing an electric SUV, the RIvian R1S, and a pickup truck; the Rivian R1T, the Kelley Blue Book reports. Rivian unveiled the electric van it will sell to Amazon (AMZN) in October.
Amazon plans to have 10,000 Rivian electric delivery vans on the road by 2022 and 100,000 electric vans in service by 2030, The Verge claims. Ford (NYSE: F) has invested $500 million in Rivian.
Meanwhile, Amazon is part of another $2.15 billion funding round at Rivian. The Verge estimates Rivian has attracted $5.35 billion in funding since the beginning of 2019.
Ford Goes Electric
Importantly, historic automaker Ford (F) will market two all-electric vehicles soon.
The E-Transit is the all-electric version of the best-selling cargo van in the United States: the Ford Transit. The Mustang Mach-E is the electric version of Ford’s iconic muscle car. I think the Mach-E could be a template for electric police and rental. In particular, the Mach-E resembles the pursuit cars many American cops drive.
A network of 2,100 Ford EV-certified dealerships and over 13,500 charging stations will support the E-Transit and Mach-E. In addition, there are 13 companies that can retrofit E-Transit for speciality uses such as delivery.
The Incredible Ford F-Series
In addition, Ford plans to launch an all-electric version of its popular F-150 pickup truck in 2022, Inside EVs claims. The all-electric F-150 could be the most powerful Ford pickup yet because it will have dual motors.
I think the all-electric F-150 could take EVs mainstream because is the F-series pickup is the most popular vehicle in America. Ford sold 909,330 F-series in 2019, and 186,562 F-Series trucks in the first quarter of 2020, The Detroit Free Press estimates.
The F-Series is so popular it could be the 80th largest company in the United States in terms of sales, The Detroit Free Press claims. F-Series revenues are larger than Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Tesla, MasterCard, Netflix, VISA, Uber, CapitalOne, Twitter and Southwest Airlines, Ford claims.
I think Ford is laying the groundwork for a nationwide roll-out of an electric F-Series pickup. A network of over 2,100 dealerships and over 13,500 charging stations could support the electric pickups. If the electric F-Series is as popular as the gas and diesel F-Series it could become the most popular electric vehicle.
Ford’s Electrics could be Good News for QuantumScape
That could be good news for QuantumScape because Ford will need batteries to power all those pickup trucks. QuantumScape could make money by selling Ford the batteries.
Ford could buy QuantumScape’s solid-state battery because they are denser and smaller. Using smaller batteries could enable Ford to build electric pickups and vans with more cargo space, which will be a selling point.
Smaller batteries could also help Ford make the pickups and vans more powerful. I consider power one of EV’s most potent selling points. People love more powerful vehicles and will pay extra for them.
A Lariat variant of the Ford F-150 now costs around $60,000. The Detroit Free Press claims Ford cannot produce enough F-150s to keep up with consumer demand.
QuantumScape Partners with Volkswagen
Ford’s electric plans could be good news for QuantumScape (QS) because they show an established automaker is serious about EVs.
Mr. Market is one person who believes in the potential of EVs. In 2020, QuantumScape’s share price rose from $4.40 on 14 August 2020 (after the IPO) to $120.88 on 22 December 2020. QuantumScape’s price dropped to $114.77 on 24 December 2020.
Auto companies share Mr. Market’s faith in QuantumScape The world’s largest automaker Volkswagen Group has invested over $300 million in QuantumScape, a press release claims. Volkswagen AG (XETRA: VOW) plan a joint venture for industrial level production of solid-state batteries.
Volkswagen and Ford are collaborating on commercial and electric vehicles including vans, a press release states. In particular, Ford and VW will build a new electric vehicle based on Volkswagen’s Modular Electric Drive tool kit starting in 2023
In addition, Volkswagen plans to build an electric-pickup on Ford’s Ranger platform in 2020. Beyond that, I think Ford and Volkswagen could market the E-Transit in Europe together.
Thus, QuantumScape could have the world’s largest and sixth largest automakers for customers. Wheels.ca estimates Volkswagen AG is the world’s largest automaker with annual sales of 10.8 million vehicles in 2019. Ford is the sixth largest automaker with annual sales 5.7 million vehicles in 2019.
Can QuantumScape Make Money?
Unfortunately, I cannot tell if QuantumScape (QS) makes money. Stockrow offered no financial data for QuantumScape on 24 December 2020.
Thus, I cannot recommend QuantumScape or say anything bad about it because there are no financial numbers. However, there are two excellent companies with close ties to QuantumScape you can invest in.
First there is Ford (F). Mr. Market paid only $8.86 for Ford shares on 24 December 2020. YetFord reported quarterly revenues of $37.501 billion, a quarterly gross profit of $6.278 billion, and a quarterly operating income of $2.351 billion on 30 September 2020.
Ford is also a cash-rich company with $44.831 billion in cash and short-term investments on 30 September 2020. Moreover, Ford paid a quarterly dividend of 15₵ until 29 January 2020.
Ford is the Best Electric Vehicle Stock
I consider the Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) the best electric vehicle stock around. Ford is cheap, cash-rich, and dividend paying and it owns one of the valuable vehicle brands on Earth the F-Series.
Volkswagen AG (VOW.DE) was trading on European exchanges for $169.70 a share on 24 December 2020. VW reported annual revenues of $215.420 billion, an annual operating loss of $21.194 billion and an annual gross profit of $11.930 billion on 31 December 2019.
Volkswagen is also a cash rich company with an operating cash flow of $17.983 billion on 31 December 2019. Unfortunately, Volkswagen has not paid a dividend since May 4, 2018 when it paid an annual dividend of $4.67.
I advise people who want to invest in the electric car revolution to investigate Ford. Smart investors will avoid QuantumScape because little information about that company is available. | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/can-quantumscape-make-money-from-solid-state-batteries-market-mad-house-10ccf890530e | ['Daniel G. Jennings'] | 2020-12-27 17:01:51.312000+00:00 | ['Electric Vehicles', 'Tesla', 'Electricity', 'Battery', 'Electric Car'] |
Asynchronous Javascript (2) — More about promise and async await | The Library of Trinity College
More about Promise
Promise.resolve()
Mostly we return a resolved promise object with a given value, that value can be everything, it can be another promise or thenable statement, if that value is a thenable statement, then the fulfillment status will be depends on it. For more, please refer to the MDN docs
Promise.resolve("finished").then(data=> {console.log(data)}) //output
//finished
Promise.reject()
Same as Promise.resolve() but return a rejected promise, others are same
_______________________________________________________________
Below are built-in promise functions that handle multi promise
We will re-use the promisfy examples from last post
//Promisfied setTimeout
const delay = (msg, ms) => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(
() => resolve(msg), ms)); //Promisfied navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition
const geoLocation = (opts) => new Promise((resolve, reject) => navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(
posData=>{resolve(posData)}, error=>{reject(error)}, opts));
Promise.race()
Kick-off multi promise at the same time and only return the result of fastest promise
Promise.race([delay("abc", 0), geoLocation()]).then(data => {console.log(data)}); //print abc, as we wait 0 second(immediately) to do that
//abc Promise.race([delay("abc", 3000), geoLocation()]).then(data => {console.log(data)}); //print location data, as it faster than print abc this time
//GeolocationPosition {coords: GeolocationCoordinates, timestamp: 1608386922668}
Promise.all()
Kick-off multi promise at the same time, if one of them fail, it will just stop and return error — all or nothing.
Promise.all([delay("abc", 3000), geoLocation()]).then(data => {console.log(data)}); //allow the location access this time
//print result of both promise
//["abc", GeolocationPosition] Promise.all([delay("abc", 3000), geoLocation()]).then(data => {console.log(data)}).catch(error => {console.log(error)}); //prints the error as we block the retrieve of location
//GeolocationPositionError {code: 1, message: "User denied Geolocation"}
Promise.allSettled()
Kick-off multi promise at the same time, and return the detail status of each promise
Promise.allSettled([delay("abc", 3000), geoLocation()]).then(data => {console.log(data)}).catch(error => {console.log(error)}); //allow the location access this time
//print detail status for both promise
//[{status: "fulfilled", value: "abc"}, {status: "fulfilled", value: GeolocationPosition}] Promise.allSettled([delay("abc", 3000), geoLocation()]).then(data => {console.log(data)}).catch(error => {console.log(error)}); //block the location access this time
//print detail status for both promise
//[{status: "fulfilled", value: "abc"}, {status: "rejected", reason: GeolocationPositionError}]
2. Async await
Besides callbacks and promise, there is another syntax in Javascript to writing asynchronous code — async await, they’re 2 reserved keywords, but we often use them together. It is similar to promise or sometimes we even say that is the syntactic sugar of promise.
Like promise, we cannot just wrap the asynchronous code with async await, we have to promisfy them first if they doesn’t return promise. For detail, please refer to the last passage
//Promisfied setTimeout
const delay = (msg, ms) => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(
() => resolve(msg), ms)); //Promisfied navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition
const geoLocation = (opts) => new Promise((resolve, reject) => navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(
posData=>{resolve(posData)}, error=>{reject(error)}, opts));
Consider the below code snippet in promise
delay('Some task required before retrieving location', 0)
.then(data => console.log(data))
.then(() => geoLocation())
.then(data => {console.log(data); return delay('Some task after getting the location', 0)})
.catch(err => {console.log(err); return delay('Some task after fail getting the location', 0)})
.then(data => console.log(data));
We can implement it in async await like this
async function doSomeTask() { const msgBeforeLoc = await delay('Some task required before retrieving location', 0);
console.log(msgBeforeLoc); try {
const loc = await geoLocation();
console.log(loc);
const msgAfterLoc = await delay('Some task after getting the location', 0);
console.log(msgAfterLoc);
} catch(error) {
console.log(error);
const msgAfterLoc = await delay('Some task after fail getting the location', 0);
console.log(msgAfterLoc);
}
} doSomeTask();
Let’s look at the detail
“async” keyword in front of function
We have to wrap everything inside a function with “async” in front of it. This function will return a resolved promise no matter what we’re returning now or even we do not have the return statement
That means we can append a “then” statement after and it will become a promise chain.
“await” keyword in front of statements
As mentioned above, it supports promise only, you have to promisfy the async code first if they doesn’t return promise. In the above examples, I promisfy setTimeout and navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition, they’re in “delay” and “geoLocation” respectively.
So, we just use them like a normal function with “await” in front of it. Inside Javascript engine, it will convert each of them into “then” statement and execute them one after each other, same as the “then” statement in promise. The result will just store in the variable we assign the await statement to it instead of the next “then” statement in the promise chain
Error handling
Async await doesn’t provide any error handling like promise does, but as shown in the above, we can use the try catch statement
How about async without await ?
Let’s try to remove those “await” inside the function.
We can still run the code, but soon we will found that those asynchronous code are not working, it seems the Javascript engine didn’t realize they are asynchronous call, it no longer “wait” them to return the result, thus we will see “Promise <pending>” in log
From Mozilla docs
“Await expressions suspend progress through an async function, yielding control and subsequently resuming progress only when an awaited promise-based asynchronous operation is either fulfilled or rejected.”
That means we have to add “await” in front of each statement invoking asynchronous code
How about await without async ?
Let’s try to remove the “async” keyword in front of function.
It will result in compilation error, we can’t use await without async
Calling multiple async await function
Consider the example below
const delay = (msg, ms) => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(
() => resolve(msg), ms)); async function funcA() {
console.log('before a')
await delay('a', 2000).then(data=> {console.log(data)});
console.log('after a')
}
async function funcB() {
console.log('before b')
await delay('b', 2000).then(data=> {console.log(data)});
console.log('after b')
}
function run() {
funcA();
funcB();
}
run();
It prints
before a
before b
a
after a
b
after b
instead of
before a
a
after a
before b
b
after b
In fact, the caller has to be implement with async await too
async function run() {
await funcA();
await funcB();
}
run();
or we can implement with promise too
funcA().then(data => {funcB()})
3. Promise vs async await
Simpler and Less code
Async await got significant less amount of code, only wrapped inside a “async” function and added a “await” keyword in each statement invoking asynchronous code, the result will just store in the variable we assign the await statement to it. In contrast, promise chain always requires another .then() statement for next action or just handle the response
invisible then block
Consider the code below in promise
(just re-use the example from last section, but added a console log to print other task)
function trackUserHandler() {
delay('Some task required before retrieving location', 0)
.then(data => console.log(data))
.then(() => geoLocation())
.then(data => {console.log(data); return delay('Some task after getting the location', 0)})
.catch(err => {console.log(err); return delay('Some task after fail getting the location', 0)})
.then(data => console.log(data)); console.log("other task");
}
and the code below in async await
(just re-use the example from last section, but added a console log to print other task)
async function doSomeTask() {
const msgBeforeLoc = await delay('Some task required before retrieving location', 0);
console.log(msgBeforeLoc);
try {
const loc = await geoLocation();
console.log(loc);
const msgAfterLoc = await delay('Some task after getting the location', 0);
console.log(msgAfterLoc);
} catch(error) {
console.log(error);
const msgAfterLoc = await delay('Some task after fail getting the location', 0);
console.log(msgAfterLoc);
}
console.log("other task");
}
In the last section, I mentioned they produce the same output, Let’s try again the new version
The Promise example prints “other task” first
Like the callback, it executes the synchronous task first
other task
Some task required before retrieving location
GeolocationPosition {coords: GeolocationCoordinates, timestamp: 1608277437934}
Some task after getting the location
However, the async await example prints “other task” at last
because inside the async function, even we do not add await in front of the console.log(‘other task’), but Javascript engine would still wrap them with an invisible “then”, that’s why | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/asynchronous-javascript-2-418e0d27c006 | ['Johnny Lai'] | 2020-12-20 14:56:45.789000+00:00 | ['Es6 In Depth', 'JavaScript', 'Async Functions', 'Javascript Promise', 'ES6'] |
Breaking the Cycle of Spiritual Abuse | Photo: Unsplash/@nicolaerosu
Spiritual abuse is a part of a cycle of unchallenged and unaccountable sins of Christian leadership. Many Christians are wrongly led to believe that in every single instance of spiritual abuse, it is more “spiritually mature” to leave quietly rather than to stay and speak up.
But the reality is that spiritual abuse feeds off of every instance that people simply leave the church quietly. It is to the exclusive benefit of spiritual abusers to have their victims silently disappear from among the fold so that they can shape the narrative.
Every time spiritual abusers “get away with it,” they feel more emboldened to inflict the same or worse abuse on future victims and live as though they are ecclesiastically invincible. In fact, spiritual abusers often see that the worst thing that can happen to them may be a slap on the wrist behind closed doors, but nothing more. Spiritual abusers are often masters of their own church polity systems because they know every loophole and every church political way to surround themselves with enough clout to fly under the radar with their abuse.
**Victims of spiritual abuse are never to blame** — rather, it is the deficiency of advocacy within the church that causes the cycle of spiritual abuse to continue. Other Christians and other leaders side with silence rather than advocate for victims, leaving them isolated and with no recourse for the abuse they have received. Church leadership across the board is deficient in providing training to their members for spotting spiritual abuse and reporting it, and instead, focus on exclusively submitting to leadership without reservation. Seminaries fail to train future leaders of the church on how to stand up against abusive leadership they may one day find themselves amongst in a church they serve. Denominations fail to create whistleblower policies and mechanisms for laypeople to be able to report spiritual abuse. Instead many denominations tout the biblical nature of their church polity as is as the bulletproof structure against abuse, but the matter of fact is that every polity is susceptible to spiritual abuse. While independent churches and hierarchical churches are susceptible to the tyrannical abuse of one leader, connectional and Presbyterian churches are susceptible to the tyrannical abuse of many who would rather side with power, influence, and reputation than with the victims of abuse.
Too often, I have seen leaders in the church side with spiritual abusers than with those who have been abused. Too often, I have seen these same complicit leaders attempt to make “leave quietly” the exclusive model to deal with spiritual abuse. Too often, I have seen these same complicit leaders place spiritually abusive pastors into another pastoral position elsewhere as their solution to their sin, rather than holding them accountable and publicly denouncing the abuse as a shame on the name of Christ.
“Too often have I seen people write off the Christian faith entirely because they experienced this spiritual abuse in churches that boasted of being the only perfect church with all the right doctrine and theology — if such horrendous abuse happens unchallenged at the ‘best’ of the church, it’s no wonder why they have left the church in its entirety.”
Too often have I seen other laypeople remain silent or even get wrapped up in aiding the abuse by ostracizing victims, spreading rumors and gossip about them to slander their reputation, and making the victims out to be the scapegoats for systemic church leadership problems. Too often have I seen these complicit laypeople actually argue that strong-arm leadership was a faithful biblical expression of spiritual leadership, and thereby give justification and license for abusive tactics that their leaders use against often gentle and meek Christians. Too often have I seen people’s faith shipwrecked because no one stood up for them when they went through spiritual abuse, even though so many had positions where they could have done something to advocate for these victims. Too often have I seen people write off the Christian faith entirely because they experienced this spiritual abuse in churches that boasted of being the only perfect church with all the right doctrine and theology — if such horrendous abuse happens unchallenged at the “best” of the church, it’s no wonder why they have left the church in its entirety.
What’s the solution? The solution is for churches and Christians to talk more openly and extensively about the reality of spiritual abuse. It’s to require training on this topic for all church leadership as well as for membership in the church. It’s to require significant coverage of this topic at seminaries and Bible colleges for future leaders.
But beyond the resources and training, the solution requires a posture of standing with victims and empowering them to speak up against the abusers. It’s to give a voice to them and surround them with support, counseling, prayer, and companionship so that they can help stop the cycle of spiritual abuse. It’s to push for congregational and denominational policies, procedures, and mechanisms that protect victims and hold abusive leaders accountable and sees spiritual abuse as something that requires public repentance and removal from positions of authority in the church.
God himself speaks about the abusive leaders during Ezekiel’s time in Ezekiel 34 who were feeding off the sheep and fattening themselves. God did not hesitate to let his people know that he took this spiritual abuse seriously and that he himself would tear these “shepherds” down. Jesus embodied this holy and righteous anger against spiritual abuse when he turned tables in the Temple courts and challenged the religious leaders and stood by the side of those who received the brunt of spiritual abuse. If we are to be more and more like Jesus renewed by the Spirit, that means that we should consider spiritual abuse the same way that he does. We should not tolerate it, excuse it, justify it, or even remain silent about it. We should be courageous enough to “drive a spoke in the wheel” of spiritual abuse and be willing to lose it all and lay our lives down for victims of spiritual abuse.
God knows who are his sheep and he knows who are false shepherds who are simply there for their own gain and glory. Many on that day will say, “Lord, Lord! Did I not pastor theologically conservative churches where the gospel was preached every Sunday, and did I not write so many sound theological books, and did I not host a podcast that brought many people into a deeper theological knowledge, and did I not get trained in the best seminary, and did I not do many other wonderful things for your kingdom?” And he will say, “I never knew you.” But to the sheep who have been beaten, bruised, stomped on, silenced, and marginalized, who experienced years of hard counseling, trauma, ostracization, scapegoating, and wounds for their entire lives yet never let go of the “Love that would not let them go,” Jesus will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant… enter into the joy of your master.” | https://timothyisaiahcho.medium.com/breaking-the-cycle-of-spiritual-abuse-daf32425b5b2 | ['Timothy Isaiah Cho'] | 2019-02-19 17:42:32.673000+00:00 | ['Bible', 'Spiritual Abuse', 'Church', 'Christianity', 'Church Leadership'] |
Ek Kadam- “ Things will Change” | “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world.”
So, after putting our 60 second pitch in the virtual meeting regarding mega project, our group witnessed many amazing ideas from everyone. In every idea, there was something that reflected their emotions towards community services and issues that our society is facing. I first listened to the fellow members and in the end placed my pitch in front of them. This is the idea about which I discussed few things in my previous blog already. Actually it was a pitch of 60 seconds. But when I started presenting my pitch, everyone started liking it and started relating it to their own personalities. As it’s name Ek Kadam is so diverse.
i) Why there is a need of Ek Kadam?
ii) What kind of initiative it is?
iii) How it came into my mind?
iv) And why is it so diverse that at the end of session it had all the votes for the best mega project topic for Group 3 Batch 173 -Amal Academy?
You will get all the answers when you get to know about the initiative behind this idea. So let’s embarked on this journey. When my 5th semester of BSc Mechanical Engineering started , I started thinking that I should start working on something different or I must have my own startup. So, every night I plunged into the black hole of my brain . Later on, I came up with 2 to 3 ideas. Then I started thinking about the possible ways to accomplish them . You can say two were Entrepreneurial ideas that are meant to earn and 1 idea is to do something for my society, my community and for my Pakistan. As our country Pakistan is facing many social issues that hinder it’s way to progress. So any issue just need one step to resolve. These issues include lack of skilled personnels , lack of guidance towards education , lack of career counseling of our youth, poverty, illiteracy, rape and women harassment cases are top on the list.
The main idea of Ek Kadam is SDP (Skills Development Program). To teach skills life MS Ofiice, freelancing, Content writing , Adobe Illustrator for Graphics Designing to the students of secondary and Inter along with the proper guidance and counseling regarding their future. This initiative will help the students to avail the opportunities once they have proper mindset about their future and can also utilize these skills in future to become financially independent.
The target audience is especially students of 9th,10th, 1st Year and 2nd Year with less guidance and opportunities. And in this time of pandemic where every thing is shifted virtually. We will proceed through virtual platforms like youtube, facebook and instagram and when everything gets back to normal we will visit orphanages low standard schools .
The initiative behind it is to make the students skillful and more aware with the pros and cons of the things. This will eradicate the roots of illiteracy and child labor in our society.
Furthermore, by visiting such places we will also have small activities sessions and self defense seminars in which we will teach self defense techniques, how to tackle such situations and other techniques especially to girls and children. This step is to stop sexual harassment and rape in our society.
So in short, virtually we will career counsel them, guide them to take their step in future with more clear mindset. And to make small guidance tutorial like videos on skills that we want them to learn. So everything will cover under the same roof. And by visit to the orphanages and other places we will bring our laptops their in case if there will be no such facility there to let them practice the skills.
Previously, few months back I made a video on self defense after Lahore motorway incident, and I spread it to the best of my strength and get many positive feedbacks. So , if our group of 5 will start spreading on their behalf we can leave impact and can have access to more people.
The main purpose behind this initiative is to sort out all the social issues that currently our country is facing. And In sha Allah, Allah will help us to put our idea into in person efforts. | https://medium.com/@muhammad-hammad173/ek-kadam-things-will-change-5070e5a4780a | ['Muhammad Hammad Javed'] | 2020-12-27 07:55:46.096000+00:00 | ['One Step', 'Self Defense', 'Poverty', 'Counseling', 'Opportunity'] |
Joins with Apache Spark | RE: Data, Joins are everywhere it is what enables us join data sources ( or tables) to form a richer and more complete view of our data, based on keys they have in common.
In this blog I review JOINs as used by the defacto* Big Data framework Apache Spark. More than any other system, Apache Spark’s unified approach to data processing allows us to work with a large variety of data sources/file types (text, csv, json, parquet, avro… s3, relational DB, NoSQL DBs etc) all in the same environment, making joins inevitable albeit COSTLY.
Using Apache Spark’s DataFrame API (same is possible in SparkSQL, Dataset APIs) we illustrate some interesting characteristics of joins in Spark. In this first blog we keep things at a high-level without worrying about Spark’s behavior under the hood or join performance.
Below is the general syntax for joins in Spark.
Spark JOIN Syntax
In the above syntax, just like what we may be familiar with in SQL world, we specify the left table e.g dfLeft , the right table e.g dfright , the joinCondition which specifies which keys should match for a successful join and joinType (inner, outer etc…) which specifies which rows/data should be returned in the results.
The joins we are familiar with from the relational world (as captured in the image above) are known as equi-joins (wiki). This type of join specifies the join condition only with equality comparator e.g dfLeft.key == dfRight.key . Spark however enables joins beyond this 😲…. by allowing the joinCondition to be an arbitrary Boolean expression not just equality as in the case of equi-joins. So we can do more fancy stuff like join two tables if keyA is in a certain range of keyB keyA == keyB +/- 5 or if keyA is contained in the array KeyB 😲 keyB.contains(keyA) or an even more complex join could be, join two tables base on text fields, if they are within a certain edit distance of each other… so this join will succeed even when there are minor typos in the key field edit_distance(keyA,keyB) <= 5 . [NB: the syntax for conditions used in this paragraph are not formal, they just to illustrate in a readable way]
Apache Spark lists the following type of joins inner , outer , left_outer , right_outer , left_semi , left_anti , natural_join , cross or cartesian joins. Most other joins are possible by adding where/filter conditions on the core joins.
Understanding by Doing
Now true to my minimalist yet effective approach 😊….let’s try this seemingly trivial example for illustrating joins in Spark. Take note of the two tables below and try to guess the output of each joinType (inner, outer, left_outer, right_outer …etc). The two tables have only ID =1 in common.
Tables dfLeft and dfRight to illustrate joins.
Inner Join
keep only records whose key exists in both tables. This the default joinType.
Output (you guessed right 😊)
Output of inner Join
Outer Join
retain records from both tables, inserting null in either table when there is no matching record.
Output
Output of outer Join
Left Outer Join
retain all records on the left side, keep null in right side where there are no match keys.
Output
Right Outer Join
You can guess :)
Left Semi Join
Keep only the left table (don’t show the right table), where the joinCondition is met. This is a useful filtering mechanism.
Output
Output of left_semi Join
Left Anti Join
This is the complement of the left_semi join, in this case you return only the left table where the joinCondition is NOT met.
Output
Output of left_anti Join
Cross (Cartesian) Join
This join can easily result in large output so use cautiously. Join each row on the left with every row on the right😲. So for our three rows tables, the resulting joined table ha 3x3=9 rows.
Output
Output of crossJoin
Using Arbitrary Join Conditions
This is what makes joins in Spark even more powerful — the ability to specify sophisticated joinConditions not just equality.
In below example we want to join the two tables if and only if their labels have one or more characters in common😲 (put in another way - if they have at least one character in common). To do this we define a joinCondition that does just that — takes in the two columns and checks whether their intersect is more than or equal to one character in length. 😊
Output (can you believe it 😲)
Can you find the atleast one character that is causing leftLabel to join to rightLabel ?? well done to you!!!
Output of a inner Join on a custom condition.
Conclusion
Hope this lived up to the expectation of a simple yet effective demonstration of Spark’s Join capability. As you may already suspect, joining in Spark or any other distributed system for that matter may not always be trivial because of the distributed nature of data in such systems. Thus there are a few things to be aware of in terms of performance. We discuss that later.
Feel free to comment, share, suggest or question.! etc…. | https://medium.com/@emml.asimadi/joins-with-apache-spark-80d9abea751c | ['Emml Asimadi'] | 2019-04-16 01:57:27.891000+00:00 | ['Sql Joins', 'Spark', 'Apache Spark'] |
The best trails for you to do in Breckenridge! Trails for every level | The best trails for you to do in Breckenridge! Trails for every level Mary Pritchard Mar 4·3 min read
If you’re in Breckenridge, I’m assuming you already know about the world class ski hills we have here. It’s no secret Breckenridge is one of the best places to ski and that’s why people come from all over the world to ski here. These are some of my favorite ski trails in Breckenridge!
Sitting on a green hill
Beginner Skiers and Riders
If you have the basics down of getting on and off the lift, stopping, and turning, then this is where you should start. A lot of beginners start on green trails which are indicated on the signs with a green circle!
A beautiful view from a beginner/intermediate lift
Best trails for beginners: One of my top favorite runs in Breck is Silverthorne. It is up the Quicksilver Lift at the base of Peak 9. This run is groomed, not too steep, wide, and pretty simple for someone just learning. I would recommend doing this run a few times until you perfect it; then move onto something bigger and better.
Going up the Beaver Run Lift
Intermediate Skiers and Riders
Once having the basics down, if you can get a little more speed and confidence while going down the mountain, these are the trails for you. Intermediate trails will be marked with a blue square on the maps!
Best trails for intermediates: Still on peak 9, the Beaver run chairlift has some of the best most mellow runs you will see all day. This chair lift goes up peak 9 a little higher than the Quicksilver lift so towards the top you are going to get a little bit steeper of terrain. It mellows out as you go down. Some blue runs even turn into green ones halfway down the mountain. My favorite runs down the Beaver run lift are Sundown, Columbia, and Bonanza. Lastly, according to GoBreck, if you think you might want to attempt some moguls take the Colorado Chair and go down Cresendo. Check it out on a map!
A trail down the Kensho Chair that I obviously did not mean to go down!
Expert Skiers and Riders
According to VisitBreck, an expert rider has confidence in steeps, moguls & trees. They need to be comfortable riding in varying conditions, navigating tight and aggressive turns.
Best trails for experts: The 6 chair is the one-stop-shop for a bunch of great expert level trails. The Kensho Chair on Peak 6 also has some harder trails. My favorite ones off the Kensho Chair are Bliss and Intuition. Some random expert trails I love that are all through out the mountain are Little Johnny, Rounders, and Centennial. Most of these have moguls, but not across the whole trail so you can choose which type of terrain you would like! If you’re more into skiing through the woods & trees, try Ore Bucket on Peak 7. If you’re into the more short, sweet, and steep hills try Shock on Peak 9!
A better look at Breck from the top! This was filmed on the Kensho Chair! | https://medium.com/@mmpritch00/the-best-trails-for-you-to-do-in-breckenridge-trails-for-every-level-6627f31b2f1e | ['Mary Pritchard'] | 2021-03-22 06:21:03.577000+00:00 | ['Skiing', 'Maps', 'Snowboarding', 'Breckenridge', 'Trails'] |
Stress-Free Travel with Jubel for the Newbie Adventurer | You are ready to soak up the rays of adventure, sample different foods far and wide, and get off-the-beaten-path just a little, but don’t know where to start. Never fear — Jubel’s got all you newbie adventurers covered if you want a stress-free trip that you’ll remember forever.
And that’s just what we did for Katelyn Cook and four of her best friends, excited but novice travelers looking to see the world in a low-stress but high-fun way. We sent Katelyn and her squad to Western Europe to experience all that Spain had to offer, and (spoiler alert) she had the time of her life.
Keep on reading to find out how Jubel supports any and all of those who are new to traveling!
LEARN MORE ABOUT WHY JUBEL COULD BE PERFECT FOR YOU
Jubel Gives You an Anxiety-Free Planning Experience
For Katelyn, an easy planning experience was crucial. As she says, “When trying to originally plan the trip on my own I had this certain vision of the way I wanted to travel and what this vacation would be like. Ms. Korinth took everything that we talked about and made it extremely stress free.”
Indeed, Katelyn told our travel experts what she wanted, and they took care of the rest. Now, Katelyn says, “When I recommend Jubel to my friends and family I tell them that if they want a trip where they can stay within their budget and not stress about the planning part then Jubel is for them.”
In Katelyn’s own words, “Jubel is their ticket to an amazing dream trip.”
TRAVELING ABROAD FOR THE FIRST TIME? CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO DEAL WITH CULTURE SHOCK
Our Expert Travel Advisors Make Sure You Are Safe and Comfortable on this Easy Vacation
Katelyn didn’t want to stress about logistics on her vacation of a lifetime, so we took care of that for her.
Katelyn says, “There were car arrangements to pick us up and take us to the airport and our sleeping accommodations were so perfectly arranged in the middle of every city making everyday touring so easy.”
This gave Katelyn the chance to really explore each and every city she was in. In Madrid, according to her, “we became frequent customers to one of the restaurants below our apartment and we became good friends with one of the waiters, who we loved to get to know more.”
These sort of serendipitous interactions wouldn’t have been possible without a stress-free environment, and for that, Katelyn is very grateful.
TRYING TO STAY IN YOUR LINGUISTIC COMFORT ZONE THIS TRIP? READ ABOUT OUR FAVORITE ENGLISH-SPEAKING DESTINATIONS!
With Jubel, You Can Hit All the Sights You Want Without Worry!
Jubel does all the research in advance for you, so you can just travel care-free. Our Jubel Atlases contain all the research you need to go out and explore, so you don’t have to worry about things like finding the best spots, as well as knowing all the tips and tricks.
Our Jubel atlases contain information for each country, including on safety, currency, and public transportation, as well as vetted recommendations on where to eat, drink, and explore.
This made Katelyn’s trip easy and worry-free. “I chose to book through Jubel because I was so uncertain on how to go about everything and I love getting an expert’s opinion, and Ms. Korinth was the best of the best. Our trip was beyond my expectations; it was amazing,” Katelyn writes.
IF YOU WANT TO LEARN ALL ABOUT OUR FAVORITE OFF-THE-BEATEN-PATH SPOTS IN SPAIN, CHECK OUT THIS ARTICLE
Jubel Provides In-Country Support Throughout the Trip for Stress-Free Travel
Katelyn’s not alone when she felt that when she was that “traveling to a country that we were not familiar with was definitely scary.” Luckily, our team of expert advisors kept her feeling safe. “We were easily able to contact Ms. Korinth at any time with questions or concerns.”
Plus, if on the off-chance something goes wrong along the way, Jubel provides top-quality support 7-days a week to make sure you and your travel partners are safe and taken care of.
For Katelyn, the trip just seemed too good to be true. In Katelyn’s words, “Our advisor, Ms. Korinth, took everything I was looking for in a dream trip and made it come true. For so long, I kept telling myself that I would travel to different countries and another year would pass by without accomplishing my dreams.”
For Katelyn, “Jubel made my dreams come true which is so special to me because without Jubel I don’t know if I would’ve gone on my trip.”
So if you are ready to go on your first adventure, but don’t know quite where to start, why not let Jubel take the reins? | https://medium.com/jubel-co/stress-free-travel-with-jubel-for-the-newbie-adventurer-10c2f685d841 | [] | 2020-02-20 10:52:19.001000+00:00 | ['Tips And Tricks', 'Travel', 'Spain', 'Testimonials', 'Europe'] |
Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener review: A budget price makes this system worth the setup hassles | Bringing your garage door into your smart home isn’t the simplest process, nor is it the cheapest: Many smart garage door systems—our top pick, the Chamberlain myQ, notwithstanding—will run you $100 or more. And then there’s the hassle of climbing around on a ladder in your garage and dealing with some often janky wiring.
Meross doesn’t do much about the installation headaches—in fact, it’s one of the more labor-intensive openers on the market, for reasons I’ll explain shortly—but it does help out greatly when it comes to price. At a mere $40, it’s the second cheapest smart opener on the market, after the $30 myQ.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best smart garage door controllers, 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. Christopher Null / IDG Less-than-articulate installation instructions like this might challenge novices.
Like all of Meross’ products, the initial presentation of the device is decidedly understated. A plain white box contains all the individually packaged components, with nothing but a QR code to direct you to setup instructions and the Meross app. You will need those instructions.
All smart garage door openers have compatibility limitations, and Meross’ is no exception. Like all the other wired openers I’ve tested, Meross’ does not work out of the box with newer, more secure openers and requires a special accessory in order to do so.
Meross doesn’t actually sell this accessory; you are directed to email the company to obtain one directly (for free) if the app’s compatibility checker determines your opener isn’t compatible.
As such, it’s probably worth downloading the app and plugging in your garage door model information before you even purchase the product in order to save yourself an extra trip up the ladder in your garage. I ended up installing the device on a slightly older Liftmaster that did not need the accessory. The other two openers in my garage, however, would have required one.
[ Further reading: A smart home guide for beginners ]While Meross’ installation instructions are far from perfect, hardware setup is similar in most ways to other smart garage door openers. The opener plugs directly into wall power, and two bare wire leads connect the Meross opener to terminals on the back of the garage door motor, either through screw posts or spring-loaded connectors. Meross throws you for a twist, however, in its choice of door sensor technology, which is used to tell the app whether the garage door is open or shut. While most smart openers use a wireless sensor that mounts to the door and can sense whether it is upright (door shut) or horizontal (door open), Meross instead relies on a two-part magnetic sensor similar to the type used in a home security system.
Christopher Null / IDG A simple in-app animation tells you when your door is in motion.
That’s an interesting idea—except the sensor must connect to the Meross opener via a long wire. You snake this wire along the track, much like you do with the infrared sensors used to determine whether the door opening is blocked, and carefully position the magnets somewhere on the door.
Getting this all situated isn’t the simplest process, because if the sensor wire hits the chain, it can easily rip the whole thing apart. Meross doesn’t provide any accessories to make this easy, so bring some binder clips to make the process a bit cleaner. (Gloves are also a good idea, since the track can be quite oily.)
The good news is that the lack of a wireless door sensor takes one potential trouble spot out of the equation, and the MSG100 need only communicate with your router via Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) in order to maintain its connection. Setup through the Meross app was quick and error-free in my testing, after which I was able to use the app to freely open and close the door.
Alexa and Google Assistant are both supported, letting you use your voice to operate the controls, and the MSG100 also supports both Samsung SmartThings and IFTTT. A different version of this product (model MSG100HK) supports Apple HomeKit, but it was not available at press time.
I particularly enjoyed the thoughtful additional features in the app, including an “overtime reminder,” which pushes a warning if the door is left open for a user-configured length of time, and the “overnight reminder,” which alerts you if the door is open after hours (at a time you set). You can also set the door to close automatically after it’s been open for a set time, or close at a certain time of day. My only complaint with the app is that it can be slow to respond—opening the door can take 5 to 10 seconds of “thinking” in some cases—but that’s a minor issue. All activity is logged in the app, and push notifications are also sent to your phone for just about everything.
Meross’s installation is more onerous than most smart garage products, but for just $40, one might feel able to tolerate a bit of a headache. If MyQ’s opener doesn’t work for you, this is our second-best recommendation.
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/@nick08400912/meross-smart-wi-fi-garage-door-opener-review-a-budget-price-makes-this-system-worth-the-setup-756965ea50dc | [] | 2020-12-24 18:20:58.215000+00:00 | ['Surveillance', 'Lighting', 'Connected Home', 'Audio'] |
The Hyperledger Project and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Join Forces | The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and Hyperledger are joining their organizations in an effort to foster mass blockchain adoption.
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a non-profit that educates businesses on how to use Ethereum to address specific industry use cases, and the Linux Foundation´s Hyperledger project, an open-source collaborative initiative that aims to “advance cross-industry blockchain technologies”, have officially joined their organizations in an effort to accelerate the mass adoption of distributed ledger technologies, and help foster a climate of collaboration between the two enterprises.
Ron Resnick, the executive director of the EEA, said in a statement he believes that this represents “a time of great opportunity”, since the collaboration through a mutual associate membership could open the way “for both organizations to work more closely together”.
Amber Baldet, founder of the Clovyr dApp store, and former head of blockchain at JP Morgan Chase & Co., commented on the synergy that results from such an initiative,
There are already several organizations that belong to both Hyperledger and EEA, and good relationships among those in leadership positions […] It makes sense to work together toward the common goal of solving real business challenges with decentralized technologies.
Executive Director of Hyperledger added,
Great open standards depend upon great open source code, so this is a natural alliance for both organizations.
This news puts to rest rumors that Hyperledger and the EEA were at each other´s throats in a bid to achieve enterprise blockchain supremacy. Casey Kuhlman, CEO of Monax, explained that while this may have been the case in the past, there are no current confrontations among both parties.
Disclaimer: information contained herein is provided without considering your personal circumstances, therefore should not be construed as financial advice, investment recommendation or an offer of, or solicitation for, any transactions in cryptocurrencies. | https://medium.com/bitrates-news/the-hyperledger-project-and-the-enterprise-ethereum-alliance-join-forces-d0e5f2b3909c | [] | 2018-10-03 07:53:49.478000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Hyperledger', 'Ethereum'] |
Can Voter Suppression Increase Electoral Bias? | Voter suppression has become an increasing concern among proponents of voting rights, especially as federal courts have shown through Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and subsequent cases that they will adopt a more hands-off stance on questionable actions by state governments. In reaction to these changes, political scientists and other scholars have published considerable amounts of research demonstrating the rising threat of voter suppression in the United States.
I approach this issue from an angle of electoral bias. With funding support from the MIT Election Data Science Lab (MEDSL) as well as the American Political Science Association’s Centennial Center (APSA), my research looks at the relationship between voter suppression and electoral bias. Specifically, I am asking the question, can voter suppression increase electoral bias in single-member district electoral systems?
Does the way we run elections in the United States make voter suppression a more potent strategy than in other countries and therefore a greater danger to the future of American democracy? My findings show that this is exactly the danger we face.
The Question
By examining electoral systems, I am stepping back and trying to understand voter suppression in the US within a wider framework. An electoral system is the overarching way a country runs its elections. There are many types of electoral systems, but the two most common use either single-member districts (SMD) or proportional representation (PR). In SMD, the country (such as the US) is divided into districts, and each district elects one officeholder. In PR, the proportion of seats each party wins in a legislature is consistent with the overall percent votes they receive.
Electoral bias occurs when a political party systematically wins a higher percent of elected positions in comparison to the percent vote it received. A well-established cause of electoral bias in SMD systems (and one that political scientists discuss at length) is gerrymandering, or when legislative district lines are drawn in ways that increase the number of seats the governing party wins in comparison to the votes it receives. My argument is that gerrymandering is only one of many possible causes of electoral bias. My first step towards establishing this has been to demonstrate that electoral bias has had a long history in American politics — it has existed long before the current wave of extreme gerrymandering orchestrated by the Republican Party. Indeed, in my analysis of elections to the US House of Representatives, I have shown that electoral bias was much greater in the middle of the twentieth century than today, and I have also demonstrated that gerrymandering alone could not have caused most of the electoral bias in those elections.
So, what else besides gerrymandering might cause electoral bias in SMD systems? One possibility is voter suppression. To make a comparison, consider that in a PR system, when 1% fewer supporters of a particular party are kept from getting to the polls, that party is likely to win approximately 1% fewer seats in the legislature. But in SMD systems, a 1% decrease in voter turnout by the supporters of a party can instead cause a much larger number of districts to flip to another party and thereby cause a much greater seat loss. Effectively, this implies a “double whammy” for those being kept from the polls. That section of the electorate ends up losing their immediate influence on the election, and if the strategy of keeping them from the polls is effective enough, it can target districts in a way that causes a large number of districts to flip to the other party like dominoes.
Why is this the case? One reason is that in SMD systems, the number of seats a party wins is only crudely related to the percent of votes it receives. Even small shifts in the vote can cause significant changes in how many elected positions each party wins, depending on how the geographic distribution of the vote shift is related to how district lines are drawn. If the shift happens in many districts where the elections are already close, or if the shift is highly concentrated in one region, then many districts can flip even when the vote shift is not that large. Voter suppression can cause exactly these types of disproportionate shifts.
A second reason, to make matters even worse, is that SMD is easier to manipulate than PR. While gerrymandering is very easy to orchestrate within SMD systems, it is much harder if not impossible in PR systems, for example. (This is because there are few, if any, district lines in PR systems and since these districts elect multiple officeholders in a proportional manner, the impact of manipulating the district lines tends to be muted.) Similarly, when it comes to voter suppression, the playbook is surprisingly easy to pull off in SMD: find districts that your opponent is likely to win, especially by a small margin, and then invent an excuse to make voting harder for your opponent’s supporters in those districts. For example, if your opponent wins support in urban areas, reduce the number of polling places so that it becomes much harder to vote in urban than rural areas. If your opponent is supported by particular economic or ethnic groups who live in concentrated geographic areas, find ways to target those groups and get them thrown off the voter rolls.
In other words, the way the United States runs elections makes voter suppression a much more potent and effective strategy, which in turn poses considerable danger to the democratic process. The question that followed from this, and which I then set about examining was whether this threat to American democracy as perpetuated by voter suppression has already influenced American politics.
The Evidence
Since I am trying to get a larger picture of how our SMD electoral system amplifies the impact of voter suppression in the US, I have taken a more historical view and examined elections over a long period. Because of this approach, and like in all scientific research, I still needed to get around a few hurdles in the process. The first was getting the data. Most of the US House of Representatives election data that extended back into the nineteenth century had significant missing information and other problems that weakened the data. With grant support from MEDSL and APSA, I therefore set about collecting comprehensive district-level results for all candidates who ran in US House of Representative elections from 1840 to 1974. This data will now be housed at the MEDSL website, where anyone can download it for use in their research. Combined with the 1976 to 2018 data that was already made available by MEDSL, this expanded dataset will be the most extensive US House election data that is publicly available in electronic form.
The second hurdle I needed to overcome was to simplify the question enough so that I could test it with the data that was available. To do so, I expanded the question slightly. Instead of just voter suppression, I measured all forms of voter underrepresentation, which includes malapportionment and low voter turnout. I then used a new measure of electoral bias that I have developed, called “DPIx” (or “directional proportionality index”) to test the theory. DPIx can be used in a number of ways, but in this case, I was specifically measuring bias toward the Democratic Party vis-à-vis the Republican Party. I did so in two ways: the first way looked at the entire bias, while the second looked at the bias caused entirely by voter underrepresentation.
As the graph below shows, since 2012 there has been around a 5% bias in US House elections favoring the Republican Party, a finding that is consistent with other existing research showing that gerrymandering has been aiding the Republican Party. But the story doesn’t end there — the graph below also shows that there was significant electoral bias over the entire 150-year period that I have collected data for, and that in the past electoral bias often benefitted the Democratic Party. Follow the blue line in the graph: it shows the electoral bias due to voter underrepresentation, which started to rise around 1870, became substantial around the 1930s, and then slowly declined starting around 1960. That bias does not completely disappear until the 1990s. While the overall DPIx measurement jumps around considerably during this period — a common occurrence in SMD systems — the electoral bias caused by voter underrepresentation emerges as being steady, clear, and consistently in favor of the Democratic Party.
Why did this bias due to voter underrepresentation rise and then decline? Well, consider the fact that this time frame fits almost perfectly the history of Jim Crow in the former Confederate states. One of the key characteristics of Jim Crow was extreme voter suppression, especially towards African Americans, who overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party through much of this period. The blue line begins to rise just as violence is beginning in the American South, reaches its peak as Jim Crow becomes completely institutionalized, and then begins its decline as the Civil Rights Movement becomes highly active, and especially after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So how do we know that the rise and fall of the blue line was caused by Jim Crow? Well, an easy way to test this is to examine the exact same data but exclude states that had been in the former Confederacy. This is shown in the graph below. This graph demonstrates that once we remove the Jim Crow states, the electoral bias caused by voter underrepresentation (and therefore voter suppression), as demonstrated by the blue line, all but disappeared.
Conclusion
The evidence that I found and the analysis that I have presented demonstrates clearly that voter suppression can cause significant electoral bias and that it is therefore a threat to American democracy very much like gerrymandering. The evidence is also consistent with the argument that electoral bias jumped in the Republican’s favor in 2012, right after state governments controlled by the Republican Party began taking extreme measures to gerrymander legislative districts. But my findings further suggest that there are likely a range of ways in which electoral bias can be caused in SMD systems, including through voter suppression.
It is my hope that this work adds to the significant amount of research being conducted on voter suppression and that it highlights why those efforts are so important. What my findings suggest is that well-targeted suppression that may seem minor on the surface can end up having a significant impact. Some people cannot vote because they lack the proper identification. Others are banned from voting because they had once been arrested. Yet others give up on voting altogether because the number of polling locations have been reduced, and they find the process too tedious and the wait too long. Under the right circumstances, therefore, it is not hard to imagine how this could trigger the flipping of districts in ways that fundamentally change the power dynamics within the American government. | https://medium.com/mit-election-lab/can-voter-suppression-increase-electoral-bias-549c7023bcd2 | ['Mit Election Lab'] | 2020-12-18 14:26:44.209000+00:00 | ['Elections', 'Politics', 'Bias', 'Voting'] |
Journey To Fill Your Emptiness | When I got my first job, I’m so excited because I thought I have my dream job. Maybe that’s the case for most college fresh grads. I remember that it’s not easy for a couple of weeks. Adjusting from college life to social life. But I remember that my eyes were burning with excitement — youngster.
The first year I spend my life similar when I was in college, playing video games. It’s not about the games, it’s about playing with friends. Some of you might relate to this. But over time my friends got married and having kids. We were playing every night, but after that we never play again — don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for them.
Having a lot of time on my hand, I began wondering what do I want to do with my time. I hooked with manga again after a few years I left it. Reading manga is effective to spend — waste — your time. I can spend 3 hours straight without remembering what did I do. Time flies so fast.
Fast forward I felt bored again after the emptiness comes to visit me. Everything kind of dull. I left manga for the second time. Now I have a lot of time again on my hand — also emptiness.
I still keep in touch with my gaming friend. One of them gave an idea to create a tutorial website about daily life tech stuff. Something in me feels strange, I never thought my emptiness fade away as I wrote. I write code every day, but I never have this kind of feeling.
I started to write things other than tutorials, I write reviews of k-dramas. Yes you right, I love watching k-dramas. I wrote tens of reviews, but eventually I don’t feel good about it anymore. It because when I’m watching the movie, there is part of me processing what should I write about it. That makes me enjoy the movie less.
At this point, I knew that writing is what excites me. But what kind of writing do I really enjoy. I kept looking for it until one day I remember that I like to read stories about finding happiness and peace of mind. My first book is about “Law Of Attraction”, my high school teacher told me about it but I forgot the title. I kept reading about that kind of stuff. My friends gave me this weird expression when I told a story about that kind of stuff, they told me I grew up too fast for my age — I become the weird one.
Fast forward I began to write on Medium. If you check my story, I just started a week ago. But my journey to come to this place started a long time ago. I write about happiness and peace of mind. If you ask me, do I have a qualification to write one, my answer is NO. If what you mean by qualification is a degree. Writing for me is my way of consoling myself. Because I’m not perfect and I interested in this field. You can read well-written detail about it from Seth Godin. I don’t know whether writing here is what I was looking for, but for now it is.
For you who still on your journey to find what to do with your time and emptiness, I will try to summarize my process of thinking to a couple of points.
Look around you
Sometimes we can’t see what is right in front of us. For me, I’m not aware of things around me that have become my daily life — things become automated. Knowing what you like and don’t like might give you insight about what to do.
For example from the beginning of my career, writing becomes part of me. Every day I write code, but I’m not aware of it because it becomes automated over time. Writing about happiness excites me the most — for now.
Try it yourself
When you try to do new things, there are two possibilities either you like it or not. I know it scary to try things that you might not like. But what if you actually like it?
I never knew that I can fill in my emptiness through writing — because every day I write code and I still feel empty. But for me, type of writing also plays the role to fill in my emptiness. Don’t jump to a conclusion too fast, take it slow and try it yourself. You don’t need to try to do something big, it just gonna overwhelm you.
Try something small first, anything positive will do. Beware not to spend money too much on your trial and error. Minimize your cost as much as possible. If you try something costly and you don’t like it, it might become a disaster. You might give up finding your things. Take it slow.
Ask for help
I hope you have someone to ask for help. For you might need help from someone else to know better about yourself. One might find it hard to introspect himself — like me. Sometimes someone else can describe you better than yourself.
I don’t have many friends, I don’t need additional fingers to count it. I thought I rarely speak. But my friends told me that I’m quite chatty. They told me sometimes I can blabber non stop. If it just me, I won’t be able to figure it out. It applies when you try to find what you want to do. You might miss the thing you try to look for, especially when you don’t know what you looking for. | https://medium.com/@opvl/journey-to-fill-your-emptiness-bc9b5075cb76 | [] | 2020-12-13 23:07:22.086000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Life', 'Journey'] |
Convolutional Neural Networks: Simplified | How exactly do CNNs work?
It’s a technical topic, but I’ll try to explain it in simple terms.
Kernels:
An image is a set of pixels, and to interpret what they depict as a whole, CNNs use something called Kernels. (Also called filters or feature detectors).
Kernels can be termed as the intelligence of CNNs.
Let’s correlate reading a paragraph with kernels. Just as we read a line from left to right, we extract meaning from the text. Similarly, the kernel moves left to right over an image, while extracting features. Also, while reading, we interpret one word at a time and not individual letters, likewise kernel extracts features from a set of pixels at a time. The number of pixels considered at once is determined by the size of the kernel. (A square kernel of size 3*3 is most commonly used).
Kernels in CNN
Each pixel in an image is associated with a value in the range 0 to 255, determining its intensity (Or 3 values per pixel for colored images, one for each of red, green, and blue channels). Similarly, kernels also have a value associated with each of its blocks.
Where do kernels get their values?
As I mentioned before, kernels are the intelligence that extracts features. The values may be initialized randomly or by some predefined function, but they change over time when the network is being trained. The actual intelligence part of our network is these values.
Now you might be wondering, “Hey, that’s all good, but how does the kernel extract features?”
It is as simple as multiplication and addition!
Features are extracted by multiplying corresponding blocks as shown and adding them up. For example value at position [1, 1] in the image is multiplied by the value at position [1, 1] in the kernel. (Typically, this is followed by an activation layer to remove non-linearity, but it’s a vast topic so I won’t include that in this article)
In the following example, in the first step… The resultant feature is given as (7*1) + (2*0) + (3*-1) + …. + (2*-1) = 6
Feature extraction
Strides:
Images contain thousands of pixels, and processing all of them is computationally expensive as well as time-consuming. So we reduce the number of features by altering the Stride parameter.
Stride defines the number of pixels by which the kernel should move in either direction.
In the illustrations you see below, the kernel is moving to the immediate next set of pixels, in this case, the stride is [1, 1]. This tells the kernel to move 1 pixel to the right while moving along the row and 1 pixel down while moving along the column.
Now, to reduce the size, if we change the stride to say [2, 2], the kernel will skip 1 pixel while moving in either direction.
Stride is an important parameter in CNNs because it helps to reduce the size drastically and thus reduce the number of computations. In the above example, we reduce the number of output features from 9 to just 4 by changing the stride parameter.
Pooling:
Video by Kensuke Koike from YouTube
This video accurately demonstrates that we don’t necessarily lose information when we reduce the size of the image, as we can identify that the picture depicts a dog even after the image was reduced in size.
So if even 1/4th part of the actual image is sufficient to deduce what it depicts, we don’t need to process the complete image, even in CNNs. This is where pooling comes into picture.
Pooling is used to reduce the size of the feature map.
Pooling directly reduces the size of the image (feature map) by moving a filter over the features and taking only one value from a block of features. That one value depends on the type of pooling. It may be the maximum value from the block (Max Pooling) or the sum of values (Sum Pooling) or the average of all values (Mean Pooling). Max pooling is the one that’s used most commonly.
Flattening And Prediction:
After a series of convolutions and pooling, we obtain the features and now we need our network to predict something from these features. It’s as if the network now sees eyes, nose, and whiskers, and from this it has to predict that the image is of a cat. To do this, we need to first flatten the matrix.
Flattening
After flattening, we predict our class from the features by using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN).
The main use of convolution is to extract features, and they perform well at it. ANN converts the features into more attributes which will intern give better predictions, hence ANNs are used after convolution. I will explain ANNs in detail in my next article. | https://medium.com/ai-in-plain-english/convolutional-neural-networks-simplified-165148207e02 | ['Rohan Hirekerur'] | 2020-07-08 08:06:30.494000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Convolutional Neural Net', 'Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning'] |
Fair, But Not So Lovely: India’s Obsession With Skin Whitening | DDuring a trip to a north Indian village, an old woman walked up to me to say, “Every morning, at 5 a.m., you should drink half a cup of fresh, non-boiled cow milk. The complexion of your child-to-be will be fair.” I plastered a smile on my face. I was not even pregnant. But colorism runs so deep that this was the best advice she thought to offer me.
Women have passed on similar age old “wisdom” to attain fairness for generations. “Apply gram flour, milk, and turmeric on her face daily,” my mother was told when I was a kid, so I “would not look like a Madrasan anymore.” Madrasan refers to a person from the southern city of Madras, now Chennai. North Indians are typically lighter skinned than South Indians, who live in a hotter climate. Colorism exacerbates this geographical divide.
Colorism also has a pervasive impact on job and marriage opportunities. Fair people are perceived as more presentable. In 2008, the state of Maharashtra sponsored 100 dark-skinned tribal girls to train as flight attendants. Only eight of them were eventually recruited, that too as ground staff — likely in part due to their complexion. Similarly, the description of women in the arranged marriage market often includes skin tone shorthand like: f = fair, vf = very fair, and vvf = very very fair. (This practice is not as rampant for prospective grooms.)
Ratna Soren, a 24-year-old anthropology student from Hazaribagh, a small district in the eastern state of Jharkhand, is seen as a misfit in her family because she is still single. All her younger cousins are married. She has used Fair & Lovely since she was 4 years old. “It still hasn’t changed my complexion,” she says. This has elicited incessant rejections from prospective grooms. “I am seen as a burden on my family. A girl with dark complexion must have more dowry to offer if she wants to get married in India,” she says, getting emotional. “My parents cannot afford it.”
In some extreme cases, colorism has even taken lives. In 2014, a woman in a posh suburb of Delhi hanged herself because her husband abused her for being dark-skinned. The same year, a schoolteacher named Brototi Das set herself on fire, fed up with the constant humiliation she suffered from her family for her dark complexion. Yet another woman poisoned the food during a family function, killing five, allegedly tired of her family’s taunts over her skin color. All of these women were under the age of 25.
Their ages are notable. Though colorism is often considered a colonial relic, young Indians can be just as guilty of perpetuating it. In a 2015 essay, author Neha Mishra cited a survey that asked Indians between the ages of 20–25 to describe “pretty.” 71 percent of those surveyed used words such as “fair” or “light.” The survey also revealed that the pressure to look fair is much higher on Indian women than men.
Color discrimination has also played a huge role in the world’s most prodigious film industry. Bollywood films often feature songs that glorify fair skin and deride darker skin shades. For instance, in the 1990s film “Suhaag,” the male protagonist lusts after women with fair skin and dark sunglasses. A more recent song talks about how the two lead actors’ hearts start beating fast upon seeing “white white faces.”
Most actors who have dominated India’s film industry have been fair-skinned, particularly the women, from Madhubala in the 1960s to Kareena Kapoor and Katrina Kaif today. To make matters worse, some of these actors also make extra income by endorsing “fairness” products, further perpetuating the notion that when it comes to complexion, lighter is simply better. | https://brightthemag.com/fair-but-not-so-lovely-indias-obsession-with-skin-whitening-beauty-body-image-bleaching-4d6ba9c9743d | ['Neha Dixit'] | 2019-07-10 13:42:45.235000+00:00 | ['Beauty', 'Race', 'Brightest', 'Features', 'India'] |
Stay-At-Home with Menorah or Tree | Stay-At-Home with Menorah or Tree
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
Buddha’s birthday is already past
When it is the shortest day;
We celebrate the Light of the sun,
The Light of the Spirit within and without.
We light the menorah every night
And know we are never alone.
We tell sacred stories and pray for peace,
We give thanks and give more to
Celebrate what could really be —
That all have enough and more to give.
We stay at home and pray for healing.
We dress the trees with shimmering garlands,
Colorful glass balls, angels and stars.
Do not dimay; be merry. Let love
Create a new earth and heaven
And fill every heart with joy. | https://medium.com/@aikya/menorah-or-tree-stay-merry-5b84095af558 | ['Aikya Param'] | 2020-12-10 19:04:08.685000+00:00 | ['Light', 'Heaven', 'Earth', 'Written Tales', 'Poetry'] |
3 Ways to Stop Feeling That Your Life Is Getting Out of Control | 3 Ways to Stop Feeling That Your Life Is Getting Out of Control
#3: Just don’t do anything about it
Photo by energepic.com from Pexels
As an almost Type A personality, I love working and finishing my tasks. When I am typing away on my laptop, completing my assignments before time, it leaves me with a deep sense of accomplishment. I thrive when I hit the submit button before everyone else does.
This gives me a high, like nothing else.
As expected, I do not do well under pressure. If I get multiple submissions and deadlines in a short frame of time, I lose my sanity. I find it difficult to deal with these cloudy and rainy days.
Even small failures are generalized to everything else. If I get late for some project, my instant thought is that ‘I am a failure’ instead of the negative feeling being limited to the task.
In cognitive psychology, this is known as a cognitive bias. A cognitive bias is a distortion in thought patterns. They develop as a result of the human brain’s efforts to simplify information and make sense out of it.
As a result of such biases, I end up feeling that all the control I have over myself and my life is slipping away. As someone who loves having control and working hard, this results in me panicking and blacking out.
To cope with this, over the period of the past couple of years and my training as a psychologist, I have devised certain strategies that I use extensively to get out of the feeling that life is spiraling out of control. | https://medium.com/inspired-writer/3-ways-to-stop-feeling-that-your-life-is-getting-out-of-control-49ff861e1564 | ['Jyoti Meena'] | 2020-11-06 16:37:24.471000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Personal Growth', 'Psychology', 'Self-awareness', 'Personal Development'] |
The Christmas No One Wanted in 2020 | My friend Adam and I this weekend were texting back forth about this tweet.
Tweet from Adrian Gibbs on December 16th
2020 has brought a heaviness to a regularly joyful season. In this year, we have walked through a pandemic, racial reckoning, job losses, contested elections, disrupted routines, and added doses of fear and anxiety for our children. As a pastor, I’m well aware that many who walked through divorces, painful conflicts with loved ones, and health issues outside of the Coronavirus.
I don’t walk through this Christmas season glibly. I realize that many reading this post would label 2020 “The Christmas No One Wanted.”
If you read the account of the Christmas stories in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, you encounter a strange similarity to 2020.
Let’s start here. Most likely, 300–400 years passed through the end of the Old & New Testament. Generations of people lived in the relative silence of God. They heard the stories of Adam, Abraham, Moses, and David living in a shell of that time. By this time we enter the New Testament, most of the readers lived under Roman occupation.
Jesus enters a world full of darkness, chaos, and controversy. Mary, his mother, experienced a miracle in the immaculate conception but most likely had the shame of a baby out of wedlock. Mary and Joseph also had to walk by foot from Nazareth to Bethlehem for a foreign ruler’s census.
If you asked Mary and Joseph, I wonder if they would say label their story, “The Christmas they didn’t want either.”
2020 has disturbed us individually. Each of us has had to walk through a level of disappointment, grief, and somberness this year. That truth allows us to have more compassion rather than less.
So, we find ourselves amid Christmas, the happiest time of the year. As Adrian Gibbs points out, it seems trite to throw out shallow cliches from the past year. On the other hand, our church Fathers and Mothers placed the celebration of Christmas in December because they knew we would need a light in the darkness of winter.
As I texted with Adam this weekend, one thing became apparent — we think we want happiness and comfort when in reality, we’re searching for joy and hope. Those terms are not mere semantics but rather reflect the shallowness and depth of this season. We want joy rooted in an unshakeable hope despite the bleakness of the world around us.
The Good News of Christmas invites us to such joy and hope. Jesus leaves the riches of heaven to live in a bleak world. He embraces pain and suffering to identify with us. We need the message of “Emmanuel, God with us” because Jesus knows more than we realize the 2020s of our lives.
Hope and joy invite you to grieve rather than deny reality, and it invites you to experience a Savior with you in this season.
Adam sent me this prayer that his pastor prays over the congregation every week that I think is very applicable in a 2020 Christmas. Let this prayer guide you to Jesus in the various emotions of this week: | https://medium.com/koinonia/the-christmas-no-one-wanted-in-2020-c1b3d5980cc7 | ['Peter Englert'] | 2020-12-21 19:27:09.666000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Christianity', 'Joy', 'Christmas', 'Hope'] |
Stolen Election | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/resistance-poetry/stolen-election-edad076150d5 | ['Andrew Wlos'] | 2020-11-21 14:42:19.992000+00:00 | ['Resistance Poetry', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Election 2020', 'Trump', 'Politics'] |
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